Mercy Blade

CHAPTER 15 Good Nose on Ugly Dog

I looked at the sky out the window and judged that it was several hours until dawn on Saturday. I hadn’t slept a full eight hours in days and my eyes felt gritty and dry, my body jumpy and strained, my mind fuzzy and overloaded. I needed a good sleep or a good hunt. I needed to inspect Safia’s body in the morgue with animal senses to see/smell what I’d missed in human form. I needed to scout vamp HQ with better than human senses too, but with the security cameras on twenty-four/ seven that was going to be impossible. And I needed to get away from Evangelina and Bruiser. Far away.

Ignoring my guests, I booted up the laptop, pulled up a city map, and found the location of the morgue. I finished off my tea, closed the laptop, and stood, the chair barking across the floor. “I’m going out. See you in the morning.” I intercepted the look my two houseguests exchanged but decided to pretend it hadn’t happened. In my bedroom, I grabbed a fetish necklace, made sure the gold nugget necklace was in place, repacked Beast’s travel bag, and added a handwritten note with Molly’s phone number on it in case I ended up in the pound.

Beast growled once and put her head on her paws, shutting her eyes, not interested in what I was doing. Maybe a little miffed. She could be part of this excursion if she wanted, but Beast was jealous of any time I spent in an animal form other than her own.

The two visitors were still sitting at the kitchen table, talking softly, when I walked back through, which meant that taking a stack of my own steaks from the fridge and a bag of Snickers wasn’t going to happen, which just brought home to me the fact that my life wasn’t my own anymore. Which really sucked the red off all my candy. I frowned at them, hoping they would take the hint that they were being pains in the butt, but they just sat silent and watched me. I was proud when I didn’t slam the door, and the murmur of their voices picked up when I was outside.

I was grouchy and irritated and acting like an idiot. I knew it would pass, but for now I rode the annoyance, letting it power me as I helmeted up and took off on Bitsa, leaving behind the itchy, uncomfortable feelings left over from taking a shower with Bruiser. I wove over to Langenstein’s on Arabella Street for meat, forgetting it wasn’t open all night, and, even more frustrated, drove around for half an hour, finally stopping at a twenty-four-hour fast-food place and buying a bucket of chicken. Cooked. But they might have called the cops if I’d ordered it raw. I strapped it to my bike, stopped for gasoline, bottled water, and candy bars, and wove around until I found the morgue.

The New Orleans Coroner’s Office and Forensic Center was on Martin Luther King Boulevard, in a busy, well-traveled part of town. The building was three stories of new, post-Katrina construction, well lighted, and patrolled by cops. And for the moment, a van was parked at a loading bay in the back, the doors of the van open, the loading bay brightly lit. Two cops stood near a corner stealing a smoke.

There was no wooded place to shift nearby, which wasn’t helpful; I needed privacy and calm to call on my magics. I located a private home with a recently planted flower and ornamental tree garden and pulled Bitsa off the street into the shadows under a short Japanese maple tree. I knew that she would be okay where I left her—one good thing about having a police presence nearby and a witchy locking system on the bike was that Bitsa wouldn’t get stolen. Standing in the shadows, I listened, scented, and watched for people, security cameras, and anything else that might cause me trouble. Satisfied that I was alone and unobserved, I strapped on the travel bag, opened the bucket of chicken, undressed, and pulled the fetish necklace out. The bones and teeth of a female bloodhound clacked and rattled.

I had acquired the bones from a taxidermist I frequented in the mountains. I had asked him to keep an eye out for any large mammal carcass he might find, and he had called me several times over the years, having acquired dead animals he thought I might like. He had stripped the flesh from the bones and teeth and strung them onto necklaces for me, believing that I was into some strange voudon practice. I had never set him straight. Someday the strange things people believed about me were gonna come back and bite me. Hard. I set the bloodhound necklace around my neck and sat in the midst of ferns, protected from eyes on the street by azaleas and big-leafed hostas. And I ripped off the bandages Evangelina had so carefully applied.

I had never tried the bloodhound form before, but I needed a really good nose right now. I closed my eyes and blew out hard, searching for a calm center, which eluded me for a number of reasons: Beast didn’t like it when I shifted into any creature other than big-cat, my emotions were ragged and on edge because of Bruiser, I was angry because Rick hadn’t called, and seeing the stupid photos. And getting naked in my own walled garden was one thing, but getting naked in a private yard was very different. It took too long, but eventually I was calm enough to feel my skinwalker energies rise.

I held the necklace and relaxed, listening to the night breezes, feeling the pull of the three-day, sharp-pointed moon, still thin, far overhead. I felt the beat of my heart in my throat, in the palms of my hands, and the soles of my feet as I slowed the functions of my body, slowed my heart rate, let my blood pressure drop, my muscles relax, as if I were going to sleep. I lay on the ground beneath the trees in the humid air, leafy ferns a cushion.

Mind slowing, I sank inside, my consciousness falling away, all but the purpose of this hunt. As always, I set that purpose into the lining of my skin, into the depths of my brain, so I wouldn’t lose it when I shifted, when I changed. I dropped deeper. Lower. Into the darkness inside where broken, painful memories danced in a gray world of shadow, blood, and doubt. I heard a drum beating a measured beat, steady and slow, smelled herbs and the scent of fresh smoke. The night wind seemed to cool and freshen. As I dropped deeper, I sought the fetish and the memory of form and structure hidden in the inner snake lying inside the bones and teeth of the necklace, the coiled, curled snake, resting deep in the cells, in the remains of the marrow.

I took up the snake and I dropped within, like water flowing across a sandy streambed, like sleet peppering the ground with a bitter icy shush of sound. Grayness enveloped me, sparkling and cold as the world fell away. And I was in the gray place of the change.

Beast was sulking far out of sight, and my mind was empty and private and alone.

My breathing deepened. Heart rate sped up. And my bones ... slid. Skin rippled. Hair, brown and black and sleek, sprouted. Pain slid like a knife between muscle and bone. My nose and jaw compressed and grew forward. My nostrils drew deep. My shoulders and hips ground and scraped as bone flowed into new shapes.

Minutes passed until I came to myself, panting, tongue hanging out, hot belly on the cool dirt. Hungry, I thought. I stood and shook, ears and loose skin slapping, rippling, and sliding over deeper tissue. I huffed a breath and the smells of the city hit my scent receptors. It was like being blindsided by an odoriferous Mack truck. Ten seconds later the scents and chemical compounds were categorized and compartmentalized by the newly expanded olfactory center in my brain in a way that was unique to this canine species. Ten seconds after that, they had been recognized and identified by my normal human mental abilities, and grouped by similarities. Dogscatsrats, menwomenchildren, overworked toilets and unwashed bodies, oilexhaustgasoline, cigarettemarijuana, beer-liquor, antsroachesfleas. Instantly I began to itch and raised a back paw to scratch the side of my neck. Dang fleas.

Unexpectedly, Beast rose from the depths of my consciousness and peered out through my eyes. Ugly dog, she thought contemptuously. Bad eyes. She was right. Bloodhounds weren’t bred to depend on sight. She sniffed through the elongated nose of the bloodhound and crept a little closer to the forefront of my brain, which was odd for her. Good smells, she thought at me. Good nose on ugly dog, she amended with reluctance.

Not ugly, I though back. Just not feline. Beast huffed back in disdain.

I looked around and, satisfied that I was alone, began rooting in the chicken carton. I pulled out legs and breasts and wings and crunched down. One good thing about being a shape-shifter, if I got bone splinters, they were gone as soon as I shifted back. I ate the entire box of extra crispy chicken and biscuits, leaving the mangled paper bucket scattered in the garden.

Stomach satisfied, I trotted through the shadows and into the street, to the open bay door of the morgue. I swerved out of sight of the two uniformed cops standing at the back of the building; they were smoking and discussing wives with the I-can-tell-you-a-better-story tone that men use for women they have been with a long time. I caught a strong scent of newly dead body and blood, some of it in the van beside me, most of it on the air and inside the building. Underneath that was an older scent of big-cat-human-female. Safia.

I slinked around the van and sat hidden behind a wheel and tire, looking for and spotting static video cameras. I judged the limits of their field of view and knew there was no way to avoid them all, but I was betting that the camera feeds went directly to digital storage and were not monitored by a human who might raise an alarm that a dog had gotten in. Considering I could end up in the dog pound if caught, I was betting a lot. I heard the two cops grind out butts and walk out into the night, stretching their legs. I slipped in and, just like that, I was inside.

To call it a morgue was not quite sufficient, not descriptive enough. There were offices and storage rooms with files. There was a room marked REC. EQUIP., which I guessed held photographic, video, and audio recording gear. There was a chapel that could have been used for any religion or none, where I guessed they stashed grieving families. There was an autoclave room that was unlit, and a laboratory area staffed by two lab techs who worked to music blasting through a CD player. To my now-supersensitive nose, the place reeked of cleaning supplies, chemicals, solvents, and bodies in various stages of decomposition.

At the end of the hallway, I rose up and touched my paw to a steel plate on the wall. The door opened with a whoosh. I’d found the area of the morgue that was similar to what I might see on TV and in movies: an evidence collection room, an autopsy room, and a body storage area that hummed with individual refrigeration units and a larger walk-in, multiple-body fridge at the back. To my new nose, the place reeked.

No one was in sight, and it was easy enough to follow the scent path to the body storage unit where Safia was, in the middle row of drawers. Though I no longer had hands to open the refrigerated unit, my paws were strong. I raised up on my hind legs, hooked the latch with a paw, and pulled. Icy air and the stench of death roiled into the room. The tray began to slide out. Balancing myself on the drawer, I walked on my hind paws, following its movement. When the tray was fully extended, I pressed a red arrow withaVshape below it, and slowly the tray began to drop. It seemed like a nifty device to keep employee back injuries to a minimum in a day and age of fatter, heavier Americans—which meant fatter, heavier corpses.

When the tray was down fully, I was able to drop to all fours and study the girl. Bloodhound eyes aren’t the best, and the poor vision is obscured by folds of skin; ears flop down over the ear canal, affecting hearing; but the nose is so sensitive that it beats any other dog in the canine kingdom. I sniffed and snuffed, pulling the scents in over the olfactory receptors in my nose, the blend rich, textured, layered, and intense. Smelling so many scents at once seemed to affect my pleasure centers, because I didn’t want to stop breathing in the heady mixture. While I drew in the new scents, I began to separate them into their individual components and categories.

Because she hadn’t been autopsied, as I stood over Safia I smelled blood and internal organs, water that had been used to wash the body, hair products, harsh and floral soaps, gunpowder, an unusual fishy smell that might have been her supper, and in her sweat, the pheromones of fear. The cat had been terrified when she died.

I confirmed Safia as the big-cat who had followed the werewolves when they hunted on Beast’s territory. The one who watched them kill without killing any deer herself. I should have parsed her scent when I met her and shook her hand, but with all the vamp- and were-smells in the ballroom, I’d missed it.

Safia had seen the wolves hunt before I’d met them in Booger’s Scoot. It was unlikely she had happened upon the hunt; therefore, she had been . . . invited to watch? I found a plastic bag with Safia’s clothes at the bottom of the tray. With my teeth, I tore a hole in the bag and sniffed with short, hard breaths. On her dress, I scented the wolf-bitch. Safia had known the wolves. Known and not told Kemnebi; I didn’t think his disgust upon first seeing and smelling the wolves had been feigned.

I trailed my nose down her limbs, scenting nail polish remover and polish, the henna of her tattoos, and oddly, a pine and floral scent that was Gee. I snuffed. What had Safia been doing with the Mercy Blade? Curious. I smelled dozens of other scents on her hands, where she had greeted guests at the party the night she died.

Kemnebi’s scent was all over her, everywhere, the scent of his skin cells caught under her nails and his semen strong between her legs. The bloodhound nose was giving me information I really didn’t need or want.

Over everything was the scent of Katie. The whacked-out vamp had come upon the were-cat within an hour after death, according to the coroner, and had savaged her, searching for blood. There were punctures at chest, groin, and elbow, and she had licked the body free of spilled blood, Katie’s vamp saliva strong on the girl where she had ripped open Safia’s abdomen and sucked her descending aorta dry. Thanks to the timetable and the video footage, Katie wouldn’t be accused of murder, but she had drunk dead blood. And Leo had drunk from her.

Beast sent me an image of a young, dead buck, days old, kept safe in a tree for when she got hungry again. And then a vision of steaks bought in a store, wrapped in plastic. Days old. Okay. Got it, I thought at her. I eat old meat. But still . . . Ick. So far, I wasn’t liking the things I learned while in bloodhound form. They were too personal, too intimate. Deep inside, Beast sniffed with a self-satisfied air.

I was about to stop when I found one final scent. Around her mouth, as if she had kissed him just before she died, I smelled Rick. Pretty boy Rick LaFleur. My breath stopped, suspended. Had he been at the party where she died? No. Had he been there, I would have smelled Rick, even in my human form. I was certain. Well . . . almost certain.

I heard voices down the hall and quickly tried to raise the tray. It moved, but far too slowly. Panic thudded into my chest with my heartbeat and I looked around for a place to hide, my dim eyesight a disability and my keen sense of smell no help at all. I could sit under a desk, but even there my feet, tail, and haunches would be visible. Better places were nada. Zilch. So I raced to the door and pressed my side against the wall, hoping the sight of the refrigerator open and the body pulled out to knee level would distract them from me. Two people entered. I couldn’t see much from the glare through the open door, but from the smells that pushed into the room with them, one was female, ovulating, wore way too much stinky perfume, hair spray, gel, and body lotion, and one was a male who smoked. A lot. They stopped just inside the opening, the door braced open.

“Did you leave the were-cat’s unit open?” the woman asked.

“No. I looked my fill when we unloaded her.”

“Maybe she’s starting to stink. Do you smell that?”

“Smells like wet dog. My roommate’s dog has this skin condition and it stinks like that.”

They moved into the room and I scooted out the door as it closed, whipping my tail up and out of the way of the door. I followed my own scent up the hall and back outside, narrowly missing two techs who were standing in front of a vending area, dropping coins and zipping dollar bills into machines that stank of sugar and rancid fats. I had no idea how humans could eat that stuff.

I came to under the shadow of a house, the smell of fried chicken and grease the strongest scent to my nose. The world was brighter, louder, but dull and void, and I sniffed instinctively as if to restore the scent smorgasbord. Nothing happened and shock hit me like a fist. It was like being sighted and waking up blind, and I was head-blind, scent-blind. Bloodhounds had a different view of the world from humans or even big-cats. They could experience and know so much more about the world than we ever could. And then I remembered the smell of Rick on Safia’s body. He had kissed her. Soon before she died.

Though I was starving from the calorie loss of shifting, I didn’t raid the saddlebags yet. I stood, pulled the pack off my neck, and dressed in my jeans, tee, and boots. I felt immensely better fully clothed—a strictly human reaction that Beast had never understood. After putting the remaining gnawed bones into the torn chicken bucket, I ate half a bag of Snickers bars and washed them down with bottled water, adding the wrappers to the garbage.

Stomach no longer cramping from hunger, I pushed Bitsa out into the street and looked up at the sky. With Beast’s time sense, I judged that it was an hour from dawn. If Molly was here, I would have changed back to bloodhound and had her walk me on a leash around vamp HQ to discover what smells I might find, but that wasn’t going to happen.

Frustrated, I kicked Bitsa alive and scooted down Martin Luther King Boulevard, away from the coroner’s morgue. Every time I discovered something new, it seemed to push me further from any possible unifying truth. I had a lot of thinking to do.

Back home, I found the house dark and silent. I killed Bitsa’s engine before I arrived, walked her to her parking space, and pulled off my boots to enter the house. I carried a mug of microwaved tea back to my bedroom, closed the door and riffled through my files again, spending a lot of time arranging and studying the new files I’d photocopied from the woo-woo room. There was one file I had never seen before, signed in by Jodi less than a week ago. In it was a photocopy that wasn’t a police report. It read like scientific speculation on the history, mythos, and possibilities presented by the appearance of shifters. It also contained suggestions on how weres or shifters might be located and studied.

Meaning trapped and dissected. I wasn’t stupid. Sections were brutal in their analyses, as if psychos had gone to med and postgraduate school and then become animal trappers and taxidermists.

A less bloody section followed, compiled by geneticists and virologists, consisting of explanations of the way that viruses affect genetic structure, followed by some calculations I didn’t understand about how physics might allow a shape transformation, and how shape transformation might in turn affect the understanding of physics. Large portions had been whited out and photocopied with the changes intact, not that reading the scientific particulars would have made a lot of sense to me anyway.

I ignored all the technical stuff and turned to the last section where the words CURRENT SUMMARY OF GEO-POLITICAL HISTORY attracted my eyes. There was a copied e-mail—addresses whited out, of course—whose author noted that no were, walker, or shifter of any kind had come out of the closet in Europe, Asia, or parts of the Middle East, or at least not yet. He posited that there were several possible reasons: that they were fearful of exposure due to cultural stigma, that there had never been weres or shifters in those parts of the globe, or that any weres, walkers, or shifters had become extinct in those parts of the globe. According to the writer, shifters had possibly been a big part of the settling, growth, and expansion of Middle Eastern, Asian, and European culture. No surprise there, guesswork disguised as logic.

I read, “This raises tantalizing hints about the brothers Romulus and Remus, who were raised by a wolf-bitch, and who settled Rome. It suggests the possibility that the satyrs and centaurs of ancient Greece, who were half-man, half-animal creatures, might have been shape-shifters. We might consider the tales of Celtic selkies, pre- and post-Columbian American Indian skinwalkers. The Egyptian god Ra had a falcon’s head, Sekhmet the head of a lion—”

It was all guesswork. Educated guesswork, but still just guesswork. I set it down and went online to discover that the writer was correct. To date, no European shape-shifters, no Middle Eastern shifters, and no Asian shifters had come out of the closet. And Kemnebi claimed that his kind had killed the last European werewolf during Charlemagne’s reign. Maybe he had been declaring a truth; if so, the weres knew their own history, which meant that they might know about shifters like me, if only in theory.

I found something in the file that looked like parts of a photocopied journal. It was handwritten with that lovely script that people used to learn and use in school, that had been the mark of a well-educated person. The photocopied pages had been highlighted here and there with names, some of whom I recognized: Leonard Pellissier, Lady Beatrice Stonehaven, Grégoire, master of Clan Arceneau, Ming Mearkanis, who was true dead now. I flipped through and nothing else caught my eye until a name popped out at me. The section read:

Magnolia Sweets, Leo’s primo blood-servant, is gone. Her son, though young, was groomed as secundo, to take over her duties should she be unable to perform them. But yesterday Magnolia left, and with her his Blade. She abandoned her son and her vampire, impossible as it seems. Leo seems unable to maintain his previous stability and slides into devoveo; this morn, in a rage, he banished his secundo. Terrance has lost mother, position, and clan. He is only a child, angry and lost.

I have prepared a letter to the Rochefort clan, and purchased the child a berth. He goes to France, to sign in blood and servitude there. I hope I do not live to regret my decision, but it seems the right and proper decision, and the action of one who was once Christian.

The words “who was once Christian,” bothered me, though I didn’t want to look too closely at why. I flipped through the pages but found no indication of the original writer, and whoever had made the photocopies had not been interested in the bit of history. Nothing else caught my attention.

I stretched out on my mattress, staring up at the ceiling, the laptop open on the floor at the foot of the bed.

The ceiling was dusty. It hadn’t been dusty when I moved in. I wondered if I was supposed to clean it. Not that I would.

Woolgathering wouldn’t help me solve this case, and so far, my search had found nothing that jumped up and squealed, “This guy is the murderer of Safia!” I couldn’t see how it all fit together, not yet, but I was certain that it did.

Back online, I did a quick search on the Cursed of Artemis, the proper name for weres. There was a host of info on the goddess Artemis and not much on the cursed. I marked several sites to go back to if needed and studied the dusty ceiling some more, my eyes on a cobweb draping a corner.

Kem had also claimed that all weres were predators. But I was pretty sure skinwalkers could take on forms other than predator. Beast growled at me. Beast is not prey.

“I know,” I murmured to her. “You’re not a dog either, but I appreciate the willingness to let me shift into one.”

Good nose, she said, without adding ugly dog. From Beast, that was excellent praise.

I rolled over, went offline and placed the report on the floor next to the computer, finishing the summary. There were multiple authors, most of whom disagreed on pretty much every issue. But based on an extensive knowledge of myth and the information gained since the weres were revealed, they agreed on several conclusions: weres were one-creature-only shifters; they were bound by the moon in ways not yet made public; initially, weres had been made, not born, originally created from a human who survived a near-lethal bite by an infected human or animal; there was evidence that some weres could now breed true, suggesting that they had become a human subspecies; and the weres themselves had outlawed turning a human into one of them. Skinwalkers, if they had ever existed, were possibly weres’ forebears; and, last, skinwalkers might be extinct.

A shaft of pain pierced me and I closed my eyes against the knowledge that I may have killed the only one like me on the planet. Later. I can deal with it later, I thought. Yeah. Me and that gal from Gone with the Wind, the one in the green drapes with a plantation to run. I forced my mind back to the problem at hand—weres, skinwalkers, vamps, Gee, Rick, and what they all had to do with killing Safia.

Rick had been undercover and after the were-cats, going after what he would think of as the weakest link, the were-female, that much was clear from his scent on Safia’s mouth. Not that I had any way of proving it. Jodi wouldn’t tell me and I didn’t have passwords for the police computer system.

I tapped the page with a fingertip, remembering the way the werewolves smelled. Sick. And early in the past century, they were breaking their own laws, trying to turn human females, all of whom had died. And the wolf-bitch had seemed crazy as a loon.

The were-cats, however, hadn’t smelled sick. Important differences between weres and me—I was born, not made, and I couldn’t make another skinwalker via a bite, at least I didn’t think I could, which put me into a very different category from a were.

There was more blacked out near the bottom of the report, but the writer closed with one further conjecture, and this one caught and held my attention. “Perhaps the weres, who are all predators, grew in numbers faster than their shape-shifter forebears, or skinwalkers. With both blended into human society, there could have been war between them, with the weres victorious, killing off all other kinds of shifters.”

If that was so, it made the werewolves and the were-cats my enemies. Kemnebi had said he didn’t like the way I smelled. And Leo had made sure he got a good whiff of me. Ergo, Leo knew more than he was telling about the weres. And about me.