Mercy Blade (30 page)

Because she hadn’t been autopsied, as I stood over Safia I smelled blood and internal organs, water that had been used to wash the body, hair products, harsh and floral soaps, gunpowder, an unusual fishy smell that might have been her supper, and in her sweat, the pheromones of fear. The cat had been terrified when she died.

I confirmed Safia as the big-cat who had followed the werewolves when they hunted on Beast’s territory. The one who watched them kill without killing any deer herself. I should have parsed her scent when I met her and shook her hand, but with all the vamp- and were-smells in the ballroom, I’d missed it.

Safia had seen the wolves hunt before I’d met them in Booger’s Scoot. It was unlikely she had
happened
upon the hunt; therefore, she had been . . . invited to watch? I found a plastic bag with Safia’s clothes at the bottom of the tray. With my teeth, I tore a hole in the bag and sniffed with short, hard breaths. On her dress, I scented the wolf-bitch. Safia
had
known the wolves. Known and not told Kemnebi; I didn’t think his disgust upon first seeing and smelling the wolves had been feigned.

I trailed my nose down her limbs, scenting nail polish remover and polish, the henna of her tattoos, and oddly, a pine and floral scent that was Gee. I snuffed. What had Safia been doing with the Mercy Blade? Curious. I smelled dozens of other scents on her hands, where she had greeted guests at the party the night she died.

Kemnebi’s scent was all over her, everywhere, the scent of his skin cells caught under her nails and his semen strong between her legs. The bloodhound nose was giving me information I really didn’t need or want.

Over everything was the scent of Katie. The whacked-out vamp had come upon the were-cat within an hour after death, according to the coroner, and had savaged her, searching for blood. There were punctures at chest, groin, and elbow, and she had licked the body free of spilled blood, Katie’s vamp saliva strong on the girl where she had ripped open Safia’s abdomen and sucked her descending aorta dry. Thanks to the timetable and the video footage, Katie wouldn’t be accused of murder, but she
had
drunk dead blood. And Leo had drunk from her.

Beast sent me an image of a young, dead buck, days old, kept safe in a tree for when she got hungry again. And then a vision of steaks bought in a store, wrapped in plastic. Days old.
Okay. Got it
, I thought at her. I eat old meat.
But still . . . Ick.
So far, I wasn’t liking the things I learned while in bloodhound form. They were too personal, too intimate. Deep inside, Beast sniffed with a self-satisfied air.

I was about to stop when I found one final scent. Around her mouth, as if she had kissed him just before she died, I smelled Rick. Pretty boy Rick LaFleur. My breath stopped, suspended. Had he been at the party where she died? No. Had he been there, I would have smelled Rick, even in my human form. I was certain. Well . . . almost certain.

I heard voices down the hall and quickly tried to raise the tray. It moved, but far too slowly. Panic thudded into my chest with my heartbeat and I looked around for a place to hide, my dim eyesight a disability and my keen sense of smell no help at all. I could sit under a desk, but even there my feet, tail, and haunches would be visible. Better places were nada. Zilch. So I raced to the door and pressed my side against the wall, hoping the sight of the refrigerator open and the body pulled out to knee level would distract them from me. Two people entered. I couldn’t see much from the glare through the open door, but from the smells that pushed into the room with them, one was female, ovulating, wore way too much stinky perfume, hair spray, gel, and body lotion, and one was a male who smoked. A lot. They stopped just inside the opening, the door braced open.

“Did you leave the were-cat’s unit open?” the woman asked.

“No. I looked my fill when we unloaded her.”

“Maybe she’s starting to stink. Do you smell that?”

“Smells like wet dog. My roommate’s dog has this skin condition and it stinks like that.”

They moved into the room and I scooted out the door as it closed, whipping my tail up and out of the way of the door. I followed my own scent up the hall and back outside, narrowly missing two techs who were standing in front of a vending area, dropping coins and zipping dollar bills into machines that stank of sugar and rancid fats. I had no idea how humans could eat that stuff.

 

I came to under the shadow of a house, the smell of fried chicken and grease the strongest scent to my nose. The world was brighter, louder, but dull and void, and I sniffed instinctively as if to restore the scent smorgasbord. Nothing happened and shock hit me like a fist. It was like being sighted and waking up blind, and I
was
head-blind, scent-blind. Bloodhounds had a different view of the world from humans or even big-cats. They could experience and know so much more about the world than we ever could. And then I remembered the smell of Rick on Safia’s body. He had kissed her. Soon before she died.

Though I was starving from the calorie loss of shifting, I didn’t raid the saddlebags yet. I stood, pulled the pack off my neck, and dressed in my jeans, tee, and boots. I felt immensely better fully clothed—a strictly human reaction that Beast had never understood. After putting the remaining gnawed bones into the torn chicken bucket, I ate half a bag of Snickers bars and washed them down with bottled water, adding the wrappers to the garbage.

Stomach no longer cramping from hunger, I pushed Bitsa out into the street and looked up at the sky. With Beast’s time sense, I judged that it was an hour from dawn. If Molly was here, I would have changed back to bloodhound and had her walk me on a leash around vamp HQ to discover what smells I might find, but that wasn’t going to happen.

Frustrated, I kicked Bitsa alive and scooted down Martin Luther King Boulevard, away from the coroner’s morgue. Every time I discovered something new, it seemed to push me further from any possible unifying truth. I had a lot of thinking to do.

 

Back home, I found the house dark and silent. I killed Bitsa’s engine before I arrived, walked her to her parking space, and pulled off my boots to enter the house. I carried a mug of microwaved tea back to my bedroom, closed the door and riffled through my files again, spending a lot of time arranging and studying the new files I’d photocopied from the woo-woo room. There was one file I had never seen before, signed in by Jodi less than a week ago. In it was a photocopy that wasn’t a police report. It read like scientific speculation on the history, mythos, and possibilities presented by the appearance of shifters. It also contained suggestions on how weres or shifters might be located and studied.

Meaning trapped and dissected. I wasn’t stupid. Sections were brutal in their analyses, as if psychos had gone to med and postgraduate school and then become animal trappers and taxidermists.

A less bloody section followed, compiled by geneticists and virologists, consisting of explanations of the way that viruses affect genetic structure, followed by some calculations I didn’t understand about how physics might allow a shape transformation, and how shape transformation might in turn affect the understanding of physics. Large portions had been whited out and photocopied with the changes intact, not that reading the scientific particulars would have made a lot of sense to me anyway.

I ignored all the technical stuff and turned to the last section where the words CURRENT SUMMARY OF GEO-POLITICAL HISTORY attracted my eyes. There was a copied e-mail—addresses whited out, of course—whose author noted that no were, walker, or shifter of any kind had come out of the closet in Europe, Asia, or parts of the Middle East, or at least not yet. He posited that there were several possible reasons: that they were fearful of exposure due to cultural stigma, that there had never been weres or shifters in those parts of the globe, or that any weres, walkers, or shifters had become extinct in those parts of the globe. According to the writer, shifters had possibly been a big part of the settling, growth, and expansion of Middle Eastern, Asian, and European culture. No surprise there, guesswork disguised as logic.

I read, “This raises tantalizing hints about the brothers Romulus and Remus, who were raised by a wolf-bitch, and who settled Rome. It suggests the possibility that the satyrs and centaurs of ancient Greece, who were half-man, half-animal creatures, might have been shape-shifters. We might consider the tales of Celtic selkies, pre- and post-Columbian American Indian skinwalkers. The Egyptian god Ra had a falcon’s head, Sekhmet the head of a lion—”

It was all guesswork. Educated guesswork, but still just guesswork. I set it down and went online to discover that the writer was correct. To date, no European shape-shifters, no Middle Eastern shifters, and no Asian shifters had come out of the closet. And Kemnebi claimed that his kind had killed the last European werewolf during Charlemagne’s reign. Maybe he had been declaring a truth; if so, the weres knew their own history, which meant that they might know about shifters like me, if only in theory.

I found something in the file that looked like parts of a photocopied journal. It was handwritten with that lovely script that people used to learn and use in school, that had been the mark of a well-educated person. The photocopied pages had been highlighted here and there with names, some of whom I recognized: Leonard Pellissier, Lady Beatrice Stonehaven, Grégoire, master of Clan Arceneau, Ming Mearkanis, who was true dead now. I flipped through and nothing else caught my eye until a name popped out at me. The section read:

The words “who was once Christian,” bothered me, though I didn’t want to look too closely at why. I flipped through the pages but found no indication of the original writer, and whoever had made the photocopies had not been interested in the bit of history. Nothing else caught my attention.

I stretched out on my mattress, staring up at the ceiling, the laptop open on the floor at the foot of the bed.

The ceiling was dusty. It hadn’t been dusty when I moved in. I wondered if I was supposed to clean it. Not that I would.

Woolgathering wouldn’t help me solve this case, and so far, my search had found nothing that jumped up and squealed, “This guy is the murderer of Safia!” I couldn’t see how it all fit together, not yet, but I was certain that it did.

Back online, I did a quick search on the Cursed of Artemis, the proper name for weres. There was a host of info on the goddess Artemis and not much on the cursed. I marked several sites to go back to if needed and studied the dusty ceiling some more, my eyes on a cobweb draping a corner.

Kem had also claimed that all weres were predators. But I was pretty sure skinwalkers could take on forms other than predator. Beast growled at me.
Beast is not prey
.

“I know,” I murmured to her. “You’re not a dog either, but I appreciate the willingness to let me shift into one.”

Good nose
, she said, without adding
ugly dog
. From Beast, that was excellent praise.

I rolled over, went offline and placed the report on the floor next to the computer, finishing the summary. There were multiple authors, most of whom disagreed on pretty much every issue. But based on an extensive knowledge of myth and the information gained since the weres were revealed, they agreed on several conclusions: weres were one-creature-only shifters; they were bound by the moon in ways not yet made public; initially, weres had been made, not born, originally created from a human who survived a near-lethal bite by an infected human or animal; there was evidence that some weres could now breed true, suggesting that they had become a human subspecies; and the weres themselves had outlawed turning a human into one of them. Skinwalkers, if they had ever existed, were possibly weres’ forebears; and, last, skinwalkers might be extinct.

A shaft of pain pierced me and I closed my eyes against the knowledge that I may have killed the only one like me on the planet.
Later. I can deal with it later
, I thought. Yeah. Me and that gal from
Gone with the Wind
, the one in the green drapes with a plantation to run. I forced my mind back to the problem at hand—weres, skinwalkers, vamps, Gee, Rick, and what they all had to do with killing Safia.

Rick had been undercover and after the were-cats, going after what he would think of as the weakest link, the were-female, that much was clear from his scent on Safia’s mouth. Not that I had any way of proving it. Jodi wouldn’t tell me and I didn’t have passwords for the police computer system.

I tapped the page with a fingertip, remembering the way the werewolves smelled. Sick. And early in the past century, they were breaking their own laws, trying to turn human females, all of whom had died. And the wolf-bitch had seemed crazy as a loon.

The were-cats, however, hadn’t smelled sick. Important differences between weres and me—I was born, not made, and I couldn’t make another skinwalker via a bite, at least I didn’t think I could, which put me into a very different category from a were.

There was more blacked out near the bottom of the report, but the writer closed with one further conjecture, and this one caught and held my attention. “Perhaps the weres, who are all predators, grew in numbers faster than their shape-shifter forebears, or skinwalkers. With both blended into human society, there could have been war between them, with the weres victorious, killing off all other kinds of shifters.”