Meow

by Skye MacKinnon

  “Over there,” Lennox whispers. “The brick house, that’s his.” He sniffs the air, his eyes turning yellow for a moment. “Nobody in. Let’s do a bit of breaking and entering.”

  I return his grin and together, we jump off the roof and land in a crouch side by side. Just like old times. He keeps a look out while I pick the lock. Instinctively we’ve taken on our old roles, becoming a well-trained team again, despite all the time apart.

  As soon as we step into the house, it’s clear that the owner is very wealthy and likes to portray his wealth openly. Antique vases, oil paintings, expensive rugs. It all reeks of money. Lennox goes to disable the alarm system; he knows where it is because he’s been here before. I begin to look around, a bitter taste developing in my mouth. Part of this wealth is connected to poisoning children. As much as I can understand and enjoy killing and poisoning adults, harming children is a step too far.

  Besides all the opulence, there isn't much interesting to find in this house. The man seems to live alone. No family pictures, no women's clothes. A very badly stocked kitchen. He doesn't seem to spend a lot of time here, yet compared to Mr Kindler's house, this is a home that's actually gets lived in. His bed sheets are crumpled, and there are traces of body fluids on there that I don't really want to identify. I could give them a sniff, and my cat senses would immediately find out what they are, but no thanks. There are traces of drugs on his bedside table as well as some cigarette butts in an ashtray. I don't like people who smoke in bed. It makes their corpses smell like smoke.

  "I found something!" Lennox calls from downstairs and with one last look around the bedroom, I join him in the hallway. He's shifted a large ornate mirror to one side, revealing a door behind it. I feel like I should have spotted that earlier, but I hadn't even started looking at the hallway yet. I was busy with the upper floor. Still, I'm a little annoyed that he found it and not me.

  "Finally something fun," I mutter, then tell him how Winston Kindler's house was as boring as fuck.

  "I do like a secret basement," Lennox says with a wide grin. One that likely mirrors my own. Hidden rooms are the best. I wonder what we'll find. Skeletons? Drugs? A sex dungeon? I've seen it all.

  I go down first, not bothering with a torch. My cat eyes are good enough for this. Lennox can see in the dark too, but not as well as me. Poor doggy.

  Down below, the air is musty and damp. I switch on the lights to expose a poorly painted room, with brickwork showing through some of the holes in the paint. Compared to the beautiful interior upstairs, this is a travesty.

  In the centre of the room is a single chair made from iron, complete with manacles and an iron collar. Lovely. Seems like the man uses this for interrogations or torture. Killing, maybe? Could be all three. A drain just beneath the chair shows that someone thought about what this room would be used for when they built it. It's handy to have a drain, saves having to clean all the blood from the floor. I know what I'm talking about. Sadly, most of my marks don't plan their assassinations in advance, which leaves me with having to make their deaths as bloodless as possible, unless I want to send a message.

  "Nice," Lennox mutters appreciatively. A man after my own heart. "Can you smell that?"

  I sniff the air. "The powder. The poison they're using on the kids."

  He nods. "Let's find it."

  There aren't many places it could be hidden. A few shelves line the walls, and two large metal boxes wait in the corners. I open one of them. It's full of torture equipment. My, that's quite a collection. I only have about half of what they have in here, and I'm a bit of a professional. Granted, I don't specialise in torture per se, but I am a little jealous. Something catches my eye behind the box, and I shove it to one side.

  "Ha!" I exclaim before I can stop myself.

  "What?" Lennox calls from the other side of the room. He's rummaging through the other box.

  "There's another hidden door," I reply cheerily. "Let's see what's hidden behind it. Why would you put a secret door in an already secret room? Bit paranoid, don't you think?"

  He comes over and stands close to me. I can feel his body heat on my skin, almost as if he's touching me. I both want to jump away from him and move closer. I decide for crouching low and climbing through the hole in the wall into the secret room. It's dark and smells of something very familiar. Blood. Human blood.

  What the fuck have we got ourselves into?

  I let my eyes adjust to the darkness and blink a couple of times. It's more of a tunnel than a room, leading away from the house. It must lead under the front garden and then across the road. Is this tunnel going to connect with the house opposite? Now that would be an interesting twist, but it wouldn't explain the scent of blood that's drenching the walls.

  I move forward, my head almost touching the ceiling even though I'm crawling. Whoever built this wasn't a very big person. Definitely not the man I saw back at the basement where Mr Kindler now lies dead and abandoned. This was either done before he moved in here, or not for his use.

  "See anything?" Lennox shouts from behind me.

  "Not yet! This tunnel is very long!"

  I hurry up, crawling on all fours over the luckily smooth floor. This isn't a quickly dug dirt tunnel, no, someone's put a lot of effort into it. It would almost be clean if it weren't for occasional blood stains on the walls and ceiling.

  Finally, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Literally, but I hope it might be a metaphor as well. I really need to find some solid evidence of whatever's going on here. Preferably a written confession that explains it all, so I can go back to my day job. This is too much work. Too many unknown variables. Not the way I like to do things. When I go on a job, I plan everything. It's rare that something goes wrong. With this case though, nothing is as it's supposed to be. I'm stumbling in the dark, and the more I search, the more questions I find. It's getting frustrating. Finding Lennox was a nice distraction, but I really want it to end.

  I climb out of the tunnel and into a dark room. My cat eyes let me see enough to know that it's a lab of some sort. Much more expansive than the pieces of apparatus I found in that flat near the market. This is any scientist's wet dream come true. The shelves and cabinets lining the walls are well stocked with chemicals, glass jars and boxes. There are tons of supplies on the four long tables as well as long as equipment like Bunsen burners and stacks of test tube racks. All of it is extremely clean. It even smells of vinegar and cleaning supplies. I doubt I'll find much here. But why keep this lab so clean and then not remove the blood stains in the tunnel?

  The tunnel entrance isn't barred like in the house I've just come from, but clearly visible between a desk and a filing cabinet. On the wall opposite is a thick metal door. I check it tentatively, but it's locked. There's nobody in the house, so I'll pick it later to look around whatever this house is. First, let's see if there's something useful here in the lab.

  Lennox crawls out of the tunnel, jumping out not quite as elegantly as I did. Well, he's not a cat. That makes a big difference.

  "Nice," he mutters appreciatively.

  "Still like poisons?" I ask him and he nods.

  "I've got my own lab, but it's nowhere as big as this. I could get used to having access to a facility like this. Maybe we can take it over once we've disposed of whoever owns it? Spoils of war?"

  I laugh. "I like the way you think. As long as I get any knives that might be hidden somewhere."

  "You've always had an eye for sharp things," he replies with a wink. "It really stank of death in that tunnel. Have you found any bodies yet?"

  "No, but I've not opened any cabinets yet. It doesn't smell dead in here though."

  He sniffs the air, his eyes turning yellow. The one thing I actually admit to is that wolves have a better sense of smell than cats. That's the only thing they're better at though. We win in everything else.

  "There's something strange coming from over there," he mutters and slowly walks towards one of the closed cabinets. His eyes remai
n yellow, making him look kind of kick-arse. No, I did not just say that. It makes him look like a wolf-man. Not exotic. Not attractive in a strange way. Not at all.

  I follow him, smelling the air. When I get closer, I can sense he's right. It's not the scent of death and decay that I smelled before, but something different. It feels familiar, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

  Lennox carefully opens the wooden doors and steps back with a muffled sound.

  "What is it?" I squeeze past him to see what's upset him.

  Oh my. It's a row of jars with bits swimming in them. Organs. Body parts. But they're not big enough to belong to adults. No. Those are the organs of dead children.

  "Bastards," I curse, looking at Lennox's shocked expression. "How can they do that?"

  He just stares at me.

  I let him be and take one of the jars, trying not to look at the small human heart. There's a label on it.

  Wolf shifter.

  Female.

  8 years old.

  Test 34 (2).

  Deceased after 12 days.

  My stomach roils. An eight-year-old girl. Murdered. Dissected. Given some sort of poison in a test. That's what it has to be about. The poison in the sweets. They must have tried it on children before they put it into mass production.

  I'm going to find and kill them. Painfully.

  "I wonder where they got the children from," Lennox says quietly, his voice made of ice.

  He's right. It's not like there are many stray shifters running about. Most of them - well, almost all of them - are part of the Pack, controlled and enslaved. If Test 34 means that she was the thirty-fourth child to be given the poison, that would mean a lot more children falling victim to these monsters. There can't be more than a handful of stray shifters in the town, if even that. Maybe none at all. No, they must have come from the Pack.

  "I'm going to kill them," Lennox hisses. "They've been selling children for experimentation. I knew the Pack was bad, but I didn't expect them to be this unscrupulous."

  Tears are threatening to destroy my last semblance of composure, so I turn away from him and randomly choose one of the shelves.

  "Let's see if we can find more evidence. There must be a paper trail. Something that will tell us who's involved."

  He mutters something but then copies me, taking apart the laboratory one shelf at a time. We're going to destroy them, even if we have to kill every single Pack member in town.

  Chapter Seventeen

  When I get home, I don't bother stopping by the common areas. I don't want to see anyone. I need time alone to think and process what I've seen. I doubt I've ever been this shocked in all my life.

  I let myself fall onto my hammock and stretch my legs. It feels good to be in my little sanctuary. My place of peace. Death and anguish don't follow me in here. This is my home and woe all who try to defile it.

  "You look tired."

  I jump up, grabbing some knives from my belt in mid-air, ready to throw them at the stranger who just spoke to me. A man, dressed in black, is hanging from my ceiling. How the fuck did I not notice him?

  Simple. I was thinking of dismembered children. Sue me.

  He doesn't move, not showing any signs that he's about to jump me. He isn't here to kill me, that much is obvious. He could have done so easily already. How did he even get in? The window is locked from the inside, and there are traps all around it, so definitely not that way. That means he must have come from downstairs. He walked through our house, and nobody noticed. I need to have a word with my colleagues. This is ridiculous, someone breaking into the headquarters of an assassin business.

  "What do you want?" I snap, glaring up at him.

  He's wearing a black jumpsuit with a wide hood that hides most of his face. Even so, I'm pretty sure I've never met him before. The way he moves, his voice, his smell. None of them rings a bell.

  "You've stumbled across some interesting things, am I right?" he asks with a small laugh. It's not a question. He knows what I've been up to. A suspicion rises in me, but I keep my cards close to my chest for now.

  "Everything in my life is interesting," I quip. "What do you know about it?"

  He laughs. "Yes, a cat leading a group of ragtag criminals. Not quite what I expected when I found this card."

  He flicks something and I catch it. My business card. I don't give them to just anybody. I hold it to my nose and sniff. Caitlin. The girl from the sweet shop.

  "She's dead," he says matter of factly. "I found this on her body."

  "Did you kill her?" I ask just as calmly.

  "Maybe. Would you be upset about it?"

  I shrug. "Depends. She may have been involved in something bad and if that's true, then go ahead. Kill her again, if you want to."

  He smiles and moves a little. Immediately, I have my knives ready to throw, but he's only stretching his arms. He must be sore from clinging to the ceiling beams for so long. Who knows how long he's been waiting in here for me.

  "Want to come down so we can talk properly?" I suggest, eyeing him warily.

  He nods, and with a graceful backflip, he lands next to me, not even swaying. Wow. That landing was worthy of a cat. Who the fuck is he?

  "You know who I am, but who are you?" I ask.

  "A friend. A partner in crime. An interested party. Pick one."

  "I'd rather you tell me."

  "We have the same enemy. Not sure what that makes us."

  He flaunts over to my hammock and sits down on it, leaving me no choice but to remain standing. I don't have any other furniture in my attic, save a wooden chest that hides my messy assortment of clothes. I've never touched an iron in my life and I don't intend to, unless I'd need to use it as a weapon. Who cares about crinkles. The dead certainly don't.

  "Was she involved?" I ask. "Caitlin?"

  He throws back his hood, exposing a face that would make other people falter. Three large scars run from his right temple all the way down to his left jaw. Like he was clawed by a beast. Something big. If it wasn't for the scars, he could probably be called attractive. His eyes are bright green, not quite emerald but something lighter, like sun shining on fresh grass. A beard graces his cheeks, interrupted by the puckered lines of his scars. His dark brown hair is bound back, but I can't see how long it is.

  "She was. She had a sense for which children were shifters. She sent them on errands, telling them they could earn some extra pocket money. They never returned, obviously. I think you may have found parts of them at the laboratory."

  I suppress a shudder. "How do you know so much?"

  He doesn't reply to my question. Instead, he looks at me, and I have the feeling he's weighing me up. Judging whether I'm the right person for whatever he's planning.

  I take it as an opportunity to take in more of him. His body is lithe and toned. A predator ready to fight. His shoulders are narrower than Lennox's, but he's a little taller. Why the heck am I comparing him to Lennox? It's not like there aren't any other men in this town to take as examples.

  Finally, he stops his examination and meets my eyes. "I killed him. Kindler. And I also killed Caitlin. And quite a few other people, if you must know."

  He confirms what I'd already suspected. He's the assassin whose work I admired.

  "Who else?"

  He chuckles. "The man whose house you broke into today. One of the people owning the flat near the market. Some others you didn't come across and won't now because, well, they're no longer there."

  "Then why are you here?" I challenge him. "Looks like you've got it all under control. Killing one after the other until everyone involved in this is dead."

  "If only it was that easy. I've come to the end of what I can achieve on my own. I've realised this is much bigger than I first assumed. Whenever I kill one person, three more take their place. It's time to go after the people behind it all, not the henchmen."

  He probably means the Fangs, but I'm not going to reveal that I know about them. So I just nod, st
udying him.

  "So you want to pool resources and go after the head of the snake?"

  "Aye. You seem to have come quite far in a very short time, so it seemed you'd be a good partner. It's taken me months to put it all together."

  "Months? How long have they been giving poison to children?"

  "About two months, but they started their experiments long before that. I first noticed something fishy was going on when two shifter kids disappeared from where I lived. I wasn't close to them or anything, but it intrigued me. Turns out they were two of the first who were used in those experiments."

  A shiver runs over my back. The thought that anyone would harm children still gets to me. It squeezes through the tight assassin walls I've built around my emotions. Damn it. Now's not the time to start acting human.

  "We should meet with that other man of yours, and your team."

  "He's not my man," I snap, but the assassin just grins at me.

  "It looked like a date to me. He even got you flowers."

  "None of your business."

  He shrugs. "I like the name, by the way. Meow. Very imaginative."

  I snort. "Yeah, totally creative. But if you want me to introduce you to my team, I need to know more about you."

  He crosses his arms behind his head and relaxes on my hammock. What an arrogant bastard. I'm not sure yet if I like him or not. His manner is frustrating, but it's also a bit like looking into a mirror.

  "The name's Gryphon. I'm a freelancer like you, except that I work alone."

  "You're not a shifter," I state, confident because he doesn't smell like one of us. Still, he doesn't seem quite human, not with the way he clung to my ceiling.

  "I'm not," he says simply, but doesn't expand on what he actually is.

  "What are you? I'm going to find out at some point or another, so better tell me now."

  He grins lazily. "I'm human."

  "No, you're not."

  "I'm human, I'm telling you. Human with a bit of extra magic."

  "Magic?" I snort. "Magic doesn't exist. Not like in the books. No wands and wizards and spells."