Hunter's Trail (A Scarlett Bernard Novel) (27 page)

“J’ai besoin de vous parler, madame. Attachez le chien. Ouvrez la porte.”
He held up the ID again.

I stared at Jesse, trying to pick up from his expression what the hell was going on. But he remained very firm and professional. I waited. After a long moment of silence, I heard at least three bolts thrown open, and a crack appeared in the door.

My Taser is very special. It’s a police-issued, drive stun model, meaning I hold it directly against a target and it hurts like a bitch. Unlike most drive stun models, however, mine has been modified to affect the central nervous system the same way a Taser gun does. It’s the best nonlethal weapon for a null because it means I don’t have to dick around with trying to shoot a weapon at supernatural creatures who are probably moving really fast. By the time you’re close enough to me to be a physical threat, you’re close enough to tase.

It’s basically a pocket-sized cattle prod.

I could have given it to Jesse to use, but since I had to be right there anyway to make sure she couldn’t use her magic, we had decided it was best for me to do the tasing while Jesse distracted her. It works through clothes, but when the Luparii scout finally opened the door all the way, I opted not to take chances. As Jesse began to speak in rapid French, I slid up the cuff of her sleek black pants, pressed the Taser against her skin, and pulled the trigger. The whole thing was over faster than she could say, “Ooh la la! A Taser!”

Or whatever French people say.

Chapter 42

I held the Taser on her skin until the woman crumpled forward. Jesse was ready to catch her though, dragging her quickly into the condo and dumping her just inside the door. I hauled myself to my feet and followed as fast as I could. I slammed the door closed behind me, and we exchanged a relieved grin while I caught my breath. From deeper in the condo, the bargest began to bark again.

I looked at the woman at my feet. She was very tall, maybe six feet; blonde and beautiful in a harsh, imperialist kind of way. In a movie she’d be cast as a German Nazi ice queen, French heritage or not. She glared at me with her lips moving, but I knew from experience that she lacked the fine motor skills for talking.

The condo’s front door opened directly onto a living room/dining
room combination, with the kitchen off to our left. She must have had the bargest restrained in a back bedroom. “You told her to put the dog away?” I asked Jesse. He nodded.

“So,” I said to Jesse, “You speak French.”

“A little,” he admitted. “I already spoke Spanish, so in high school my mom made me take French. Haven’t used it in years, though.” Jesse wrinkled his nose. “Smell that?”

I glanced around the condo. It wasn’t even furnished, not really, but what little furniture was there probably cost more than my van. “Money?”

“Piss,” Jesse corrected. “I think she pissed herself.”

“Oh. Yeah, that happens.”

He nudged the Luparii scout’s body with a toe. She glared up at us, conscious but unable to access the ability for speech. Jesse glanced down at my Taser. “Is that thing street legal?” he asked doubtfully.

“Let’s call it legal-adjacent,” I suggested.

“Will she be okay?”

The barking from the back room had gotten so loud that he had to repeat himself twice before I understood. “She’ll be fine,” I yelled back. “We should get her tied up before she recovers though.”

Jesse produced the roll of duct tape from behind his back, where he must have tucked it into his belt, and we got to work taping the woman’s ankles, wrists, and mouth. We used more than half the roll before Jesse declared her officially subdued. As he tore off the tape, I spotted a very expensive handbag sitting on the countertop. “Hey,” I called, crossing the empty kitchen to the bag. I almost didn’t want to put my grubby hands inside it, it looked so expensive. I solved the problem by flipping the damn thing over. A small mound of purse paraphernalia scattered across the counter.

Jesse picked up a French passport. “Her name is Petra Corbett,” he called over the sound of barking.

“Doesn’t sound very French,” I yelled back. He just shrugged.

“We gotta get it to be quiet, or someone’s gonna call the LAPD for real,” Jesse pointed out. I nodded, and he started for the back bedroom. I hobbled after him.

Jesse opened the bedroom door very slowly, but the bargest didn’t dart out and trample him. It must have been in a crate or something. But when the door began to move, the thing went suddenly quiet, and Jesse and I exchanged a nervous glance. He pushed the door the rest of the way open.

I swung the backpack around so I could dig the dog stuff out of it, but I looked up when I heard Jesse’s gasp. He was planted in the doorway, frozen, mouth wide open. “Holy shit,” he breathed.

“What?” I said, making my way toward the doorway.

“That,” Jesse said, eyes huge and round, “is the ugliest fucking dog I have ever seen.”

I came up behind Jesse’s shoulder and got my first look at the bargest.

The back bedroom was fairly large and had no furniture, but a lot of space was taken up by an enormous wire crate that didn’t look sturdy enough for what was inside. The bargest stood tense and growling within it, paws planted in all four corners of the crate. I had been expecting big, and it was very big. Almost three feet at the shoulder, and I was guessing about a hundred and eighty pounds. Big, yes, but not the biggest dog I’d ever seen.

But Jesse was right; it was hideous. Except for the ears, the bargest looked like someone had taken a Scottish deerhound, shaved off huge swathes of its fur, and dipped it in the blackest of black ink—except that its face was lumpy and not quite symmetrical, giving the overall impression that it had recently lost a prizefight. Tufts of short, coarse fur covered part of the back and one ear, while the rest of its skin was hairless, with a pebbly reptile-like texture that looked a little lik
e . . .
armor. The hairless ear had been torn at some point and had healed not quite right. The good ear flicked forward, and I realized that it was a perfect wolf’s ear.

If Frankenstein made a do
g . . .

It snarled, drawing black lips up over terrible white teeth. Jesse took an involuntary step back, stretching out his arm protectively. “This isn’t gonna work, Scar,” he warned. “That thing is dangerous.” Jesse held out his hand. “Give me the Taser. We’ll tape it up and take it to Dashiell or Kirsten. They’ll find a humane way to put it down.”

I stared at the bargest. Once you got past the ugliness and the size, it looke
d . . .
like a dog. A terrified, confused dog. “Let me talk to it,” I suggested.

“And say what?” Jesse said disbelievingly. “That thing only knows French commands.”

“Well, try one. Tell it to sit.”

Jesse shook his head at me, but said, “Uh—
asseyez-vous
.” He looked at me. “I don’t know the command tense.”

I pushed gently past his arm and approached the kennel. When I took a few steps into the room, though, the bargest hit my radius, and suddenly it’s growling stopped and it whined uncertainly. It shook itself. Jesse began to say something, and the bargest snarled again, the tufts of fur on its back rising with tension.

With some effort, I lowered myself to the floor a few feet in front of the kennel, stretching out my bad knee and pulling my opposite foot in to touch my thigh. “Jesse,” I said softly, not meeting the bargest’s eyes, “I saw a wad of paper in the purse. Would you see if any of it is for the dog? Vet papers or whatever?”

I wasn’t looking at him, but I could practically feel a suspicious look coming from Jesse. “First promise me you won’t go any closer,” he commanded.

“I won’t go any closer.”

I heard soft footfalls on the carpet, and the bargest looked at me, slightly calmer. It tilted its head, puzzled. Maybe having multiple people in one room had been a little overwhelming

“Hi, puppy,” I said soothingly, keeping my eyes on the floor. “I’m Scarlett. What’s your name?”

I glanced up to see the bargest yawning, displaying enormous jaws that could possibly be described as “slavering.” “Hoo boy,” I breathed. Despite the shadows in the crate, I thought I saw it wag its tail once, tentatively. Encouraged, I crooned some more nonsense at it.

Jesse chose that moment to reenter the room. The bargest went on alert again, feet planted, tufts of hair standing on end. Jesse didn’t notice; he was focused on the unfolded wad of papers. “You were right, they had to register it with the airline. Paid a
fortune
to fly it too.”

“Jesse,” I murmured, “you’re too big. Be smaller.”

“Oh. Right.” He sat down on the carpeted floor, and the bargest stopped growling and shifted its feet nervously, totally confused by the situation.

“What’s her name?” I asked softly.

“Her?” He looked at the crate again, but the dog was black and there were shadows. It was impossible to see between its legs.

“Call it a hunch,” I said.

Jesse flipped a page while the bargest eyed both of us. “You’re right, it’s a female,” he noted, scanning the paper. “They claim she’s a Peruvian Hairless mix, which strikes me as total bullshit. Her name i
s . . .
heh. Belle.”

“As in Beauty?” I said incredulously. I don’t know much French, but my childhood had been infiltrated by Disney, just like everybody else’s.

“Yep. The Luparii might be a bunch of assholes, but at least one of them has a sense of humor.”

“Guess so.”

Jesse looked at his watch. “We need to move. We’ve already been here too long. If any of the neighbors saw u
s . . .
” The bargest, hearing our friendly voices, began to tentatively wag her tail again. “Well, look at that,” Jesse said softly.

I nodded. “I don’t think she’s actually that aggressive. I think she’s scared and confused.”

“Scarlett,” Jesse said patiently, like he was talking to some bleeding-heart moron. “She’s evil.”

“Hush. She’s no such thing, are you girl?” Hearing the question in my voice, the bargest’s tail started wagging double-time.

“She slaughtered those two werewolves, Scarlett,” Jesse said gently. “Just because you
want
something to be tru
e . . .
”

For the bargest’s sake, I kept my voice low and calm, even as I said, “I’m not an idiot, Jesse. Look at her: before it started wagging, that tail was tucked between her legs. She’s not cowering—they probably trained her not to run from scary stuff—but she’s leaning sideways so she’ll be ready to recoil. She doesn’t understand if she’s supposed to listen to us or attack us, and we haven’t given her the right cues for either.”

There was a long pause behind me, and then Jesse said defensively, “She was snarling.”

“We scared her, and she’s trapped in a little box. You’d snarl too.”

“She’s dangerous, Scarlett.”

I turned my head slightly so I could look back at him. “So is your gun, but I trust you with it. Now trust me.”

My partner locked eyes with me for a second, and then nodded warily. “Okay. So what do you want to do?”

I told Jesse to go move the scout into the bathroom so she wouldn’t distract the bargest. I also gave him his jeans and T-shirt out of the backpack so he could change. When Jesse closed the door to the bedroom we were in, I approached the bargest’s crate by crawling in a curve toward it, never facing her head-on or making eye contact. I crawled on my hands and good knee until I was at the side of her kennel that had the latches. Making sure I wasn’t blocking her escape route from the crate, I took a deep breath and undid them. The door sprang open.

The bargest exploded out of the crate, suddenly seeming to fill the room with her presence. It was overwhelming, terrifying, but I forced myself not to cower. She could probably smell my fear, but there wasn’t much I could do about that, so I just sat there as calmly as possible while she raced around the room—which had seemed fairly big only a moment ago—in tight controlled circles. Now that I could see all of he
r . . .
well, she was just as ugly as before, with a strange club-like tail that just naturally looked like someone had docked it at ten inches. But there was something else going on with her too: a graceful power and intelligence that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with how she was built. I could see why the Luparii had chosen this particular puppy for the bargest spell.

After a few minutes, when I didn’t seem to be going anywhere, she calmed down and came over to sniff me. I held very still. After she’d snuffled her muzzle around my hair and clothes, I very slowly lifted my hand from the floor, my fingers curled in a loose fist, and held it out to her. She sniffed it for a long moment, and then gave me a single approving lick. Her club tail wagged again.

“I’m not sure that Belle suits you,” I said, lowering my forehead to touch hers. “It seems a little pretentious and cruel.” She was wearing a collar, a formidable spiked leather thing. I scratched her neck under the collar, and she panted appreciatively.

I pulled the new canvas collar out of my backpack and let her sniff it. When she didn’t object, I fastened it around her neck and then undid the buckle on the leather collar, letting it fall on the floor. The bargest was a huge investment of time, money, and magic, and if I were the Luparii, I wouldn’t have been above putting some kind of GPS chip in the collar to protect my investment.

She sniffed the discarded collar once, and looked back up at me. She had a quizzical expression that said,
What now?
“We got this,” I told her.
I repeated the procedure with the new leash, letting her sniff it before fastening it. She gazed at me evenly, her tail still wagging rather hesitantly.

Even though I trusted her in that moment, alone together in a room with no stimuli, it was better safe than sorry. I took the soft canvas muzzle out of the bag and let her smell that too. “Okay?” I said. She gave me a resigned look. “You’ve done this before, I take it.” At my voice, her tail wagged once.

I fastened the muzzle behind her head and let out a breath I’d been holding.

We left the Luparii scout tied up in the bathroom. I was tempted to hand her over to Dashiell, to be killed or used as leverage. But, aside from the fact that I didn’t know how Jesse would react to that idea, we weren’t up for getting her into the van in broad daylight, especially with my injury.

The bargest seemed to accept Jesse more now that she wasn’t stuck in a little box while he loomed over her, so I gave him the leash to hold on the way to my van. I was a little nervous that the bargest might take off as soon as she hit fresh air—which prompted a funny mental image of her racing flat-out down the center of the street, with Jesse dragging behind her like a prisoner in a Western—but I needn’t have worried. The bargest heeled perfectly, staying exactly in step with Jesse’s left foot as we walked.

“All that work, and you didn’t get to use your big wagon,” I said sadly, as Jesse stowed it sideways in the back of the van to make room for the bargest. He patted the bottom of the van and the bargest hopped up effortlessly. Despite the graceful movement, the whole van shuddered as she climbed aboard.

“The night is young,” Jesse said, his voice still a little tight. He was doing a good job of appearing calm, but I knew that committing daylight crimes was bothering him. Or maybe he was just a little nervous about the bargest. “We may get a chance yet.”

We climbed in the van, both of us craning our heads around to check the back. The bargest had curled into a tight knot on the floor, laying with her head facing forward so she could keep an eye on us. “I’ve never seen a dog do that in a car,” Jesse said, amazed.