Down These Strange Streets

IN RED, WITH PEARLS by Patricia Briggs

New York Times bestseller Patricia Briggs is perhaps best known for the Mercy Thompson series, detailing the paranormal adventures of a coyote-shapeshifting car mechanic embroiled in the world of vampires, werewolves, and gremlins, and the related Alpha and Omega series, but she has also written traditional fantasy series such as the four-volume Sianim sequence (Masques, Wolfsbane, Steal the Dragon, When Demons Walk), the two-volume Hurog series (Dragon Bones, Dragon Blood), and the Raven duology (Raven’s Shadow, Raven’s Strike), as well as the stand-alone novel The Hob’s Bargain. Her most recent book is River Marked, a new Mercy Thompson novel.

In the thriller that follows, we accompany werewolf private investigator Warren Smith, who will be familiar to readers of the Mercy Thompson series, as he races to crack a case involving zombies, witches, and lawyers. Just another day at the office.

I’M REAL GOOD AT WAITING. I RECKON IT’S ALL THE TIME I SPENT HERDING cows when I was a boy. Kyle says it’s the werewolf in me, that predators have to be patient. But Kyle knows squat about herding cows. I’d say he knows squat about predators, too, but he’s a lawyer.

I stretched out my legs and put the heels of my boots on the desk of Angelina the Receptionist and Dictator of All Things Proper at Brooks, Gordon, and Howe, Attorneys at Law. Angelina would have thrown a fit if she’d seen my feet propped up where anyone could just walk in and see me.

“Image, hijo,” she’d said to me when I started working for the firm. I kinda liked it when she called me hijo. Though I was a lot older than any son of hers could possibly be—she didn’t know that.

She’d given me a disapproving look. “It is all about image. Your appearance must be just so to get the clients to spend their money, Warren. They like expensive offices, lawyers in suits, and private detectives in fedoras and ties—it tells them that we are successful, that we have the skills to help them.”

I’d told her I’d wear a fedora when the cows came home wearing muumuus and feather boas. I consented, however, to wearing ties to work and to play nicely during office hours, and she was mostly happy with that.

Office hours had been officially over for a good while, the tie was in my back pocket, and Angelina was gone for the day. I’d have been gone for the day, too, but one of Kyle’s clients had come bursting in all upset and he’d taken her into his office and was talking her down.

Kyle was usually the last one out of the office. This time it was a sobbing client who suddenly decided that the jerk who’d slept with her best friend was actually the love of her life and she didn’t really want to divorce him, just teach him a lesson. Tomorrow it would be a mound of paperwork that would only take him a few minutes to straighten up and a few minutes would stretch into a few hours. He tended toward workaholism.

I didn’t mind. Kyle was worth waiting a bit for. And, like I said, I’m pretty good at waiting anyhow.

A noise out in the hall had me pulling my feet off the desk just before the outer door opened and a young woman in a sleek red dress with a big string of pearls around her throat entered the office in a wave of Chanel No. 5; she was stunning.

“Hey,” she said with a big smile and a dark breathy voice. “Are you Kyle Brooks?” Her ears had pearls in them, too. Her hands were bare, though I could see that she’d recently been wearing a wedding ring. Dating a divorce attorney makes me notice things like that.

“No, ma’am,” I told her. “After hours here. Best you try him tomorrow.”

She leaned over Angelina’s desk and the low-cut dress did what sleek little dresses are built to do in such circumstances. If I ran that way, I might have counted it a treat for the eyes. “I have to find Kyle Brooks.”

She was close enough that the feel of her breath brushed my face. Mostly mint toothpaste. Mostly.

“Well now,” I said, standing up slowly and sauntering around the desk as if I found her all sorts of interesting. Which I all-of-a-sudden surely did. “Just what do you want with Kyle, darlin’?”

Her smile died and she looked worried. “I have to find him. I have to. Can you help me?”

Kyle’s office was down the hall and in the back. I could hear the woman he was with talking at him as she had been for the past half hour.

“Think I can,” I said, and led her the opposite direction, to the big conference room at the other end of the offices. “Stay right here for a couple of minutes,” I told her. “He’ll be right in.”

She’d followed me docilely and stopped where I told her to. I shut the door on her and hightailed it back to Kyle’s office.

I opened the door without knocking and ignored Kyle’s frown. “Would you do me a favor?” I asked tossing him my cell phone. “Call Elizaveta—her number is under w.” Under witch; he’d figure it out, he was a smart man. “Tell her we have an incident, a her kinda incident, we’d like some help with. ’Scuse me, ma’am.” I tipped my nonexistent hat to his indignant client before turning back to Kyle. “Might be the kind of thing we should clear the offices for.”

“Your kind of thing?” Kyle asked obliquely. Something supernatural, he meant.

“That’s right.” I ducked out of his office and ran back to the conference room.

“One minute seventeen,” the beautiful woman was saying when I rejoined her.

She stopped counting when the door opened, her body tense. When she saw me, she frowned. “I need Kyle,” she said.

“I know you do,” I told her. “He’ll be right here.” Hopefully not until after he got his client out safely and called Elizaveta Arkadyevna, my wolf pack’s contractual witch.

I heard the front door of the office close and thought that I should have done something to make Kyle leave, too. But I hadn’t known how long our guest would have stayed put—probably exactly “a couple of minutes” from the sounds of it. Not enough time to get Kyle to do anything except call Elizaveta—which he’d done because I heard Elizaveta’s cranky voice; my cell phone distorted it just enough that with the door between us, I couldn’t tell what she was saying.

I wasn’t the only one who heard it. The zombie turned its head to the door.

My first clue about what the woman was had been that her breath had come out smelling fresh and oxygen-rich instead of dulled like someone’s who was really breathing would have. A vampire’s did the same thing, but she didn’t smell like a vampire, not even under the rich scent of the Chanel. The second was the way she’d obeyed what I’d told her. Zombies are supposed to be really cooperative as long as what you tell them doesn’t contradict what their master tells them to do.

“Yes,” Kyle said from the hallway, closing in on the conference room. “This is Kyle Brooks. We’re at my offices. Fine, thank you.” The door popped open. “What’s—”

The zombie launched itself at him.

I knew it was going to do it as soon as Kyle named himself. I was ready when he opened the door. I’m damned fast and I thought I had a handle on it, but that thing was faster than I’d thought it would be. I grabbed its shoulders and yanked it back, so it missed its target. Instead of nailing Kyle’s throat, it latched onto his collarbone.

“Sh—” he cried out, jerking back.

“Stay still,” I told him sharply, and he froze, his eyes on me and not on the zombie gnawing on him.

I don’t often use that tone of voice on anyone, and I hadn’t been sure it would work on a human. But if he tried to pull himself away, he was just going to do more damage to himself.

I tried not to think about the blood staining his shirt because I didn’t know if the witch needed the zombie still up and moving to tell who sent it after Kyle.

And I was damned sure going to get whoever had sent it after Kyle.

If I couldn’t tear the zombie apart, I had to avoid looking at Kyle’s blood. He helped. He didn’t look like a man in pain; he looked thoroughly ticked.

“Get her off,” he gritted, while trying to do it himself. He may be slightly built, but he’s tough, is Kyle. But it had locked its jaw good and tight, and Kyle couldn’t budge it.

I’d always assumed that taking on a zombie would pretty much be like fighting a human—one that was relentless and didn’t react to pain—but basically a human. When it moved on Kyle, it was moving a lot faster than I’d seen any mundane human move and now it was proving stronger, too.

It didn’t so much try to get away from me as it did to get to Kyle. I’d have thought that would make it easier to subdue. Finally I got an arm wrapped all the way around its shoulders, pulling it tight against me. Then I could put my other hand to work on prying her teeth apart. Its teeth. Its jaw broke in the process—and I got my thumb gnawed on a little.

Kyle staggered back, white to the bone, but he stripped off his shirt and wadded it against the hole she’d dug in him. “What is she?” he asked. “Why isn’t she bleeding more?”

He was looking at it in quick glances. I understood. It wasn’t pretty anymore with its jaw hanging half off.

“Zombie,” I told him a little breathlessly. It was now trying to get away from me, and that did make things a bit more difficult, but at least I wasn’t trying to pry it off Kyle.

“Your business, then?” he said.

Usually I’d agree; not even shark-sharp lawyers like Kyle were so exotic as to call for assassination by zombie—it was too flamboyant, too blatant. The witches and supernatural-priest types who could create zombies had never been hidden the way the werewolves used to be, but they lived among the psychics, Wiccans, and New Agers where the con artists and the selfdeluded provided ample cover for a few real magic practitioners. They didn’t give up that cover lightly. Somebody would have had to have paid a lot for a zombie assassination.

I shook my head. “Don’t know. Seems awfully set on you, either way.” The zombie hadn’t managed to get a limb free for the past few seconds, so I chanced turning my attention to Kyle. His wound worried me.

“You get out Howard’s good malt,” I told him. “He keeps the key behind the third book on the top left shelf. Clean that wound out with it. It’s liable to have all sorts of stuff in its mouth.” I didn’t know much about zombies, but I knew about the Komodo dragon, which doesn’t need poison to kill its prey because the bacteria in its mouth do the job just fine.

Kyle didn’t argue, and took himself out of the conference room. As soon as he was out of sight, the zombie started crying out something. Might have been Kyle’s name, but it was hard to tell what with its jaw so badly mangled.

I held on to it—by now I’d gotten a hold that prevented it from hitting me effectively or wiggling loose. That gave me the leisure to be concerned with other things. Kyle had shut the door gently behind him. I tried not to speculate about Kyle’s reaction, tried to wrap up the panic and bury it where it could do no harm. He’d seen weird things before, even if none of them had drawn blood.

I could have destroyed the zombie and left it in the conference room for later retrieval with no one the wiser; could have hidden all of this from my lover as I used to do. But it had been different with Kyle from the beginning. The lies I’d told to him about who and what I was, lies that necessity dictated and time had made familiar, had tasted foul on my tongue when spoken to him. Now he knew my truths and I wouldn’t hide from him again. If he couldn’t live with who and what I was, so be it.

But none of that was useful, so I forced my attention to the matter at hand. Who would send a zombie to kill Kyle? Was it something directed at me? The zombie was pretty strong evidence that it was someone from my world, my world of the things that live in the dark corners, and not Kyle’s; he was as human as it got.

Still, I couldn’t think of anyone I’d offended so much that I’d made Kyle into a target. Nor, with the possible exception of Elizaveta herself—who was, as Winston Churchill said of her mother Russia, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”—could I think of who could even create a zombie in the Tri-Cities. Eastern Washington State was not a hotbed of hoodoo or voodoo.

Maybe someone had hired it done? Hired an assassin, and the assassin had chosen the manner of death?

Kyle had a lot more enemies than I did. When he chose to use it, his special gift was to make the opposing parties in a courtroom look either like violent criminals, or like complete idiots—and sometimes both. Some of them had quite a bit of money, enough to hire a killer, certainly.

Maybe it wasn’t my fault.

A zombie hit, though, screamed expensive, a lot more expensive than someone like Kyle would normally command. Which meant it was probably my fault.

I heard Elizaveta arrive and stride down the hall to the conference room. The lack of talking led me to believe that Kyle was still cleaning up.

Elizaveta opened the conference room door and entered like the Queen Mary coming to port in a wave of herbs and menthol instead of salt water, but with the same regal dominance, a regality accompanied by enough fabric and colors to do justice to a gypsy in midwinter—and it was hotter than sin outside.

I’d always thought that she must have been beautiful when she was young. Not a conventional beauty, something much more powerful than that. Now her nose looked hawkish and her eyes were too hard, but the power was still there.

“Warren, my little cinnamon bun, what have you found?” She never spoke to me in Russian as she did Adam, who understood it; instead she translated the endearments that peppered her speech—probably because they made me squirm. Why would you compare a grown man to a sweet roll?

I responded to her overblown presentation as I usually did, dipping down into my childhood accent—added to a bit by Hollywood Westerns. “Ah reckon it’s a zombie, ma’am, but I thought you oughta take a good look first.”

She smiled. “What was it doing when you found it?”

“It found me, ma’am. Lookin’ for Kyle.”

“And you relocated its jaw for that, my little Texas bunny?” she asked archly.

“No,” said Kyle from the doorway. His spare shirt hung over his shoulders, folded back to avoid possible contact with the blood from the liberally splattered towel he held to his collarbone. He smelled like whiskey, but not even a zombie attack could make him unpretty or completely destroy his composure. “He broke her jaw when he pulled her off me. You must be Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya. I’m Kyle Brooks.”

She looked down at him—she is damn near as tall as I am. Her face was turned away from me, but Kyle had his lawyer face on, so I doubted her expression was friendly. The zombie’s noises increased and so did its struggles. The witch turned to look at it without addressing Kyle.

“Quit playing and kill it,” she told me coolly. “Breaking its neck should be enough.” She’d never been happy with bringing humans into things she’d rather they be ignorant of. I guess she was trying to teach him and me a lesson.

I didn’t like playing her game, but if she didn’t need the zombie running around, Kyle would be safer with it dead.

I didn’t look at Kyle when I popped the thing’s neck. Its spine broke easily under my hand—which was what she’d wanted Kyle to see. I laid the limp body down on the conference table as carefully as I could, pulling the dress down over the dead woman’s thighs.

Elizaveta turned her attention to the corpse, and I finally noticed that she wasn’t alone. Nadia’s gift was blending in—some of that was magic. I’d been occupied with the zombie, Kyle, and Elizaveta, but I still I should have noticed her.

“Nadia,” I said, “thank you for coming.” Of all Elizaveta’s numerous family, I liked Nadia the best; she was quiet, competent, and smart. She also was, I understood, one of three of the family who were honest apprentices rather than dogsbodies who did Elizaveta’s bidding.

The old woman’s grandson, who was supposed to inherit the family business, had been found to be jump-starting his career in a manner Elizaveta found embarrassing. He’d quietly disappeared. I figure in a few hundred years someone would discover his remains in a jar in Elizaveta’s basement.

I’d shed no tears for him. He’d conspired to murder Bran Cornick, the Marrok who ruled the wolves in this part of the world—the man who made being a werewolf less of a nightmare than it might have been. Elizaveta was still mad at Bran for outing the wolves—I’d always secretly wondered if she’d been a part of that mess, too, if only by being complicit.

Nadia lifted a pair of deep gray eyes to mine and smiled at me, light crow’s feet dispelling the illusion of youth that her fine-pored skin and gray-free, seal-brown hair gave her. But the appearance of youth was no great loss because her smile was big and sweet.

“Warren,” she said. She’d been born in the Tri-Cities and not a hint of Russian accent touched her voice. “You look . . .”

“Dressed up?” I said looking down at my slacks. “I’m working for Kyle’s firm and they are a bit upscale. I got to keep the boots, though. As long as I remember to polish ’em once in a while.”

She flushed a little. “I didn’t mean to be rude, sorry. I didn’t know you were a lawyer.”

“Nah,” I told her. “Kyle’s the lawyer.” I introduced her to him. She took the hand he held out and murmured her greeting. “I’m the gofer,” I told her, answering the question she hadn’t gotten around to yet.

“Private detective,” corrected Kyle.

“Ink’s so new it might smear,” I told Nadia’s raised eyebrows.

“Niece, quit flirting with the men and tell me what you see,” said Elizaveta sharply, without looking up.

Nadia blushed—not because she’d been flirting, but because her great-aunt had embarrassed her—and turned her attention to the body on the table. After a steadying breath, she was all business.

“I know her face,” she said in some surprise. “This woman has been in the papers. She disappeared when out for a jog last Saturday morning. I don’t remember her name—”

“Toni McFetters,” said Kyle. “You’re right. I didn’t recognize her before.”

“Not unexpected under the circumstances.” Nadia was clearly paying more attention to the dead body than she was to any of us; her voice was clinical. “Easiest way to get a corpse to raise is to kill her yourself.”

“Are you saying that she was killed just for this?” Kyle looked cool and composed, but I could smell his agitation.

“Probably,” said Nadia when her great-aunt didn’t say anything. “This kind of magic works best on a fresh corpse. Hopeless to try it with one a mortuary has filled with embalming fluid, and stealing a body from a hospital morgue is tough. Too many people at a hospital.” She glanced over her shoulder, saw Kyle, and clearly, from the consternation on her face, ran the past few minutes of conversation through her head. “I’m so sorry. I’m not used to discussing my work with a layman. I do know this is difficult for you. Whoever did this was willing to kill you—I’d imagine that murder doesn’t bother them much.”

“If it had killed Kyle,” I asked, “would it have died?”

“Deanimated,” said Elizaveta briskly. “It was already dead when it came here. It would be possible to give such a one a directive, and then dissipate the magic after that directive was accomplished.”

“So someone would have come in here and found Kyle dead—killed by this woman who would be dead, too,” I said. “Elizaveta, ma’am—” I tried to work a way around the question I wanted to ask without offending her. “Is there anyone in the Tri-Cities who knows how to animate a dead body like this?”

Elizaveta gave me a smile with teeth, so I guess she was offended. “Yes, my little bunny, I could have done it. But I am obligated to the Alpha of your pack and I am aware of your ties to the lawyer. I would not accept a commission to kill him.” She examined my face and saw that wasn’t enough for me. “No,” she said clearly. “I did not kill this woman, nor did I turn her into a zombie and send her after your lover.”

“My apologies,” I told her. “But I had to ask.”

“The magic keeps them warm,” murmured Nadia into the tense atmosphere. I couldn’t tell if she was blind to the tension between me and Elizaveta, or if she spoke to dispel it. “Almost at normal body temperature. Forensics wouldn’t give an accurate time of death. It would look as though she’d died at the same time he had. A murder-suicide, perhaps. Impossible to tell without further work—but I think she was killed with an overdose of something that overworked her heart. Cocaine, perhaps. Something of that sort.”

I don’t know about Elizaveta, but I was distracted from her by what Nadia said. There wouldn’t be a zombie to horrify the mundane public, just a mystery of why they’d killed each other. The use of the zombie as a murder weapon suddenly made more sense. No one would know about the magic—and no forensics to tie the real killer to the crime.

Nadia continued with her analysis. “In view of the fact that she was abducted while out jogging, her clothing is of some interest—no one jogs in a dress like this. The pearls are fake—good fakes, but nothing any insurance company or jewelry store would have a record of. The lipstick is of a common shade. The dress is more interesting. It isn’t new. Maybe it came from a thrift store—we should be able to check it out.”

“Shouldn’t we call the police?” asked Kyle.

We all looked at him.

“We have a dead body of a missing person on my conference table. Someone is going to notice,” he said.

“She has disappeared,” said Elizaveta, speaking to him for the first time. “There is no gain in making her reappear.”

Kyle’s face hardened. “She has a family. Two kids and a husband. They deserve to know what happened to her.”

“Can you fix her up?” I asked Elizaveta. “Repair the damages I did and then leave her somewhere she’ll be found?”

“It is safer and easier to dispose of the body entirely,” said Elizaveta dismissively.

“Well, yes, ma’am,” I told her, making a subtle motion with my hand to stop Kyle from saying anything more. If Kyle started demanding things, we’d be up a creek without a paddle and maybe with a few more bodies besides. He saw my gesture and let me take point. Of all the humans I’ve ever known, Kyle is one of the best at reading body language.

“Easier and safer,” I agreed with Elizaveta blandly. The witch shot me a suspicious look. “But if you did decide to put the body out where someone could find it—you and I both know that you could do it so’s no one would ever associate it with you, this office, or magic of any kind. Easier if the damage I did to her, which might be tough to explain, can be repaired.”

“There’s no bruising around the site,” said Nadia. “I could mend the flesh together, Aunt Elizaveta, so they could never tell.”

The old witch stared at me, torn between resenting my manipulation and preening under my confidence in her abilities. I meant it and made sure she could hear it in my voice.

“You know that you enjoy the tough ones more,” I coaxed. “Cleaning up another body is boring. This presents more of a challenge.”

“Another body,” said Kyle. But he said it real quiet and I think I was the only one who heard him. One of Elizaveta’s gifts was making bodies disappear—around a werewolf pack, even a well-run pack like ours, there are going to be some bodies that need to disappear.

The corners of Elizaveta’s mouth turned up, her shoulders relaxed, and I knew that I’d won.

“All right, sweet boy. You are right. Never could forensics unravel the mystery I can weave. If I wanted them to learn nothing, nothing is what they would learn. Still . . .” She smiled at me, eyes veiled with satisfaction. “It would be more challenging yet to show them evidence that doesn’t exist. You, my private detective, will help to find who did this. When it is known, I will point the police in the correct direction.”

“Thank you,” I said, dropping my eyes from hers as was proper. As I did so, I noticed that Kyle had dropped the hand that held the towel and I didn’t like what his wound looked like. I know about bite wounds; I’ve seen a lot of them. Bite wounds shouldn’t get black edges a half hour after they’ve been inflicted.

I took a step closer to him and pulled the towel down so I could get a better look, and my nose wrinkled at the scent of rot that had set up far too soon.

“Ma’am?” I said. “Would you look at this, please?”

She glanced at Kyle and pursed her lips. Looking back at me she said, “Not my business. Take him to the emergency room.”

I didn’t growl at her, but only because my control is very, very good. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as the wolf inside decided he didn’t like her answer.

“He is,” I said, staring at her. “He is my mate and that makes him your concern.”

Naming Kyle as my mate was a big step—but one my wolf and I were pleased with. I felt Kyle’s attention spike and heard Nadia’s indrawn breath, but kept my eyes on my target. Kyle’s agreement would be needed, but not now, not for this.

“Mate implies procreation,” Elizaveta said in prissy tones. “The two of you cannot have children. He is not your mate.” She couldn’t care less that I was gay, despite her words. I knew why she was behaving this way. I’d gotten my way with the body, and she wanted to win one of the battles tonight. She’d chosen the wrong one.

“You can discuss that with Adam,” I said softly. The wolf would have torn out her throat happily—though that wouldn’t have gotten Kyle fixed up. “Kyle, do you still have my cell phone?”

“I’d rather go to the emergency room,” he said.

“No,” I told him sharply. “No emergency room.” I couldn’t afford to divide the battle between them. “Elizaveta, do you want me to call Adam?”

Kyle, bless him, stopped arguing.

“I will remember this,” she told me.

“That’s fine.” I worked at keeping my temper. “Remember that I’m only expectin’ you to live up to the letter of the agreement you have with my pack.” I’d won. Time to let her keep her pride if I could. A bit of flattery and a bone. “You know that the emergency doctors could do nothing with this—I can smell the gangrene. This is beyond them. If you don’t take care of it, he’ll die.” I was afraid that was the truth and let her hear it.

“Only for you, cinnamon bun, only for you would I do this,” she said. Then she reached out and pinched my cheek hard—the cheek on my face.

All business, she stepped between Kyle and me and pulled the towel farther out of the way and sniffed.

“Good whiskey,” she said, dropping the thick Russian accent and exchanging it for a hint of Great Britain. “Not as good as Russian vodka, but not the worst thing you could have done. Still, neither could fix this. For this you need me.”

I’D CARRIED THE BODY OUT TO ELIZAVETA’S CAR WRAPPED IN A RUG. I KNOW it’s a cliché, but a rug works pretty well to disguise a body because people expect it to be awkward and heavy. I used the rug from Kyle’s office and told Elizaveta to keep it—which pleased her because it was an expensive rug. Kyle wouldn’t want it back.

Kyle wasn’t in the reception area where I’d left him. I listened and tracked him to his office. He was looking out his window at the traffic below. We were three stories up—pretty high for the Tri-Cities, which were still able to sprawl instead of climb to deal with the pressure of expansion.

I couldn’t tell what he was thinking—but he didn’t turn around when I came into the office, not a good sign.

“Kyle? Do you want me to take you to the emergency room?” The blackness was gone from the wound, but Elizaveta was no healer. I didn’t think it would scar permanently, but it would hurt for a while yet.

“I want to find out who killed that woman,” he said. “Someone killed her to get me—a woman I didn’t even know.”

I heard it in his voice under the anger. No one else would have, but I have very, very good hearing.

I took a chance and stepped in close to him, putting my arms around him and pulling him into me. “Not your fault,” I said. “Not your fault.”

“I know that,” he snapped, but he didn’t pull away. After a moment, he leaned back against me and put his hands on my arms, holding them where they were. “I know that—who better? I see it all the time. ‘But maybe if I were a better cook, he wouldn’t hit me’ or ‘If I could just have bought that car she wanted, she wouldn’t have taken off with my best friend.’ It is not my fault that someone killed her—not your fault either if it turns out to be that way.”

I just held him.

“It feels like it, though,” he said in a much different voice, the voice that no one else ever heard from him. He didn’t let himself be vulnerable in front of anyone else.

“I’ll find him,” I told him, and then I leaned down and blew a teasing huff of air into his ear. “Or else Elizaveta will turn me into a toad.”

WE WENT OUT TO EAT THAT NIGHT. KYLE LIKES TO COOK, BUT HE TAKES too long and it was way past dinner time. He didn’t talk much over the food, pausing occasionally to stare into space, as he did when working on a particularly difficult case instead of dealing with getting munched on by a dead woman.

I’d lost him once, when he’d found out what I was. It says something about Kyle that it wasn’t the werewolf part that bothered him, but the lies I’d told to keep the wolf from him. I hadn’t had a choice about the lies—I think that was the only reason he forgave me.

I’d gotten him back and I wasn’t likely to take him for granted anytime soon. The food tasted like sawdust as I waited for him to realize that he wouldn’t have zombies trying to kill him if I weren’t part of his life.

“Hey,” he said, his gaze suddenly sharpening on my face. “You okay?”

“Fine.” I smiled at him and tucked into supper with a little more effort. I wasn’t going to kill the chance I’d been given by brooding over losing him before it happened.

Of course, there was a note on the door to Kyle’s house when we drove into the driveway.

Kyle ripped it off and opened it. “He’s objecting to your truck,” he told me dryly as he read, giving me the abbreviated version. “He’s sent a duplicate letter to the city. With photos to illustrate his point.”

“Nothin’ wrong with my truck,” I said indignantly, and Kyle grinned. He lost his smile as soon as he looked back down at the note.

Three months ago, the nice family who lived next to Kyle’s house had moved to Phoenix and sold their place to a retired man. We hadn’t thought much about it at the time, not until the first note. Some children (three solemn-faced kids who, with their mother, were staying with us until their mother’s ex-husband quit threatening them) had made too much noise in Kyle’s pool after seven P.M., which was when Mr. Francis went to bed. We should make sure that all children were in their beds and silent so as not to disturb Mr. Francis if we didn’t want the police called.

We’d thought it was a joke, had laughed at the way he’d referred to himself as “Mr. Francis” in his own notes.

The grapes along the solid eight-foot-tall stone fence between the backyards were growing down over Mr. Francis’s side. We should trim them so he didn’t have to look at them. He saw a dog in the yard (me) and hoped that it was licensed, fixed, and vaccinated. A photo of the dog had been sent to the city to ensure that this was so. And so on. When the police and the city had afforded him no satisfaction, he’d taken action on his own. I’d found poisoned meat thrown inconspicuously into the bushes in Kyle’s backyard. Someone dumped a batch of red dye into the swimming pool that had stained the concrete. Fixing that had cost a mint, and we now had security cameras in the backyard. But we didn’t get them in fast enough to save the grapes.

He’d been some kind of high-level CEO forcibly retired when the stress gave him ulcers and other medical problems. He came here, to the Tri-Cities, because he was a boat-racing fan. Other cities had boat races, I’m sure of it. Maybe I could recommend some for him.

“This kind of thing is supposed to happen when you live in an apartment,” Kyle told me, crumpling the latest note in his hand. “Not in a four-thousandsquare-foot house on three-quarters of an acre.”

“We need to have a paintball game in the backyard,” I told Kyle. “I could invite the pack.”

“Escalation is not a solution,” Kyle said, though he’d smiled at the thought. He’d seen some of our paintball games. “Right now the city is on our side. We want to keep it that way.” Since Mr. Francis moved in, the folks in city hall, the police department, the zoning commission, and the building code enforcement office had all grown to know us by name.

“I know,” I groused, unlocking the front door. “As long as we act like adults, there’s nothing he can do to us.”

Kyle followed me into the foyer. His house was the first place I’d ever lived that was big enough to have a foyer.

“I could move,” he said reluctantly.

“Nah,” I rubbed his head affectionately—Kyle loved his house. “You’d miss Dick and Jane.”

Dick and Jane were the life-size naked statues in the foyer. The woman was currently wearing a little Bo Peep bonnet he’d found somewhere and a green silk sari that had belonged to his grandmother. Dick was still sporting the knitted winter hat with the long tail and a poof ball on his pride and joy because Kyle hadn’t found anything he thought was funnier yet.

“We could move back into your apartment.”

That apartment was a point of contention. He said I was keeping it because I didn’t believe that he really understood he was sleeping with a werewolf. He also said I was being stupid because he was mine as long as I never lied to him again, werewolf or not. Kyle was a smart man. He was right about why I kept it—but I wasn’t sure he was right about the rest. So I hadn’t given up the apartment yet.

Proposing a move back to it showed that Mr. Francis was getting to him. If so, the time might have come to quit playing nice.

My cell phone rang. I pulled it out of my pocket and took a look. It wasn’t a number I knew, but that wasn’t unusual anymore—I was starting to get a little work from people unconnected to the law firm.

“Warren here,” I said.

“This is Nadia,” said the witch’s niece. “Listen, Aunt Elizaveta wants me to go talk to the dead woman’s husband tomorrow. I can do that, but I thought it might be useful if you came along. You can tell when someone’s lying, right?”

“I can,” I agreed. “But won’t that arouse the wrong people’s interest if you’re out questioning people?” Wrong people like the police. I’d thought she intended to do a little magical forensics and leave the questioning to me.

“That’s one of the things I’m good at,” Nadia said. “People don’t remember me asking them things if I don’t want them to. If no one reminds him, he’ll eventually even forget I came by.”

I thought about that a moment, not entirely happy about what she said.

“I can’t do it to you,” she said anxiously. “Or anyone who is alert for it. It’s an uncommon talent—that’s why Aunt Elizaveta picked me to be one of her students.”

“I was just thinking that I have a few people to question as well,” I told her. “How ’bout I go out with you and then take you with me? We can have a cooperative investigation.”

“Cooperative investigation,” she said. “Sounds good to me.”

“Let me pick you up,” I told her. “If I leave my truck here another day, it’s liable to be towed or have all the tires slashed.”

Nadia laughed because she thought I was kidding, and we made arrangements to meet the next morning.

NADIA’S HOUSE WAS AN F HOUSE IN A SEA OF ALPHABET HOUSES IN RICHLAND. The government had done Richland a favor with all the World War II–era carbon-copy houses: kept it from looking like all the other well-heeled towns I’ve seen. A stranger to the Tri-Cities would be justified in thinking that it was the poorest of the cities rather than arguably the wealthiest, at least in absolute house values. The F houses were small, two-story, Federal-style houses that looked somewhat regrettably like the houses in a Monopoly game.

I wondered if Nadia chose her house because it disappeared into the woodwork the same way she did. I drove up her narrow, bumpy driveway and she ran out the door.

“Aunt Elizaveta is not happy,” she informed me a little breathlessly as she fastened herself in. “I hope we find something today.” She was lying about the last part, which puzzled me a little.

“What’s wrong with your great-aunt?” I asked, pulling out into traffic.

“She couldn’t find any magic signature on the body or the clothes the zombie was dressed in, except for mine and hers. That means there’s a witch or priest out and about who is skilled enough to hide from my aunt.”

There was just a hint of a smile on her face; I reckon it wouldn’t be easy to be at Elizaveta’s beck and call. Might be fun to see her stymied once in a while. That would explain the earlier lie.

“Where are we meeting Toni McFetters’s husband?” I asked.

“At his house. He’s on compassionate leave.” She gave me the address. “The children are at his in-laws’ house. He told me that when I called him yesterday and told him we’re investigating his wife’s disappearance. Our questioning should just blend in with that of the police if I can manage it right. It helps that he’ll be the only one to work on.”

Toni’s husband’s house was only a couple of blocks from Nadia’s, in a newer neighborhood—no alphabet houses at all. It was a big house, not as upscale as Kyle’s house, but not an inexpensive property either.

I pulled up in front and turned off the truck. “We can keep this short. All we need is to find out if he killed her or knows who did. And if he’s noticed anything suspicious.”

“Why don’t you do the talking?” she said. “I’ll work better if all I have to do is the magic.”

I didn’t like it, this business of messing with someone’s mind, any more than I had liked lying to Kyle before he knew that I was a werewolf. But I’d lost my innocence a long time ago.

The man who let us in smelled of desperation. He matched his wife in good looks—or would have with a few more hours of sleep—but showed none of the signs of vanity that a lot of good-looking men display, men like Kyle for instance. McFetters’s haircut was basic; his clothes were off the rack and fit indifferently.

Before I asked a single question, I knew that he had had nothing to do with his wife’s disappearance.

“Mr. McFetters, thank you for speaking to us,” I told him, refusing his offer to come in and sit down. “This won’t take long.”

“Call me Marc,” he said. “Has anyone found out anything?”

“No,” I said. It was a lie, but in a good cause. “Did anything happen in the past few weeks—before your wife disappeared—that caught your attention? Strangers in the neighborhood, someone your wife noticed when she was out jogging?”

He rubbed his hands over his head as if to jar his memory. “No,” he said, sounding lost. “No. Nothing. I usually jog with her, but I got a late start that morning; we’d . . . Anyway she has an extra hour before she has to be at work. She says she can’t think without her morning run.”

“What was she wearing?” I asked, and listened to a detailed rundown that proved that whoever said that straight men don’t pay attention to clothes was wrong.

“She was wearing a pink jogging suit we’d picked up in Vegas—it was her favorite, even though the right knee had a hole from where she fell a few weeks ago. She had size-eight Nikes—silver with purple trim. She likes her green running shoes better, but they clash with the pink. She wore the topaz studs I got her for our anniversary in her ears, and her wedding ring . . . white gold with a quarter-carat Yogo sapphire I dug up when I was eighteen and on a family vacation.” There was a sort of desperate eagerness in his voice as he went on without prompting to describe their usual running route; as if he believed that somehow, if he could only manage to give enough details, it would help him find his wife.

He ran down, eventually, and, almost at random, his gaze focused on Nadia. He frowned. “I know you from somewhere, don’t I? What was your name again?”

“Nadia,” she said.

“Did you go to Richland High?” He rubbed his hair again and tried to find the proper social protocol.

“Along with half of Richland,” she said in a gentle voice. “It’s not important right now, Marc.”

“Did you have anything to do with your wife’s disappearance?” I asked as gently as I could, pulling him back to important things. He hadn’t. I’d have bet my life on it, but for Elizaveta, I’d get absolute proof.

“No.” He blinked at me, as if the thought were too strange to contemplate. He wasn’t angry or offended, just bewildered. “No. I love Toni. I need to find her but I don’t know where to look.” Bewildered and terrified. “Where should I look?”

I SHUT THE DOOR BEHIND US AND WAITED WHILE NADIA MUTTERED A little under her breath and dropped a few herbs she had in a baggie on the steps.

“Well?” she asked after climbing in beside me.

I drove away from Toni McFetters’s house before I answered her. Churning in my gut was the understanding that if I hadn’t been with Kyle last night when the zombie came, I’d be in much the same state as Marc McFetters.

“We need to find who did this. That man doesn’t deserve the police jumping down his throat.”

“He didn’t kill her,” she said, but it was more of a question than a statement. I couldn’t believe that she’d been in the same room I had and hadn’t recognized the man’s innocence. Witches don’t have a wolf’s nose, I suppose.

“Absolutely not.”

“Good,” she said. “He was right, we did go to high school together. A geeky kid, but a real sweetie.” She shifted nervously in her seat as if she felt uncomfortable. “So that leaves us where?” Her question was a little fast. Maybe she’d liked Marc McFetters more than she was comfortable with me knowing. He seemed like a good man.

“We’re going to have some conversations with a few people who are very unhappy with Kyle.”

THERE WERE FOUR PEOPLE I WANTED TO CHECK OUT. IT MIGHT SURPRISE people who knew him that the list wasn’t longer: Kyle did not make friends of the opposition in the courtroom. He was, however, fair and honest—which meant that most of the opposing lawyers got over their anger pretty fast.

I’d decided somewhere along the way that the zombie animator had been hired to assassinate Kyle. Gut instincts were always important to the detectives in the movies, but they were more so to werewolves. Mostly, gut instincts were just little bits of information floating around that resolved themselves into the most likely scenario.

That meant that we were looking for two different people. The one who did the hiring, and the one who was hired. Motive. My license might be new, but I was old. I’d survived because I understood what moved people, why they acted and why they did not. Old werewolves aren’t that common; most of us who survive the Change die in fights with other werewolves shortly thereafter, because most werewolves don’t understand body language. They also don’t think. They trust their fangs and claws—even though other wolves have fangs and claws, too. I watched and learned.

Motive was easier to find than an assassin for hire. I’d find the man who wanted Kyle dead, and then I’d find the killer. That was why my list wasn’t longer. Today we’d try the people who hated Kyle and could still afford to hire an assassin after Kyle got through with them in court. If I didn’t find a likely suspect, tomorrow I’d leave Nadia at home, call in the pack, and go hunting for someone who’d hate me enough to kill the man I loved.

I’d called Sean Nyelund’s office and made an appointment to see him under the name of my pack Alpha—Adam Hauptman—before I picked up Nadia that morning.

Nyelund worked in a newer office building in Kennewick, making money with other people’s savings. He was good at it. Very good.

What he had not been good at was taking care of his own. He got the possession down fine, but not the concern for their welfare that should have gone along with it. His wife had sneaked out of his house in her underwear and hid in a neighbor’s garage for three hours before they’d found her. It was the first time she’d been out of the house in two years. Now she lived in Tennessee with her family, a good chunk of the money her husband had made in his life, and a new husband who was good with his guns.

Nyelund hated Kyle, and he certainly had the money to hire an assassin. The only question was—had he?

Sean’s receptionist was a pretty young thing not long out of high school. She had a bright smile to match the bright voice I’d talked to on the phone. Her eyes were frightened.

“Just a moment, let me announce you,” she told me. Then she picked up her phone. “Mr. Hauptman to see you, sir.”

A human wouldn’t have heard the quiet “Send him in.”

He had his back to us when we entered his office, typing rapidly on a keyboard. It was a power play that worked against him because I shut the door and used a little pack magic to keep the noise confined to this room. We wolves don’t have much magic other than the shifting itself, but what we do have is good for keeping our business private.

He turned around, “Mr. Haupt—” and then he saw who I was. He stiffened subtly, his hand hidden by the desk—and then he noticed Nadia. His hands were suddenly both clearly visible on the top of his desk. “Ah, I see. Mr. Smith, using pseudonyms now? I wasn’t aware you had enough money to invest. Perhaps the lady?”

Nyelund looked like a slightly overweight soft-bodied, soft-minded kind of guy, the kind who should be out saving puppies on the street corner. He had dimples and good manners. It was his eyes that gave him away, cold and assessing. If he hadn’t been smart, he’d already have been in jail.

“I thought it would save some time,” I said. “Did you order a hit on Kyle Brooks?”

“Would I do such a thing?” he asked, spreading his hands out. Just a good ol’ boy, that was Sean Nyelund. “I don’t know where you came up with that idea.”

I questioned him for twenty minutes or so and couldn’t get a straight answer out of him. It could mean that he’d done it. It could mean that he was thinking about doing it—or that he enjoyed the hell out of frustrating me. Hard to tell.

Finally, he said, “Go away, Mr. Smith. You bore me. Come back if you have money to invest.”

“You take care, now,” I said, tipping an imaginary hat. “I’d hate to see anything happen to you.”

He grunted and turned back to his computer.

Nadia worked her magic under the cover of my opening the door, and then we strolled out past the receptionist.

“He pulled a gun on you,” Nadia said, belting in.

“I saw it,” I told her. “You saved me, darlin’ girl.”

She laughed. “Or reassured him that you weren’t about to attack.”

“Could be,” I acknowledged, but thought that Nyelund would happily have shot me if he could have gotten away with it. Something to keep in mind.

“What did you learn?” she asked. “I couldn’t tell anything about him.”

“The jury is out on Nyelund,” I told her. “He makes such a point of not answering questions, he might as well be fae.”

“Does he know that you’re a werewolf?” she asked. “And that werewolves can smell lies?”

I shook my head, relatively certain of my answer. The public might know about werewolves—but I wasn’t taking out advertising. Kyle knew, but he was pretty much the only human who did. Using Adam’s name might make Nyelund suspicious—Adam had become a celebrity once the word got out that he was the local pack Alpha. If I were Nyelund, though, I’d bet that the celebrity part was why I’d used Adam’s name, not the Alpha-werewolf part. And should he think I was a werewolf anyway, he couldn’t prove anything and it just might make Kyle a mite safer.

If Nyelund was smart and subtle, Phillip Dean, the next man on my list, was a different kettle of fish. He’d done some time after Kyle worked his magic in court—but only because he was stupid and talked his way into jail by threatening the judge. Dean was a nasty brute who’d inherited his father’s money a couple of years ago. The money wasn’t really enough to hire anyone—but he had the contacts, and it was only a matter of time before he killed someone. He’d almost managed to make it his ex-wife and wouldn’t mind at all making Kyle Brooks his first kill.

He also, as it turned out after I made a few phone calls, was vacationing in Florida—Disney World.

“Doesn’t mean it isn’t him,” I told Nadia. “But he’s kinda a long shot anyway. Doesn’t think ahead very well, though he’s cunning enough when cornered.”

“So? Where to now?”

“Ms. Makenzie Covington.”

“A woman?”

I smiled at her. “Most of Kyle’s clients are women, but he takes on cases for men, too. Ms. Covington is a real piece of work; tried to pose as the abused wife so that she could take her ex to the cleaners—she was not happy when Kyle proved that she inflicted her bruises herself. Her ex-husband’s bruises were also her doing. She lost visitation rights—not that she cared about the kids, but it humiliated her in front of her friends. Two years from now, she’ll be off tormenting her third or fourth husband, and wouldn’t make my list. Six weeks after her divorce, though, her ire is still focused pretty hard on Kyle.”

“Why not on her ex?”

I smiled a bit grimly. “By the time she got through with him, all he could say was ‘Yes, dear’ and look at the ground. Kyle was the one who humiliated her and protected her victim.”

Makenzie Covington worked at home—which was currently a condo in South Richland. She was striking rather than beautiful. Dark hair, dark eyes, and strong features, she looked like a passionate woman who lived life to its fullest. Which was sort of true. She didn’t recognize me when she answered her doorbell.

I introduced myself and Nadia.

“I’ve never met a private detective before,” she cooed at me. “Won’t you come in?”

It didn’t take long to figure out that it wasn’t her. If she’d ordered a hit on someone, she wouldn’t have welcomed a pair of private investigators into her home and gotten all hot and bothered about it. Sometimes being a werewolf gives you interesting insights into people.

Still.

“Ma’am, you haven’t ordered a hit on Kyle Brooks, have you?”

“No,” she said immediately and truthfully. “But if you find someone who will, tell him I’ll pay half.” That was the truth, too.

“I’ll do that,” I told her. Then it took me about twenty minutes to extract us from her condo, by the end of which even Nadia caught on to what Ms. Covington wanted from us.

“I am really glad I brought you with me for that,” I told Nadia.

Nadia giggled. She hadn’t even bothered doing any magic. No need for it. “I don’t think I was much help. She’d have taken both of us to bed, wouldn’t she?”

“You, me, and the stray dog outside, yes, ma’am.” I pulled out into traffic. Maybe I was driving a little faster than normal.

“I’ve never seen you disconcerted before,” she said. “Usually you just talk slower and use lots of ain’ts and ma’ams.”

“Now I know how those sixty-year-old wives feel when their husband of forty years comes back from the doctor with a bottle full of blue pills.” I wasn’t as flustered as I made out, but I enjoyed Nadia’s laughter. She didn’t laugh as often as she ought.

HARPER SULLIVAN WAS A RETIRED DOCTOR.

Divorce is a nasty business and secrets tend to come out. The good doctor’s secret was that he liked to diagnose his patients with various lifethreatening diseases they didn’t have. Of course, that meant they had to come in for frequent treatments. Eventually (especially when they were getting ready to get a second opinion), they were miraculously cured, all credit going to the doctor.

Kyle’d used blackmail to get a nice settlement for the doctor’s ex-wife (who wasn’t any great shakes herself if she’d kept quiet about what he was doing for twenty years) and to force the doctor to retire. There wasn’t real proof, Kyle’d explained to me, only hearsay—enough to ruin Sullivan’s reputation and get the AMA on his case, but he’d likely have kept his license. Blackmail was better because it kept more people from being harmed. Kyle can occasionally be as pragmatic as a wolf when it comes to making sure that justice is done.

Dr. Sullivan was weeding his azalea bed when we drove up. He didn’t look up until I cleared my throat. It always bothered me that he looked like that doctor in that old TV show—Marcus Welby, M.D.

“Doctor,” I said, “I’m Warren Smith. I’m a private investigator. This is my partner for the day, Nadia Popov. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Of course,” he said, getting up and pulling off his work gloves. “It is getting hot out, though. Why don’t you come in and have some iced tea?”

I’d met him a couple of times, and it was unlikely that he didn’t know me. But he gave no sign of it that I could discern, even when I introduced myself.

He led us around to the back door of the big brick house—explaining that he didn’t want to track dirt inside. He showed us into his living room—a big space with hardwood floors, real Persian rugs, and antique furniture, some of it even older than I was. But the thing that dominated the room was a wall of windows that looked out over the Columbia River.

We were both staring at the view when he shot me.

It wasn’t silver, and a lead bullet wasn’t going to kill me—but it hurt a lot. I spun and snarled, a hand to my shoulder. He wasn’t a very good shot if he missed my heart at that range.

It was the second time I’d had a gun pulled on me today—I’d expected something of the sort from Nyelund, though I’d hoped that meeting him at his work would preclude actual violence. The doctor I’d picked as someone who’d hire out his dirty work. At least he wasn’t a marksman.

“Oops,” he said and adjusted his aim.

“STOP,” said Nadia.

Now a dominant can enforce his will on a lesser wolf. I’d done something of the sort with Kyle yesterday when I’d made him quit pulling against the zombie’s bite. But this was something else again, ’cause not only did the doctor freeze, but so did I. And it wasn’t the kind of hesitation—the loss of will to disobey that my Alpha could hit me with—my body flat-out refused to move at all.

Screw that.

I drew in a deep breath and called out the wolf—who shook off the magic like water that wanted to cling where it wasn’t supposed to. He also healed up a fair bit of the damage the pistol had done. I took a step mostly to prove I could.

She didn’t even notice me; she was too busy with Sullivan. “You won’t kill anyone,” she told him in that same black-magic voice. “You’ll leave Kyle Brooks alone.” I was really glad I’d broken her hold on me before that one. “You won’t remember this. You’ll just feel as though whatever we were talking about got solved. Everything is all right.”

“All right,” muttered the doctor, and my wolf saw that something was broken inside him, something that had been whole and well when we’d come here. In an elk, it was the sign that the animal was done for; next blizzard, next predator, and it wouldn’t fight to survive.

Nadia turned and seemed a little surprised to see me so close. “Your shoulder?”

“Healing,” I said. “I’m fine.” Sometimes things like that took a long time to heal, and once in a while they just closed right up. This was that once in a while. I looked around, but there had been surprisingly little blood; most of it had been absorbed by my clothes.

The bullet had gone right though me and through the window, leaving behind a spiderweb of cracks. The doctor appeared to have forgotten about us and shuffled off with his gun, muttering to himself, “It’s all right. Everything is fine.”

Nadia grabbed a damp towel from the kitchen and wiped the blood off the hardwood floor, leaving not a trace behind. Then she took the splattered towel and held it against the broken window.

The wolf felt her magic and backed away. Not frightened, just cautious. When she pulled the towel away, it was clean of my blood and the window was intact.

“Waste not, want not,” she said. “I thought I’d have to supply some of my own to finish it up—but your blood is potent.”

I took her arm. “Let’s go before he breaks loose,” I said, though I didn’t think he’d really break loose. The suggestions she’d planted might fade. But she’d broken him, and my instincts said that was permanent.

That’s the problem with witches; they don’t really care about anyone except themselves. Their power comes from pain, blood, and sacrifice—other people’s pain, blood, and sacrifice, when they could manage it. If they flinched away from doing harm, they wouldn’t have any power. Then other witches would take advantage of that and steal what little power they had. White witches were few, and tended to be psychotically paranoid. Elizaveta and her family skirted the edge of true black magic, but they did stand on that edge and look into the abyss with open eyes.

The wolf could respect a predator like that, but neither of us were entirely comfortable with it. What she’d just done to the doctor was wrong: it would have been kinder to kill him.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly as I drove back across the river into her part of Richland.

“What for?” I asked. “Saving my life?”

“You didn’t like it that I stole his will,” she said. “I admit I could have been more careful. But he’d shot you, and I used that, used your pain. It gave me a little more power than I’m used to. He’ll be all right.”

If she wanted to believe that, who was I to tell her differently? Maybe I was wrong, but I didn’t think so.

“So,” she said softly, “are you finished with this? Did you find out what you needed to know with Dr. Sullivan? Is it solved, then?”

I opened my mouth, thought a bit more, and said, “Yes, I suppose I am finished.”

We didn’t talk much more, but when she hopped out of the truck when I stopped in her driveway, she said without looking at me, “Maybe we could see each other again? I make a mean cherry pie.”

I smiled. “Maybe so.”

She relaxed, gave me a rare grin, and kissed her fingertips, and blew the kiss my way before she ran into her house, looking about sixteen.

Everything will be all right. I flexed my fingers on the steering wheel.

KYLE AND I ATE DINNER AT A MEXICAN RESTAURANT KITTY-CORNER FROM Kyle’s offices. The music was loud enough that human ears wouldn’t hear private conversations—one of the reasons I liked to eat at this place.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Kyle said. “Find something?”

I looked at him. He looked tired. “Yes.”

“Are you going to tell me?”

I looked down at my food. “Yes. But not tonight. I have a few more things to check out—a couple of things to do.”

“Illegal?”

I gave him a half grin. “Like I’d tell you ahead of time.”

“You’ll just make me an accessory afterward,” he grumbled.

“I’ve a little justice to serve,” I told him.

He thought about it while he ate a few bites of his fish tostada. “Toni McFetters deserves justice,” he said. “Are you sure you can’t go about it legally?”

“I plan on using proper channels for some of it,” I said. “But there’s some of it that it’s not possible to do that with.”

Kyle believed in the court system—one of the few traces of optimism in his cynical worldview. However—as his blackmail of Sullivan proved—he understood its limitations.

“All right,” he said. “I can live with justice. Will I see you at home tonight?”

“I’ll be in later,” I said. “Maybe very late.”

He looked at me seriously. “Don’t get caught. Don’t get hurt. Don’t think I didn’t notice that you’re wearing a different shirt than you put on this morning and aren’t using your right arm to eat with.”

“I won’t,” I said earnestly. “I’ll try not to. I would never try to get something like that by you.”

He laughed, stood up and leaned across the narrow table, and kissed me, oblivious to the stares we got. The Tri-Cities is a pretty uptight town, and two men kissing in public is not a common sight.

A girl in the next table gave a wolf whistle and said, “Can I kiss the cowboy next?”

Okay, so maybe everyone wasn’t that uptight.

Kyle gave her a cheeky grin. “Sorry. He’s my cowboy, you’ll have to find your own.”

She sighed. “I have one. But he doesn’t look like that when he blushes.”

“Maybe if I kissed him, he would?” Kyle arched an eyebrow.

She laughed. And if some of the people might have made an offended scene about the kiss, she’d taken the edge off. I kissed her cheek in appreciation as I passed her table on the way out. Her cowboy might not blush, but she did.

FROM THE OFFICE, I CALLED BEN. A FELLOW PACK MEMBER, BEN WAS ALSO a computer geek. I can get by on the computer, but Ben makes me look like a complete Luddite. It took him the better part of an hour to run down the information I’d asked him for—it would have taken me a week or more. I put the hour to good use, pulling out the clues my instincts told me were there, running off some photocopies of sensitive files, and calling a few more people. After Ben called me back, I called George and then went out to do a little private detecting.

GEORGE, IN ADDITION TO BEING A WEREWOLF, WAS ALSO A PASCO POLICE officer. He was my link to the “proper channels” I’d promised Kyle.

George met me at a fast-food place a few blocks from Sean Nyelund’s house in West Pasco. He drove his own car and came dressed casually, but he was on the job despite the late hour. We both ordered something to drink and sat down. It was nearly closing time and it wasn’t tough to find a place where no one would overhear us.

“You said you have something on Nyelund.” His tone was eager. In addition to being a police officer, he was into the BDSM scene—which kept a very low profile around here. During Nyelund’s divorce, Nyelund admitted that he was into BDSM, and that tidbit made the news. George and his friends didn’t appreciate that one bit. Nyelund wasn’t a BDSM dom. He was a psychopathic, sadistic bastard who enjoyed breaking people.

“Right,” I told George. “He’s got another victim.” I gave him the name of Nyelund’s receptionist. “These files you don’t have,” I told him, giving him copies I’d made in the office. “Confidential lawyer/client/doctor stuff. They’ll show you what to look for—but I promised the victim they would be for your eyes only.”

I waited while he paged through Nyelund’s first wife’s medical files and transcripts of her therapy sessions. She’d given them to Kyle and then told him he couldn’t use them. I’d called her and told her about Nyelund’s little receptionist. It had taken me most of that hour I’d waited for Ben to talk her into it. She’d told me I could show George, but no one else.

He whistled through his teeth. “Poor kid,” he said. But he wasn’t surprised. He’d known what the case was about, but Nyelund’s ex-wife’s refusal to bring charges against him had tied his hands. It was the details that were new to him.

“He’s got a bunker, a secret room,” he said, sounding like a kid in a candy store. Secret rooms were pretty easily sniffed out if the one looking happened to have a wolf’s sense of smell. “And he likes to film things. Illegal things. How helpful of him.”

“Is it useful?”

“I need a reason for the search warrant.”

I gave him a thumb drive. Nyelund thought his guard dogs would keep people from taking photos through his window. Guard dogs don’t bark at me if I don’t want them to, and Nyelund had been too occupied to notice me. His lights had been on, so I hadn’t even had to use a flash. My camera had helpfully recorded the time and date.

I tapped the drive. “You’ll find the photos on that good for probable cause. You can even give my name as the photographer. I’m a private detective and I was sent out to take photos of this guy’s wife, only I got the address wrong. When I realized what I was taking photos of, I gave you a call.”

A snake doesn’t change his spots. It had been only a matter of time before Nyelund tried his tricks on a new victim. Kyle and I’d been keeping an eye on him, but we’d missed the receptionist. Ben said she’d been working for him for about two months—right after she moved to the Tri-Cities.

“She’s seventeen,” I told him.

George grinned at me, his eyes enraged. “Is she, now? And look at him with that camera. Wrapped up like a great big birthday present. Thanks, Warren.”

“Don’t mention it.” I tipped my imaginary hat to him. If Nyelund hadn’t been so obliging, I’d have resorted to being a credible witness, but this was better.

IT WAS VERY LATE WHEN I MADE IT TO MY NEXT STOP. THE BACK DOOR wasn’t locked and let me into the kitchen. I waited a minute and listened. Only one person in the house, and that person was asleep.

I walked into the living room, toward the stairs that led to the bedrooms. I’d been thinking about this all night, and I still hadn’t made up my mind what I was going to do.

Instinct was one thing; proving what I knew was an entirely different proposition.

I’d planned on a little sleuthing and then interrogation—but then the lights of a car driving past illuminated the top of a curio cabinet where there were a bunch of photos. One of them caught my eye and I went over and picked it up.

I didn’t need the light to see it; one of the benefits of my condition is superb night vision. I stared at the photo of a pair of happy people for a moment, then replaced it.

I went into the bedroom and did what I had to do. Nadia didn’t even wake up when I snapped her neck. It was easier than snapping the neck of the zombie she’d made of the woman she’d killed.

I searched the room and found a few things. From the bedroom, I called Nadia’s great-aunt.

“You call me late, my little sticky bun. Did you find out something I can use?”

“No,” I told Elizaveta. “It was Nadia.”

“You are wrong,” she pronounced. “Nadia does not have the skill to animate the dead.” She’d always underestimated Nadia. Everyone had. Everyone but me.

“Nine thousand dollars was transferred into one of her bank accounts two weeks ago and another last week.” Ten thousand or over, and the feds start to pay attention. “Last year she made a hundred and ten thousand dollars; she listed her profession as artist. From her bank records, she made four or five times that much this year.”

Elizaveta would not consider Nadia’s profession as an assassin an issue.

“She worked exclusively for humans,” I told her. “She keeps copies of her contracts. Her employers all knew she was a witch. It was her edge.” That would be an issue. Mundane folks tend to get all frightened when they figure out they have monsters in their midst, and it results in things like the Inquisition and the witch hunts that wiped out the majority of the witch bloodlines in Europe a few centuries back.

“You are at her house.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Wait there for me. Do not do anything rash.”

I looked at Nadia’s face. “No, ma’am. I don’t do rash.”

I WAITED IN THE DARK, SITTING IN THE LITTLE ROCKER IN NADIA’S ROOM, until Elizaveta came in.

She stared at her great-niece for a moment and then said in a very chilly voice, “I told you not to do anything rash.”

“It was already done,” I informed her.

“It was my business to take care of,” she said.

“Folks think that your grandson is dead,” I told her.

I figured he wasn’t. Like I said, witches draw their power from suffering, from sacrifice, like Nadia using my blood to mend the window at Dr. Sullivan’s. I wasn’t providing Elizaveta anyone else to torture.

Elizaveta stared at me, gray eyes sharp as a harpy’s. Witches don’t have much trouble seeing in the dark either.

“She moved against what was mine,” I told her. “That made stopping her my business. I’m a wolf, ma’am. Not a cat. I don’t play around with my prey.” I had liked Nadia, the Nadia I thought she was anyway. It was better that I killed her quickly.

I reached out and handed her the ring I’d found in Nadia’s jewelry box. “This is Toni McFetters’s wedding ring. When you put out the body for the police to find, it will cause fewer questions if she’s wearing that ring. The clothes she was wearing are in a paper bag in the closet—a pink running suit. Maybe she should die of natural causes. I’m sure you can figure something out.”

She took it and sighed, her voice softening and the Russian accent gone. She sounded old. “You know, it is very difficult to raise a witch so that they do not self-destruct. I myself had six siblings and only two of us survived. My sister had no talent at all. The temptations are so great.”

She looked at Nadia. When she looked back at me, the accent had returned. “She had a crush on you, my little Texas bunny. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been so foolish as to do this where I might find her out.”

“She knew that I’m gay,” I told her, startled.

She laughed. “Forbidden fruit is the sweetest, Warren, my darling. She thought she could change that if you would just look at her. I imagine getting paid to kill your boyfriend was too much temptation for her to resist.” She smiled sweetly at me, waiting for me to understand that this was all my fault.

She cared for Nadia, I thought, but she cared more that I’d robbed her of the opportunity to get more power. Maybe she was also ticked that I’d seen what was going on under her nose before she did.

I hate witches.

“Nadia made her choices,” I said abruptly, standing up. “I need to get home.”

As I walked out of the bedroom, Elizaveta said, “Tell your Alpha that Nadia has decided that she wants to explore the world. She already has tickets to France. No one will much notice when she doesn’t come back.”

Meaning that Elizaveta would live with my killing Nadia and wouldn’t break the deal she had with the pack. When I’d called Adam to warn him what I had to do, he’d told me that was what Elizaveta would do.

I didn’t slow down or reply.

DESPITE WHAT I’D TOLD ELIZAVETA, I HAD ONE MORE STOP TO MAKE. FOR this one I would be the wolf. It took me a while to shed my human form for the wolf, longer than usual. Probably because I’d been shot; physical weakness makes the transformation harder for me.

The second-story window, the bedroom window, was open, and I jumped through it from the ground. I landed with a thud, but my victim, like Nadia, didn’t wake up. I needed this one awake. So I made more noise, letting my claws tick on the hardwood floor.

It wasn’t hard. I was very, very angry.

“Wha—”

He turned on the light, but I was already out in the hall. Just around the corner. I made a little more noise.

He grumbled, “Damned mice.”

He walked into the hallway where I waited for him.

I CRAWLED INTO BED, EXHAUSTED, WEARY TO MY SOUL.

“Warren?” He pulled me close. “Baby, you’re freezing.”

If he asked, I would tell him.

“Can you sleep?”

I nodded.

“Fine, tell me about it in the morning.”

I took the comfort he offered gratefully.

WE WERE AWAKENED BY THE AMBULANCE.

Kyle went out to find out what he could while I showered. He came in while I was drying off.

“Mr. Francis died of a heart attack last night.” He had an odd expression on his face. Hard not to feel some relief, I guessed—and harder not to feel guilty over it. “I guess we won’t be getting any more notes.” He frowned at me, then donned his lawyer face. “Warren?”

Among the health issues our neighbor had retired with was a weak heart. Much easier to explain a heart attack than death by wild animals. This was the twenty-first century after all, not the nineteenth.

“I’d have gotten more satisfaction if I could have sunk my teeth into him,” I told Kyle, rubbing the towel over my hair with a little more force than necessary. “Apparently he decided that you’d never be a neighbor he could cow properly. He hired Nadia, Elizaveta’s niece, to kill you.”

“Mr. Francis?” Kyle said incredulously. I pulled the towel off my head to see him standing slack-jawed. “Mr. Francis hired a witch to make a zombie to kill me?” After a moment, he shook off his shock. “I thought for sure it would be Nyelund.”

“Covington said she’d pay for half if we told her who hired someone to kill you,” I told him. “It was Sullivan who shot me”—Kyle looked at the red mark on my shoulder that was all that was left of the wound—“but he won’t be a threat to anyone anymore.”

Nadia broke Sullivan—but she’d aimed that magic at me, too. I wasn’t supposed to think about Kyle anymore, I was supposed to leave off the investigation with the feeling that everything would be all right. And I wasn’t supposed to remember the magic she’d worked to ensure that result. She’d spent so long teaching everyone to underestimate her, she’d overestimated herself.

Kyle frowned at me. “Tell me.”

So I told him about Sean Nyelund while I got dressed. I paced restlessly and told him about Nadia while he sat on the bench at the foot of the bed and watched me.

“Justice was served, Warren,” he said when I finished. “I’m sorry it had to be you who served it.”

“I’m not,” I told him. I’d only done what I needed to protect my own. I’d do it again.

He smiled a little as if he knew something I didn’t. “If you say so.”

“She was right,” I said.

“Who was?”

“Nadia. She said the red dress might be useful in finding out who’d killed Toni McFetters.”

He reached up and caught my hand, pulling me down to sit beside him.

“You liked her,” he told me.

“She had a prom photo in her house.” On top of the curio cabinet. “Toni’s husband had taken Nadia to her high school prom. That red dress Toni was wearing? It was Nadia’s prom dress; so were the pearls and shoes, near as I could tell. He’d taken her to the prom and hardly remembered her.” She’d remembered him, though. I’d expected to have to search her house for Toni’s missing belongings or, if that hadn’t worked, wake Nadia up and question her. She’d made things easy for me.

“Elizaveta only objected that she’d exposed herself as a witch to the humans,” Kyle said. “If you hadn’t told her that, she would have left Nadia alone. You didn’t have to kill her.” He put his arm around me. “Tell me that’s not what you’re thinking now. Tell me that’s not what is bothering you.”

It wasn’t. Not quite. I was thinking that she had attacked Kyle and part of me would have been happier if I’d eaten her. It had taken more will than I’d thought I had not to eat the old man next door, who was even more to blame than Nadia.

I stared at Kyle. I know that the wolf must have been showing through, but he didn’t flinch, didn’t drop his eyes.

“She was escalating,” he said. “She killed for money and learned to like it. She killed Toni because Toni and her husband jogged past her house every day and they were happy. She tried to kill me because we are happy.”

He thought I was a hero. He needed to know better.

“I killed two people last night,” I told him. “Premeditated murder.” I swallowed, but told him the other part of it, too. “I enjoyed it.”

He kissed me. When he was finished, he told me, “You’re a werewolf—a predator. A skilled killer, but not an indiscriminate one. So am I. If my prey is still writhing when I’m finished, it doesn’t make me any less a predator.”

I looked at him and he gave me a crooked grin. “Ready to get rid of that apartment yet?”

I laughed and leaned into him.

“Maybe,” I said. “Just maybe.”