CHAPTER 12
Graham had been serious about not waiting around for her. She practically had to run to keep up with his long-legged strides down to the curb to catch a cab. Once the taxi driver—the first Other one she’d ever had in the city—had dropped them off at the 79th Street entrance to Central Park, Graham moved even faster. If Fiona had been human, he would have lost her at the first branch in the path, but she wasn’t human and she wasn’t about to be left behind. She gave thanks for her Fae stamina and quickness as well as for Missy’s tennis shoes as they trekked farther and farther into the park, moving from paved walks to well-worn trails and finally into the denser wilds of the park’s copses and thickets. She was also glad her keen night vision could penetrate the deepening darkness and maintain a good bead on the Lupine’s broad back. Otherwise, following him would have been impossible.
She knew what he was following, too. His nose. Her own didn’t have nearly the sensitivity to pick up on the particles in the air that spoke of Others, blood, and demons, but she knew Graham’s was. She could see it in the set of his shoulders and feel it in the tension that gathered around him the farther he moved toward the site Walker had described to him.
When they got close enough that she began to hear the sound of low voices in the distance and to see lights flickering in between the tree trunks, though, she didn’t need the senses of a Lupine to know it was bad. Even without heightened senses she could smell the death. It took the heat out of her annoyance with Graham and brought back the unpleasant roiling in her stomach.
She followed Graham through the thick underbrush, their progress nearly silent as they broke through into an uneven clearing that all but glowed with the tension of death and the reaction of the living.
Walker stood at the far side of the clearing with his back to them, his head bent in conversation with a small, dark-haired woman with pretty features and delicate hands covered in bloody rubber gloves.
He sensed Fiona the instant she stepped into the glade. His head shot up and turned toward her, his expression fierce.
“What the hell is she doing here?”
He moved across the empty space so fast, Fiona didn’t even have time to put Graham between them. She could see the woman Walker had been talking to blinking in surprise from behind her lenses, but Fiona was more interested in testing Tess and Missy’s theory. She looked carefully at Walker’s face, searching every nuance of his expression. For a second all she saw was the old, familiar anger, but then her gaze shifted to his eyes and she saw something else. A glint of concern. Of fear.
She felt a surge of optimism and nearly opened her mouth to call him on it, but Graham cut her off. He held up a hand as if trying to calm the other Lupine.
“Save it,” the alpha said. “I’ve already had this argument with her, and as she pointed out, all of us duked it out just this morning. We lost. You told me on the phone that you thought there was something odd about this kill. If ‘odd’ equals ‘demon,’ we need her here.”
” ‘Odd’ could be anything—”
“Not anything Lupine,” the woman in the glasses cut in, her voice carrying the short distance between them. “Pardon me, Alpha, but I can tell you for certain it wasn’t one of our pack. Or a loner or an out-of-towner. The killer wasn’t Lupine.”
Graham looked at the woman and nodded, as if dismissing her apology. “Don’t worry about it, Annie. Just fill me in. If it wasn’t Lupine, could it have been another kind of Other? Feline? Werefolk? Vampire even?”
Annie shook her head. “Definitely not. Just the amount of blood left here on the scene rules out vamp. I mean, I’m a biologist, not a physician, and my anatomy classes were a long time ago, but I know enough to think this wasn’t anything we’re used to dealing with. Have a look.”
Graham approached the woman and the body, being careful not to disturb anything that looked like tracks or to step in the pools of clotting blood that trailed like fingers of blackened crimson away from the corpse. Fiona hurried to follow, trying to ignore the uncomfortable sensation of once again having an angry and sullen Walker stalking behind in her shadow.
She stopped when Graham did, less than two feet from the still figure. As she looked down at it, her first thought was that if she hadn’t already been told it was human, she wouldn’t necessarily have been able to tell. It looked as if it lay there in pieces, at least three or four large chunks, connected more by proximity than physiology. Something had torn through flesh and bone, tendon and sinew, leaving little recognizable behind. Fiona could see something that may once have been blue denim, now black in the dim light, and the gory, stringy clumps by Graham’s left boot might have been human hair a few hours before. Now only assumption and optimism would attach that label.
Fiona blew out a deep breath and clenched her hands into fists to keep them from pressing betrayingly against her stomach. That organ pitched once, then clenched into a tight fist and retreated to huddle against her spine in protest. It wasn’t really the blood or that gore that bothered her; it was the emptiness of this thing that used to be human. There was nothing left, like the soul saw the desecration of its former home and fled as far and fast as the wind could carry it. Usually, human spirits clung tenaciously to their bodies and the world they had lived in. That was why their world had so many ghost stories. But in this case, not even a thread of that consciousness remained. A mercy, probably. If Fiona had seen her own body so defiled, she might have turned tail, too.
“At first glance, I admit it does look like a Lupine or maybe a Feline kill. There are claw marks.” Annie’s voice seemed to fade in like a sound track that had been playing for a while before Fiona took notice. “But they’re too large for any shifter I’ve ever heard of, let alone seen. At least eight inches long on average, although it looks like there are two smaller ones used less regularly. Here,” she pointed where the throat should have been, “and here.” Where the two largest chunks diverged, below the rib cage. “Anything with talons like that would have to be at least ten feet, minimum, and the biggest were I’ve ever heard stories about was just shy of nine.”
Graham watched with a cool sort of detachment belied only by the fisting of his hands at his sides and the leap of muscle in his jaw as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. “Is anything missing?”
Annie shook her head. “Not that I could tell from a preliminary exam, but a trained medical examiner could say for sure. Even the uterus and the intestines look to be intact. Externalized, but intact. It’s almost like parts were chewed or ripped to look like they’d been eaten, but this girl wasn’t anyone’s dinner. That makes the chances of this being a rogue Other kill pretty slim.”
Fiona frowned and looked closer. Annie was right. Fiona could see the sausagey line of the intestines partially obscured by a ragged bit of cloth with the stomach draped half out of the gaping hole in the abdominal cavity. Her frown deepened. Predators favored the stomach as a source of vitamins and minerals that could be found in the partially digested meal of the prey. It was usually the first thing to be eaten, but it looked relatively undisturbed for having been mostly removed.
“Maybe something scared it off before it could feed?”
“I don’t think so. The pattern of the wounds is wrong. If something were going to feed, it would have gone for the abdomen and stayed there till it was done, but these wounds here,” Annie pointed to the remains of the face, “barely bled, which means they occurred after she was already dead and after the abdomen had already been opened.”
Graham swore. “Then this definitely wasn’t dinner.”
Annie nodded. “It’s like I said. It looks like whatever killed her wanted people to think she’d been partially eaten, but had no real interest in eating her. It’s weird. As if someone was trying to mimic an Other kill.”
Fiona peered closer at the exposed bottom of the rib cage and then glanced back at Annie. “You’re sure nothing was missing?”
The other woman blinked at her, looking surprised. “As sure as I can be. It’s messy, but I really think it’s all here.”
“What about the heart?”
“The chest cavity is the biggest intact part here. You can see that nothing went in through the ribs or the sternum.”
“But what about something going in from below the ribs?”
Annie blinked again and raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t even think to check that.”
Hunkering down beside the corpse again, Annie pulled the sleeves of her already-spattered sweatshirt up with her teeth, bunching the fabric just above her elbows. Pressing one gloved hand against the body’s chest for balance, she reached down to the space between the two pieces of torso with the other and guided her hand up through the rib cage, her brow furrowed in concentration.
“It’s like someone carved a tunnel in here,” she muttered, finally stopping when the inside of her elbow bumped up against rib bone. Her glasses slid down the bridge of her nose and she blew at a strand of hair that flopped in front of her face. “She’s right. It’s not here. The heart is gone. But I don’t get why anything strong enough to tear all the way through the body wouldn’t just reach in from the front and grab it. It would be a lot more efficient.”
“Demons don’t worry much about efficiency,” Fiona sighed. She had really, really wanted to be wrong.
The female Lupine blanched. “A demon? You think this was done by a demon?” Her eyes flew to the alpha, seeking reassurance.
Graham nodded grimly. “It’s possible. One was spotted in the city recently. We were hoping to be able to track it down before something like this happened.”
“But there hasn’t been a demon attack around here in… forever,” Annie protested. “How did it get here? And I thought demons were basically stupid and brutal. How could it possibly have figured out a way to make its kill look like an Other attack?”
“Demons can only enter this world at the behest of a summoner,” Fiona explained. “They have to be called. And once they’ve been called, they’re bound to the summoner until they’re released or banished. If a demon under the control of a summoner were ordered to kill someone before feeding, it would have to do exactly that, and splitting the body in half certainly did enough damage to qualify as demon fun time. Once the body was split, going after the heart from below was probably just easier.”
“Not that I wanted it to be an Other,” Graham said, “but the fact that it isn’t makes things a hell of a lot more complicated.”
“I don’t know. Having one of our pack turn rogue during the middle of the negotiations would have been pretty messy, so maybe you should look on the bright side.”
Graham ignored Annie’s suggestion and looked back at Fiona. “What would it take for you to be able to pick up a trail for us?”
Fiona shrugged. “Not too much. The Fae are said to have an inherent connection to things demonic. It shouldn’t take all that much energy for me to pick up on one, which I guess is why we won the Wars.”
“Shouldn’t? You’re not certain?”
She made a frustrated face. “Like I said before, there hasn’t been a demon sighting where I come from in a couple millennia. I’m working from what I’ve heard, not from personal experience, but I’m pretty sure that’s more than you’ve got to work with.”
“So what do you need to do?”
Fiona did a mental inventory and winced. “Well, I need to gather up some more energy. I’ve used everything I came from Faerie with, and I haven’t been able to gather any since… since the last spell I cast.”
“And you can only get the energy by taking it from someone like Walker?”
Oh, how Fiona wished Missy were there to give her mate another swift kick, this time a bit higher than the shin. “I don’t take anything from someone like Walker. Fae don’t steal energy from other folk; we take the energy that is manifest around us. The energy I got from kissing Mr. Grumpypants came from the kiss itself, not from him. It’s fate’s cruel joke that the attraction between us is the one energy source I seem to be able to tap into on this plane. I certainly didn’t ask for it.”
Graham frowned. “So you’re not feeding off him?”
“Do I look like a vampire to you? Sheesh, are all werewolves so paranoid or is this just my lucky day?”
Annie muffled a laugh. Walker just watched her, his expression brooding.
“It’s certainly not hers.” Graham gestured to the body. “So if you can help us find out what killed her and where we can find it without hurting anyone else, you’re going to do it.” He turned to Walker. “Kiss her.”
“What?”
“Kiss her. Now.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
The alpha growled. “Do I look like I’m in a joking mood, Walker? I can make it an order if you prefer.”
“Oh, please do,” Fiona grumbled under her breath. “That would just do wonders for my ego.”
“I don’t have time to kick your ass over this,” Graham said, his eyes narrowed and seeming almost to glow in the darkness around them. “Not that it wouldn’t give me a great deal of pleasure, but every second we waste fighting about this is a second colder that the trail is growing, and a second longer that whatever killed this girl has to kill someone else. So shut the hell up and kiss the goddamned princess.”
Fiona didn’t have a chance to protest her amended title. With a muffled curse, Walker spun around, grabbed her by the arms, and yanked her into a furious, aggressive, bone-melting kiss that had her lighting up like Rockefeller Center at Christmastime.
She felt as if she’d turned into a giant lightbulb, with her head glowing bright enough to illuminate all of Central Park. It staggered her every single time that one touch of this obnoxious, stubborn, narrow-minded werewolf’s lips on hers could turn her entire world upside down. She came from a long line of sidhe, the royal race of Faerie, and every single drop of blood in her veins should have been as fickle as theirs. The magic she felt with Walker should have amused her fleetingly and then left her ready to move on to greener pastures and other lips, but the idea had her stomach doing that unpleasant little dance again. She didn’t want anyone else to kiss her, didn’t want anyone else to touch her, didn’t want anyone else’s taste clinging to her lips and filling her mouth with honey and coffee and warm, rich male.
Damn him to the pit and back.
When his tongue finally finished marking its territory inside her mouth and his lips finally lifted from hers, Fiona knew she was glowing like a radioactive isotope and wearing the expression of a three-year-old at bedtime. She didn’t even bother to glare at Walker, just spun on her heels and stomped two steps closer to the body, hunkering down beside it to get a better look.
It took a couple of minutes for her blood to cool from a boil to a simmer and for her to remember the simple revealing spell that would expose any traces of demon taint on the corpse. Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes and willed the energy from the kiss into the correct shape and brushed it delicately over the dead woman and the ground around her. Fiona figured this poor human had been through enough and deserved at the last to be handled with care.
The indrawn breath and muttered curses around Fiona told her before she opened her eyes that the spell had worked. She looked up and bit back an oath of her own. The entire body crawled with the sickly green light of the demon taint. The wounds were the worst, seeming to writhe and heave with the remnants of the demon’s energy. It had desecrated the woman and driven her soul so far from her body that not a shred of the person she had once been remained. She had become nothing more than hunks of meat glowing sickly in the darkness.
Fiona shuddered in revulsion at the knowledge of what she needed to do. The idea of getting any closer to the demon’s foul magic than she already had filled her mouth with bile, but she had no choice. They needed to know. Blowing out a slow, hissing breath, she quickly diverted some magic to shore up her inner shielding and reached out a hand to touch the contaminated flesh.
She heard a low, strangled groan and wondered vaguely if it came from her. The demon magic felt like slime and burned like acid. It flared at her touch, and for a few seconds Fiona could see a pattern of symbols burned into the corpse’s skin. Swearing violently, she jerked her hand away and fell backward, landing inelegantly at Walker’s feet.
“What the hell was that?” he demanded, reaching down to haul her to her feet.
“Demon marks. And an explanation for why Annie thought someone wanted to make this look like an Other kill.”
Graham growled. “That really was deliberate?”
“Absolutely.” Fiona looked around and found a stick about as thick as her finger and as long as her forearm. She turned to a bare patch of dirt and began to draw a series of lines and curves that looked like a kind of exotic and obscene alphabet.
“Since I’m not drawing with blood, I can show you the symbols without actually casting the spell. There are five altogether. These,” she pointed out the first two, “signify the demon’s name. It won’t be its full name, and maybe not even part of its real name, but it will be a designation set up by the summoner to use for spell work. Real demon names have power over them. It’s how the summoners control them, so the real name is spoken out loud when the spell is cast, but when the sigils are written down, symbols are substituted in their place. There are thousands of naming sigils, and I’m not familiar with what these particular ones translate as. I’ll have to do a little research on it. The third and fourth ones are the command. The third is a death sigil, meaning that’s the third command—to kill.”
“And the fourth?”
“It means mimicry and deception. The demon was supposed to make whoever found this body think that an Other had made the kill.” Fiona raised her eyes to the alpha. “Whoever did this knows about the negotiations and wants to see them fail.”
“Shit,” Graham swore.
“What about the last symbol? You said there were five.”
Fiona looked back at the dirt instead of at Walker while she answered his question. “The last one is the signature of the summoner, but not the kind of signature you’re thinking,” she said before he could ask for a name. “It’s not like it says, ‘Bob Smith, Sorcerer, Chelsea.’ It’s a symbol, like a family seal. It doesn’t have a name, just representative images. This one happens to depict power, death, fire, and air, which could mean absolutely anything about anybody.”
“So then you’re saying we have nothing to go on?” Graham shoved a hand through his hair and stalked off a little way, his frustration glowing nearly as brightly as the demon magic.
“No, I didn’t say that. I’m not saying I know where to find the demon or its summoner right this very minute, but we do know more than we did half an hour ago, and we do have copies of the symbols. There are places I can look these up and get some more information. Even though the demon naming symbols are unique to each summoner, they do have to follow certain conventions in order to make them applicable enough that the demon has to obey. That ought to give us something.”
“Barely.”
Annie shrugged and peeled off her rubber gloves, turning them inside out as she did so. “It’s better than the alternative, right?”
“Sure, the way steamed Brussels sprouts are better than boiled.” Graham gritted his teeth and hooked his fingers together behind his neck. “How much time will you need to trace the symbols?”
Fiona winced. He had to ask. “I don’t know. A couple of days, maybe. It depends on what sources I can find.”
His eyes flashed. “Find them fast. Walker will help if he can.” He glared at the other Lupine as if daring him to argue. “Whatever problems you two have with each other, you’ll just have to set them aside and do your jobs.”
Walker’s own eyes flared fiery gold, but he only gave a curt nod.
“Fine,” Fiona said. She wasn’t sure it would be, but she was sure that Graham didn’t want to hear that.
“Good. Walker, take her home. Both of you need to get some sleep. Annie, I need you to stay here with the body. I’ll call Adam at the hospital and ask him to come straight here when his shift is over. He’ll have the body brought to the morgue and do a proper autopsy. Maybe he can find something we missed.”
“It’s worth a try. At least he’s actually an M.D. In this case, that trumps my Ph.D. Both of them.”
Fiona glanced down when Walker’s hand closed around her elbow.
“Come on,” he said gruffly. “We’re going home.”
He didn’t sound like he had to struggle to keep his hands from wrapping around her throat, and Fiona eyed him suspiciously. This didn’t strike her as the werewolf she’d come to know and suspect. She opened her mouth to voice her suspicion, then decided not to look this particular gift wolf in the mouth.