Under a Blood Moon Read online

  “Well, he was still there when I woke up, so I don’t think he’s going anywhere. Thanks for worrying, though.”

  “Anytime. It’s my job as your partner.” He flashed me a grin that was typical Danny. I shook my head and reached for another donut. I’d never understand my partner’s mix of caring concern and fifth grade boyishness.

  We pulled into a long driveway passing through a high brick wall that served as a fence. Inside there were tall live oaks hung with Spanish moss and a carefully manicured lawn. The driveway curved around the front of a huge home with columns and a wide front porch. It looked like an unlikely place for a crime scene until Danny turned the corner. A wave of sickness swept over me: the view in front of us, the high brick walls and tiny windows, was the view from my nightmare. Danny started giving me the details.

  “Here’s what we know: Madame Marie was definitely in her room at the midnight and 3 a.m. bed checks. At 6:30, a nurse used this door to grab a quick smoke and found the blood. That’s when they found out she was missing. “

  “The bodies are over there?” I pointed to the lawn behind the building. It wasn’t really a question. I could feel the dead, even from this far away. Besides, that angle of the building would match my nightmares better, I thought with a grimace. Danny only nodded.

  I walked across the brittle summer grass, feeling the death witch part of me taking over with every step. Officers and technicians parted in front of me. The facility was on private properties so there were no cameras to be brave for. I was as scary as the bodies on the ground.

  Dark, oily bloodstains on the grass announced this was the killing place. Underneath a tall oak tree, shaded from view, the drops of blood became a flood. My skin began to tingle like I was holding on to an electrical current. There were lumps here and there covered by white sheets. Too many of them for three nurses but, my inner voice screamed, not enough of them.

  “You’re missing body parts?” Danny hadn’t caught up with me so I asked a crime scene technician.

  “Yes, umm, a lot of them actually, we have both heads, and one is attached to a torso, but the other one, well, it isn’t.” He cleared his throat. Seeing that I wasn’t going to be sick, he went on in greater detail. “We have one femur, popped out of its socket, but not the lower leg. Over there,” he pointed a few feet to the left, “an arm, and a second leg, this one whole. The torso is the most intact of anything. The head, left arm, and upper arm are all still attached.”

  “Which one is that?” I asked. He stared at me, so I repeated the question. I was ready to ask a third time when Danny came up. His look told me he could see my fury.

  “Your eyes are gone,” he said simply, and then turned to the tech. “Do we have an I.D. for that victim yet?”

  “No,” he gulped. I was mildly disgusted that a member of the police force couldn’t answer a simple question because my eyes had turned from their normal green to white with an opal’s swirl of colors. I brushed them both off and walked toward the body. No one stopped me when I pulled the cover down and laid my hand on her chest.

  A thousand details flooded into me. My mind filled with images of fur and teeth, something large and rank. Her death had been terribly slow. Claws ripped into her skin, tearing her limbs apart. The strength of those hands sealed the wounds closed, cheating her out of a quick death from blood loss. A heart attack killed her. I wondered if she recognized the symptoms as she watched her attacker eat her limbs.

  I moved from her body to the limb beside it. The leg was still wearing its white nurse’s uniform. The knob of the joint looked polished in the morning sunlight. I put my hand on top of the cloth, and a second surge of information flooded me. He ran from them, listening to the sounds of his coworker being torn apart. He had been a runner, but he hadn’t been fast enough to outrun the thing that ripped him apart.

  “Older female and middle aged male,” I said to the technician. He replied, but I didn’t catch it. My mind was still with them, still dying with them. I walked up to the tree. There was a thick stain six feet up on the trunk. I put my hand on top of the mark and saw the death of the man.

  “What happened?” Danny asked quietly.

  “It chased him down, grabbing his leg there,” I pointed to where the limb remained. “It ripped the leg out, and then carried the rest of him back here. It lifted him up. It looked at him. Then it ate the heart out of his chest.”

  “Zombie?”

  “Werewolf.” The wolf had devoured his heart in front of him, just like in my nightmare.

  ****

  Inside the building, I drank another sports drink and watched security camera video. A camera focused on the outside entrance, but not the oak tree. Three nurses left the building together, even without the sound you could tell they were laughing. The three abruptly looked to the left, toward the tree where they would die. Without hesitation all three rushed out of camera focus. The time stamp in the corner of the picture neatly announced 5:55 a.m. Somehow my abilities let me feel these deaths, as they happened, even though I was asleep miles away.

  The hallways of the medical center weren’t videotaped, but they were key card secured. That meant that only employees with a card could open a door. The doors around Madame Marie’s room showed the normal opening and closing of the nurses on shift. Even if she had gotten out of the room, there was no way to open any other door on the floor without a key card. Danny requested the logs for the key cards, while I asked to go through Maria’s room.

  The room was a standard twelve by twelve foot square with too much fluorescent light. It did offer one surprise: set up on a shaky hospital tray was an altar, complete with new images of Baron Samedi and La Santa Muerte. I gave a questioning look to the administrator who was showing us around.

  “We felt Marie would have the best chance of recovering if she was allowed to practice her faith. In the brief time she was here, she expressed a strong desire to have protective charms and icons around her. She even worked to create a small doll, which she said would be strong enough to protect her. At Peaceful Rest, the patient’s comfort comes first. We would never force someone to give up their faith.”

  The bureaucrat went on but I tuned him out. I wanted to ask if they would have allowed animal sacrifice or some of the other, more extreme, parts of her faith, or if only the non-offensive ones were allowed. I kept quiet. Some battles aren’t worth fighting.

  The room was a dead end. I couldn’t feel any magic. Even the altar was psychically dead. There wasn’t much in the whole place. Three nurses had stepped out of the building. My abilities told me that two of them had died violently just a few yards away. We had no idea what happened to the third. In the surveillance camera video, she was a laughing young woman with her blond hair in a long ponytail. Now she was gone.

  Marie had been behind locked doors in a building surrounded by cameras. She was gone as well. The enigma of it all was beginning to depress me. I started to say something to Danny but was interrupted by a breathless uniform cop.

  “We need the witch, like, now,” he stammered.

  I shot a withering glance at him, but it didn’t make much of difference. Danny shrugged his shoulders and we both followed him outside. About ten feet in front the oak tree, a few steps past the severed leg there were eight or nine cops standing in a circle. When we got closer, they stepped aside for us, leaving an empty space in front of an object. It took a minute for it to register, but once it did, I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  It was doll, hand-stitched with a soft cloth body. Her face was painted in place. I could feel people looking from the doll to me, looking from its green eyes to mine, from its brown yarn hair to my brown hair. I could see them looking at the scythe drawn on the doll’s chest and wondering if I was marked with the symbol for death.

  I turned away from the thing to take a deep breath. It’s one thing to deal with voodoo practitioners. It’s another to find a voodoo doll of yourself a few feet away from the scene of a multiple homicide. I ha
d no idea what it was meant to do, but I was willing to bet that the doll had helped me see the deaths. It had somehow focused my power on this spot when they happened. By the time I turned back, Danny had cleared away most of the onlookers. He was about to pick up the doll to put it in an evidence bag when I stopped him.

  “Mind if I hold her, it, for a minute?” I stammered.

  “Be my guest, I’m in no rush to touch it.” He looked pale as he handed the evidence bag over to me. I touched the doll through the plastic, the bag turned inside out the way I had been taught. I could feel the magic in it dance across my fingertips. It wasn’t death magic or even the natural magic that I felt when another witch brushed up against me. This felt mechanical, like something that had been made. It wasn’t an exact image of me, but it was close enough that I felt possessive about it.

  “What happens to this after we finish the investigation?” I asked.

  “It becomes evidence in the trial.”

  “And after that?”

  “Please don’t tell me you want to take that thing home, Mal.” Danny shook his head at me.

  I blushed and finished closing the bag.

  A phone call came through for us ten minutes later. The tip to the news stations after the second zombie attack had been traced. It was a cell phone registered to the WPL. The WPL professed no knowledge of Madame Marie, and no dealings with her, and yet someone with their cell phone had known we were in her apartment.

  We decided to stop by the WPL offices and ask them about the phone and the murders last night. The forensic teams hadn’t proven that a werewolf killed anyone yet, but my paranormal awareness was enough for me.

  I imagined that the first day after a full moon would be a busy one for the WPL, but the offices were empty. No one greeted us as we entered. After a few minutes, Tom Canidae wandered into the main office.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you couldn’t hear me when I greeted you,” he said sheepishly.

  “I guess you’re used to werewolf hearing, not human,” I offered.

  “You’re right. I work here. I live with other wolves. Honestly, if it wasn’t for business meetings I don’t think I’d ever enter the mundane world.” There was an odd look of disdain in his eyes when he said mundane world, as if the rest of us were somehow handicapped or terminally boring. It took him a second to wipe the look away. “What can I do for you? The offices are usually empty during the full moon. We even forward the emergency line.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing that important. We’re following up an old lead,” Danny said, deliberately nonchalant. “Madame Marie’s second zombie attack was called into one of news hotlines. The phone used to make the call is registered to the WPL. Can you tell us anything about it?”

  “Not really, we have a lot of phones.” He gestured to the battered desks around him, each one with a phone in the right hand corner. “Did you get a specific extension or number? Anyone could have made the call without the rest of us knowing.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Because when we were here the other day I got the impression that you could all hear each other’s conversations. I mean, you didn’t even call Remi into the room, and he knew you needed him.”

  “I guess you’ve got me there, Detective,” he said, but I didn’t believe he was embarrassed. “Still I’d suggest there’s a big difference between listening for your name and remembering every detail of every conversation. If we knew which extension we could narrow it down.” He looked at Danny with a pasted on expression of hope.

  “We don’t have the extension,” Danny began slowly. Tom cut him off.

  “That’s what I was afraid of, I’m sorry but there isn’t much I can do. It’s a good thing calling a tip in isn’t illegal. Now, why don’t I walk you out?” Somehow, he made it sound smooth not hurried, when hurrying us out was exactly what he was doing.

  “We don’t have the extension because it was a cell phone,” Danny finished. Tom stopped short.

  “I see. Can I get the number from you? We have about twenty cell phones, half go to office staff, the other half go to people in our emerging group. If you give me the number I can track the person down and tell them to get in touch with you,” he said.

  “Sure thing,” Danny said and began to write the number down on a Post-It note. I couldn’t believe we were going to walk out when it seemed so obvious he wanted us to go. Tom took the note and began to walk us toward the door again.

  “I’m curious, what do most of your people do for the full moon?” I asked, more to prolong the interview than anything else.

  “If they’re lucky enough to have a home with a secure place to stay, they stay there. Otherwise we offer places where they can be safe.” His tone betrayed a tiny bit of his annoyance.

  “Someplace outside?” I asked.

  “Don’t be stupid. Society would never tolerate werewolves outside under a full moon. We stay locked in our basements like everyone expects us to.” His voice was bitter as he opened the door for us. “Have a good day, detectives.” The loud click of the lock behind us made me think he didn’t really mean it.

  Thankfully, Indigo did mean it when he greeted us as his two favorite detectives. Danny ordered a slice of tiramisu while I waited patiently for the decadence that was hot chocolate chip cookies. After telling Indigo a sob story about how terrible our morning had been, and swearing I would never tell the health inspector, I managed to get a square of raw cookie dough. It was satisfying and sinful all at once.

  “I got the strangest phone call last night, care to guess what it was about?” Indigo said as he put my plate down in front of me. “Milk?” he motioned with a jug of whole milk.

  “Yes, please,” I answered. I worked intently at getting the cookie into the milk, ignoring his question. I wasn’t sure if Jakob had actually looked into buying the shop for me or if he had only followed up on investing in it. I didn’t know how I would face Indigo if Jakob had offered to buy his life’s work from him at a discount.

  “I’ll give you a hint: it was the first phone call I’ve ever had in my life from a vampire.”

  I bit into the milk-softened cookie and closed my eyes to savor its sweetness. I considered it a happy consequence that I didn’t have to face Indigo’s gaze.

  “Mallory’s stiff called you?” Danny saved me from asking.

  Indigo gave a rich laugh. “I’m not sure I’d call him that, but yeah, after the secretary pumped me for information and then put me on hold, I got to talk to the baddest of the bad.”

  “There’s nothing bad about him.” I rushed to the protection of my man, cookie crumbs falling from my chin.

  “That’s not what I meant.” Indigo put up his hands in mock defense. “I was just surprised to be chatting with the most powerful vampire in the city.”

  “The most powerful vampire in the city?” Danny looked at me in disbelief. “You holding out on me, Mors?”

  “Never, I swear I know nothing of vampire politics in the city. Jakob could be some sort of preternatural Godfather and I’d be as ignorant as you are.” I was happy to tell the truth. Jakob and I had talked about vampires and their power structure once or twice. I always came away with the same impression: the politics boiled down to whoever was strongest was on top. Right, now he was the strongest. I tried not to let it bother me.

  “Well, he did make me an offer I can’t refuse,” Indigo said with a smile. “He wants to hear my ideas for expanding the shop. All of those business plans I’ve had written for years are finally going to get seen by someone.”

  “I’m glad. Your chocolate deserves it.” I held my plate up for more.

  “I’m more than glad. I’m ecstatic. I’m dancing on air. Seriously, if I wasn’t worried about your boyfriend turning me into a rug, I’d kiss you.” With the smile on his face, Indigo looked very kissable, his rakish black hair and dancing green eyes were certainly enticing. If didn’t love Jakob so much I would have wanted much more than a kiss. Love won out though, and I limited my deprav
ity to another plate of cookies.

  Chapter Eight

  Normally after finding a crime scene Danny and I would gather a list of witnesses, people involved, and what not, and conduct interviews. We’d finish with that in a day or two, by which time the lab would have some results for us. Using what we’d learned on our own and what the lab told us, we could hand the information and the suspect over to the district attorney’s office.

  In this case, there was no suspect, there were no witnesses, and the lab had at least three days’ worth of work. We had reports to write, leftovers from the last few days along with summaries of the things we’d done this morning. There were also reports to read, the night shifts’ reports giving us the details of the work they had done, the lab reports on the objects found in Madame Marie’s apartment, and a thick file folder of background information on the WPL the precinct librarian had pulled for me.

  Sitting down in my chair that afternoon, I was nothing but grateful for the idea of a quiet few hours of reading. Reports were the perfect way for me to close out Friday afternoon and ease into my weekend.

  My first hour went by happily enough. Half way into the second hour, I noticed Danny glancing at me. I waited another few minutes to be sure and finally asked. “Is there something you want to talk about?”

  “Don’t you feel guilty that there’s someone out there who killed at least two people, and we’re sitting on our butts pushing papers?” Danny asked.

  “No.” I contemplated going back to my reading but guessed that the subject wasn’t closed. I fixed him with a level gaze. “Before I came here, I was a social worker. The first thing you learn in social work is that you can’t save everyone.”

  “All right, you can’t save everyone, fine, but still we could be doing more,” he whined.

  “What would you like to do? Get in a squad car and drive around looking for Marie?” I shook my head. “We can’t bring those people back, and there’s nothing we can do in the next five hours, or even the next three days that’s going to bring them justice any faster than finishing these reports.”