Sliver of Silver (Blushing Death) (9 page)

Chapter 8

“Hey, Kid, I thought you were a night owl.” Derek’s voice boomed over the other end of the line in a chuckle. I glanced over at the clock on the nightstand. Blaring in angry red digital letters, 3:30 a.m. stared back at me. Either he hadn’t been to sleep yet or he was full of caffeine. I was betting on the latter because he was UP.  

“Sorry to disappoint,” I growled, rubbing my eyes and shoving my hair out of my face. “What’s up?” 

“I’ve got another body for you,” Derek stated, suddenly sounding very tired.

I was starting to wonder if being a homicide detective was a good idea after all.

I jotted down the address and listened to the edge in his tone as he rattled the numbers off. It had been three days since the last body had turned up. Three days with no sign, no scent, and no rumblings of strays anywhere.

“Derek, that’s a residential neighborhood,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” he snapped.

“Is Taggar on duty tonight?” If this was our pair, he needed to be there to verify, and I needed back up with a better nose than mine.

“Um, no.”

“Call him in, and I’ll meet you there,” I dictated as I jumped out of bed. “Hey, Derek.” I slid in, quick, before he had a chance to hang up.

“Yeah, Kid?”

“What are you telling the other cops about me?”

“Psychic.” He chuckled.

“Perfect!” I rolled my eyes. “You shouldn’t throw that one around too much,” I cautioned. “You don’t want to become
that
cop.” I hung up the phone and let him chew on that for a while.

I jumped into the shower and was out the door in 30 minutes, wet hair and all. I headed east to Gahanna, where chain restaurants were king, ranch-style homes lined each street, and every drive had a Ford F-150 parked out front—whether they needed it or not.

The crime scene was easy to spot at 4:20 a.m. It was the only house on the block with all the police cars and flashing lights out front.

Parking several houses away along the curb, I marched the trimmed sidewalks of suburbia to the edge of the police tape. Neighbors of the deceased stood outside on their lawns in groups, watching the police move in and out of the house.

In the dark, the house seemed kept up and clean; the lawn was mowed, the edges trimmed, and the shutters painted. I stepped up to the tape and cleared my throat behind the first cop I saw. He snapped his head around to face me with a grim expression tightening his jaw.

“Excuse me?” I gave him my brightest, friendliest smile. At half past four in the morning, there’s no way he’d be able to tell if it reached my eyes or not. I hoped anyway. “Detective Hamlin is expecting me.”

He lifted the yellow tape just enough for me to crouch under. On the other side, I took a few steps toward the house, searching for Derek among the bobbing heads. The cop grabbed my arm, his vise-like grip wrapped around my bicep, and squeezed hard, harder than he had to, to make his point.

Every instinct I had screamed at me to draw my knife and gut him like a deer, but my mind stopped my hand and my whole body froze. This was a cop. I couldn’t gut him. Hell, I couldn’t even defend myself. Instead, I shot him a glare that let him know he’d crossed a line. Ignoring me, he turned to the officer next to him. His hand tightened on my arm, yanking me a step to my right and into the flabby mass of his body. I was going to have a pretty bruise tomorrow in the shape of this douchebag’s fingers.

“Hey, Phil, Detective Hamlin’s
psychic
is here,” he spat out. This guy clearly didn’t like psychics.

I ripped my arm from his grip and took a step away, putting some distance and room for me to move between us. Yep, I was pissed. This bastard’s manhandling set off all my warning bells, making my gut tighten and my fingers itch to unsheathe my knife. I didn’t need to hit a cop. I definitely didn’t need to slit the turkey throat of a cop either. Distance was better, gave me time to think.

My expression shifted to the cold, menacing, dead mien that frightened beings that kill in the dark. Quite a few dead vampires knew that look. The officer registered it for what it was, a threat, resting his hand on the top of his gun with his thumb on the holster clip.

Derek stepped from the front door of the house, unaware of the standoff happening on the front lawn and yelled for me to follow him. He gave me a quick wave of his hand and turned back into the house. I backed away, slow and cautious, from the officer stationed on the line without taking my eyes from his. I stepped up onto the concrete slab, a.k.a. the front porch, meeting Derek’s interested eyes.

“What was that all about?” he asked, glaring at the officer behind me. Glancing over my shoulder, I noticed the ass still had his hand resting on the butt of his gun.

“Just a little test of wills. They don’t like you bringing a psychic in. Told you.” I shrugged.

“Then it’s a good thing it’s not up to them,” he said.

I followed him into the house, hoping I wouldn’t find what my gut and my nose told me was there.

“You can see whoever it was broke down the door,” Derek said with sarcasm.

Broke it down? They damn near blew it right off the hinges! The door lay caddy corner across the threshold, dangling from the doorjamb by a single screw in a mangled bottom hinge.

We stepped over the door and waded through the living room, dodging cops standing around gawking at the
psychic
.
Perfect!
That’s all I needed, people watching me a little too carefully.

The living room was tidy, but not overly clean. A couple of remotes, an empty beer bottle, and a
Shape
magazine were strewn about the old and badly nicked coffee table.

We passed a bedroom that doubled as a gym with an elliptical and a weight bench taking up most of the space in the confined room. A set of eight pound, ten pound, and fifteen pound weights lined neatly on the weight rack along the wall.

As Derek and I turned the corner, cops and techs lined the walls to the last bedroom at the end, crowding the narrow walkway with bulk and emotion. They didn’t raise their eyes to me and they sure as hell didn’t look in the bedroom. I could taste the fear and anxiety on the stale air, like honey ice cream, thick, rich, and sweet on my tongue

So why was I going to go in there and not flinch when no one else would? When the look on these guys faces said that whatever was in there was bad? Real bad.

I had to go in when no one else would. No matter how bad the dreams got, if looking at something horrible helped stop this, then I was going to do it. A lot of people were counting on me to be this person, to see the horrible things, to kill the horrible beings. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to be this person anymore.

I gathered myself together and breathed deep. Mistake! Big mistake. The scent of sweet metal, blood lingered thick on the uncirculated air, mixing with the heady stench of torn bowels. I almost gagged as I stepped into the room and the stench hit me full in the face. The confined space made the smell worse than in the open air of the hallway. Raising the back of my hand to my nose, I tried to breathe through my mouth. That didn’t work either. I tasted the scent of raw meat on my tongue and shivered as my stomach growled and my mouth watered.

I tried to see everything else first, everything but the heap of flesh stretched across the bed. The walls were bare; no pictures, paintings, or memorabilia of any kind. The paint on the walls was chipped and cracked, peeling at the ceiling; evidence that the room hadn’t been painted in a very long time.

There wasn’t enough whitewashing in the world to cover up the brown blood and fecal matter splattered against the faded olive-green walls. The carpet, a burnt orange shag, was full of flesh, blood, and little bits of gore that I didn’t want to identify. This house was going to be hard to sell.

A vanity in the corner had a few eye shadows, some mascara, and pink lipstick. Sitting next to the mascara was a cheap bristled brush filled with long strands of dark, jet-black hair caked to the brush like plaster. The hair in the brush was so thick only the little plastic tips of the bristles showed. Of all the gore in the room, the hair in the brush was what was challenging my stomach. I turned to face the victim instead of the hairbrush and felt better.

The woman’s skin was a deep, rich bronze, Hispanic with curves where women should have curves. She was more on the lean side than heavy and tall. From the length of her on the mattress, she was about six feet tall. She was strapped to the bed at all four corners with anything they could find. A scarf. A sock. The ankles were tied down with something so soaked with blood I couldn’t tell what they were. Her dark panties were shredded across her pelvis and hooked around her thighs like they had split them down the middle.

“How long has she been dead?” I asked. The air-conditioner was off and the windows were closed. “Was the air off when you showed up?”

“Only a few hours and yeah, it was.” Derek pulled out his notepad.

Why would they have turned the air off? The heat only made the smell worse.

“The neighbors heard screaming at around 1:45 a.m. and called the police. It took a while for the local sheriff to call us in,” he hissed. Contempt dripped from every word as Derek turned to the sheriff’s deputy standing near the bedroom door in the hallway. That was as close as the Deputy Sheriff was going to get.

“So whoever did this was still close when the police arrived?” I prayed that maybe we’d finally found a lead.

“They might have been here when the neighbor called but the response time was . . . what was the response time Deputy Harris?” Derek clipped, anger making his tone harsh and his words sharp. He sounded angrier than I’d ever heard him. Even I took a step back. 

“Twenty-five minutes, sir,” the deputy spit out at Derek with just as much venom. There was clearly no love lost between these two departments.

“Twenty-five minutes? They were long gone by then.” I sighed in frustration.

I inched toward the body, small steps through blood-drizzled carpet to get a better look. The gut wound was similar to the other woman, but cleaner, like one of them was a messy eater. The woman’s face was intact, thankfully. The only place that they’d really done any damage was the victim’s gut and soft tissue. Her intestines were flung all over her chest and the surrounding bed, soaking the sheets, comforter, and mattress with her now stale blood.

A milky white substance ran from the woman’s nose down into her ear in a sticky stream that congealed and hardened in a trail down her cheek.

“Do you think it’s the same people?” Derek asked in a low whisper so that only I could hear his deep rasp. “It doesn’t seem like the same M.O.”

“Is that what I think it is?” I bit out, horrified as I pointed to the sticky substance filling her ear.

“Yeah, it is,” he said with a grim note to his tone. “That’s why I question if it’s the same perps. I won’t know until the M.E. gets done with her, but I think there was sexual assault.” He closed his notebook, shoving it into his jacket pocket as he stepped up beside me.

The victim’s eyes were still open, wide and frozen in a horrible nightmare that she’d never escape. Closing my eyes to try and wipe the horror of her lifeless eyes from my mind, I let my mind wander and sense what the room was telling me. A soft, treacherous growl rumbled through my brain as that familiar voice breathed in the scent of naked aggression, of the threat to us. I let my anger pulse through me, burning away everything else and opened my eyes. 

“There was no assault,” I stressed. This had been foreplay for them. It wasn’t about the girl on the bed. It was about them hunting together and a message to me. I got the message loud and clear.

“Why do you say that?” Derek asked as he rounded the bed, taking in the scene from the other side. I glanced around the room at the three officers standing around, listening to us. Derek got the message and cleared the room with no more than an affirmative, “Out.”

“She hasn’t been touched,” I stated.

“Why?” he asked again.

“There’s no bruising around the thighs or pubic region and more importantly, these are werewolves. In their basic nature they’re wolves.” I breathed in the smell of the room, trying to ignore the growl that rumbled in my stomach. I wished I could pick out the scents in the room, distinguish one from the other instead of one jumbled mess. My nose wasn’t that good and I wasn’t sure how to use the powers that I’d gotten from Danny.

“Can I ask you a question?” I asked, glancing up from the girl on the bed to Derek. He nodded. “On the last body, did you find that one set of jaw marks was smaller or narrower than the other?”

“Yeah. How did you know that?” he asked. Agitated, he took a few quick strides to close the distance between us.

“One’s a woman,” I answered.

“What does that mean?”

“Werewolves are more like regular wolves than you realize,” I said, taking a quick breath. “Wolves are territorial, that includes mating. This is a mated pair,” I clarified. “She would never allow her mate’s seed to come into contact with another woman to procreate. She wouldn’t risk him conceiving with someone else. It’s against her nature, her very instinct, even if the other woman is about to die.”

“Can she be that . . . pushy?”

“You mean bitchy?” I scowled.

He smirked at me. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

“Yeah, she could be just that bitchy,” I said as an uncomfortable shiver ran up my spine. A twinge of power and magic lingered in the room that I hadn’t noticed when I’d come in. The magic poked at me, like it wanted to find out what I was, sending a cold chill of understanding through me. The sensation running up my spine was definitely more than Pack magic. Pack magic was warm, inviting, and hummed with the power of the hunt. This magic was different. It had a crackling sharp edge that hurt like running crinkled aluminum foil over my skin.

I hadn’t felt any magic at the last scene but I hadn’t been looking for it either. This magic had latched on to the walls of the room and held on for dear life. It wanted to be known. 

“How do you know all this?” Derek asked, jolting me back to the crime scene.

“It’s my job to know.” My tone was frigid and sharp
.
“Werewolves mimic a lot of wolf behavior in more ways than just their appearance. Their instincts in wolf form are the same, and their social structure within the Pack is very similar. The list goes on and on. It’s instinctual.”