Hunter's Trail (A Scarlett Bernard Novel) (4 page)

Molly grunted as she hefted the bag onto her back, showing no sign of its weight.
Go Molly
, I thought. Trying not to lean on the cane too hard, I stumped past the still wolves, careful to keep Molly in my radius.

As she passed Miguel, Molly couldn’t resist a last comment. “Nice doggie. Stay.” I held my breath, but although the big werewolf’s face clouded over with fury, he made no move to touch her.

“Goddammit, Molly,” I muttered. I went straight to the van’s back doors and opened them for her. Ordinarily, I’d put a body in my van’s built-in freezer compartment, but we were passing it off as furniture, so I just pointed to the carpeted back floor and she hefted it in. As she pushed the doors shut I was already rounding the van to the driver’s seat, forgetting for a moment that Molly had driven us here. I wanted to get the hell out of there, but she paused at the back doors, leisurely peeling off her surgical gloves and pulling the keys out of her pocket. “Come on, Molls,” I whispered.

She slammed the back doors shut finally, but before she could take a single step toward the passenger door the stocky werewolf came tearing out of Will’s house. Crap. I had forgotten all about him. “Hey!” he yelled from the doorway. “I know every stick of furniture in this house, and none of it’s missing!”

Chapter 6

All four werewolves turned their heads as one to stare at me. Then a slow, devious smile spread across Molly’s face, and she gave me a nod. “See you at home,” she mouthed. She tossed me the keys, and as they sailed toward me the bubble of tension popped and the werewolves sprang toward the van.

I was already throwing my cane in and hopping up onto the seat. I started the van and instinctively pounded my hurt leg onto the gas pedal, ignoring the responding blaze of pain in my knee. The van shot onto the street (this, folks, is why we always back into the driveway) and I felt Molly leave my radius.

I steered the van back down the little dead-end road, while trying to keep one eye on the rearview mirror. Behind me, the wolves were now right at the end of the driveway, practically in the street. All four of them were silhouetted against Will’s house lights, advancing in a semicircle toward Molly, who stood a few feet into the road. Would she be okay? Then again, what could I really do if she wasn’t? I needed to call Will.

For a fumbling moment I tried pulling my cell phone out of my pocket with one hand, steering with the other while simultaneously watching the rearview mirror and ignoring the excruciating pain in my knee. It went about like you’d expect—if what you expected is a resounding fail. The van began to list to the side, and I dropped the phone when I had to put my right hand on the wheel to correct my course. Swearing, I mashed the brake with my good left leg, causing the cell to skitter deep into the passenger seat foot well. Awesome.

Abandoning the phone, I stared at the rearview mirror, worried. Molly had always talked like she could take the werewolves easily when they were in human form, but I’d never actually seen
any
vampire go up against werewolves, thanks to the treaty. For a long beat she stood with her arms open in a relaxed, welcoming position—then she abruptly vanished from sight, leaving the angry werewolves standing in the driveway, grouped around nothing. I breathed a sigh of relief. I hadn’t been expecting Molly to run away, but she’d be fine. Even in their human form, werewolves are a lot faster than most people, but they’d have to shape-shift to have a chance of catching a vampire. I put my foot back on the gas, gingerly, and began creeping forward again. I needed to go slow until I could get far enough away to put the van in park and rearrange my hurt leg. Not to mention retrieve my phone.

When I checked the mirror again, though, I could see the short figure of Anastasia gesturing wildly at the van, at me. Then she was ripping off her shirt, her pants quickly following, and the others were disrobing too, though not quite so quickly. After a second I realized that she was trying to talk the others into chasing me down in the van. Not good. I didn’t have Molly with me anymore, which meant that technically they wouldn’t be violating the peace treaty if they hurt me. I pressed down harder on the gas, ignoring the pain. They were going to hunt my van like it was a frickin’ buffalo. Werewolves are basically indestructible, and they can run forever. They could just follow me to the nearest red light and—

But as I checked the mirror again, a shadow flew across the street so fast I only had a sense of it, rather than actually seeing it. The werewolf farthest from the house, a man in the process of pulling his shirt over his head, suddenly disappeared in a flying tackle. I grinned stupidly. That had been Miguel, and
that
had been Molly.

I relaxed in my seat. Technically Molly had just violated the treaty by drawing first blood, but I knew she wouldn’t kill them. She could still get in trouble, but only if someone told Dashiell or Will, and I didn’t see any of these wolves wanting to advertise what had just happened.

I decided not to call Will until I had a chance to talk to her.

A few minutes later, my adrenaline faded, and the pain in my knee crashed into my brain fast enough to make me dizzy. Goddamned vertigo. I pulled over. “Scarlett,” I said into the rearview mirror, “I really don’t think you should be driving.”

Even after rearranging my leg, it took me almost an hour to finish the job and get back to Molly’s. I was too battered to limp up the stairs, so I just stripped and washed off the worst of the night in the downstairs bathroom. Molly had run a load of laundry for me and left the basket of clean clothes sitting on the kitchen table like a gift from the flying spaghetti monster itself. I dressed in baggy running pants and a T-shirt, then sacked out on the couch with a sheet and my downstairs stash of painkillers. I swallowed two pills, enough to knock me out before I had to think too long about the dead body I’d been handling just an hour earlier.

Mostly.

I woke up to an insistent rapping on the front door. “Nooo
o . . . 
,” I mumbled, but it didn’t help stop the knocking, so I forced my eyelids open. There were stripes of weak morning sunlight on the floor, filtering through the venetian blinds. I squinted to see the clock that Molly has hanging above the television. It was eight o’clock.

“Scarlett and Molly aren’t home right now,” I yelled at the door. There wasn’t even a pause in the knocking, so I finally dragged myself out of the couch nest and grabbed my cane.

My personal physician barely waited for me to pull it open before she walked in. “About time,” she snapped.

“Please, come in,” I muttered, closing the door behind her.

Dr. Stephanie Noring was an East Indian woman who usually worked at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. She had one of those short, plump figures that looks sultry on a few lucky women. I wasn’t sure how old she was, maybe a well-preserved fifty-five, but she had a lyrical British accent that I might have enjoyed listening to if she weren’t perpetually annoyed with me. Today she wore a rose-pink blouse and khaki pants, and her hair, a gorgeous black with elegant streaks of gray, was pulled into a loose bun at her collar. Gold bangles clinked pleasantly on her wrist as she stormed past me into the house.

“Did you bring doughnuts?” I grumbled, closing the door behind her. “Anyone who shows up anywhere before nine should bring doughnuts.”

“No, but I brought antipsychotics,” she said tartly, her British accent making her sound more crisp than sarcastic. Must be hard, having your accent ruin your demonstrations of attitude. “I heard you were in a werewolf fight and dragged around an eighty-pound bag of trash. I could only assume that you’d lost your
bloody
mind.” She followed me back to the couch, where I held up my hand to cover another yawn.

“First of all, you said ‘bloody,’” I pointed out cheerfully. “I’ve never heard anyone actually say ‘bloody’ in real life. That’s adorable. And secondly, the bag wasn’t more than seventy pounds, tops. How did you even find out?”

“Carling called me,” she said with distaste. The good doctor and Will had some kind of weird hostile relationship I didn’t understand, but she’d taken a couple of weeks off to come help me when he’d asked. He probably knew doctors who lived a little closer, but Noring was an oncologist, and she was familiar with the medication that Olivia had forced on me. Noring was also familiar with the Old World—she was a witch.

In lieu of a doctor’s bag, she carried the biggest purse I’ve ever seen in my life, a black faux-crocodile hobo that was massive enough to make Mary Poppins salivate. She pulled out a blood pressure cuff and strapped it around my upper arm, squeezing the little hand pump thingy without mercy.

“How’s the vertigo?” she asked accusingly, over the hiss off the cuff.

I winced. “Mostly gone.”

“And the edges of your aura?” She meant my radius, the sphere of nothingness that surrounded me. I hated the word “aura,” which was Olivia’s favorite term for what we could do. I didn’t correct Noring, though, because she was a teensy bit scary.

“Still fuzzy,” I admitted. When I’d changed Eli, it had been because I’d developed a sudden understanding of my own abilities—I had figured out how to sense the borders of my own power, and how to channel the magic I cancelled out into myself, taking the magic from Eli. But afterward, I hadn’t been able to sense the borders of my power like that again. The problem was that I had no idea if losing that ability was due to the concussion, or the coma, or the Domincydactl, or the seizure. And Noring knew even less than I did about nulls.

She nodded as if I’d confirmed her worst fears and resumed checking my vital signs, which were fine. Then she began running me through tests to see if I’d exacerbated the concussion. I nailed the vision, hearing, and memory portion, but failed the balance and coordination section. “That’s worse than it was two days ago,” Noring said disapprovingly. “Let’s see the leg.”

I pulled up my pants leg so she could check on my knee. It was so swollen than she had a hard time sliding the brace off, and I held my breath to keep from gasping at the pain. Noring ignored me, either because she has a shitty bedside manner or to punish me for running around on my bad leg.

I’m sorry; that was ungracious. It could also have been both.

When the brace finally surrendered, I had the knee equivalent of cankles. I sucked in air through my teeth as Noring frowned down at it, testing the joint very gently with her fingers. I held my breath so I wouldn’t cry out.

“This isn’t healing like we hoped,” she told me. For the first time since she’d arrived, her tone was mild, and possibly even sympathetic. Let’s call it sympathetic-adjacent. “There are physical therapies you can try, but nothing’s very effective until the swelling goes down. Meanwhile, I’ve got some med school friends in the city, so I’ll make some calls and get you an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon.”

I winced. “U
h . . .
I can’t really afford that.” I make okay money working for the Old World in LA, but I’d had to blow most of my savings to send Jack on a last-minute trip to Europe over Christmas.

“Your insurance should cover most of it,” Noring said. When I didn’t respond, her lips compressed back into a line. “Let me guess. You don’t have insurance.”

I shook my head guiltily, and she gave me her biggest, most long-suffering sigh yet. “Of course you don’t. What happened the last time you were in hospital?”

“That time I was injured in the line of duty, or whatever, so Dashiell paid my medical bills. This wasn’t work-related, though.”

Noring gave me a disappointed look and said, “Well, you can try giving it another few days to see if the swelling goes down, but I’m not optimistic. Something is wrong in there, more than a simple torn meniscus, and you need x-rays and an MRI. And you really should be using crutches instead of just the cane now.”

“But then I couldn’t get around,” I protested.

She arched her eyebrows in a way that effectively communicated my idiocy. “Yes, that’s kind of the idea.”

My right hand was resting on my leg above the knee, and Noring suddenly looked down and took hold of my hand, turning it so she could see my forearm. “That’s a burn,” she said, puzzled.

I pulled my hand back. “My God, did you go to medical school?” I said sarcastically. It’s possible that I’m not a morning person.

Noring wasn’t deterred. “How did you get a burn?”

“Making soup. For breakfast,” I lied. “Er, I mean a late snack.”

After leaving Will’s house the night before, I’d still had to get rid of the body, and Molly was busy making sure the werewolves didn’t follow me. I’d driven straight to an art studio in the Valley where I have an arrangement with Artie Erickson, the studio’s slightly shady proprietor. In exchange for a small fee, he grants me no-questions-asked access to the industrial furnace that came with the building when he bought it. I had my own gate key so I could back the van right up to the door closest to the furnace room. Despite that, it had still taken me nearly twenty minutes to get the body from the van to the furnace. I would take a step with the cane, lift the knot of the garbage bag, and sort of swing the bag two feet forward. Then I’d take another step and repeat. My knee throbbed so much that as soon as I reached the interior doors I started resting against the wall every three steps.

Getting the body to the furnace had been slow and made my knee hurt. Getting the body
into
the furnace was a completely different problem. Usually I toss and run, but I couldn’t move quickly now, and even a few seconds exposed to the heat would be dangerous. After some poking around, I had finally discovered a pair of big oven mitts on a hook behind the furnace room door. I put them on, along with a cracked, grimy welder’s helmet that I found in a pile of old junk. Then I opened the furnace door, planted my feet, and heaved the body through the opening, like a
boss
. My exposed ears had felt hot for a moment, and I’d gotten a mild burn on my arm where the mitten had gaped, but all in all I considered it a success.

Apparently Dr. Noring didn’t agree, though. She frowned at me, but I just shrugged, sticking to my soup story. Noring shook her head and I suddenly felt witch power brush against me, the spell shorting out in my radius like a horsefly on a bug zapper.

I looked at her indignantly. “Uh, can I help you?”

“Sorry,” she said, slightly sheepish. “I wasn’t trying. Force of habit.”

I’d assumed Noring was Old World the moment I’d met her, and I’d felt her power as soon as I concentrated. But we hadn’t discussed it until now. “You usually cast spells on your patients?”

“I don’t call it that,” she said stiffly, “but yes, sort of.”

“What kind of witch are you?” The majority of human magic users are trades witches—they can do a little bit of everything, from mild charms to enhance their appearance to (given the time and resources) complex rituals that can protect a building. A few witches have unique skills, though, not unlike how doctors have different specializations. I was guessing that Noring was one of these.

After a moment of hesitation, she sat down on the couch next to me. For the first time since we’d met, her face smoothed into an expression that wasn’t a frown or a glare, and she said quietly, “I can sense what’s happening in a body and push it toward health.”

“Like a healer?” I said, interested. I’ve heard of witches who can heal, but never met one in person.