Hunter's Trail (A Scarlett Bernard Novel) (3 page)

Chapter 4

“We need to get inside,” I said quietly, moving forward. “Don’t step in the blood.” Molly crowded into the entryway behind me so we could get the door closed and I took a good look at what was on the floor.

It was small, first of all. You hear the words “human body,” you kind of expect it to be the same size you are, or at least pretty close. But from the chest to the knees, most of th
e . . .
mea
t . . .
was missing. The woman—it was obvious from her face and hair, if not her body—was lying mostly on her back, but bent just a little to one side like she was trying to curl up in a protective ball. She’d been wearing some sort of lavender top, so shredded and bloodied now that the visible purple material wouldn’t have covered the strap of my duffel bag. I was guessing she’d worn jeans on the bottom, but only because the denim waistband was more or less intact. He hadn’t taken her pants off her. I noticed a corner of the welcome mat beneath the body. Will had just hauled the whole thing inside, which was good. It’d probably protected his hardwood floor, at least a little.

Long experience with crime scene cleanup had taught me to automatically hold my breath when I first arrived somewhere, but I let it out now, and inhaled the scent of damp, drying blood. No rot, which I’d smelled before, or any other bodily fluids, which mean
t . . .
I gagged a little. It meant she’d been killed recently, and whoever killed her had likely eaten her bowels.

Unable to look at the gore any longer, I moved my gaze toward her face. It was untouched, without even a droplet of blood. Given the circumstances, that seemed a little sick. She had been a little plain, with sunken eyes and a spray of freckles across a hooked nose. Her expression was flat—not peaceful, or terrified, or shocked. She just looked
dead
, her blue eyes staring sightlessly in the general direction of nothing. She had blonde hair cut in a chin-length bob with artistically shaded highlights. One lock of hair had fallen across the bridge of her nose, and I suppressed the urge to smooth it aside for her.

I checked Molly’s face to see how she was coping. The vampire looked sad. “She was so young,” Molly said softly, shaking her head. The woman looked older than me, maybe around thirty, but I suppose that’s young to a vampire. Molly looked up and caught me staring at her. “What?” she said self-consciously.

“You’v
e . . .
I mean, you kno
w . . .
”

“Killed people? Yes. Never on purpose, though,” Molly contended, a sudden fierceness in her voice. She hadn’t looked up from the corpse since we got inside. “And
not
like this. This woman died hard.”

I nodded. Vampires are built to be lethal, of course, but they usually don’t kill when they feed. Most of the time they press their victim’s mind to forget what’s happening as they take a little bit of blood, and everybody walks away happy. Newer vampires, however, have t
o . . .
practice before they figure out how to control themselves. And even if the victim does die, he or she usually goes quite happily, still under the vampire’s thrall. This kind of brutalization wasn’t their style.

Molly finally tore her gaze away from the body to look at me. “Who would
do
this?” she asked, her voice breaking. She was human, in my presence, which meant that the natural detachment vampires develop wasn’t really influencing her.

“A werewolf,” I said quietly. “I think this was a werewolf.” It was a guess, based on the tearing at the edges of the wounds. But I’d seen werewolf bites before, and besides, the body had been dumped at Will’s house. It wasn’t exactly a stretch.

“We should get started,” I said absently. I needed to destroy all evidence that a crime had been committed here, and the clock was ticking. “I’ll do the worst stuff, I just need you to help with lifting.” I bent at the waist and unzipped one of the duffel’s pockets, pulling out surgical gloves. I handed a pair to Molly and pulled on my own. When mine were secure, I reached into the duffel’s main compartment for a box of megathick Hefty garbage bags.

It’s awkward, snapping a garbage bag open when you’re wearing gloves, but I’ve gotten the hang of it over the years. I do have a few actual body bags, which seem more respectful, but they’re also harder to get, and frankly, the total mass of these remains didn’t justify using one. Holding onto Molly’s hand, I lowered myself to the floor, crouching awkwardly on my left leg so my braced right knee could stay extended, and began to tilt the body sideways. Then I abruptly froze. “Oh, shit,” I said softly.

Molly peered over my shoulder. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yes.” I chewed my lip for a second, considering.

“Scarlett?” Molly said. “What are you thinking? You have that look.”

“What look?”

“You know.” She mimed an exaggerated, scheming expression and stroked an imaginary goatee. “Like you’re about to do something you’re not supposed to.”

I sighed. “Because I am.” Dropping the garbage bag, I dug through the main compartment of the duffel again until I found what I wanted: a nylon camera case. I unzipped it and pulled out an inexpensive digital camera, which thankfully powered up despite months of nonuse.

“You’re taking
pictures
?” Molly said doubtfully. “Is that wise?”

“Probably not.” I said, and snapped a wide shot. I couldn’t blame her for asking—my whole job is based on destroying or hiding evidence, not creating more.

Molly sighed. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Still in the awkward crouch, I sort of half duckwalked around the body with my weight on my good leg, trying to get another angle. “So do I.”

When I’d finished taking photos and returned the camera to my duffel, I opened the garbage bag again and worked a hand under the body’s intact calves, lifting the bare feet into the bag. I fought my revulsion—her body wasn’t even cold yet. The smell of gore was worse now that I was down by the body, and I tried to concentrate on breathing through my mouth. When the feet were in, I had Molly hold the bag so I could work one hand under the shoulders and one under the torso, sliding the body into the bag. I had no leverage, and it was tough to balance on half a crouch, but it didn’t really matter because the thing was just so
light
compared to most corpses. The whole body weighed maybe sixty pounds. I was able to slide it in by moving my hands along the body like I was feeding out a length of rope.

The worst part was the perfect head, which came dragging along after the body like an overloaded caboose. “Stop,” Molly hissed abruptly, and I froze, with only the head still outside the bag. She reached down without speaking and closed the dead woman’s eyes, then muttered something as she crossed herself. I’d never seen any kind of religious behavior from her before, but I slid the head into the bag without comment. I can’t imagine that the Catholic Church endorses vampires, but I do understand that some habits die hard.

One of the woman’s hands had strayed and was still outside of the bag, so I gritted my teeth and took hold of it. Her fingernails were torn and shredded, her fingers streaked with blood. She’d fought, then. The struggle would have been messy, and the area just outside the door had been fairly clean, aside from a few blood smears. So she’d been disemboweled somewhere nearby, or maybe in a vehicle. I tucked the hand in the bag as gently as I could.

When the body was all the way in, I picked up both ends of the mat and lifted it off the floor, trying not to wring any of the blood out. Molly held the bag open and I carefully put the mat inside, on top of the dead woman. I think Molly and I were both relieved when I tightened the thick drawstring so we could no longer see the remains.

“What now?” she asked. “Do we clean up the rest?”

“Not exactly,” I said, eyeing the floor. The mat had done a good job of soaking up most of the blood, but there were a few scuffs and smears of blood that had tracked onto the hardwood. I wiped up what I could with paper towels, which I shoved in the garbage bag before knotting it tightly. Then I pulled a small spray bottle out of my bag and uncapped it.

“What is that?” Molly said curiously.

“Mostly oxygen bleach, and a few other chemicals. Olivia’s recipe,” I answered absently. My thoughts were racing. I’d seen a lot of gross stuff since I started this job, but thi
s . . .
this was more like a message. No—a taunt. It wasn’t just food, that was for sure.

I carefully sprayed each and every one of the blood spots on the floor, coating the wood with the stuff. Then I stepped back outside and sprayed every one of those smears too, tossing the spray bottle into the duffel bag. The whole process took less than a minute. I gathered the loose upper end of the bag and flipped it in a quick knot. “Let’s go.”

“Don’t you wann
a . . .
won’t that damage the wood?”

I shrugged. “Yes. But that’s Will’s problem. We leave the solution on, so it can fully break down the blood’s composition. He’ll probably end up getting new floors anyway, but even if he doesn’t, nobody will be able to prove that this was blood or extract DNA.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I was just thinking of that time at the dog park, where you made it seem like nothing had ever happened.”

I zipped up my duffel bag and hefted it back onto my shoulder. “My job is to destroy evidence of a crime above anything else. If bloodstains were the only thing here, I’d stay and work on them, but the priority is getting rid of the body. For all we know, the killer may have called the cops and tipped them off already.”

“Oh,” Molly said, checking her watch. We’d probably been inside for five minutes, though it felt like longer.

“Are you going to be able to carry that?” I said, looking at the garbage bag.

“Sure,” Molly said easily, but her face sank into a frown as she lifted the weight. “Damn, that’s heavy,” she complained. “Maybe you should get ahead of me.” I knew what she meant. If Molly left my null radius, she’d have vampire strength again. Sixty pounds would seem like nothing.

But I shook my head. “There’s a lot of blood soaked into her clothes, and a lot on that doormat. You think your control is good enough to ignore that?” The smell of that much blood would likely be overpowering for a vampire. Molly probably wouldn’t actually go after the remains—vampires prefer their food fresh—but she’d become suddenly, uncontrollably hungry. She would zoom off to find herself a “donor,” and I’d be left alone with a body I couldn’t carry.

“The bag is closed,” she scoffed, but looked a little dubious.

“It could rupture. Or you could drop it, or it could snag on something. I’m not risking it,” I said firmly.
You can’t be too careful
is my working mantra. “We’ll just go slow.”

“Fine,” Molly conceded. We made our way slowly back down the wooden walkway toward the Whale. I hobbled along with the cane, the duffel smacking into the back of my good leg with each step, and Molly kept trying and failing to carry the bag while holding it a little bit away from her body. It was too heavy, though, so she tried dragging it along behind her until I objected, fearing she’d tear a hole in the plastic. After a few steps she gave a long-suffering sigh and lifted the bag onto her back like the world’s most disturbing Santa Claus. “Ugh,” she said, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “I can feel her knees digging into my back.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Can too,” she insisted, and we bickered cheerfully for a few more steps. And then we rounded the corner of the house and found four werewolves sitting on my van.

Chapter 5

I froze, which is the third dumbest thing you can do in the presence of werewolves, right after dumping a bucket of meat juice over your head or running away. Molly cursed as she bumped into my back, but fell silent as she must have seen the werewolves. Two of them, both males, were sprawled on
top
of my damned van, leaning back with their legs dangling like they were working on their tans. The last and biggest male and a single female were half leaning, half sitting on the back bumper. I knew the female all too well: Anastasia, the bartender from Hair of the Dog, whose girlfriend, Lydia, had been bitten by another wolf infected with wolfberry. Anastasia was black, with wiry arms and a very short Afro, and her eyes were darkened with rage. She was leaning on the Whale’s back bumper, with a thickly built Latino man beside her. All four of them had that rangy, lean, wild-eyed look that seems to haunt all of the werewolves outside of my radius.

“That’s her,” Anastasia announced, pointing a finger at my chest. “She’s the one with the cure.”

There was a moment of terrible, pregnant stillness. Then Molly laughed out loud, a short, surprised guffaw that broke the silence and somehow gave me permission to start breathing again.

“Cure for what?” Molly said, laughter still in her voice. “Bitchiness? I know you’ve got it in spades, poor thing, but I don’t think my girl can help you.”

Still outside my radius, Anastasia growled, a low, terrifying buzz that started deep in her chest. Then she said simply, “Miguel.”

Instantly, the Latino werewolf next to her pushed off the van and trotted gracefully toward us, head erect. He wasn’t all that tall, maybe right around six feet, but he gave off a sense of hugeness, of
menace
, thanks to broad shoulders that looked like they’d been dipped repeatedly in several layers of muscle like candle wax. He hit my radius and faltered a little, as expressions of confusion, relief, and anger flew across his face. Then he marched forward, without the gracefulness, and stepped all the way into my personal space, so his hot breath billowed in my face. He smelled of pickles and grease. “Tell us about the cure,” he demanded. His voice was appropriately low. And appropriately terrifying.

Unconsciously, I touched the pocket where I usually keep my handheld Taser. But it was sitting on my dresser charger at Molly’s house, waiting for when I went back to work. Fuck fuckity fuck. I took a deep breath through my mouth, meeting Miguel’s eyes. Then I took a slow, deliberate step backward without looking away. I wanted to get him out of my face, but without making it look like I was fleeing. “I don’t have a cure,” I said softly. “I’m sorry. I wish I did.”

His nostrils flared as he automatically tried to sniff at my body chemistry for a lie, but he was human at the moment, and he snarled with frustration.

“Cure for what?” Molly asked again, looking from Miguel to me. This time her voice was low and serious.

I spoke to Molly without looking away from Miguel. “Anastasia thinks I have a cure for werewolf magic. Apparently she’s convinced these folks as well.”

“That’s insane,” Molly said pleasantly. “There’s no cure.”

“Try telling them that.”

Molly put the bag down and stepped between me and the huge Miguel, getting into his personal space just as he’d gotten into mine. “There’s no cure,” she said, her voice calm and reasonable. “Back off.”

I felt a surge of severe fondness for Molly.

“Ana?” Miguel called without turning. Anastasia snarled in frustration and pushed off the van as well. While she was walking, I reached behind me and locked my fingers around the top of the garbage bag. I had no idea what to do here. In a second, they were going to start asking questions about the bag, and I doubted that Will would want his wolves to know about the body on his doorstep. He’d said that the pack was already a mess, and this would only make things worse. At the same time I was feeling the urgency to move, to get rid of the bag, like a physical pressure on my back. Having a dead body with you is very, very bad.

Think
, Scarlett.

Ana stepped up beside Miguel, and I felt the pulse of additional werewolf magic in my radius. “Don’t lie to us,” she snapped at me. “I saw you go into the bar that night, and then Eli disappeared.”

“Did anyone check the doghouse?” Molly asked innocently.

“Molly,” I said reproachfully. “Not helpful.”

Miguel was not amused. He wrapped a meaty hand around Molly’s neck and lifted, which I had thought was something people only did in movies. She made a gurgling sound, clutching at the big man’s hand as her feet left the ground. She aimed a kick at his groin, but Miguel expected it and turned his body sideways. The kick hit his thigh, and he didn’t so much as grunt.

Molly’s eyes were wide, and there was suddenly a look on her face I’d never seen before—terror. Molly’s keen interest in humanity had always been one of my favorite things about her. She genuinely wants to know what modern humans experience, and she wants to feel those things too—hence the sushi class. But part of being human is being physically vulnerable, and neither of us had ever wanted her to experience that. What Miguel was doing wouldn’t leave lasting physical damage, not once she got out of my radius, but I doubted she would forget what it felt like to be victimized.

My fingers tightened on the cane. I could hit him with it and he’d drop Molly, but if we started a fight in human form we weren’t going to win.

Think
faster
, Scarlett.

“Let’s all calm down,” I said, trying to make my voice sound reasonable. “How old are you, Miguel?” I asked. “You look maybe forty, but you’re a lot older than that, right?” When someone from the Old World is in my radius, I get a general sense of their power, the amount of magic that clings to them. For the werewolves, that magic determines their strength, speed, and healing abilities, which translates loosely into the pack’s structure—most powerful at the top, least powerful at the bottom. Miguel was huge and scary-looking, but he seemed about as powerful as he did smart.

His eyes flicked warily toward me, and the arm holding Molly wavered a little. He was strong, but he was still close enough to me to be human, and holding a hundred and twenty pounds straight in the air would make anyone’s arm tired after a while. “I’m sixty-two,” he huffed.

Werewolves age more slowly than humans, at about half the speed. “You’ve been a wolf for a while, then. But you’re not all that powerful. So you’re a follower.” I tilted my head at Anastasia. “I don’t know what she’s been telling you, but you’re backing the wrong horse, Miguel. That nice young woman you’re terrorizing is a vampire.” His eyes went wide, and I pushed on. “Anyone who violates the Old World peace is going to answer to Dashiell, and if you think Anastasia’s strong enough to protect yo
u . . .
” I shook my head emphatically. “You haven’t been paying attention.”

Miguel looked uncertainly from me to Anastasia, and then lowered Molly back to the ground. She coughed, holding her neck, breathing in panicked gasps. “Miguel,” Anastasia snapped, but they were in my radius, and the nice thing about being a null is that you have home-court advantage wherever you go. The wolf pack instincts that drove Miguel to obey his superior didn’t apply when he was a human. Ana flashed teeth at him, but he simply stood there, arms folded across his chest.

“You said we were here for the abomination,” he reminded her, nodding at me. “Not to fuck around with vampires.”

Abomination. That was a new one. Not to mention an awfully big word to come out of Miguel’s mouth. I would have laughed if he hadn’t been quite so big and pee-your-pants scary. It sounded like they were considering applying some violence, so before anyone else could speak, I jumped in. “Look, you guys, this is ridiculous. I’m sorry that Eli hasn’t been around, and I know that’s thrown everyone off—”

Anastasia’s glare turned on me so quickly and furiously that I would have instinctively stepped away from her if I could step easily. “Do
not
,” she snapped, “pretend to know about our pack. Eli is our beta. Do you have any idea what that is?”

I blinked. “Uh, the beta’s the second in command. Will’s second.”

She threw up her arms in frustration. “You ignorant little brat. Do you really think that’s all he is?”

“What do you mean?” I asked warily.

“The beta also takes care of the cubs,” Anastasia declared. “He helps them integrate into the pack, find their control.”

Lydia. I’d changed Eli to a human, and now he wasn’t around to help Lydia. No wonder Ana was pissed off. If Eli’s absence was caused by something common and understandable, they would have been told, and someone else would move up in the pack hierarchy. But Will hadn’t been able to explain, and—

“What’s in the bag?”

I looked up, startled by the new voice. It was one of the two werewolves on the van’s roof. He was a slender black man with a shaved head and sharp slanted cheekbones. It was forty degrees outside, but he wore jeans and a gray ribbed tank top that showed off wiry arms.

Anastasia turned her body sideways, so she could look at him without turning her back to me. The man slid neatly off the van and onto the paved driveway. The second his sneakers hit pavement, the other wolf slithered down after him, flanking his side as he approached us. As he got closer I realized that his arms were covered in thin crisscrossing scars. One of them traveled diagonally down his shoulder to disappear under his shirt. He must have gotten them before he was changed, or he’d been in a lot of fights against silver knives, which can leave scars. Interesting. I wondered if werewolves got pack nicknames. His would definitely be Scarms.

He hit my radius and stumbled a little—he’d obviously never been near a null, because it took him longer than most to recover his balance. I used the beat to gauge his strength, with mixed results. Scarms was definitely more powerful than Miguel, but what I could do wasn’t precise enough to get an answer to how he compared to Anastasia. They were pretty close.

Then he was only a foot away from me. After a couple of seconds, Scarms repeated himself. “What’s in the bag?” I didn’t answer. Without being told, the wolf behind Scarms left his side and flowed past us, entering and then leaving my radius, toward the front door. He was a short, barrel-shaped guy who had probably been chubby before he’d been changed. He had those tight, artificial-looking curls that usually signified a perm, but his must have been natural. When werewolves change back and forth, they lose things like perms and tattoos and piercings. He bent down and examined the bleach-covered blood smears. “Blood here, I think,” he said to either Anastasia or Scarms. “But there’s bleach all over it; I can’t smell anything.”

He pulled out a key ring—goddammit, of
course
all the wolves had keys to Will’s house—and opened the front door. “Same here,” he called. He disappeared into the house, probably to look for more blood.

Thank you, Clorox. I dismissed him and turned back to Scarms and Anastasia. “There was a fight,” I lied. “Will called me to get rid of some furniture and some bloodstains. I’m taking it with me, and you’ve delayed me enough. Molly? Give me a hand?”

I passed the tied-off garbage bag to Molly, gripped my cane, and took a step forward, forcing Miguel to either step aside or plow into an injured girl half his size. Confused, he stepped aside, but Scarms right behind him did not. The werewolf didn’t move at all, just stood there and looked at me with a curious, detached expression, like I was a turtle who’d fallen out of its shell.

“A fight between whom?” he said. Anastasia made a quiet crowing noise behind me. I’m sure she was just impressed with the use of “whom.”

“We haven’t met,” I said to him. I kept my voice confident and coldly polite, like the terrifying people who run the DMV. “I’m Scarlett Bernard. You are?”

“Terrence,” he said. “Whittaker.” I nodded. My name for him was better. “That’s Drew,” he added, tilting his head toward the house.

“Nice to meet you, Terrence,” I replied. Putting my weight on my left foot, I straightened up as tall as I could and met his eyes. “I haven’t seen you at one of my crime scenes before, so let me explain how this works. I come and pick up the bloody crap. I take it with me. I get rid of it. I don’t get details or names; I’m
just the cleaning lady
,” I said, emphasizing each word.

“I want to see inside the bag,” he said tersely.

I gritted my teeth and said, “Tough rocks. I do not answer to you, or to Anastasia, or to anyone but Will, Dashiell, and Kirsten. I have another call across town tonight”—total lie— “and I do not have time to fuck around with cutting open garbage bags, cleaning up anything that falls out, and rebagging. So either get out of my way”—I pulled my cell phone out of my jacket pocket—“or I will call Will and you can explain to him why you’re interfering with me.”

Terrence glanced uneasily at Anastasia. “Don’t listen to her,” she interjected, her eyes wild. “Let’s stick with the plan. We hold her until she gives up the cure.”

I could tell Ana hadn’t meant to mention “the plan.” I fought against a crush of panic, grateful once again that they couldn’t smell my fear.

Terrence and Anastasia stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment, with Miguel flicking his own gaze from one to the other. There was a palpable intensity between the two, even in human form, and I knew a dominance fight when I saw one. I wasn’t going to get anywhere with Ana, so I looked at her opponent and said softly, “Terrence. Will knows Molly is helping me tonight. If you dick around with the treaty, you’ll answer to Dashiell.”

Miguel made a small noise in the back of his throat. We don’t talk about the actual treaty much, because in the Old World, threatening someone with it is more or less the social equivalent of the nuclear option. The treaty is very simple: don’t fuck with anyone. People who violate the treaty, or kill another Old World member under any circumstances, go to Dashiell. And everyone was afraid of Dashiell, with damned good reason.

Terrence stared at Anastasia for another long moment, and then stepped out of my way without breaking eye contact with her. Finally his eyes jerked over to me. “Another time,” he said roughly. Anastasia folded her arms, anger and frustration written all over her body, but she didn’t speak. Molly’s presence had ruined her plan, and she knew it.