Trail of Dead (4 page)

That worried me. It wasn’t like Eli to sound so frantic. He’s had a lot of practice in controlling his demeanor. Eli struggles pretty hard with his inner werewolf’s Call of the Wild. For a long time I thought he was only interested in me because being around me is so calming, but he’s proved more than once that it’s deeper than that. Still, our relationship is complicated, partly because of Jesse.
And partly because Eli was technically my employee, until I found a more permanent replacement. Finding an apprentice had not been at the top of my priority list the last couple of months.

I drove straight for Hair of the Dog, the bar where Eli works. It was just after 2:00 a.m. on a Wednesday, so the place would be closed, but only just. The bar is owned by a werewolf named Will Carling, who’s the alpha here in LA. Will is one of the few Old World creatures that I fully respect: he’s a good man, and a good leader. Werewolf movies always make it seem like a pack is all about dominance and submission—the pecking order—but in the wild, most wolf packs and werewolf packs are led by an alpha male and female (who are almost always a couple) who solve disputes, keep the wolves in line, and organize full moon activities. Basically, they’re like parents. Will doesn’t have an alpha mate yet, so his pack has a beta, a second-in-command. And that’s Eli. Poor guy has to deal with pack business, holding a full-time job,
and
being my apprentice. Good thing he has easy access to liquor.

Hair of the Dog is on a little commercial stretch of West Pico, near a children’s bookstore and a dry cleaner’s. At this time of night, with even the bar closed, I got truly phenomenal parking. I climbed down from the pickup and trudged over to the bar entrance, trying not to notice how dark and silent the street felt. I pounded on the smoked glass door for a solid two minutes until I felt something enter my radius from the other side. I shivered. It’s always weird when I neutralize someone I can’t see.

For a null, having a supernatural creature step into your radius is kind of like having someone brush their hand against your hair without touching your head: you don’t
feel
it, but you feel that it’s happening, if that makes any sense. I can usually tell if the creature in question is a vampire, werewolf, or witch, and I get a general sense of how powerful they are. And most of them know that they’ve gotten close to me—the wolves lose their edginess and near invulnerability, and the vamps have to start breathing again, which
often results in a series of amusing facial expressions. Witches, who always have the ability to channel magic but aren’t always using it, are the only ones who sometimes don’t realize they’ve entered my area.

The bolt on the door made a loud
snick
, and Eli tugged it open, gathering me into his arms so fast I was breathless. I smelled the sea in his dark-blond hair. He was wearing jeans and a ribbed tank that showed off the lean surfer’s muscles on his arms and chest. An annoying little voice that came from somewhere lower than my head went
mmmmm
. For just a second I let myself hug him back.

“Hey,” he said quietly, voice filled with relief. He released me and took my face in his hands, fingers curling in the loose strands of my hair.

“Hey, yourself,” I said, taking an uneasy step back. “I got your message. What happened?”

His face tightened a little. “Straight to business, then.” Tension rippled between us. Eli and I had slept together a few times, but then during the La Brea Park investigation, a witch had used Eli to power a locating spell to find me—which meant that in some magical, romantic way, he
belonged
to me. Naturally that completely freaked me out. Since then, whenever he tried to start a conversation that wasn’t directly related to the job, I tended to babble until I could run away. For the most part, he had stopped trying, and it seemed like our relationship got a little more businesslike every time we spoke. I wondered if I still “owned” him.

And if I wanted to.

The moment passed, and he held the door wide. “Well, come on in. There’s someone here who’d probably like to talk to you.” He bolted the door after I’d passed through, and I followed him through the little alcove into the main bar area. The whole place is pretty much one big room. There’s a square bar in the middle,
Cheers
-style, and a small hallway in the back that leads to Will’s office, bathrooms, and a janitor’s closet. The walls are covered top
to bottom in kitschy dog stuff—pictures, old calendars, framed cartoons, and so on. Someone—probably Will’s assistant, Caroline—had gone around and scotch-taped little Santa hats on most of the puppies. I couldn’t help but smile at that. Then I saw the occupied barstool and felt a familiar hum of power enter my radius. One that had no business being in a werewolf bar after hours.

“Kirsten?”

She looked up blearily, and I almost reared back in surprise. Kirsten Harms-Dickerson is the most powerful magically talented human in Los Angeles, as far as I know, and the leader of the informal witches’ union. Usually she looks like a blonde Swedish angel and has always reminded me of Samantha on
Bewitched
. Tonight, though, there were circles under her eyes, and more fine, blonde hair had escaped her ponytail than hadn’t. She looked worse off than Jubilee Jackson. A pile of shredded cardboard coasters squatted on the bar in front of her, and she was working on tearing at a new one. “Hey, Scarlett.”

“What are you doing here?” I said. The different Old World groups don’t mix much—they have a few hundred years of tension that tends to get in the way of a good time—and of pretty much everyone I know, Kirsten has the most normal life. She has a day job and everything, which made her presence here more than a little out of the norm.

“Erin” was all she said, but it was enough for pieces to fall into place. The one thing that Dashiell, Will, and Kirsten all have in common is concern for their people’s safety.

“She was one of yours?” I asked, crossing the room to drop onto the stool next to her.

Kirsten nodded, keeping her red eyes focused on the coaster, which she’d folded over and over until it looked like a sliced pizza. She started pulling the slices apart. I was opening my mouth to start another question, but Eli raised his eyebrows meaningfully, telling me not to push it. Despite their inherent differences, he and
Kirsten had developed sort of a mutual respect when they’d teamed up to save my life. “You want a drink?” he asked me, walking back behind the bar. I dropped onto a stool, hesitating, but finally shook my head. I needed to be clear.

“Not just now,” I said.

We sat there for a few minutes without talking. When the last coaster slice had been torn off and ripped in half again, Kirsten spoke. “Erin called me tonight from campus begging for help. We made plans to meet up at a coffee shop halfway between her school and my home, but Erin never came. After last fall I collected a few hairs from each of my witches in case someone targeted the Old World again. I did a locator spell, and another, and another. Erin…wasn’t anywhere.” She abandoned the coaster and leaned forward, burying her head in her arms.

Before I could ask, Eli explained. “Meaning she was dead. Or inside your radius, but you were out of town.”

I looked from one to the other. I’ve always suspected that Kirsten’s power comes from her inherent serenity—even when she was using combat magic against a serial killer last fall, her composure had never wavered. This was scary. I raised my eyebrows at Eli, who picked up the story.

“Kirsten went to the campus, and called me to go to her apartment,” he said quietly. “She thought…there was probably a crime scene to clean up somewhere.”

“Was there a body?”

He nodded. “I could smell it before I got off the elevator.”

I winced. Meat and blood smells can drive the werewolves kind of crazy, sometimes even forcing them to change. Eli’s tolerance is better than most (for some reason the inner wolf bothers him, but blood doesn’t bother his inner wolf, which just goes to show how much sense magic makes), which is why he’s able to do this job at all, but it must have been rough to be in that room. “Go on.”

Eli’s eyes became distant as he remembered. His hands, which had been doing little closing-up tasks as he spoke, went still on the bar. “There had been some kind of fight. That girl…I could hardly tell she’d been a person. It looked like she’d been
liquefied
.”

“Crushed?” I said.

He pointed a finger at me, nodding.

“What did you smell?” I asked. Eli’s werewolf senses have been helpful on more than one occasion.

“Mostly just the blood, and the other…body stuff. But there was a little bit of dirt there too. Odd smell.” He shrugged.

Jesse had said the forensics team had found dirt. “What made it odd?”

“It smelled…I don’t know, processed? I can’t really explain why, but it made me think of industrial buildings.”

“And it didn’t rain last night?”

“Nope.”

Hmm. No reason for Erin’s shoes to be muddy. “So you took the body,” I prompted. I would have too. If a person has clearly died of something explainable—gunshots or a heart attack or a car accident—I leave the body alone, even if someone from the Old World might have been involved. Basically, if there was a reasonable human explanation, I stay out of it. But a crushed body in a tiny third-floor bedroom would bring up too many questions.

“Yeah, and I cleaned up as fast as I could, but I heard the roommate coming. I grabbed the bag with the body, waited until she went into her own bedroom, and made a run for it. You said always deal with the body first, right?” He looked directly at me, and I realized what he was asking. In his quiet, pragmatic way, Eli wanted to know if he’d handled it right.

“Yes,” I replied, but a second too late.

“What? What else should I have done?”

This is what I liked about Eli—his tone wasn’t defensive or angry. He simply wanted to know. I felt awkward about correcting
him in front of someone who was essentially our boss, but what the hell, Kirsten knew he was still training. “Taken the carpet,” I replied. “There’s a carpet knife in the bag, just for that kind of thing. With a bloodstain that big and that wet, they know they’re looking for a dead body. If you take the carpet, all they have is a missing girl who’s maybe in trouble, or maybe just ran away with her rug. It changes the story.”

“So I should have picked taking the carpet over straightening the room,” he said thoughtfully.

“Yes.” I shrugged to say
not that it matters now
.

Looking troubled, Eli excused himself to the back office to count the till and lock up. Kirsten finally looked at me. “If Erin’s roommate came home, I’m assuming the police have gotten involved by now?”

“Yeah.” I filled her in on my own evening, starting when Jesse picked me up at the airport. “But he doesn’t know that Erin was a witch,” I finished.

“There’s something else he doesn’t know,” Kirsten said suddenly. She reached up, making a weak attempt to smooth down her hair. “Erin wasn’t the first witch to be murdered this week. She was the second.”

“
Two
dead witches?” I asked, startled. “Eli didn’t mention another body.”

“No, he wouldn’t have. This one was out of our hands. The woman was thrown off the Santa Monica Pier.”

“Okay, wait,” I said, and my mind was clearing now. “Can you start at the beginning please?”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry.” Kirsten straightened her back, obviously trying to rally. With her makeup wiped off and her hair a lopsided cloud around her face, I was struck by how young she looked. How old
was
Kirsten? Thirty? Thirty-five? It seemed awfully young to have so much power and so many people counting on you. Granted, I was only twenty-three, but I had the opposite of power, and nobody counted on me.

“Last Friday, I got a call from one of my witches,” she began. “Her name is—was—Denise Godfry, although she worked under a different name. Anyway, she asked to meet with me, in person, to discuss a problem. I agreed, of course, but I had meetings that night. We were supposed to have brunch in Santa Monica the next morning, but Denise never showed. I called and called, and finally went down there. There was a policeman at her apartment.” Kirsten began victimizing a new coaster, and I noticed that her manicure was chipped to shit. A very bad sign.

“She was dead,” I prompted.

“Yes. The police said she had killed herself,” Kirsten said, with a bitter little emphasis on the word
police
. “Her body was found in Santa Monica, right up on the damned beach. It even made the
Times
, though you probably didn’t see it in New York.”

I tried to remember if I had ever heard her swear. “No.”

“Anyway, I was very worried. I tried explaining to the policemen that it couldn’t have been a suicide, but none of them would listen to me. Then last night it was the same thing all over again, with Erin.”

“I don’t mean to be insensitive, but how do you know Denise didn’t just fall? Or, um…jump?”

She was shaking her head. “Denise was hydrophobic. Deeply afraid of the ocean. She told me once that she’d seen that movie
Jaws
when she was a little girl, and she still couldn’t stand to be
over
water, much less in it. She would
never
have been on the pier. And if she were going to kill herself, it wouldn’t be like that.” The coaster in her hands was viciously ripped in half. “I told the policeman that too, for all the good it did me.”

I raised my eyebrows, surprised. “You told the police?” It wasn’t like her to involve the police in Old World affairs.

But Kirsten said, “At the time I was thinking Denise’s death didn’t have anything to do with her being a witch. I thought maybe it was an ordinary murder. If there is such a thing.”

I understood. This was Los Angeles, after all, and young women who are out alone in the middle of the night do disappear for “ordinary” human reasons. “But then Erin died too, and you figured it was an Old World connection,” I surmised. She nodded at her coaster pieces. “Aside from being witches, was there anything that Erin and Denise had in common?”