Black Magic Bayou (16 page)

Which begged the question,
how
did one get into the sorority house? Had one of the girls been playing with magic she didn’t understand? Or was this an intentional attack? If someone was targeting the Delta Phi girls, calling a demon up from the fiery pits of hell was a pretty big deal. Not exactly a normal reaction to a breakup or not getting picked as a pledge.

Then I remembered my one brief experience with a sorority during my freshman year at Tulane, and I wondered if it was
really
a stretch to think a slighted rushee might go over the edge. Some of those girls based their whole identity on joining a sorority.

They’d only invited me because having a werewolf in the sisterhood made them look more inclusive.

Seriously.

I took a drink from my coffee, which was now more lukewarm than hot, and turned the page again.

I choked, coughing so hard I sputtered the coffee right back into my cup, narrowly avoiding doing a spit-take on the antique book.

Setting my cup down and wiping my chin, I eagerly tapped the page and pointed dramatically at Magnolia with my other finger. “Phone.
Phone.
”

Wilder was standing directly behind me now, one arm braced on the back of my chair as he inspected the page I was poking. The tiny Latin font didn’t tell me anything, but the drawings had a closeup of the thing’s face and a full-bodied sketch as well. Guess this wasn’t its first trip to our world.

I hoped it would be the last.

Its eight hideous eyes seemed to be watching me even from the still-life representation on the page, and there was no doubt in my mind this was the same creature that had tried to attack us at the Delta Phi house.

Magnolia handed me my house phone, and I found the scrap of paper with Santiago’s number on it tucked inside the cover of the book.

I half-expected it to go to voicemail, since Santiago didn’t strike me as a daytime kind of person, but after two rings his already familiar voice came through the line. “Hello.”

“I know what it is.”

“It took you this long? I expected you to call me from the car on the way home, you seemed so eager. Not changing your mind on our arrangement, are you?”

My gaze darted to Wilder, but he’d left the kitchen and was in the living room now, casually prodding the broken coffee table with one toe.

“If you don’t think you can handle the demon, that’s fine, but don’t project your insecurities onto me,” I replied, keeping my voice cold. I hated that his every word sounded the way velvet felt, soft and lush and insanely touchable.

When we were done with this demon, I was going to make damn sure I never crossed paths with Santiago again. If you’re afraid of sharks, don’t swim in the ocean, right?

He chuckled softly. “I like it when you growl at me,
brujita
. Your blood is full of fire. Now tell me what kind of creature it is.”

“Gamigan?” I didn’t think the name itself looked particularly Latin, and I was hoping I didn’t completely mangle the pronunciation.

The line went quiet, and for a minute I thought Santiago might have gotten disconnected. Then he made a small
huh
sound and said, “I don’t know if you’re the praying kind, but if you are, pray for those girls.”

He hung up.

I stared at the phone for a few seconds before handing it back to Magnolia, unsure what the subtext of that parting line had been. Could he save them or not? Were they already dead or maybe just wishing they were?

I mulled these thoughts over, not finding an answer I liked no matter how I considered the facts. Now we had a name for the beast, but would that be enough?

Sick of staring at the drawing, I snapped the book closed with a loud
thwap
.

Magnolia was pretending to type something, but I could see her eyes lifting to me periodically.

“What does
brujita
mean?” I asked, needing to break the silence somehow.

“Little witch,” Wilder, not Mags, responded. “He gave you a nickname.”

I was starting to realize that naming things might actually mean more trouble than good.

What my day needed was a crime scene.

Thankfully, Detective Bryce Perry must have foreseen the need to interrupt a relatively awkward conversation, because he showed up at my door shortly after I hung up the phone with Santiago.

Wilder, who apparently decided being with the police would keep me safe enough for the time being, went with Magnolia to collect my car and his motorcycle from the French Quarter where we’d left them the previous evening.

I had to wonder what would change now that we’d gone from flirtation to physical intimacy. Could he still be my bodyguard?
Should
he? While it might make him extra motivated to protect me, I also recognized it would make situations like those with Santiago a lot more difficult for me to navigate. I couldn’t negotiate the weird little arrangements that kept my life functioning properly and also worry about hurting Wilder’s feelings.

I still wanted him around and as part of my pack, but maybe it was time to start thinking of making him my Second instead of my guard. It would give him more power and autonomy, and was a role better suited to someone like him anyway.

Ben would shit a brick.

Luckily, Ben didn’t get to make these decisions.

Detective Perry drove a nondescript navy sedan, and I had to assume he had a hidden siren light somewhere, but I couldn’t see it. His car was boring and said nothing about him except that he was kind of a slob. There was a half-full Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup in the drink tray and an assortment of fast-food wrappers littered across the passenger-side floor.

“Do you live here?” I asked. “I mean, don’t be too ashamed to tell me.”

He smiled at this and leaned over to grab a McDonald’s fry container near my feet so he could chuck it in the backseat. It didn’t make a lick of difference to the grease-stained strata around my ankles.

I didn’t dare look behind me.

“My guys cleared the scene late last night. There’s not a lot left, but I thought maybe you might want to poke around, see if anything stands out. I know you didn’t get to see much yesterday.”

“I’m still surprised you let me see anything.”

“The times, they are a changing.” He turned a corner onto an almost deserted block with a dozen or so storefronts boarded up, the paint on all the buildings peeled and fading. Another block and we reached the area I’d been to the previous morning, a strip club on one side of the street advertising
Live Nude Girls!
Out front a woman in her early thirties was sitting on the hood of an orange Chevelle, smoking a cigarette. Her hair was in curlers, and she was wearing a baggy sweater over ripped jeans. When she saw Perry get out of the car, she gave him a polite nod. She didn’t acknowledge me.

The bar looked different today than yesterday. The police tape was still hanging in front of the alley, but without all the cars and uniformed officers there wasn’t any life here. The place felt cold and gray, scrubbed bare of anything remotely human. It was nothing more than bricks and broken glass and a faded red
closed
sign in the window.

Someone had removed all the yellow plastic tent markers that had been used to flag potential evidence, and there was nothing on the concrete to indicate where the body had been. Guess they didn’t use chalk for that, like the movies had taught me. I still remembered the location though.

I ducked under the police tape, and the smell of the alley mingled with the fresh scent of smoke from the woman’s cigarette. The breeze was blowing just right to give me the worst of both worlds. Stale beer and old piss, combined with burnt tobacco. Pretty much par for the course in a place like this. But the copper tang of blood was here too, fresh compared to some of the other odors.

I paced the area where Liam’s body had been lying a day ago, scanning the street and walls, hoping something might speak to me. All the real evidence was gone, but there might be something here they hadn’t seen. Something a human would miss.

That’s why he’d brought me, after all.

I noticed a few drops of blood and crouched down, touching them with my fingers. Wolf. Emmett, specifically. I remembered how bloody his shirt had been when I saw him the previous morning. Guess I shouldn’t be too surprised to find he’d left some behind. It
had
been a fight after all.

But I didn’t need to know what happened to Emmett; I needed to know what had happened to Liam Casey.

If I was here to do freaky wolf shit, I might as well do freaky wolf shit.

Crouching low to the ground, I balanced myself with one hand on the concrete and leaned as close to the area where the body had been as I could without lying down. I shut my eyes and breathed deep, parsing through layers of useless stink, trying to get to anything that might tell me I hadn’t wasted my time coming back here.

I focused on the sweet smell of blood.

The hair on the back of my neck went up, the way a dog’s might in a stressful situation, but I kept my eyelids shut tight and breathed through my nostrils. Sight would never be a werewolf’s strongest sense. I had twenty-twenty vision, fine, but with just my nose doing the work, a whole new world opened up to me.

I dropped to my knees and lowered my face closer to the street, my palms near my head to support me.

There were so many other distractions to push away. My shampoo was too apparent with my hair hanging by my face, and the scent of my morning coffee on my breath was chasing off what I was trying to find. I tucked my hair back, and got so close to the pavement my nose brushed the rough asphalt.

Somewhere behind me Perry shifted, his pants rustling softly, one leg against the other, a faint squeak in the sole of one of his shoes.

“Shh,” I whispered.

“But I—”

“Shh.”

He stopped moving. I was pretty sure he was holding his breath now. All the better.

I rubbed the asphalt with my palm. Tar and liquor and a few other unsavory things wafted up, and then there, at last, was the blood. It had the same scent as the man who’d been lying here the day before, the one my pack was meant to have killed.

I crawled forward, inch by inch, pausing before I went headlong into the side of a dumpster, then sniffed the metal, guiding myself up by feel and scent alone. This, obviously, wasn’t the greatest plan, because the dumpster was full of garbage.

Now I had lost the blood trail thanks to the intense reek of warm trash. I coughed, gagged, and my eyes watered. I straightened up and coughed a bit more into the crook of my elbow, then wiped my eyes on the back of my wrists.

The smell of his blood on my hands refocused me, and I sniffed the air cautiously.

“What are you doing?” Perry had apparently already forgotten my request for silence.

This must have looked pretty weird.

“I…” Opening my eyes again, I glanced over at the befuddled detective. He was still standing as motionless as possible, but the expression on his face told me he was sure I was completely insane.

How best to explain this to a normie?

“Bryce.” It felt weird to use his first name, but he’d also just watched me sniff the sidewalk, so I figured we were past the formality stage at this point. “How long have you been working supernatural cases?”

“About a year.”

“How many werewolf assaults have you worked on?”

“Four.”

I chose to rephrase, because we both knew he’d taken my question too literally. “How many of those were situations where the werewolf was the aggressor and not the victim?”

“One.”

I knew all about that one too because it was my job to know. When you’re responsible for the protection and wellbeing of a pack, you make it your business to know all the terrible shit that’s happened to them before. In the case Perry was referring to, the wolf had been at fault. It was an open-and-shut assault with deadly intent.

It was also the night before a full moon, and the perpetrator was a lone wolf from somewhere in Florida. He hadn’t belonged to the pack, but his actions had become the pack’s problem.

Just like this had become my problem.

“Here’s the thing about werewolf attacks.” I moved across the alley quietly, my steps noiseless and light. Perry seemed surprised when I was suddenly right in front of him. “When we try to hurt someone, we don’t think with the human part of our brains. We have an animal inside us, quite literally.” I touched my stomach. “There is a wolf within us, and when our hunter brain activates, the wolf is in control, not the man. Or woman.”

He nodded, but I could tell he wasn’t quite getting it.

“When you worked that werewolf assault, what did the crime scene look like?”

His cheeks blanched, and his color went from typical pale to a shade of white normally reserved for the dead. “It was bad.”

“It would be. Because even if I don’t have my teeth or my claws, I know how to kill.” I wasn’t sure why I said
I
instead of
he
. Making it personal was only going to remind him I was capable of the same kind of violence.

But maybe that
was
the point. If I could show him the potential for harm wasn’t the same thing as guilt, I might be able to convince him someone else had done this.

“There are a half-dozen ways I could make you bleed to death without ripping out your throat.” I took a step closer, could smell his fear mingling with the coffee and donut he’d had for breakfast.

Fear, I’m afraid to admit, was one of the single most glorious smells in the world. It meant I was in control, that I had the upper hand.

It also meant I was menacing a police officer.

Taking a step back, I lifted my hands and mimed a cat scratching. “But no claws today, Detective.”

“What are you saying, exactly?”

“I’m saying if Mason and Emmett were the ones who killed this guy, you would have needed a power washer to clean out this alley. Instead I can barely get the smallest hint of blood unless I’m facedown in the trash.”

“You think it’s totally out of the question they did this?”