Under a Blood Moon Read online

  It was probably true, but that didn’t matter much. “You’ve told him not to think of it, right?”

  “Dozens of times, so has everybody else. I think you’re going to have to tell him yourself when you get out of here.” She contemplated a chocolate. “Ideas when that’s going to be?”

  “Not soon enough,” I said. I knew Isaura would appreciate what I was about to say. “The food is terrible. I could kill for French fries.”

  “Your wish is my command,” she said. “I’ll be back in a matter of minutes. While I’m gone, it may comfort you to know that anything else you want is at your beck and call. Jakob had a show down with one of the ICU nurses. You’re to be denied nothing.”

  I stopped her, French fries could wait. “What happened?”

  “She wanted you to wait for drugs. He didn’t want you to be in pain. Apparently, she was one of those old-fashioned nurses. Thought if you could go longer without drugs, you’d be better off. The two of them had very loud, very tense words. I’m not surprised you don’t remember it, you were pretty out of it for those first few days.” She rolled her eyes to indicate my mental state and left on her errand. A few minutes later, I was in bad-for-me food heaven.

  “Tell me something exciting,” I asked, happily drenching my bounty in ketchup and salt.

  Isaura laughed. “I’m a computer programmer, Mallory. I work alone in a room without a window. Nothing exciting happens in my world.”

  “There has to be something. I’ve been out of touch with reality for too long, and the damn hospital TV only gets movies, no CNN.”

  “That’s Jakob’s fault. He insisted you not see anything that might upset you.” She said with a grin.

  “Wonderful,” I rolled my eyes. “It’s going to be tough getting back to normal isn’t it?”

  “Oh yeah. That man loves you something awful, and he almost lost you. I suspect he’s going to treat you like spun glass for a while. I’m uncontrollably jealous, you know.”

  “Thanks, I’ll trade places with you anytime you’re ready to deal with Nurse Nancy and her freezing cold hands.” We both laughed at my joke, our laughter only increased when my nurse arrived.

  “If you girls can contain yourself, I’d like to see if our patient could walk a bit.” She gave us a stern look.

  “Come on, Mal, I’ve always wanted to see that cute behind of yours.” Isaura stood up and pushed the bedside table out of the way.

  “I’m afraid you won’t have that thrill today,” the nurse said sourly. “This gown has a third sleeve so it wraps around completely. Can you dress yourself, or do you need help?”

  “They didn’t break my arms, right?” I asked, but really, I felt more than up to it. Isaura politely turned her back to give me privacy but then came up beside me. Sandwiched between the nurse and my friend I gingerly put weight on my legs. The cold of the tile floor seeped in through my hospital issue socks. I felt my foot slip a little, but a gentle wind pressed at my back, steadying me.

  “That you, Isa?” I asked, coining a nickname.

  “Me?” She batted her eyelashes at me, doing her best to look innocent even though I knew better. “Trust me, Mal, you need the help.”

  “Don’t help her too much. She can’t go home until she can walk on her own.” The nurse put in, totally missing the point of our exchange.

  “If all that’s standing between me and getting the hell out of here is walking, let’s walk, ladies.”

  The nurse gave my subtle cursing a frown, but as I wobbled toward the door, she got over it. Outside my door, a uniform cop I didn’t know stood to salute me, and Officer White watched him with a smile.

  “You look good, Mallory,” she said.

  “Thanks, Jessa. And thanks for the stuff upstairs.”

  She nodded in agreement. I wasn’t about to mention the spell work out loud in front of another officer. We walked to the end of the hallway and back before the nurse was willing to let Isaura take me out alone. I managed two more circuits of the floor with her gentle wind buoying me up. I let her know I was extraordinarily grateful and tired.

  “I should leave you alone to sleep, but it seems bizarre that I sat next to you coding when you were completely unconscious, and now that I know you’ll wake up I’m going to leave.”

  “You coded next to me?”

  “Yup. The hospital has wireless. That’s how I got to be day shift. I can work anywhere with a plug and ’net.” She grinned. “If you have a sudden affinity for Unix it’s my fault. I kept talking to you about what I was doing.”

  “Rest assured I have no memory of any Unixes,” I replied.

  “Singular, it’s an operating system, like Microsoft.”

  “See? I’m clueless,” I teased. “Now get back to your life and let me sleep.”

  “Fair enough.” She pulled the table next to my bed and picked up the phone. She dialed a number, and her cell phone started to ring in her hip pocket. She hung up and silenced it. “If you need me hit redial. I’m ten minutes away. I can be here with more candy, French Fries, or a helpful breeze whenever you need me.”

  “Thanks.” I smiled gratefully. It only took me a few minutes after she left to fall asleep.

  I woke up and started to examine my IV line. There was something disturbingly alien about the smooth way the plastic tucked into my flesh. It itched a little, but I thought that might be because I was looking at it. I tried to shake off the feeling, but my eyes kept going back to it.

  “It’s good to see you awake,” Danny said walking in the door. I suspected it was the closest he would come to admitting any real emotion.

  “It’s good to be awake. I’m sorry I made you all worry.” It was the only real emotion I was willing to admit to him.

  “When we got there we realized there wasn’t much left to worry about.” His eyes twinkled a bit. “Speaking of which I brought you a present.”

  “A present?” I perked up. I hadn’t expected anything from Danny.

  “Yup.” He handed me an evidence bag filled with black grit that might have been sand. When I looked at it closely, it looked more like tiny pebbles of black glass.

  “What is it?”

  “Officially we have no idea. Unofficially I think it’s the remains of the wolf pack.” He pronounced the two versions of reality with a light tone.

  “Why don’t you pull up a chair and tell me the story?” I gestured to the chair by the bed, unable to take my eyes off the shiny black substance.

  Danny rubbed his hands together and started with the story. “On the way to where you were there are two tunnels. One goes right, the other goes left. On the one side, we found several werewolves, all dead by vampire attack. We assume that was Agent Zollern.”

  “Well, him and—” I started but Danny cut me off good-naturedly.

  “We assume it was him because he’s the only person in this whole mess who had any legal authority to be there. From the way it looks, he started out incredibly pissed, ripping bodies open, tearing out hearts, squeezing limbs so hard the bones turned to jelly. Dr. Mohahan insists he’s never seen such violence. After that, he must have gotten tired because the injuries change. They’re more controlled, almost like someone else entirely who didn’t have quite the emotional stake in the matter.”

  I nodded. Jakob’s victims versus Mark’s victims, only officially there was no way anyone would every say that. “How many were there?”

  “In that room?”

  I nodded.

  “Twenty-three.”

  “Wow.”

  “Not really. We found five dead at the WPL offices, add them together and you only get twenty-eight. Now we have thirty-five missing people over six months, so you have to figure there’s at least another ten or twenty to account for, and that’s assuming each original member of the pack made a lot of followers.”

  “What about the rest?” I swallowed, remembering Anna channeling her Goddess. I suspected the bodies would be severely burned.

  “There isn
’t any ‘rest’. There’s just the room where you were held and a lot of that black stuff.”

  I turned the powder over in the bag a few times. It really did look like tiny bits of glass. “I don’t understand.”

  “A few interesting facts might help. The floors of most of those public works buildings are covered with dirt. The dirt is mostly made of sand. The temperature it takes to burn a body is roughly 1800’ Fahrenheit. But even at that high of temperature the bones leave behind ashes. Somewhere around 1250’ Fahrenheit, sand mixed with ash will turn into glass.”

  I looked down at the bag that seemed to contain tiny balls of glass. Danny followed my glance.

  “Exactly. The lab has pretty much given up on finding out what that stuff is, but I think that’s because the lab likes to think in nice logical steps. It never occurs to them that there might be some way to heat an entire room to nearly 2000 degrees without burning through the walls around it or the grass above it. Some way, or maybe someone, who could do that.”

  “The fire goddess, Raya,” I said softly.

  “Well, we Irish call her Brigid but I understand modern witches use different names. When we found Anna, she was carrying you and her eyes were still gone. I don’t think anyone else noticed.”

  “What’s going to happen to her? To all of them?”

  “Nothing.” Danny leaned back and crossed his arms behind his head. “Officially the case is closed pending your reports. A pack of twenty-eight werewolves terrorized the city. Of the thirty-five missing people, seven have been recovered from a werewolf safe house, six were found with you, and the rest are assumed dead. Special Agent Zollern killed twenty-three of the werewolves when they attacked him. You killed five of them at the WPL offices, or so the special agent tells us. End of story.”

  “So Jakob and Anna?”

  “They were never there.”

  “You told me you took me from Anna.”

  He shrugged. “The reports don’t say that.”

  “And we all know the reports never lie.” I shook my head. “Should I be okay with this?” I wasn’t an overly moral creature, but it seemed like we were crossing a line.

  “Is your job to protect people or enforce the law? Because exterminating a pack of killer werewolves is protecting people, not enforcing the law. The law tells us they deserved to go to trial and be proven guilty and then executed, not just executed.”

  I was going to need more time to think about it all. I shook my head.

  “If it helps matters any, the sentence for a lycanthrope that attacks a human, whether for food or to convert them, is death. No appeals, no insanity defense, death by silver bullet or burning as quickly as possible. The wolves terrorizing the city were denied due process, but they got justice.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I watched a few mindless movies I had already seen on the hospital TV, read some of Mark’s book, and dozed a little. It wasn’t until my dinner arrived that I realized how late it was.

  “How much longer until sunset?” I asked the nurse.

  “Who knows, it’s six now, but with the thunderstorm that’s about the break outside, it’s already dark.” She left me with my food tray. There is something odd about institutional food trays. We’ve all used them in elementary schools, work cafeterias, and places like the hospital room I was in, but no one had ever bothered to mention that always held substandard food. The piece of white bread sitting in the rectangle on the right would make Jakob cringe, while the questionable meat with mysterious gravy would insult all but the most banal of eaters. I could only pick at the meal, hoping the requirements to leave didn’t involve cleaning my dinner plate. I pushed the tray aside.

  “It wasn’t to your liking, my love?” I heard Jakob’s voice, and my heart skipped a beat. He was standing in the doorway his hair still tousled with sleep. He looked thrown together enough that I was sure he’d rushed here as soon as he could.

  “You’re the only thing that I like in this place. Come kiss me,” I begged, and he did. His kiss was soft and chaste but still sweet. I felt tired and sore but his kisses reminded me how glad I was to be alive.

  “You look a thousand times better.” He looked at me with unconcealed joy in his eyes.

  “I walked,” I said proudly. It sounded a little childish, but it was my only accomplishment for the day.

  “Good, because I’m planning on taking you dancing, and you’ll need to walk there. “

  “Get me out of this place, and I’ll fly,” I promised.

  “Really?” He raised his eyebrows at me. My fear of heights had kept me from flying with Jakob ever since I met him.

  “Really. I don’t want to be afraid of things anymore,” I said, my voice growing serious. “Danny told me what they found. Are we going to talk about it?”

  “What is there to say?”

  “You could tell me what happened. I only know my side of it.”

  “Why don’t we talk about it when you’re feeling stronger,” he evaded.

  “I’m feeling stronger now,” I said firmly, but a doctor appeared at my door and our conversation was put off.

  I went through a series of tests that made almost no sense, but somehow checked me for extensive injuries. After I’d followed his pocket light, told him how many fingers he was holding, and squeezed his fingers with my hand, he rendered a diagnosis.

  “The healers saw to it you don’t have any broken bones. The residual trauma to your system from the borderline starvation will pass in a couple of days. The nurses tell me you were walking?”

  “I’ve done a few laps around the hall.” I neglected to mention Isaura’s magical assistance.

  “Then there really isn’t any reason to keep you here any longer. I’d like you to see your regular doctor for follow up care, and a psychologist to handle any post-traumatic stress symptoms that come up.”

  “I promise she’ll get the best of care,” Jakob said from across the room.

  “I don’t doubt that, Mr. Mueller.” The doctor turned back to me. “Without the help of the healers you might not have walked again for months and even then you would have had difficulty. Of course that’s assuming that your body could have recovered from the other effects. Can I give you some advice, Detective Mors?’

  It was one of those rhetorical questions people ask before they act like assholes. I nodded.

  “Take things slowly for a few weeks. When you do go back to work, be more careful.” He fixed me a stare that told me he suspected I’d asked the werewolves to tie me up for fun. Clearly, I was completely at fault here. “You’re a very lucky woman.”

  “I know,” I said.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Jakob and I argued about where I should go when I left the hospital. He won eventually, claiming my stairs wouldn’t be the best thing for someone who had only started walking. As he drove out of the city with the top down, I smiled at the night around me. As the landscape beside me shifted into flat plains covered by dark skies, I started laughing.

  “Should I ask?” Jakob said.

  “The night is a thousand times more beautiful when I know there aren’t any werewolves waiting for me in it.”

  “I promise you, you’re safe.” His voice held a quiet malice I hadn’t heard from him before. It was reassuring despite the violence it promised. I thought of Danny’s description of the bodies, torn in half and the bones crushed.

  “Thanks to you.” I put my hand on his knee. “I owe you a lot.”

  “That’s incredibly distracting, and I’m trying to drive,” he admitted.

  “I’ve seen you multi-task before, you’ll manage.” I moved my hand further up his leg. He took it off with a laugh.

  “Let me get you home.”

  ****

  By the time we made it to the house, I was exhausted. I wanted to stay out on the wide stone porch and watch the night, but my body insisted I sleep. Jakob agreed with it, and I was smart enough to concede when I was outnumbered. The next morning I sl
ept late, but with Jakob practically dead beside me, there was nothing to keep me in bed. I got dressed stiffly, my body protesting after so much abuse and then five days of doing nothing.

  I wandered around the house. Decades ago Jakob hired an earth witch to form the space out of flat ground. He paid a small fortune, but the seemingly endless caverns were worth it. Jakob had given me a tour of the rooms he used, but there were still whole sections I’d never seen. I contemplated exploring all of them, but decided that was too ambitious. I ended up in Jakob’s office where I found Mark poring over case files.

  “Having fun?” I asked. He jumped a little. “So much for supernatural hearing.”

  “It only works when you pay attention to it,” Mark grumbled. “Should you be up and moving around?”

  “The doctor tells me there’s nothing physically wrong with me. Besides, I’m beginning to get bored with resting quietly.”

  “If you’re really bored, there are case reports you could do. The case can’t be closed until we have your version of everything.”

  “I’m happy to do it, but shouldn’t someone tell me what my version of events is first?”

  “Is that bothering you?”

  “Shouldn’t it?” I asked him, curious to hear his point of view.

  “No. The bad guys were punished, the good guys are heroes, and everyone in the city is grateful that it turned out that way.”

  “The bad guys didn’t get a trial.”

  “Neither did their victims,” Mark answered, his voice flat.

  “Doesn’t killing them make us as bad as them?” I quoted a thousand comic book heroes.

  “We’re not killing mindlessly, destroying innocent lives, or even killing because it’s easy or fun. We destroyed them because there wasn’t any other way. That’s why we’re not like them.”

  “I guess you’re right, but it seems wrong to kill someone outside of the law.”