And Jimmy would have bragged about it, made a big deal about snagging the last piece of special meat, just like he’d done when he saw Kowalski. But it would have been Sandee and the kids looking at a man’s forearm, unprepared for the harsh reality of what the terra indigene saw when they looked at humans. Most humans. He had to keep believing that Simon and Vlad and the rest of the Others no longer saw all humans as prey.
But the Others had known the theft was going to happen and hadn’t asked the police for help, so he had to wonder if Jimmy had created a wedge between himself and Simon Wolfgard, had cracked the trust that had been building.
And he had to wonder what that meant for the mixed communities that were being created and the people who were now living among the world’s dominant predators without even the pretense of a barrier between them.
• • •
Burke studied Kowalski, who sat in his office looking pale and still a bit shaky. But the officer’s dark eyes didn’t have the wild look anymore, so now it was time to talk.
“What happened?” Burke asked.
Kowalski shook his head. “I saw Cyrus waving that package and bragging about scoring a piece of special meat, and I lost it. I don’t remember taking him down. Things snapped into focus again when Jenni Crowgard asked if I needed help, if I wanted her to peck its eyes out. Its eyes, not his eyes. I knew I needed an excuse to get her away from him and I needed to get him out of the Courtyard, get him back on land where human laws did apply. I needed to arrest him and get him out of there because he was drawing attention to himself, to all of us, and . . .” He stopped, seemed to choke.
“It’s one thing to pick up a wallet that was dropped for you to find and know the person who owned it crossed some line and was killed and eaten because of it. It’s quite another thing to see the proof of it.”
“Whenever word got out that the Wolves had bitten off the hand of a shoplifter, Howling Good Reads would be packed with customers for days after,” Kowalski said.
Burke smiled. “The perversity of human nature. But a severed hand isn’t the same as a corpse. The terra indigene in the Courtyard are true to their nature, Karl, and that makes them very dangerous. But they’re still the only chance of survival that we have because no matter how dangerous Simon and Vlad and the rest of them are, they are nowhere near as much of a threat to us as the Others who live in the wild country.”
Kowalski sat back. “I know.” He sighed. “I know. What happens now?”
“I don’t want you out on the street, so you ride a desk for the rest of the day, give yourself time to settle. If the lieutenant needs a driver, Debany or Hilborn can handle it.”
Burke clasped and unclasped his fingers a couple of times, debating the wisdom of saying anything, even now. “When you’re a cop serving in a small human village within the wild country, sometimes you make hard choices that you wouldn’t—couldn’t—make in a human-controlled city. And you look the truth in the face when its fangs are bared and its fur is smeared with the blood of the prey you had gone out to talk to that morning. But you’d taken a walk beyond the village lights the night before, and you were mulling things over out loud about how to handle a difficult situation, about the nice woman who had a broken arm again, how her mate beat her but she was too frightened to say anything against him so there was nothing you could do, and that was a shame because she really was a nice woman who had shown a couple of terra indigene females how to mend clothes, which is what started the argument that ended with her arm being broken, along with a couple of fingers to keep her from doing any mending for a while. And when you go to talk to the man the next morning and discover he isn’t home, you follow the game trail behind his house and you come upon a savaged, partially eaten body and you look the truth in the face—not the truth that has fangs and fur but the hard truth about yourself, that you’re just as dangerous as the beings the rest of the people fear but you can’t afford to be as honest about it. You can’t tell those people that you’ll make deals with what they fear in order to keep them safe from the monsters who look just like them.”
Kowalski said nothing for a long minute. “You think I should have stepped aside?”
“No,” Burke said gently. “You interfered because you’ve been around the Others long enough to understand that it’s one thing to know something intellectually and quite another to look the truth in the face. The police? We’ve seen plenty of evidence of how the terra indigene respond when they’re angry with humans. But civilians like Ruthie and Merri Lee who are living so close to the Courtyard and working among the Others? They don’t need that much truth.”
“Protect the women?” Kowalski gave him a dry smile. “They might take exception to that.”
“Of course they would—and should—but I’ll deny I ever said it.”
The smile faded. “You’re giving me a lot of credit for a few seconds I don’t remember.”
“I recognized the look in your eyes when you got to the station. I saw it in a mirror once or twice when I was around your age.”
Burke’s phone rang. He glanced at it, then focused on Kowalski. “You steady enough?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then get to work.” He picked up the receiver as Kowalski walked out of his office. “Burke.”
“It’s O’Sullivan.”
Trying to remember if the ITF agent was back in Lakeside and had heard about the debacle in the Courtyard, Burke merely said, “What can I do for you?”
“Do you have any news about Dr. Lorenzo?”
He’d tell O’Sullivan everything once they could talk face-to-face, but he didn’t want to say anything about Lorenzo over the phone. “I heard he resigned from the task force. And his car was found. Had some bullet holes.”
A hesitation. “Are you checking hospitals and the morgue for any John Does?”
“Not necessary.”
“Did you fill out a DLU?”
“Not required.” Did O’Sullivan understand the message, that Lorenzo was alive and his whereabouts were known?
“Could you check the hospitals and morgue anyway?”
Burke sat up straighter. “Problem?”
“Half the doctors who were gathering information about the cassandra sangue resigned from the task force after being threatened by members of the Humans First and Last movement. During my talk with the governor, I confirmed that several other doctors besides Lorenzo have disappeared.”
He wrote down the names O’Sullivan gave him. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Appreciate it,” O’Sullivan said. “I’m on my way to catch a train back to Lakeside. Should be arriving late this afternoon.”
“Give me your ETA when you know it, and I’ll have someone pick you up.”
“Thanks.”
Burke hung up and sat back. There were still plenty of blood prophets living in the compounds where they’d been held all their lives, unwilling, or unable, to conceive of any kind of independent life. But there were also plenty of those girls who were now trying to shape a life for themselves, struggling with their addiction to cut, pushed into that self-destructive act by visions that wouldn’t be denied. Even the least talented among those girls could give a handler a very nice living, and the best among them . . .
He’d done a little digging, a little research, called a couple of places posing as a possible client before all the dirty secrets about benevolent ownership and what was done to the girls in those places came crashing down on the prophecy industry. One question, one cut on a girl with low-end talent and basic training, cost a couple of hundred dollars. Someone like Meg Corbyn, who was intelligent and absorbed information perhaps too well, who saw strings of images and was frighteningly accurate? A cut on someone with Meg’s skill would cost thousands.
Plenty of motivation to abduct and interrogate men who would know where to find girls who might no
t be as well protected as the Others believed—mainly because they would never consider that a human would be rash enough and greedy enough to try to get past them and snatch a girl.
Burke pushed away from his desk. He wanted to go to the Courtyard and assess the situation. But first he would get Kowalski started on locating the missing doctors, or at least getting some idea of where and when they were last seen. And then he needed to apprise the mayor and police commissioner of the potential trouble this attempted theft of meat might cause the city.
• • •
“What?” Simon snapped when Vlad, who was behind HGR’s checkout counter doing nothing useful, continued to stare at him.
“I noticed that all the books you’re putting on the display table are thrillers by terra indigene authors and are the type that could be described as ‘rip and tear.’”
“So?”
“Don’t you think the message is a little too blunt?”
Snarling, he turned toward the counter—and noticed Miss Twyla standing quietly between the shelves that separated the front area from the rest of the store.
“Is there something we can do for you, Miss Twyla?” Vlad asked.
“I understand that all the meat that was delivered yesterday was stolen.”
“Currently there is nothing in the butcher shop for sale.”
“I see.”
Simon couldn’t stand having her think there was no meat, that the female pack would have nothing to eat but greens. “The meat the thieves didn’t take we gave to Meat-n-Greens to use. And we can thaw a couple of packages of bison meat.”
Miss Twyla nodded. “That’s a good plan. And humans don’t need as much meat as you folks do, so a little can go a long way.”
He wanted to believe her. Wasn’t sure he did.
“The girls tell me you have creeks running through the Courtyard. Any of you catch fish in those creeks?” Miss Twyla asked.
“Henry does.”
“Fish is another kind of meat.”
Did Meg like fish?
When Simon didn’t say anything, Vlad smiled at Miss Twyla. “Thank you for the suggestion.” When she didn’t go away, he added, “Is there something else?”
Miss Twyla looked at Simon in a way that made him want to back up a step—or show her his better set of teeth as a warning.
“My James was a good man, and I loved him for all the years we were married. Still do, even though he’s been gone some years now. But he enjoyed eating a cheese that smelled up a house worse than a bad case of farts.”
Simon blinked. Scratched behind one ear. He didn’t know how to respond to Miss Twyla saying “farts.” “Did you like the cheese?”
“I did not. But once or twice a year he would get a craving for it and buy enough of that cheese to make a sandwich, and it was the best treat he could think to buy. He ate those cheese sandwiches before we were married and every year we spent together.”
“But it was stinky.”
“It was. But it was part of who he was. He didn’t ask me to eat it, and I didn’t ask him to give up eating it. That’s how it works when two people are partners.”
She took a step forward. Simon held his ground as long as he could before taking a step back.
“You have more courage than you’re showing right now, and avoiding that girl doesn’t do either of you any favors. You talk it out, set it right, decide what each of you can live with.”
“I ate a human,” he snapped, feeling cornered.
“All by yourself? You must have been hungry.”
“No, not by myself! We—” Simon glanced at Vlad, who shrugged.
“You think there’s anyone here except the children who hasn’t figured out what happened to the thieves? Miss Merri says you used to put a sign on the butcher shop door when you’d caught some of what you call special meat, although the only thing I can see about it being special is you didn’t catch it all that often and certainly didn’t go looking for it off your own land.” She looked pointedly at Vlad. “Not the meat anyway.” She turned back to Simon. “Am I right in thinking you don’t mix that meat with other kinds?”
“We never sold it at the butcher shop,” Simon growled. Before Meg, they might have stored a bit in the big refrigerator because meat was meat, but they learned the difference between clean and human clean, and as they got to know the human female pack, it began to matter that they not do things that could make the girls sick. “And we haven’t kept any of that meat in the shop for a long time now.” Not since the day Meg called Boone and asked for some special meat for Sam, not knowing that there was a special kind of meat.
“You had one package in the shop,” Miss Twyla said.
“In a separate cooler. And the cooler wasn’t in the shop for very long.”
“Just long enough for Cyrus to take the bait?” She nodded again, as if something had been confirmed. “If he deserved being given that package, then he did, and while I can’t say it surprises me, it makes my heart heavy to know he was involved with those thieves. But I’m grateful Officer Kowalski stepped in and didn’t let Cyrus bring that package home for the children to see.”
“We weren’t going to let him leave the Courtyard with the package,” Vlad said quietly. “We wouldn’t have let his mate and young see the meat. Selling it to him was punishment and warning for that Cyrus. Kowalski had no authority here to arrest that Cyrus and take him, and the package, to the police station. But we let him do it.”
“Just shows you’re all learning to pull as a team.” Miss Twyla gave Simon a hard look—the same kind of look a nanny would give an erring pup. But a nanny might add a paw-whack or a nip to the look. “You talk it out with Miss Meg and set things right.”
She walked to the back of the store. A moment later they heard the door open and close.
Still feeling cornered, Simon glared at Vlad. “You didn’t help.”
“You weren’t being scolded for eating a human; you were being scolded for upsetting Meg, which I haven’t done.”
“It’s not the same for you,” Simon muttered.
Vlad stared at him. “You weren’t bothered by this when we killed those intruders and the Wolves were tearing into the flesh. You weren’t bothered by it when you bit through the hand and elbow and gave the inked meat to Boone to wrap up for that Cyrus. You were fine with all of it until you went home and saw Meg sleeping—and weren’t sure you would be welcome.” Vlad looked away. “Miss Twyla is right. You need to find out if this changes things between you and Meg.”
Seeing the truth in Vlad’s words, Simon nodded and went back to working on the display in order to avoid finding out for just a little while longer.
• • •
Meg stood at one end of the Green Complex’s kitchen garden and stared at the woven baskets filled with zucchini. “Is this normal?”
“Even for zucchini, this is a bumper crop.” Ruth wiped sweat off her forehead with one hand and pressed the other hand to her lower back as she straightened up.
“Nadine said she’ll take some to make zucchini bread for A Little Bite,” Merri Lee said. She held out two modest-size zucchini. “You should take these, Meg.”
Meg sighed but she took them. Eating foods that were in season was all well and good, but she now understood about having too much of a good thing.
“You don’t have to eat them tonight,” Merri Lee said. “They’ll keep for a day or two.”
Goody. A no-zucchini meal. Of course, she wasn’t sure what they would eat—or if she’d be eating alone.
Then she saw the Wolf moving toward her. Simon, with his dark coat shot with lighter gray hairs. It had been a while since she’d had that odd sense of not being able to see him clearly when he moved, as if she were seeing an overlapping image of something even larger poking through a Wolf suit, making the outline indistinct. Maybe a little
of his true form, whatever it was, showed through when he was stressed, like when he was in human form and things shifted involuntarily because he was angry or upset.
Did anyone else experience this when they looked at the Others? Or did seeing the visions of prophecy skew the way she saw the mundane world? If you could call any of the terra indigene mundane.
Ruth and Merri Lee looked around and spotted Simon.
“We should go,” Ruth said.
“You don’t have to,” Meg said quickly.
Merri Lee picked up one of the baskets. “Yes, we do. You’re not always going to agree or get along, but you’re going to be unhappy until you talk it out.”
“I could just conk him on the head with a big zucchini.”
Laughing, Ruth picked up the other basket. “Something every woman has imagined doing to a man at one time or another.”
She watched her friends put the woven baskets into the wire baskets on the front of their bicycles. She watched them ride away. Then she looked at Simon, who had edged closer to the garden as Merri Lee and Ruth moved farther away.
“We need to talk,” she told him.
She didn’t hurry back to the Green Complex. Simon walked beside her, not stopping to sniff anything to find out who had been nearby today. That was so unusual it made her wonder if he was unhappy too.
Unlocking his front door, she let him into his apartment, then went up to her own place to put the zucchini in the fridge and pour two glasses of cold water. A minute later, he opened the kitchen door and sat down at the table.
What to say? How to start?
“They were bad humans.” Simon’s voice was rough, but his amber eyes didn’t have the flickers of red that indicated anger.
Meg took a sip of water. “It was wrong of them to steal the meat from our butcher shop, same as if they had stolen from a human shop.”
“Yes.”
Of course, it would have been smarter for those men to steal from a human shop. The police would have arrested them instead of eating them. “How many were there?”