2 Blood Trail (21 page)

Yes, I’ve a few questions myself about his past.
In fact, Fitzroy had turned out to be more questions than answers. Celluci didn’t like that in a man and he liked it even less now that he was beginning to see how he could fill in the blanks.

If Henry Fitzroy thought he could hide what he was, he was due for a nasty surprise.

 

The old man was asleep; Mark could hear him snoring through the wall that separated their bedrooms.

“The sleep of the just,” he murmured, linking his hands behind his head and staring at a watermark on the ceiling. Although he’d agreed to help in his uncle’s holy war—
And
that’s
one elderly gentleman who’s a few pickles short of a barrel.
—nothing had actually been said about what this entailed. Whether or not the werewolves were creatures of the devil was a moot point as far as he was concerned—more importantly, they were creatures apparently outside the law.

He was a businessman; there had to be a way he could make a profit out of that.

If he could capture one of them, he knew a number of people who would be more than willing to purchase such a curiosity. Unfortunately, that idea came with an obvious problem. The creature could just refuse to change—and they appeared to have complete control over the process—ruining any credibility he might have. And in sales, credibility was everything.

“All right, if I can’t make a buck out of them live. . . .”

He smiled.

Were
wolves.

Wolves.

Dead wolves meant pelts. Take the head as well and there’d be a dandy rug.

People were always willing to pay for the unique and the unusual.

“Has anybody seen Daniel this morning?”

Jennifer glanced up from the burr she was working out of her sister’s fur. “He headed up the lane about an hour ago. Said he was going to wait for the mail.”

“But it’s Sunday.” Nadine rolled her eyes. “Honestly, that child and the day of the week. Peter, could you go get him.” Her tone fell between an order and a request.

Good sergeants used much the same tone, Vicki reflected; maybe the wer could integrate more easily than she’d expected.

Peter dragged his T-shirt over his head and tossed it at Rose. “You think you can find the car keys before I get back?”

“They’re in here somewhere,” she muttered, shuffling through yet another pile of papers. “I know they are, I can smell them.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Vicki advised, rescuing a lopsided stack of
Ontario Farmers
from sliding to the floor. “If we don’t find them by the time Peter gets back, we’ll take Henry’s car.”

“We’ll take the BMW?” Peter kicked his sneakers off. “You know where Henry’s keys are?”

Vicki grinned. “Sure, he gave them to me in case we needed to move it.”

“All right!” He dropped his shorts on Rose’s head. “Don’t look too hard,” he instructed, then changed and barreled out the door, heading at full speed up the lane.

Mark had intended to just drive by the farm, to see if he could spot any of these alleged werewolves and get a good look at their pelts, but when he saw the shape sitting by the mailbox it seemed like a gift from God.

“And as I have been assured, God is on our side.”

So he stopped.

It didn’t look like a wolf, but neither did it look quite like a dog. About the size of a small German shepherd, it sat watching him, head cocked to one side, panting a little in the heat. Its pure black coat definitely appeared to have the characteristics of a wolf pelt, with the long silky hairs that women loved to run their hands through.

He stretched an arm out the open window of the car and snapped his fingers. “Here, uh, boy. Comere. . . .”

The creature stood, stretched, and yawned, its teeth showing very white against the black of its muzzle.

Why hadn’t he brought a biscuit or a pork chop or something? “Come on.” Pity it was black; a more exotic color would fetch a higher price.

And then he saw a flash of red coming up the lane. When it reached the mailbox, he realized that the black must only be about half grown. The red creature was huge with the most beautiful pelt Mark had ever seen. Long thick hair shaded from a deep russet to almost a red-gold in the sunlight. Every time it moved, new highlights flickered along the length of its body. Both muzzle and ears were sharply pointed and its eyes were delineated with darker fur, giving it an almost humanly expressive face.

He knew people who would pay big bucks to own a fur like that.

It studied him for a moment, head high, ignoring the attempts of the smaller one to knock it over. There was something in its gaze that made Mark feel intensely uncomfortable and any doubts he might have had about these creatures being more than they seemed vanished under that steady stare. Then it turned and both creatures headed back down the lane.

“Oh, yes,” he murmured, watching them run. “I have found my fortune.” Best of all, if anything went wrong this time, crazy Uncle Carl and his high caliber mission from God would take the rap.

First on the agenda, a drive into London to do a little research.

 

It didn’t take long for Vicki to discover the attraction Henry’s BMW held; low on the dashboard, discreetly out of sight from prying eyes and further camouflaged by the mat black finish—on everything including the buttons and the digital display—was a state of the art compact disk player. She was perfectly willing to admire the sound quality, she was even willing to listen to Peter enthuse about woofers and tweeters and internal stabilization somethings, but she was not willing to listen to opera all the way into London, especially not with the two wer singing along.

They compromised and sang along with Conway Twitty instead. As far as the wer were concerned, the Grand Ol’ Opry ran a poor second to grand old opera, but it was better than no music at all. Vicki could tolerate country. At least she understood the language, and Rose had a hysterical gift for mimicking twang and heartache.

They cut through the east end of the city, down Highbury Avenue—Highway 126—heading for the 401. The moment they hit traffic, Rose reached over and turned the music off. To Vicki’s surprise, Peter, reclining in the back with his head half out the window, made no protest.

“We don’t see things quite the same way you do,” Rose explained, very carefully changing lanes and passing an eighteen wheeler. “So we have to pay a lot more attention when we drive.”

“Most of the world should pay more attention when they drive,” Vicki muttered. “Peter, stop kicking the back of my seat.”

“Sorry.” Peter rearranged his legs. “Vicki, I was wondering, how come you’re going to see the OPP on a Sunday? Won’t the place be closed down?”

Vicki snorted. “Closed down? Peter, the police don’t ever close down, it’s a twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week job. You should know that, your brother’s a cop.”

“Yeah, but he’s city.”

“The Ontario Provincial Police are police just like any others . . . except no one keeps messing with the color of their cars.” Vicki liked the old black and whites and hadn’t approved the Metro Toronto Police cars going bright yellow and then white. “In fact,” she continued, “in a lot of places they’re the only police. That said, on a hot Sunday afternoon in August, everyone with a good reason to be out of district headquarters should be and I might be able to get the information I need.”

“I thought you were just going to go in and ask them for the names of everyone who has a .30 caliber rifle registered?” A Chevy cut in front of them and Rose dropped back a careful three car lengths, muttering, “Dickhead,” under her breath.

“I am. But as they have no reason to tell me, a lot is going to depend on how I ask. And who.”

Peter snorted. “You’re going to try to intimidate some poor rookie, aren’t you?”

Vicki pushed her glasses up her nose. “Of course not.” It was actually more a combination of a subtle pulling of rank and an invoking of the “We’re all in this together” attitude shared by cops all over the world. Granted, she wasn’t a cop anymore, but that shouldn’t affect the ultimate result.

The OPP District Headquarters overlooked the 401 on the south side of Exidor Road, the red brick building tucked in behind a Ramada Inn. Vicki had the twins wait by the car.

Had she still been a cop, it would’ve worked. Unfortunately, that she
used
to be a cop, wasn’t good enough. Had she not then tried to “intimidate a poor rookie” it might still have worked, but the very intense young woman she spoke to knew Vicki had no right to the information, “working on a case” or not, and, her back up, refused to show it to her.

Things would have gone better with the sergeant if Vicki hadn’t lost her temper.

By the time she left the building, most of the anger was self-directed. Her lips had thinned to a tight, white line and her nostrils flared with every breath. She’d handled the whole thing badly and she knew it.

I am not a cop. I cannot expect to be treated like one. The sooner I get that through my fat head, the better
. It was a litany easy to forget back in Toronto where everyone knew her and she could still access many of her old privileges, but she’d just been given a nasty preview of what would happen when the people on the Metro force were no longer the men and women she’d served with. Her hands clenched and unclenched as though they were looking for a throat to wrap around.

She started for the car, standing in solitary splendor at the edge of the lot. With every step, she could feel the waves of heat rising up off the pavement, but they were nothing compared to the heat rising off her.
Where the hell are the twins?
She half hoped they’d done something stupid just so she could blow off some steam. With most of the distance to the car covered, she saw them heading across the parking lot from the Ramada Inn carrying bottles of water.

When they met, both wer took one look at her and dropped their eyes.

“It didn’t work, did it?” Rose asked tentatively, peering up through her eyelashes. Under her hair, her ears were forward.

“No. It didn’t.”

“We just went for some water,” Peter offered, his posture identical to his sister’s. He held out the second of the plastic bottles he carried. “We, uh, brought you one.”

Vicki looked from the bottle to the twins and back to the bottle. Finally she snorted and took it. “Thank you.” It was cold and it helped. “Oh, chill out. I’m not going to bite you.” Which was when she realized that they thought she might.

Which was so absurd that she had to laugh.

Both sets of ears perked up and both twins looked relieved. If they’d been in fur, they probably would have bounced; as they weren’t, they merely grinned and drank their water.

Dominant/submissive behavior,
Vicki thought draining her bottle. She worried about that a little. If all the wer but the dominant couple were conditioned to be submissive as a response to anger or aggression, that could cause major problems out in the world.

As Rose went around the car to the driver’s side, two heavily muscled young men lounging around the Ramada Inn pool began calling out lurid invitations. Rose yawned, turned her back on them, and got into the car.

And then again,
Vicki reconsidered,
maybe there’s nothing to worry about.

She tossed her empty bottle into the back seat with Peter. “Let’s go get lunch while I come up with another brilliant idea.”

 

Unlike a number of other places, London had managed to grow from a small town serving the surrounding farming community into a fair sized city without losing its dignity. Vicki approved of what she saw as they drove into the center of town. The city planners had left plenty of parks, from acres of land to tiny playgrounds tucked in odd corners. New development had gone up around mature trees and where that hadn’t been possible new trees had been planted. Cicadas sang accompaniment throughout most of the drive and the whole city looked quiet and peaceful, basking in the heat.

Vicki, who liked a little more grit in her cities, strongly suspected that the place would bore her to tears in less than twenty-four hours. Although she emphatically denied sharing the commonly held Torontonian delusion that Toronto occupied the center of the universe, she couldn’t imagine working, or living, anywhere else.

“The place is called Bob’s Steak House,” Peter explained as Rose pulled into a small, nearly empty parking lot. “It’s actually up on Clarence Street, but if we leave the car there we have to parallel park.”

“Which we’re not exactly very good at,” Rose added, cutting the engine with a sigh of relief.

Vicki would have been perfectly happy stopping for fast food—all she really demanded at this point was air conditioning—but the twins had argued for a restaurant “where the meat isn’t so dead.”

A short block east of the lot, Rose rocked to a halt in front of a little corner store and exclaimed, “Baseball stickers!”