She wrinkled her nose when she saw what I was doing. “What is that?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Is that going to kill my lawn?”
That was something I hadn’t considered. But blood was high in nutrients, right? A fertilizer? “No,” I said, and hoped I was
right.
“Okay,” she drawled, hands on hips, glaring at me. “I may regret asking this, but
why
are you doing this?”
I tried to be as brief and clear as possible. “There’s this demon attacking me—it’s responsible for the fire at New Moon.
This is a protection potion. It’s supposed to keep you all safe.”
She let me work in silence for a few more moments. Then, “Why is this demon attacking you?”
“I pissed some people off in Vegas. Long story.”
Another long pause before she said, “Kitty, you’re my sister and I love you, but have you ever considered another line of
work?”
I had absolutely no response to that. I giggled. “I’m sorry. I try to be careful, honest. These things just
happen
.”
“Are we really in danger? Is this like last time?”
“No, this is nothing like last time, and you’re not in danger. This is just a precaution.” This was like dealing with the
pack—I had to sound confident.
Cheryl looked skeptical.
“So,” I said. “How are Mark and the kids?”
“They’re fine. You’re changing the subject.”
I stopped and faced her. “This’ll work. And you have to promise not to tell Mom. I did their house already. They don’t need
to know.”
I expected her to argue, but she didn’t. Because she understood. We both wanted to protect our mother from anything that might
upset her. This would probably upset her.
She walked with me as I finished the circle of protection. Mission accomplished.
“I guess I’d better get going,” I said.
“How much trouble are you in, really?” she said, arms crossed.
“A lot, I think. But I’m working on it.”
“Be careful.” She sounded very serious.
“Yeah. Let me know if anything weird happens, okay?”
“Weirder than usual?”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “That.”
We hugged. I left another jar of the stuff with her, just in case. She waited to watch me drive away before going back inside.
M
y cell phone rang Tuesday morning when Ben and I were still in bed. I didn’t want to answer it, but I couldn’t pretend it
wasn’t my phone, because it played “I Wanna Be Sedated.” It went almost all the way through the chorus before Ben grunted
and poked me, forcing me to action.
Caller ID read Hardin. I groaned.
The very last thing I needed in the midst of all this was a call from Detective Jessi Hardin. She was the Denver PD’s resident
expert on what they called paranatural situations. If a body turned up in a back alley that looked like it had been mauled
by a wolf or drained of blood, she headed the investigation. This was mostly through happenstance and Hardin’s bullheaded
determination to educate herself now that these things—these monsters—were in the open and publicly acknowledged. She was
a believer, and the supernatural didn’t scare her. No, it only pissed her off.
For some reason, she always called me when she stumbled across something new and freaky. Like I knew any more than she did.
I didn’t want to answer, but if I didn’t, she’d show up in person. She usually brought along crime-scene photos of dead bodies.
I wanted to avoid that if I could.
Just before the call would be shunted to voice mail, I answered. “You have a body, don’t you?”
“I have a body,” she answered, but without the peppy sarcasm I had come to expect from her. One of the things that made her
good at her work was a sense of humor.
“I guarantee you it wasn’t werewolves this time, I promise.” If one of my pack attacked a person, I’d deal with the murderer
myself.
“I know. This is something completely different. Kitty—”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better. Why are you calling me? Are you going to show me gruesome crime-scene photos?”
“Kitty, be quiet for a minute, please.”
I shut up, because she sounded serious, stone serious, like she wanted to be doing anything other than having this conversation.
She said, “Do you know a man named Mick Cabrerra?”
The name took a minute to click, because I’d heard his last name maybe twice in my life. But I knew only one Mick, and my
mind turned worried circles wondering what my disgruntled werewolf minion could have gotten into. “Yes.”
Hardin’s voice was strained. “We found his body last night. I’m sorry.”
“What?” I’m afraid I squeaked. “What? But how? I saw him just a couple days ago, he was fine. What could kill him—he’s a werewolf.
Did you know he’s a werewolf? He can’t be dead.”
“Yes. The blood test is standard autopsy procedure now. We haven’t been able to reach any next of kin, and he had your name
and number in his wallet as an emergency contact. Was he part of your pack?”
“Yes,” I said quietly. “But how did he die?”
She sighed, which meant it was something odd, unusual, something she didn’t want to talk about. “It’s complicated. But there
was a fire.”
Somehow, strangely, that didn’t surprise me. Fire had been hunting us, and now it had gotten one of us. I didn’t want to picture
Mick burned up like that, dying like that. I closed my eyes as the breath went out of me.
“Do you want to come down to the morgue? To see him? We can talk about it in person, if you’d like.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to see him; I’d already seen enough bodies. But I thought that later on I might want the closure.
“Okay, yeah,” I said. “I should do that.”
“We’re going to spend a little while longer looking for his family.”
“I’m not sure he has any family, Detective.”
“Then you may be it. But we can talk about that later. Do you need directions to get here?”
Ben was awake, sitting up, and looking at me as I listened to the directions and tried to memorize them. I’d probably have
to look it up anyway. Or maybe Ben would know. I’m not sure what kind of desperate, forlorn expression I showed him. He touched
my leg.
“Okay,” I said when she’d finished. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.” I shut off the phone.
Ben waited for the explanation as I wiped tears away. This was stress, thinking of everything I needed to do, going to see
his body, telling everyone else what had happened. I’d taken over this pack. I was the alpha. I was supposed to protect them.
I climbed out of bed and started dressing. “That was Detective Hardin. She says that Mick is dead.”
For a moment, we paused and looked at each other. His expression was stark, disbelieving. “Oh. God,” he said. “How?”
“Fire.”
Then Ben was standing next to me and holding me, a tight, comforting embrace without words. Because what could we say, really?
But I needed the hug.
W
hat the police procedural TV shows can’t get across is the smell.
The morgue smelled overwhelmingly of alcohol and death. More so even than a hospital, which at least had a variety of odors
of life and living overlaying the antiseptic reek. This place was a war between sterility and decay. A normal human would
smell and maybe even be bothered by a sickly tang lodging in the back of the throat. But for me and Ben, for any lycanthrope,
the smell filled our lungs and seeped in through our pores. My arms broke out in gooseflesh. I should have been getting used
to this, the way these grotesque smells assaulted my sensitive werewolf nose.
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.”