2 Blood Trail (10 page)

“They’ve gone to get their Uncle Stuart,” said the graying man next to Henry. Although he’d taken part in the welcome, those were the first words he’d actually spoken. He extended his hand across the table. An old scar puckered the skin of his forearm. Vicki wasn’t positive, but it looked like a bite. “I’m Donald Heerkens, their father.”

“I’m Jennifer.” The closer of the two girls on the couch broke in before Donald could say any more.

“And I’m Marie.”

And how the hell does anyone tell you apart?
Vicki wondered. Sitting down, at least, they appeared to be the exact same size and even their expressions looked identical.
Mind you, I’m hardly one to judge
.
All kids look alike to me at that age. . . .

The two of them giggled at their uncle’s mock scowl.

“So now you’ve met everyone who’s here,” Marie continued.

“Everyone except Daddy,” Jennifer added, “ ’cause like you already met Rose and Peter.” The two of them smiled at her in unison. Even their dimples matched.

Daddy must be Stuart, Vicki realized; Nadine’s husband, Daniel’s father, Donald’s brother-in-law, Peter’s and Rose’s uncle. The dominant male. Meeting
him
should prove to be interesting.

“Nice thing to be ignored in my own home,” growled a voice from the door.

Shadow flung himself out from under Vicki’s fingers, charged across the kitchen barking like a furry little maniac, and leapt up at the man who’d just come into the house—who caught him, swung him up over his head, and turned Daniel upside down.

Vicki didn’t need an introduction. The same force of personality that marked Nadine marked Stuart and he was
definitely
very male. He was also very naked and that added considerable weight to the latter observation. Vicki had to admit she was favorably impressed although at five ten she could probably give him at least four inches. Judging by human standards, which was all she had to work with, Henry’s warning aside, he appeared to be younger than his wife by about five years. His hair—all his hair, and there was rather a lot of it all over his body—remained unmarked by gray.

“Stuart. . . .” Nadine pulled a pair of blue sweatpants off the back of her chair and threw them at her husband.

He caught them one-handed, Daniel tucked under the other arm, and stared at them with distaste. Then he turned and looked straight at Vicki. “I don’t much like clothing, Ms. Nelson,” he told her, obviously as aware of her identity as she was of his. “It stops the change and in this heat it’s damned uncomfortable. If you’re going to be here for a while, you’re going to have to get used to the little we wear.”

“It’s your house,” Vicki told him levelly. “It’s not my place to say what you should wear.”

He studied her face, then smiled suddenly and she got the impression she’d passed a test of some kind. “Humans usually worry about clothing.”

“I save my worry for more important things.”

Henry hid a smile. Since they’d met, he’d been trying to figure out if Vicki was infinitely adaptable to circumstances or just so single-minded that anything not leading to her current goal was ignored. In eight months of observation he’d come no closer to an answer.

Tossing the sweatpants in the corner, Stuart held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Ms. Nelson.”

She returned both smile and handshake, careful not to come on too strong.
Come on too strong to a naked werewolf
.
Yeah, right
. “And you. Please, call me Vicki.”

“Vicki.” Then he turned to Henry and by the tiniest of changes, the smile became something else. He held out his hand again. “Henry.”

“Stuart.” The smile was a warning, not a challenge. Henry recognized it and acknowledged it. It could change to challenge very quickly and neither man wanted that. As long as Henry kept to his place, the situation between them would remain tense but stable.

Uninterested in all this grown-up posturing, Daniel twisted against his father’s side, found the grip loose enough to allow change, did, and began to bark. His father put him down just as the screen door opened and Cloud and Storm came in.

For the next few moments, the two older wer allowed themselves to be attacked by their younger cousin, the fight accompanied by much growling and snapping and feigned—at least Vicki assumed they were feigned—yelps of pain. As none of the other adults seemed worried about the battle, Vicki took the time to actually look at her surroundings.

The kitchen furniture was heavy and old and a little shabby from years of use. The wooden table could seat eight easily and twelve without much crowding. Although the chairs had chew marks up each leg they—to judge by the one under Vicki—had been made to endure and still had all four feet planted firmly on the worn linoleum. The lounge that the twins were perched on, tucked under the window by the back door, had probably been bought in the fifties and hadn’t been moved from that corner since. The refrigerator looked new, as did the electric stove. In fact, the electric stove looked so new, Vicki suspected it was seldom used. The old woodstove in the far corner would likely be not only a source of winter heat but their main cooking facility. If they cooked. She hadn’t thought to ask Henry what the wer ate or if she’d be expected to join in. A sudden vision of a bleeding hunk of meat with a side of steaming entrails as tomorrow’s breakfast made her stomach lurch. The north wall was lined with cupboards and the south with doors, leading, Vicki assumed, to the rest of the house.

To her city bred nose, the kitchen quite frankly
smelled
. It smelled of old woodsmoke, of sheep shit—and quite probably sheep, too, if she had any idea of what sheep smelled like—and very strongly of well, wer. It wasn’t an unpleasant combination, but it was certainly pungent.

Housework didn’t seem to be high on the list of wer priorities. That was fine with Vicki, it wasn’t one of her top ten ways to spend time either. Her mother, however, would no doubt have fits at the tufts of hair piled up in every available nook and cranny.

Of course, my mother would no doubt have fits at this entire situation
. . .

Peter stood up and dangled a squirming Shadow at shoulder level—front paws in his left hand, rear paws in his right—deftly keeping the pup’s teeth away from the more sensitive, protruding, areas of his anatomy.

. . .
so it’s probably a good thing she isn’t here
.

Just as she was beginning to wonder if she shouldn’t bring up the reason for her visit, Stuart cleared his throat. Peter released Shadow, smiled a welcome at Vicki and Henry, changed, and curled up on the floor beside his twin. Shadow gave one last excited bark and went over to collapse, panting, on his mother’s feet. Everyone else, the two visitors included, turned to face Stuart expectantly.

And all he did was clear his throat
. Vicki was impressed again.
If he could bottle that he could make a fortune
.

“Henry assures us that you can be trusted, Ms. Nelson, Vicki.” His eyes were a pale Husky blue, startlingly light under heavy black brows. “I’m sure you realize that things would get very unpleasant for us if the world knew we existed?”

“I realize.” And she did, which was why she decided not to be insulted at the question. “Although
someone
obviously knows.”

“Yes.” How a word that was mostly sibilants could be growled Vicki had no idea. But it was. “There are three humans in this territory who know of the pack. An elderly doctor in London, the local game warden, and Colin’s partner.”

“Colin the police officer.” It wasn’t really a question. A werewolf on the London Police Force was a phenomenon Vicki was unlikely to forget. She pulled a notebook and a pen from the depths of her purse. “The twins—Rose and Peter, that is—mentioned him.”

Donald’s expression seemed more confused than proud. “My oldest son. He’s the first of us to hold what you could call a job.”

“The first to finish high school,” Nadine said. At Vicki’s expression, she added, “Generally we find school very . . . stressful. Most of us leave as soon as we can.” Her lips twisted up into what Vicki could only assume was a smile. “Trouble is, they’re making it harder to leave at the same time they’re making it harder to stay.”

“The world is becoming smaller,” Henry said quietly. “The wer are being forced to integrate. Sooner or later, they’ll be discovered.” He had no doubt as to how his mortal brethren would treat the wer; they’d be considered animals if they were allowed to live at all. When so small a thing as skin color made so large a difference, what chance did the wer have?

Vicki was thinking much the same thing. “Well,” her tone brooked no argument, “let’s just hope it’s later. I personally am amazed you’ve managed to keep the list down to three.”

Stuart shrugged, muscles rippling under the thick mat of black hair that covered his chest. “We keep to ourselves and humans are very good at believing what they wish to believe.”

“And seeing what they wish to see,” Donald added, the skin around his eyes crinkled with amusement.

“Or not seeing,” Marie put in with a giggle.

The assembled wer nodded in agreement—regardless of shape—all save Shadow, who had fallen asleep, chin pillowed on his mother’s bare instep.

“What about those who might suspect what you are?” Vicki asked. Murderers were almost always known to the victim. The times they weren’t were usually the cases that never got solved.

“There aren’t any.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“There aren’t any,” Stuart repeated.

He obviously believed what he said, but Vicki thought he was living in a dream world. A noise from the right pulled her gaze down to the two wer on the floor. Cloud looked as though she wanted to disagree.
Or maybe she wants to go walkies. How the hell can I tell?

“You do have contact with humans. The younger ones, at least, on a regular basis.” Vicki’s gesture covered both sets of twins. “What about other kids at school? Teachers?”

“We don’t change at
school
, ” Marie protested.

Jennifer’s head bobbed in support, red hair flying. “We
can’t
change when we’re dressed.”

“And as you’re dressed at school, you
can’t
change at school?” They seemed pleased she was so quick on the uptake. “It must be frustrating. . . .”

Marie shrugged. “It’s not so bad.”

“Don’t you ever want to tell people what you can do? Show them your other shape?”

Stuart’s growl sounded very loud and very menacing in the shocked silence that followed. The girls looked as though she’d suggested something obscene. “Okay. I guess not.”
Don’t judge them by human standards. Try to remember that
. “What about special friends?”

Storm and Cloud were unreadable. Marie and Jennifer looked puzzled. “Boyfriends?”

Both girls wrinkled their noses in identical expressions of disgust.

“Humans don’t smell right,” Stuart explained, shortly. “That sort of thing never happens.”

“They don’t smell right?”

“No.”

Vicki decided to leave it at that. She really wasn’t up for a discussion of werewolf breeding criteria, not at this hour of the night. There were, however, two things that had to be covered. The first still made Vicki uncomfortable and, in almost a year of working for herself, she hadn’t come up with a less than blunt way of bringing it up. “About my fee. . . .”

“We can pay it,” Stuart told her and only nodded when she mentioned the amount.

“All right, then,” she laced her fingers together and stared into the pattern thus formed for a moment, “one more thing. When I find whoever is doing this, what then? We can’t take him to court. He can’t be held accountable for murder under the law without giving away the existence of your people.”

Stuart smiled and, in spite of the heat, Vicki felt a chill run up and down her back. “He will be accountable to our law. To pack law.”

“Revenge, then?”

“Why not? He’s killed two of us for no reason, no cause. Who has better right to be judge and jury?”

Who indeed?

“There’s no other way to stop him from killing again,” Henry said quietly. He thought he understood Vicki’s hesitation, if only in the abstract. Ethics formed in the sixteenth century had an easier time with justice over law than ethics formed in the twentieth.

What it came down to, Vicki realized, was a question of whose life had more value; the people here in this room or the maniac, singular or collective, who was picking them off one by one? Put like that, it didn’t seem to be such a difficult question.

“The three people you have, then, I’d like to check them out.”

“We already checked,” Donald began but Stuart cut him off.

“It’s too late to do anything tonight. We’ll get you the information tomorrow.”

As Vicki had already been told, they’d attempted to deal with this themselves after Nadine’s twin had been shot. She wasn’t surprised that they’d done some checking. She wished they hadn’t; in her experience, amateurs only muddied the waters. “Did you find anything?”

Stuart sighed and ran both his hands back through his hair. “Only what we already knew; Dr. Dixon is a very old man who hasn’t betrayed us in over forty years and isn’t likely to start now. Arthur Fortrin went north at the end of July and won’t be back until Labor Day weekend. And Colin’s partner, Barry, had both the skill and the opportunity.”

Vicki tapped her pen against the paper. “That doesn’t look good for Barry.”

“No,” Stuart agreed. “It doesn’t.”

 

“Hey, Colin! Wait a minute. . . .”

Colin sighed and leaned against the open door of the truck. There really wasn’t anything else he could do; leaping inside and roaring off in a cloud of exhaust fumes would certainly not make things any better. He watched his partner cross the dark parking lot, weaving his way around the scattered cars belonging to the midnight shift, brows drawn down into a deep vee, looking very much like a man who wanted some answers. Exactly the situation Colin had been trying to avoid.