My breath ached when I drew it in, belatedly, painfully. A reasonable voice in my head said,
He’s undercover. He has a job to do. It’s only a job
. A less reasonable voice that had angry Beast-overtones said,
Mine
. And clawed at my heart. But I’d just narrowly avoided sex in the shower with Bruiser. I had no reason or right to feel pain or betrayal.
I folded the paper carefully, so the photos didn’t crease, and tucked it into my jeans pocket. I stuffed my feelings away too, without looking at them, and shoved the voices, the reasonable one and the angry one, deeper. I had a job to do.
I went back into the house and placed the black and white photograph in front of Bruiser, who was sitting with Evangelina at the table, sipping tea. I added sugar and cream to the third prepared mug and sat across from them.
Bruiser studied the photo and his lips turned up in a winsome smile, the kind people give when presented with a remembrance of an enchanted time. “I remember the day this was taken. There was this photographer, Ernest something.”
“Ernest J. Bellocq?” I asked. I’d seen his work before. He took photos of Storyville and other neighborhoods in New Orleans for years, and had been the first, and so far as I knew, the only, photographer to capture vamp images on film until digital photography became common. Vamps had never imaged well on silver used in the photographic process.
“Yes, that’s the name. Maggie was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen. I was half in love with her when I was a young lad.” I laid the color photo in front of him, and Bruiser’s face changed. He swore and looked at me, his face closed off, thinking. Calculating? Concocting a story? Maybe.
“No one was with Leo and me when we made this kill.” He made it sound like a legitimate hunt, not a murder, but I kept my mouth shut on the comment. “So who took this and why did he bring it to you?”
“Someone with an agenda. Someone who knows most of what’s going on and wants me to figure out the rest for him.”
“Without giving himself away,” Evangelina said.
CHAPTER 15
Good Nose on Ugly Dog
I looked at the sky out the window and judged that it was several hours until dawn on Saturday. I hadn’t slept a full eight hours in days and my eyes felt gritty and dry, my body jumpy and strained, my mind fuzzy and overloaded. I needed a good sleep or a good hunt. I needed to inspect Safia’s body in the morgue with animal senses to see/smell what I’d missed in human form. I needed to scout vamp HQ with better than human senses too, but with the security cameras on twenty-four/ seven that was going to be impossible. And I needed to get away from Evangelina and Bruiser. Far away.
Ignoring my guests, I booted up the laptop, pulled up a city map, and found the location of the morgue. I finished off my tea, closed the laptop, and stood, the chair barking across the floor. “I’m going out. See you in the morning.” I intercepted the look my two houseguests exchanged but decided to pretend it hadn’t happened. In my bedroom, I grabbed a fetish necklace, made sure the gold nugget necklace was in place, repacked Beast’s travel bag, and added a handwritten note with Molly’s phone number on it in case I ended up in the pound.
Beast growled once and put her head on her paws, shutting her eyes, not interested in what I was doing. Maybe a little miffed. She could be part of this excursion if she wanted, but Beast was jealous of any time I spent in an animal form other than her own.
The two visitors were still sitting at the kitchen table, talking softly, when I walked back through, which meant that taking a stack of my own steaks from the fridge and a bag of Snickers wasn’t going to happen, which just brought home to me the fact that my life wasn’t my own anymore. Which really sucked the red off all my candy. I frowned at them, hoping they would take the hint that they were being pains in the butt, but they just sat silent and watched me. I was proud when I didn’t slam the door, and the murmur of their voices picked up when I was outside.
I was grouchy and irritated and acting like an idiot. I knew it would pass, but for now I rode the annoyance, letting it power me as I helmeted up and took off on Bitsa, leaving behind the itchy, uncomfortable feelings left over from taking a shower with Bruiser. I wove over to Langenstein’s on Arabella Street for meat, forgetting it wasn’t open all night, and, even more frustrated, drove around for half an hour, finally stopping at a twenty-four-hour fast-food place and buying a bucket of chicken. Cooked. But they might have called the cops if I’d ordered it raw. I strapped it to my bike, stopped for gasoline, bottled water, and candy bars, and wove around until I found the morgue.
The New Orleans Coroner’s Office and Forensic Center was on Martin Luther King Boulevard, in a busy, well-traveled part of town. The building was three stories of new, post-Katrina construction, well lighted, and patrolled by cops. And for the moment, a van was parked at a loading bay in the back, the doors of the van open, the loading bay brightly lit. Two cops stood near a corner stealing a smoke.
There was no wooded place to shift nearby, which wasn’t helpful; I needed privacy and calm to call on my magics. I located a private home with a recently planted flower and ornamental tree garden and pulled Bitsa off the street into the shadows under a short Japanese maple tree. I knew that she would be okay where I left her—one good thing about having a police presence nearby and a witchy locking system on the bike was that Bitsa wouldn’t get stolen. Standing in the shadows, I listened, scented, and watched for people, security cameras, and anything else that might cause me trouble. Satisfied that I was alone and unobserved, I strapped on the travel bag, opened the bucket of chicken, undressed, and pulled the fetish necklace out. The bones and teeth of a female bloodhound clacked and rattled.
I had acquired the bones from a taxidermist I frequented in the mountains. I had asked him to keep an eye out for any large mammal carcass he might find, and he had called me several times over the years, having acquired dead animals he thought I might like. He had stripped the flesh from the bones and teeth and strung them onto necklaces for me, believing that I was into some strange voudon practice. I had never set him straight. Someday the strange things people believed about me were gonna come back and bite me. Hard. I set the bloodhound necklace around my neck and sat in the midst of ferns, protected from eyes on the street by azaleas and big-leafed hostas. And I ripped off the bandages Evangelina had so carefully applied.
I had never tried the bloodhound form before, but I needed a really good nose right now. I closed my eyes and blew out hard, searching for a calm center, which eluded me for a number of reasons: Beast didn’t like it when I shifted into any creature other than big-cat, my emotions were ragged and on edge because of Bruiser, I was angry because Rick hadn’t called, and seeing the stupid photos. And getting naked in my own walled garden was one thing, but getting naked in a private yard was very different. It took too long, but eventually I was calm enough to feel my skinwalker energies rise.
I held the necklace and relaxed, listening to the night breezes, feeling the pull of the three-day, sharp-pointed moon, still thin, far overhead. I felt the beat of my heart in my throat, in the palms of my hands, and the soles of my feet as I slowed the functions of my body, slowed my heart rate, let my blood pressure drop, my muscles relax, as if I were going to sleep. I lay on the ground beneath the trees in the humid air, leafy ferns a cushion.
Mind slowing, I sank inside, my consciousness falling away, all but the purpose of this hunt. As always, I set that purpose into the lining of my skin, into the depths of my brain, so I wouldn’t lose it when I
shifted
, when I
changed
. I dropped deeper. Lower. Into the darkness inside where broken, painful memories danced in a gray world of shadow, blood, and doubt. I heard a drum beating a measured beat, steady and slow, smelled herbs and the scent of fresh smoke. The night wind seemed to cool and freshen. As I dropped deeper, I sought the fetish and the memory of form and structure hidden in the inner snake lying inside the bones and teeth of the necklace, the coiled, curled snake, resting deep in the cells, in the remains of the marrow.
I took up the snake and I dropped within, like water flowing across a sandy streambed, like sleet peppering the ground with a bitter icy
shush
of sound. Grayness enveloped me, sparkling and cold as the world fell away. And I was in the gray place of the change.
Beast was sulking far out of sight, and my mind was empty and private and alone.
My breathing deepened. Heart rate sped up. And my bones ... slid. Skin rippled. Hair, brown and black and sleek, sprouted. Pain slid like a knife between muscle and bone. My nose and jaw compressed and grew forward. My nostrils drew deep. My shoulders and hips ground and scraped as bone flowed into new shapes.
Minutes passed until I came to myself, panting, tongue hanging out, hot belly on the cool dirt.
Hungry
, I thought. I stood and shook, ears and loose skin slapping, rippling, and sliding over deeper tissue. I huffed a breath and the smells of the city hit my scent receptors. It was like being blindsided by an odoriferous Mack truck. Ten seconds later the scents and chemical compounds were categorized and compartmentalized by the newly expanded olfactory center in my brain in a way that was unique to this canine species. Ten seconds after that, they had been recognized and identified by my normal human mental abilities, and grouped by similarities. Dogscatsrats, menwomenchildren, overworked toilets and unwashed bodies, oilexhaustgasoline, cigarettemarijuana, beer-liquor, antsroachesfleas. Instantly I began to itch and raised a back paw to scratch the side of my neck. Dang fleas.
Unexpectedly, Beast rose from the depths of my consciousness and peered out through my eyes.
Ugly dog
, she thought contemptuously.
Bad eyes.
She was right. Bloodhounds weren’t bred to depend on sight. She sniffed through the elongated nose of the bloodhound and crept a little closer to the forefront of my brain, which was odd for her.
Good smells
, she thought at me.
Good nose on ugly dog
, she amended with reluctance.
Not ugly
, I though back.
Just not feline
. Beast huffed back in disdain.
I looked around and, satisfied that I was alone, began rooting in the chicken carton. I pulled out legs and breasts and wings and crunched down. One good thing about being a shape-shifter, if I got bone splinters, they were gone as soon as I shifted back. I ate the entire box of extra crispy chicken and biscuits, leaving the mangled paper bucket scattered in the garden.
Stomach satisfied, I trotted through the shadows and into the street, to the open bay door of the morgue. I swerved out of sight of the two uniformed cops standing at the back of the building; they were smoking and discussing wives with the I-can-tell-you-a-better-story tone that men use for women they have been with a long time. I caught a strong scent of newly dead body and blood, some of it in the van beside me, most of it on the air and inside the building. Underneath that was an older scent of big-cat-human-female. Safia.
I slinked around the van and sat hidden behind a wheel and tire, looking for and spotting static video cameras. I judged the limits of their field of view and knew there was no way to avoid them all, but I was betting that the camera feeds went directly to digital storage and were not monitored by a human who might raise an alarm that a dog had gotten in. Considering I could end up in the dog pound if caught, I was betting a lot. I heard the two cops grind out butts and walk out into the night, stretching their legs. I slipped in and, just like that, I was inside.
To call it a morgue was not quite sufficient, not descriptive enough. There were offices and storage rooms with files. There was a room marked REC. EQUIP., which I guessed held photographic, video, and audio recording gear. There was a chapel that could have been used for any religion or none, where I guessed they stashed grieving families. There was an autoclave room that was unlit, and a laboratory area staffed by two lab techs who worked to music blasting through a CD player. To my now-supersensitive nose, the place reeked of cleaning supplies, chemicals, solvents, and bodies in various stages of decomposition.
At the end of the hallway, I rose up and touched my paw to a steel plate on the wall. The door opened with a whoosh. I’d found the area of the morgue that was similar to what I might see on TV and in movies: an evidence collection room, an autopsy room, and a body storage area that hummed with individual refrigeration units and a larger walk-in, multiple-body fridge at the back. To my new nose, the place reeked.
No one was in sight, and it was easy enough to follow the scent path to the body storage unit where Safia was, in the middle row of drawers. Though I no longer had hands to open the refrigerated unit, my paws were strong. I raised up on my hind legs, hooked the latch with a paw, and pulled. Icy air and the stench of death roiled into the room. The tray began to slide out. Balancing myself on the drawer, I walked on my hind paws, following its movement. When the tray was fully extended, I pressed a red arrow withaVshape below it, and slowly the tray began to drop. It seemed like a nifty device to keep employee back injuries to a minimum in a day and age of fatter, heavier Americans—which meant fatter, heavier corpses.
When the tray was down fully, I was able to drop to all fours and study the girl. Bloodhound eyes aren’t the best, and the poor vision is obscured by folds of skin; ears flop down over the ear canal, affecting hearing; but the nose is so sensitive that it beats any other dog in the canine kingdom. I sniffed and snuffed, pulling the scents in over the olfactory receptors in my nose, the blend rich, textured, layered, and intense. Smelling so many scents at once seemed to affect my pleasure centers, because I didn’t want to stop breathing in the heady mixture. While I drew in the new scents, I began to separate them into their individual components and categories.