Trail of Dead (27 page)

As I drove I tried to remember what Olivia had told me about the effects of that strain of nightshade: it caused the werewolves to completely lose control of both the human and the wolf sides. They couldn’t keep from changing back and forth, over and over, which was excruciatingly painful. They attacked humans at will, which was out of character for both real wolves and the shapeshifters, who preferred to hunt deer and rabbits. Most wolves who ingested wolfberry had to be shot. The lucky ones just lost their minds and spent years recovering. The good news was, all of that was caused by werewolf magic interacting with the herb’s magic, so if a null like me could get close enough, he or she could stop everything. Olivia had once said that the only two ways to stop a werewolf who’d ingested wolfberry were a null or a silver bullet.

Olivia. She had done this. I didn’t know how yet, but unlike the scene at Kirsten’s house, this felt like classic Olivia: a big, messy strike at someone I loved, designed to cause maximum damage
with no regard for bystanders.
I can hurt you whenever I want
; that was the message.
No one is safe from me.
I worked to keep my breathing even as I drove. I had to stay calm. I had to be able to get in there and do this. I wasn’t going to help Eli if I couldn’t keep my shit together. I bit down on a burst of hysterical laughter, my back aching from the effort. I was so past keeping anything together.

I blew through the traffic and only stopped for a single red light, because I wanted to take the opportunity to dig through Jesse’s glove compartment. I was rewarded, though: I found a great big bottle of extra-strength Advil and shook out four pills. I swallowed them with a flat soda that was in Jesse’s cup holder, and then sped on to the bar.

I parked right out in front without bothering to see if it was even a legal spot. As I ran to the entrance, I saw a thin figure on the sidewalk in a defensive crouch, like she expected someone to run up and shove her over. I squinted against the streetlight and recognized Anastasia, an African-American woman in her late twenties. She was a werewolf and one of Will’s part-time bartenders. He must have stationed her out here to let me in and keep everyone else out.

That made sense, but she was shaking like a leaf. I crouched, very carefully touching her wrist. “Ana?”

Her gaze met mine for an instant, and then she looked away. “Will ordered me to stay out,” she said, her low voice clouded with shock and grief. “My girlfriend’s in there, but he said I had to leave, and I couldn’t…I couldn’t stay.”

Ouch. I understood that she was being literal. She
couldn’t
go in. As the alpha, Will can control the wolf half of his pack members, but he’s a good guy and doesn’t usually push them. This was probably the first time he’d flexed his power over her, and she wasn’t taking it well.

“Who’s in there, Ana?”

She swallowed. “Some customers. Will. And Lydia.”

“Which wolves?” I said, trying to keep the impatience out of my voice. “Who took the wolfberry?”

“Eli,” she said. “And Caroline.”

I didn’t wait for further explanation, just rose carefully—the Advil was already helping, but my back was still stiff and tender—and stepped past Anastasia, into the bar.

The door opened into a tiny alcove, a few feet away from the main bar area. As soon as I stepped all the way into the alcove, I froze and looked down. I was standing on a human hand.

I managed not to yelp but lurched backward, almost slipping in a long smear of blood. When I was steady I pressed my back against the door, which had closed behind me, straining to see in the dim bar lighting. There was a body taking up most of the alcove, a woman lying on her stomach, pointed toward the door as though she were trying to leave. I recognized the short, dark hair, the sweeping, tilted nose. Caroline. A strangled sob escaping my throat, I bent at the waist, spotting at least two bullet holes in her back. Silver bullets.

“Scarlett?” Will’s voice whispered.

Later, Scarlett. Mourn for her later.
I held my breath and stepped around Caroline’s corpse into the main room of the bar. Hair of the Dog was in shambles. There was broken glass
everywhere
, from dozens of framed pictures that had exploded off the walls. It looked like someone had swept an arm around the room, knocking everything violently to the floor, and then rolled around in the broken glass and shaken like a dog. Which was probably more or less what had happened. The smell of blood was overwhelming, and I saw that the dark-colored floor was shining in places. A lot of places. I counted four other bodies on the floor, that I could see.

Against my usual instincts, I ignored them. They were either dead or in need of help, and that wasn’t coming while there was a crazed werewolf running around. I looked at Will, who was holding a huge revolver in his right hand, his left hand flat and out in
a “calm down” gesture. They were both pointed toward the back corner of the bar, which I couldn’t see yet. I stepped up next to him, trying to keep as quiet as I could, and rounded the bar to see an enormous wolf—Eli—growling in the back corner of the room. The wolf’s fur was raised all along his back, and his huge teeth were locked around the neck of a young woman in her midtwenties. She was pale, drenched in blood and tears and wolf slobber, breathing in a rapid pant with little whimpering noises. My own breath caught in my throat.

I had seen pictures of Eli’s wolf, but they didn’t do him justice: he was gorgeous, colored in blurred shades of silver and black, with white tips on the bottom of each paw. I couldn’t get over the
size
of him, either—wild wolves are big, but werewolves weigh as much in wolf form as they do in human form. Eli had to be around two hundred pounds, most of it muscle, and the wolf was the same. His eyes, though…there was unmistakable madness in them. I’d seen werewolves from this distance before, and I’d once seen a rabid dog in our neighborhood when I was growing up. But I’d never seen the two combined.

The woman was scrambling to hold her own weight upright on the slippery blood-and-glass floor so she wouldn’t just be dangling from the wolf’s enormous jaws, while simultaneously trying not to jar the wolf. It was obvious that she was tiring, and with nothing to gain purchase on, she was beginning to slip downward. I tried to swallow, my mouth suddenly bone-dry.

Will must have seen me in his peripheral vision, but he gave a tiny head shake.
Don’t move yet.
I stayed a step behind him, keeping the wolf’s attention on the bigger man. “Eli,” Will crooned softly, “let go of her, okay? She’s a friend.” The wolf didn’t move, just continued to growl. “He’s shifting about every two minutes,” Will said in the same soothing voice, and I realized he was talking to me. “He’s got maybe a minute and a half. If he starts to change, he’ll bite down. I
will
shoot him before that happens.”

Will’s voice was firm and calm, but when I chanced a sideways look I saw tears rolling down his cheeks. “Silver?” I asked briefly, though I knew the answer. Will was the one who had shot Caroline.
Later, Scarlett.

“Yes.”

“Let me try,” I whispered, as calmly as I could.

For the first time, Will took his eyes off Eli’s wolf to glance at me. “He can snap her neck before you can get a single step forward—”

“No time to argue,” I said. Moving
very
slowly, I pulled Molly’s sweater over my head, keeping my eyes away from the wolf’s. I spotted a tattered gray bar rag hanging out of Will’s back pocket and reached forward to tug it out at the same speed. “You have to let me try, Will. It’s
Eli
.” I tried to keep my voice as calm as Will’s, but when I got to Eli’s name I couldn’t keep the desperation out of it. The wolf heard it and snarled in his throat, ears flicking in my direction.

“If he so much as starts to twitch—”

“Shh. I know.” Wearing only my bulletproof vest on top, I slowly lowered my body to the floor. At least we wouldn’t have to worry about Will shooting me in the back by accident.

A cornered wolf was one of the most dangerous creatures in nature. Still, all I had to do was get close enough to get him in my radius, which meant I needed to move maybe fifteen feet. I wanted to try my new expansion trick, but it had backfired on me at Kirsten’s, and besides I just couldn’t trust my ability to concentrate, not now. I dropped the sweater on the floor and put my right hand on it. I kept the bar towel covering as much of my left hand as possible, though my finger pads got cut almost immediately. My hands more or less protected, I got down on my hands and knees. Ignoring the pain in my back, I kept my lips closed and my teeth covered as the Velcro on the bulletproof vest rustled softly. My gaze focused on the floor, I made my first “step” on all fours toward Eli’s wolf.

The wolf growled again. I had changed the rules of behavior. I cringed a little but kept going. “It’s okay,” I said softly, keeping my eyes on the floor. I kept my body low, so my face and my imaginary tail wouldn’t appear to be any higher than the wolf in front of me. The struggling woman had started making involuntary whimpering sounds, which probably wasn’t helping Eli calm down any. “I’m a friend. It’s okay.” I kept going, crooning nonsense in the same calming tone Will had used. The bar towel was already soaked through with blood, though none of it was mine.

I flicked my eyes up for the briefest of seconds, to check on the wolf’s reaction. The fur had gone down along his spine. He was still growling, but there was a note of uncertainty in it now.

“My mom was an veterinary tech at an animal hospital,” I said to no one in particular. I just wanted to keep talking, keep the calming sound going. “She worked with abused dogs a lot, crazy dogs.”

“Thirty seconds, Scarlett.” Tension had crept into Will’s voice now. I gave a very brief nod without looking back and kept going. Just eight more feet.

“I know you’re not a dog, Eli, but I’m really hoping the same rules apply,” I added, keeping my voice low. Five more feet. The wolf’s low-throated growl changed slightly, to something that sounded more like whining. His tail, which had been standing perfectly straight and stiff, wilted a bit into a more relaxed pose.

“It’s gonna happen, Scarlett,” Will whispered urgently. As he said it, the wolf made a sudden cry of pain and began to flinch, cringing inward upon himself like he’d been viciously kicked in the stomach. The woman cried out in fear. Without thinking, I dropped and rolled as fast as I could, sliding in the slippery mess. Blood-covered glass fragments cut into my jeans and the bulletproof vest.

There.
I felt Eli enter my radius, and faster than my dizzy eyes could follow, a naked man dropped suddenly to the floor in place
of the wolf. The woman gave a full-out scream, but I skidded right past her through the blood, to Eli’s side. He was unconscious. I shifted to kneel next to him and checked his pulse, held my cheek in front of his nose. Alive. I sighed with relief and looked back up.

The woman had run toward Will and was clinging to him, her body shaking with sobs. Behind her, Will nodded at me, a complicated expression of relief and misery clouding his face.

Will walked the bloody woman over to a bar stool and propped her on it. Her upper body collapsed down onto the bar’s surface, and she stayed there, sobbing into her arms. Will moved his hands like he might try to comfort her, but then reversed direction, disappearing for a moment into his office through the back door. When he came back there was something in his hand, but I didn’t see the syringe until he’d stabbed it into the bloody woman’s upper arm.

I gasped. “Will—”

“It’s okay,” he said levelly. “It’s just a sedative.”
A lot of that going around
, I thought. The woman’s body went limp, and he picked her up from the bar stool and lifted her whole body onto the bar, which was much cleaner and safer looking than the floor at the moment. “She’s going into shock, but I need her to stay here until I can get some of Dashiell’s crew here to erase her memory. I just called him, from the office.”

“Is she going to change?”

He frowned. “I can’t tell. His teeth punctured her neck, but only slightly—I think the rest of the blood on her is from the glass and the other…the other…”
Victims
, I thought, but neither of us wanted to say it. “And you were here, which might have slowed the magic. I’m just not sure.” He shrugged. “We’ll erase her memory, but we’ll keep an eye on her.”

“What
happened
here?” I said bluntly, unable to keep it in. “Caroline…?”

Without answering, Will crunched across the glass toward the nearest body lying on the ground. It was a man I’d never seen
before, around thirty, wearing one of those tacky bowler shirts under a lot of blood. I couldn’t see his actual injuries from where I was sitting, but Will checked for a pulse, checked for breathing, just as I had with Eli. Then he shook his head. “Dead,” he said briefly, and moved on to the next body. I looked away. Part of me felt like I should get up and help him, but I had no idea if leaving Eli would cause the wolfberry’s effects to start up again.

“It was cookies,” Will said matter-of-factly, and I looked up at him. He was answering my question. “Small businesses like ours, we exchange gifts with a lot of our vendors. Gourmet chocolate, nuts, microbrews, that kind of thing. We got a big tin of Christmas cookies delivered here a couple of hours ago. I was at the bar, but Caroline was in the office, and Eli was back there eating his dinner at my desk. They both had some.”

“Olivia.”

He nodded, bitterness on his face. He checked another pulse, shook his head again. “It hit Caroline first. She started screaming, and I saw the change take her. Usually I can control their wolves, help them stay in human form if they start to lose it before the full moon. But with the wolfberry…I was helpless.”

“And then Eli…” I prompted.

Will nodded. “And then Eli,” he said grimly. “He’s strong, and he fought it, harder than I’ve ever seen anyone who wasn’t an alpha. But in the end I think that made it worse.” He shook his head. “When he finally went, there was no sense to him. Just…madness.