I took shallow breaths and thought about escape.
Detective Hardin met us in the lobby. She was a brisk woman, always moving like she was in a hurry and losing her patience. Of average height, with dark hair tied in a tail, she wore a functional pantsuit that might have been on her for a couple of days now. The shadows under her eyes suggested she’d worked through the night. Her smile was grim, and she didn’t have a quip, which added another layer of depression and unreality to the situation. I wanted Hardin back to her snide, not in the middle of a disaster self.
“Kitty. Mr. O’Farrell. Thanks for coming. It’s this way.” We walked with her through a set of double doors marked private, then down a chilly corridor of off-white walls and an institutional linoleum floor.
“Can you tell me what exactly killed him? You said it was a fire, but complicated. Did his building burn? Was it someplace else?”
Apparently, she couldn’t tell me. “How long have you known Mr. Cabrerra?” she asked instead.
“A few years,” I said. “I didn’t know him well. We weren’t best friends or anything.”
“But you were both werewolves? Part of the same pack?”
“That doesn’t mean we all walk around arm in arm singing ‘We Are Family.’ The pack here is pretty standoffish, to tell you the truth. I only ever see most of the others on full-moon nights.”
She turned a quizzical expression to me. “Where exactly do you all go on full-moon nights?”
“I’m not going to tell you that, Detective.”
Unsurprised, she shrugged and continued on. The question had been offhand and unimportant, but I wondered if maybe we needed to start driving out to Kansas or Wyoming, to make sure no one bothered us.
“Did Mr. Cabrerra smoke?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. I’d never seen him light up, and he didn’t smell like someone who smoked. Now there was an interesting set of smells a werewolf could spot from a mile away. Detective Hardin smelled like that: sooty, musty, sharp.
“Did he work with fire at all? Was he a welder, a mechanic, anything that would have had him in contact with open flames, or with anything volatile?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Why?”
“I’m just trying to rule out all the logical explanation, because the illogical one has everyone twitching.”
Detective Hardin, as head of the Denver PD’s newly established Paranatural Unit, got all the cases that made people twitch. She’d landed in the position by accident, but she seemed to be thriving in it. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view.
We paused outside a room. So this was it. I braced. Ben curled his hand around mine.
She took a deep breath and said, “What do you know about spontaneous human combustion?”
I hadn’t braced well enough, because I blinked at her, dumbstruck. “What?”
“I thought you knew about all this supernatural crap,” she said. “Spontaneous human combustion, the idea that a human body can, for unknown reasons, suddenly generate enough heat to ignite.”
“I know the definition,” I said. “I can’t say I’ve ever encountered it. Ever.” I’d never even had a crazy person call in to the show wanting to talk about it, and that was saying something.
“Well. It’s on the list of what might have happened to Mr. Cabrerra. It’s on the bottom of the list—but frankly, it’s about as likely as anything else, based on what I’ve been able to come up with. There’s no reason he should have burned to death in the middle of his apartment, when nothing else caught fire.”
Fire. Burning. The smell of sulfur and brimstone. The smell from last full-moon night, the van at Flint House, and the fire at New Moon.
I shook my head at the door we stood in front of. “Detective, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think I can do this.” I didn’t want to have to smell Mick burned and carry that memory with me forever.
“It’s not that bad, Kitty.” She touched my arm briefly. “Not as bad as you’d expect.”
She opened the door. The room was small, sterile, with a linoleum floor and tiled walls. It seemed more like a doctor’s office than what I’d pictured a morgue being like. A couple of plastic chairs stood against the wall, and a gurney rested in the middle. A body lay on it, a sheet drawn up to its bare shoulders.
He looked like Mick. I recognized him, short black hair, stocky frame, wide nose, and round cheeks. He hadn’t been burned to a crisp, but he had been burned. His face was red, like a sunburn. Blackened scorch marks reached up from under the sheet, streaks climbing his neck to his chin. His hair looked singed, scorched. It was like he’d been caught in a flash explosion at the level of his heart.
Ben and I stared for a moment. I kept wondering what had happened. The protection spell, the potion Grant had given me—it didn’t work. The thought almost pushed me to panic, because it meant none of us was safe. New Moon, my human family, everyone I’d given the jars to, all of it was for nothing.
But no, I’d given Mick a jar of the potion yesterday—and he’d scoffed at it. I’d have to find out if he had used it—he probably hadn’t. Maybe this thing killed him simply because it could.
I should have done more. I should have protected him. Inside, Wolf howled.
“Do you need a minute, or are you ready to leave?” she said.
I closed my eyes and turned toward the door. “I’m ready.”
Hardin led us to a nearby conference room, where we could talk. She offered coffee, but I wasn’t thirsty.
“We got the call about ten last night,” she said. “Someone in Mr. Cabrerra’s apartment building smelled smoke coming from his unit. The building manager couldn’t find the source, and Mr. Cabrerra’s door was locked. The manager called the fire department; they broke in and found the body. Nothing else had burned. As I understand it, werewolves aren’t indestructible, they’re just really tough to kill without the magic silver bullet. Am I right?”
“You need to take the heart or cut off the head. Or do so much damage they can’t heal before they die of blood loss,” I said.
She nodded. “The medical examiner performed an autopsy last night. His heart was destroyed—we assume that’s what killed him, that if it hadn’t gotten to his heart he might have survived. But this is what has the ME wigged out. He burned from the inside out. It’s like someone reached inside him and lit a blowtorch.”
Numb and confused, I said, “This is why you brought up spontaneous human combustion?”
“Unless you know of some other weird, unlikely phenomenon that could cause something like this.”
I looked at Ben, who shrugged and said, “Hey, you’re the expert.”
Why did people keep thinking that? I must have been doing a good job of fooling everyone. Werewolves were werewolves—that didn’t make them any more prone to having unlikely things like this happen to them, did it?
As a matter of fact, it did. This thing had already proven it would go after the whole pack, not just me. A moment of dizziness made me hold my head to steady myself. I had to make this stop. There had to be a way to make this stop.
Ben put his hand on my leg, and the touch anchored me. Brought me back to the table, the conference room, Hardin, the horror of the situation. Didn’t stop tears from falling.
Hardin watched me. “You do know something. What is it?”
Once again, I explained the trip to Vegas, the cult, the sacrifice, the attacks, Grant’s potion, and my suspicion that Mick hadn’t used it. If nothing else, there’d be no such thing as a secret Babylonian cult lurking in Sin City anymore. Everybody was going to know about it at this rate. Not that everyone believed me. I’d have thought that Hardin would be beyond disbelief after everything she’d seen and studied, but her expression was blank.
She said, “That doesn’t get me any closer to figuring out what happened or who to arrest.”
“Yeah, well, sorry about that.”
“What’s the likelihood of this happening
again?” she asked.
Likely. Very likely. I didn’t want to think about it, so I turned away, biting my lip.
“Do you want to talk about some kind of police protection?” she said. She was being as nice as she’d ever been to me, but her voice was still businesslike, almost harsh, when what I wanted was for someone to pat me on the head and say, “There, there.”
Ben said, “Police protection isn’t going to do a whole lot of good for people burning up from the inside.”
“I can’t sit around doing nothing,” she said, scowling.
“Trust me, Detective, as soon as I find the magic spell that will make all this go away, I’ll let you know,” I said.
She made an offhand gesture that might have been saying, touché. “I’ll keep digging on my end. But the usual request applies: If you find out anything, let me know, right?”
“You too, I hope.”
“Will do. Thanks for stopping by.”
She escorted us to the front door, said the farewells, then went back in. I almost said something to her about taking a break, getting some sleep, food, fresh clothes. I was worried about her and didn’t want her to burn out—metaphorically or literally, given the circumstances. Every time I saw her she looked harried beyond all reason. But the door closed, she was gone, and I lost my chance.
Leaning against Ben, I prompted a hug. We clung to each other, squeezing comfort into each other.
I muttered into Ben’s shoulder, “This isn’t a coincidence, this can’t be a coincidence. Spontaneous human combustion isn’t spontaneous when you’re being haunted by a heat-generating demon.”
“That makes sense,” Ben agreed.
“This is my fault. I’m the reason this is happening, and now I’ve put everyone in danger—”
“Kitty. You couldn’t help it. You couldn’t know. What were you supposed to do, let those guys in Vegas kill you?” Ben said.
If I could go back, knowing what I knew now, knowing I could save Mick’s life, maybe everyone’s life . . . I might have let them kill me. I looked at him, despairing, my eyes large and shining.
“Let’s go home,” he said and kissed the top of my head.
“Even though we might burst into flames with no warning at any minute?”
“Kitty.” He gave me a reprimanding look.
In the car and on the road, I slumped and looked out the window, watching the world go by. Wondering how to stop an enemy that we couldn’t see, couldn’t identify, couldn’t anticipate.
I said, “I can’t believe I’m the closest thing he has to next of kin.” It wasn’t fair that he didn’t have anyone. I hadn’t known him well enough to be the emergency contact in his wallet.
“You might not have noticed, but most people who get stuck as werewolves aren’t the kind who have close ties to big families. Present company excepted, of course.”
“I’d noticed,” I said. “I am constantly reminded that this isn’t the life I signed up for.”
“Does that include me?” He quirked a wry smile.
Erp. I could see now how my statement could be taken the wrong way. Especially since a relationship with Ben had been about as unexpected as getting attacked by a werewolf in the first place.
I leaned my head on his shoulder. “I’m the last person to complain about the pleasant little surprises that happen along the way.”
It was the unpleasant ones I was getting sick of.
Near home, I spotted a familiar motorcycle and rider in the rearview mirror. Same helmet, same jacket, following about three cars back. Peter, still at it. I wished I had gotten a phone number from him, so I could call him. Tell him to stop this. He wasn’t going to learn anything I hadn’t already told him, and I really didn’t want him getting caught up in this demon business.
My first job was to tell the rest of the pack what had happened. We’d lost one of our own, and anybody could be next.
Ben took the notepad where I kept everyone’s contact info away from me. “I’ll make the calls,” Ben said. “I’m a lawyer, I’m used to giving people bad news.”
I let him. That left me to call Odysseus Grant.
His phone rang. And rang. He didn’t answer. Either he was busy, or he had finally gotten sick of me and wasn’t taking my calls anymore. I tried not to think the worst: Something had happened to him, he’d confronted the Band of Tiamat, or they’d confronted him, and it had ended badly. And I’d never know.
I turned on the computer and called up web sites for Las Vegas newspapers, looking for something spectacular and out of the ordinary: mass murder, fires, chaos in the streets. But I didn’t find anything unusual, at least not by Las Vegas standards. A couple of crooked politicians were exposed, a tycoon announced plans for a new resort. If something had happened, it might have been so subtle it hadn’t made the news.
Or maybe he was busy and not answering his phone.
By the time I’d finished, Ben set his phone down, blowing out a sigh. He pursed his lips.
“Well?” I said.
“I told Shaun and Becky. They’ll spread the word. They want to talk. That’s probably not a bad idea.”
“Show some kind of leadership so the troops don’t lose faith?”
“Something like that. They suggested meeting in the mountains. I told them we could be there in a couple of hours, for anyone who wants to talk.”
The forest where we spent full moons would be heavy with the memory and smell of shifting, of turning wolf and running. Feelings would run high there. I wasn’t sure everyone could handle it. I didn’t want any more trouble than we already had. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”
Ben ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “I would have told them New Moon, but so much for that.”
We were running out of territory.
“Okay,” I said. “But we’d better get going. I want to get there first.”
“Occupy the high ground?”
“Something like that. I just think it’ll go better if we’re there already. It’s a dominance thing.”
“It usually is,” he said.
The human side could be as sarcastic as it wanted about pack dynamics, but the pack still seemed to win out in the end.
Chapter 13
We were too late. We arrived at the remote parcel of land where we parked on full-moon nights, and Shaun, Becky, and a half dozen others had already arrived. I bristled, because it meant they had the same thought I had and wanted to make a statement. It was almost a challenge.
They’d carpooled in a couple of cars, which were parked to the side. They lined up along the barbed-wire fence that marked the property: arrayed in a straight line, leaning on fence posts or standing in tough poses, arms crossed, glaring, frowning. Ben parked the car in front of them. We got out and leaned on the hood. Stared them down. I tried not to think about the OK Corral.
Most of these people knew me in the old days, when I was a new wolf, weak, bottom of the pecking order. Back then, being submissive was far easier than trying to stand up for myself. Being submissive meant the bigger, badder wolves looked out for me. Most of the time. When they weren’t beating me up themselves. It had seemed like a fair trade at the time.
That meant some of these wolves remembered how easy it used to be to knock me around. They had to be wondering, how tough was I really? How easy would it be to nudge me out of that top spot?
I got a lot of mileage out of the fact that me returning to Denver as a badass alpha had confused the hell out of some of them. It put them in “wait and see” mode. But I was running out of time to prove my worth. I had to convince them they were better off with me in charge than not.
What a mess. I wondered if this was the demon’s main purpose all along: not to destroy me directly, but to undermine my position in the pack to the point where the other wolves did the job.
I thought about what a real badass alpha werewolf would do in a situation like this, and all I could think was drill sergeant, screaming at the troops
to get them in line, punishing them for questioning my authority. I didn’t want to do that. I wasn’t very good at that sort of thing. I wasn’t a drill sergeant, and we weren’t in the army. We were supposed to be a family.
“Hi,” I said, as neutrally as I could. Not cheerful, not angry, not scared. Definitely not scared. They had every right to be here asking questions. No need for me to get all defensive about it. Ben stood next to me, looking surly. The muscle of the operation. Good cop/bad cop. That made me want to smile. “Is everyone okay? Did anything unusual happen to anyone else last night?”
“Besides Mick dying?” said Dan. One of the tough guys, lanky and muscular. Not so tough that he liked to stick his neck out, usually.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “Besides that.”
I tried to read the body language. People were scared, trying to cover it up with anger. Bunched shoulders stood in for raised hackles. Eyes glared and lips were open, just a muscle twitch away from being bared. But they weren’t threatening me, not yet. Nobody was glaring at me. They glared at the ground, or off to the side, or at my shoulder, but they didn’t make eye contact to offer a direct challenge. I hoped my neutral tone put them off-balance. If I wasn’t aggressive, maybe they’d be less likely to show aggression, and we could do this without fighting about it.
“He’s really dead?” Shaun said. His arms were crossed, his dark eyes serious.
I nodded. “I saw his body at the morgue.” Now I was glad I had done it, so I could say that with confidence.
“It was the thing. The same thing that went after us the other night?”