Hunter's Trail (A Scarlett Bernard Novel) (9 page)

I looked at him for a long moment, working on the metaphor. “So the patches are lik
e . . .
their acknowledgment of him? As their alpha?”

He released my hand and twisted his fingers in the air, looking for words. “Acknowledgment, yes, but also their belief in him. In his ability to do the job. It’s all subconscious and almost automatic, but basically every pack member gives up a tiny piece of their magic, their own relationship with their wolf. That power, collected from the pack, builds the alpha’s shield.”

“So it’s like a self-feeding system. They believe he’s the alpha so he can be the alpha so they believe he’s the alpha.” Eli nodded. I frowned. “And when the pack gets unstable?”

“When a pack member stops trusting in the alpha, that magic is returned to him. But it’s also taken away from the alpha, creating a little hole in the shield.”

“And the more pack members who lose faith in the alpha, the more holes in the shield,” I said, understanding.

“I know, it’s weird,” Eli said, shrugging a little. “Wild wolves have this complex pack structure, and werewolves are emotionally and socially even more complicated than wild wolves. That gap, between wolf and werewolf, is filled in by magic.”

Huh. That explained why Will was looking so haggard lately, and why he’d been so busy. He was trying to get the pack’s faith back.

“We did it,” I said slowly. “I did it. I made the pack unstable when I changed you.”

Eli sighed. “How were you supposed to know? Besides,” he added, taking my hand again, “I know it looks bad now, but Will is a good alpha. He’ll get them back when this stuff with Anastasia and Lydia blows over.”

“But how is it going to blow over?” I asked. As long as Eli was around, the pack’s integrity was going to be constantly threatened. “Ana seemed more than just irked. She’s losing it. You almost have t
o . . .
leave town. And tell everyone you left of your own free will.”

Eli considered that for a moment. We both knew that if he left, it would most likely be the end of us. I couldn’t go with him unless Dashiell released me from my job arrangement, which was unlikely. And I couldn’t run away with him, because Dashiell was keeping my brother under his thumb for the very purpose of preventing that. Eli opened his mouth to answer, his face troubled, but at that moment my phone rang.

We both jumped a little. A tinny version of “Werewolves of London” came burbling out of my pocket. I fished out my phone and answered it without checking the screen.

“Hey, Will.”

“Scarlett,” Will said, his voice despairing, “there’s another one.” I met Eli’s blue eyes. He raised his eyebrows in question and I just shook my head.

“Anothe
r . . . 
?”

“Another disaster. At my house.”

Chapter 12

After calling Jesse and giving him the address, I drove straight to Will’s house, beating Jesse by about twenty-five seconds. I backed the van into the driveway again, opened the van door, and pointed with my cane so Jesse would know to stash his sedan in the empty lot across the street from Will’s house.

“There’s really another body?” Jesse asked as he joined me. I nodded. Jesse was silent for a long moment, and when I glanced over, he was visibly distressed. So much for trying to catch the guy before he could kill anyone else.
We walked toward the house, with Jesse going extra slow and me working extra hard to keep up. It worked, sort of. It seemed to take forever for me to get out and make my way toward the door, even after Jesse took my duffel bag for me. Will was waiting outside when we made our way to the wooden walkway next to his house. The alpha werewolf paced back and forth, looking cornered and agitated. He had stuffed a towel in the crack underneath the front door, and I realized it was to keep the smell out. Or rather, to keep the smell
in
. That meant that the smell of the body had gotten to
Will
, whose control had always been so total. I shivered in my thick sherpa hoodie, spooked.

Will hurried to meet us on the walkway, possibly so we could talk, or possibly to get in my radius quicker. “I brought her inside, just like last night,” he said abruptly. “I figured that would cut down on the amount of flooring I have to replace.” Now inside my radius, he took a deep, relieved breath, as though he’d just popped out of the water after a deep dive.

“Was it a werewolf again?” I asked, and Will gave me a tight nod.

“Same one. I could smell him.”

I nodded back, glancing at Jesse. His jaw was clenched tight, and he looked as agitated as Will. “I should have been here,” he muttered. “I should have been watching the house.”

I winced. Will tilted his head quizzically, and I explained, “He thought we should stake out your place, but I told him the guy wouldn’t be able to change for a few more days.”

Will shook his head. “I would have said the same thing. He shouldn’t be able to change this quickly.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Will admitted. “Come inside. We’ll talk there.”

The new body was positioned almost exactly like the one from the night before, and I had the strange impression that it had grown through the floor in the same spot, like when a new snack rises to the front of a vending machine to replace the one you took. She was a small Asian woman in her early thirties, with chin-length black hair and the well-defined back and leg muscles of a serious swimmer. She was wearing only a pair of simple satin panties, and like Leah Rhodes, her face was untouched.

But she was different from Leah Rhodes in that no part of her appeared to b
e . . .
missing. Instead, this woman had died the death of a thousand cuts—maybe literally. Wide, messy scratches in clumps of four covered her arms, legs, and torso. Each clump was deep enough to need stitches, but I doubted that any one of them—or hell, any
three
of them—would have killed her. There were so
many
, though. She looked like she was wearing a red-and-white Jackson Pollock painting underneath her underwear. There was a band of untouched skin on each of her wrists and ankles. Unlike Leah Rhodes, this girl’s fingernails were smooth and buffed to a shine. She hadn’t fought her attacker. I hoped that meant she’d been drugged and unconscious while he did this to her, but it might have just been because she was tied down.

“Same thing?” I asked Will. “She was on your doorstep?” He nodded.

“Were there any witnesses?” Jesse asked immediately. He dropped my bag inside the door, almost exactly where I had put it the night before, and began walking around me so he could see the body.

“I don’t think so,” Will said grimly. “My next-door neighbor has been on vacation in Aspen. I got lucky. Again.” He shook his head. “But for a lot of reasons, this can’t keep happening.”

Jesse didn’t respond. He had crouched down next to the corpse and was staring intently at her face.

“Jesse?” I asked.

“I know her,” he said softly. “I mean, I know her name.” He looked up at me. “When I went through missing persons reports at the station today,” he went on. “Her picture was attached to one of them. I saw that she was Asian and I clicked past it, but her name i
s . . .
Kathryn. Kathryn Wong.”

“You’re sure?” I asked, and Jesse nodded.

He looked back at the dead girl, peering at the girl’s injuries. “See these?” he said, pointing to the wounds on her shoulders. He moved his hand until he was pointing at her shins. “And these? It’s a progression.”

“What do you mean, progression?” Will asked, frowning.

“He started at the top and worked his way down,” Jesse said absently. “See, the scratches up here stopped bleeding a while ago—they’re even starting to scab over. But the ones on her legs are raw.”

“Oh my God,” Will said, staring. “You’re right.” Will’s eyes unfocused suddenly, calculating.

“What does that mean to you?” Jesse asked, looking at Will’s expression. Will didn’t answer.

I tried not to imagine how the girl’s last moments must have gone, but it was impossible. She must have been in agonizing pain, trying to get away, bleeding. He must have attacked her upper body first, waited a little while, and gone after her torso. Then waited a little longer and come after her legs. It was eerily methodical, like he’d been waiting for something to happen in between each attack.

Playing a hunch, I added, “Will? Is he trying to change them?”

Will’s distant eyes flickered back to me. “It’s definitely a possibility,” he said at last. “I can’t tell if she bled out, or if the magic took her.”

Werewolf magic is contagious, but only through body fluids, and just a little bit won’t usually get the job done. So if somebody gets a single bite or scratch, they’ll most often recover and go about their lives. But the more magic-tinged blood or saliva that a person absorbs, the more the magic gets in. And if enough magic gets in, the body will try to make the transformation. Sometimes it works, and the person becomes a werewolf. Sometimes—more and more often in the last couple of decades—it doesn’t work, and the magic overwhelms the human body, killing the victim.

Jesse and Will were both staring down at the body, unmoving, so I broke in. “Guys?” I said, snapping my fingers. “Body now? Talk later?”

The men looked up at me, and under different circumstances their identical startled expressions would have been funny. “You’re right,” Will said heavily. “We’ve got to get rid of it.”

“Her,”
Jesse corrected. “We’ve got to get rid of
her
.” His voice was loaded wit
h . . .
something. Resentment? Anger? I didn’t have time to worry about it. It seemed to me like this was a personal, werewolf-to-werewolf kind of thing, but there was still the chance that the guy who’d done this would call a tip in to the police, planning to frame Will for murder. And Jesse definitely couldn’t be here if that happened. Will and I could probably get clear of something like that with Dashiell’s help, but Jesse’s career would be over.

I stumped over to the duffel bag, which Jesse had dropped inside the door, and pulled out one of my good body bags. Leah Rhodes had seemed like a twisted collection of gore by the time I’d gotten to her, but Kathryn Won
g . . .
She still seemed like a person. One who had suffered, and one who would now be shoved in a furnace and forgotten. She deserved every bit of respect I could give her.

I instructed Jesse and Will to lay the body bag out next to the body, unzip it, and sort of roll her in. Jesse had seen this done dozens of times on LAPD crime scenes, and Will had covered up more than one murder because of his wolves, so they were both pretty stoic about it—until they flipped her over. The woman’s legs and arms looked like her front, but her lower back was smooth and unbloodied. Instead of a hundred gashes, there was just a single knife wound, about five inches long and scabbed over. It was a loop and a quick slash—a number two.

Jesse paused, squatting down to peer closely at the mark. “This one was a knife, I think,” he said tightly. “It looks like it happened before the other marks.”

When he didn’t move, I gave him a little nudge. He looked up at me, startled, and there was anger in his eyes. “We need to move,” I reminded him gently. I was getting antsier by the minute.

Jesse nodded, and he and Will zipped the girl into the body bag. Will’s face was troubled and thoughtful. “You’re going to the Valley, right?” he asked. “I’ll ride with you. I might have a theory.”

Jesse’s eyes widened, but I just shrugged my acquiescence. We had to come back to Will’s anyway, so Jesse could get his car. Jesse carefully picked up the body bag and carried it outside, to the back of the van. He didn’t wait for me, and by the time I made it back to the Whale, he was closing the built-in refrigerator compartment and hopping down from the vehicle. He gave me a look as I approached, and that one expression was loaded with so many emotions that it seemed to weigh him down, his shoulders slumping forward under the load. I didn’t know if he was upset about the girl’s murder, or how she’d died, or the fact that we were going to destroy her remains, or the fact that he was helping. Maybe all of them. Now wasn’t the time to ask, though.

Jesse went for the driver’s door without a word, and I loped silently toward the passenger side, gesturing to Will to climb up in the back. There’s no seat belt back there, but if we got pulled over, a ticket would be the least of our problems.

Jesse started the van, driving carefully down the one-way road that led away from Will’s. I don’t usually like other people driving the Whale, but Jesse was a good driver, and he’d done it enough that the irritation at someone else behind the wheel had worn off for me. Will had climbed in the back of the van and was sitting on the floor in the middle, leaning his back against the rectangular freezer compartment and his feet on the long metal toolbox I have installed on the other side for less mobile cleaning stuff. “Hang on, guys,” he said distractedly, and proceeded to spend the next ten minutes on his phone, making arrangements for the bar that night. While he did that, I quietly filled Jesse in on what Eli had told me about werewolf packs.

Finally Will hung up, and Jesse glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “Explain the theory,” Jesse said shortly. I bit my lip, but didn’t speak. Not how I’d choose to talk to the alpha werewolf of Los Angeles, but I was willing to cut Jesse some slack right now. Hopefully, Will would be too.

“I think it’s a nova wolf,” Will said promptly. He was squinting at me in the dim light. “Have you heard about novas, Scarlett?” he asked.

I shook my head. “The term sounds a little familiar, but no.”

“What the hell is a nova wolf?” Jesse asked impatiently.

Will grimaced. “It comes from the term ‘Casanova wolf,’ which was a wild wolf in Yellowston
e . . .
long story.” He paused, choosing his words. “The important thing to remember is that werewolves aren’t magical creatures. We’re magical
wolves
. The magic makes us stronger, faster, and better able to heal—not to mention infectious—but otherwise we’re just wolves like any other. And in the wild, wolves need to be a part of a pack. You’ve probably heard the term ‘lone wolf,’ but that’s not really a thing. It’s just a wolf leaving one pack to find another.”

“And werewolves need packs too, we get it,” Jesse said impatiently. “What are you saying?”

“You have to understand that the pack dynamic calms our inner wolf,” he said, sounding like he was working at patience. “It’s kind of ironic, but the reassurance of the pack lets us act more human when we’re not with each other. The packs are essential to retaining what’s left of our humanity.”

“So a nova wolf is a wolf that’s just been away from a pack for too long?” I ventured.

“No. Wolves never willingly leave a pack, like I said, unless it’s to find and join another. A nova werewolf is one who’s made and then abandoned.” Will’s voice darkened. “It happens very rarely, especially now that the success rate for changing a new wolf has dropped so low.” Jesse and I didn’t interrupt. Nobody knew why transformative magic, which creates werewolves and vampires, seemed to be dying, but it had been happening for a long time now. “Most alphas, like me, can feel the magic shift if one of our pack members creates a new cub,” Will went on. “We confront them, get them to find the cub and bring it into the pack.”

“Did you feel magic shift?”

“No, bu
t . . . 
,” Will trailed off, and I turned in my seat so I could squint back at him. His face was troubled. “My connection to pack magic is off,” he said finally.

I nodded. If the LA pack was losing faith in Will, one by one, his connection to magic would be fluctuating too. “You think someone in your pack made the nova,” I stated.

“Yes. I believe that someone in my pack took advantage of the pack’s instability in the last month to change in between moons. But he or she attacked a human and abandoned him.” Will shook his head a little. “It’s happening faster than I would have thought—usually a wolf has to be alone for a while before he becomes nova—but everything else makes sense.”

Jesse sighed, like the wolves were trying to frustrate him on purpose. “If the problem is that the new wolf is alone for too long, can’t he or she just join a pack again?” Jesse asked.

I could see Will shaking his head in my peripheral vision. “Nova wolves are almost always male, and no, it doesn’t work like that. That’s where the name comes in. In the wild, every wolf pack has a male and female alpha who breed. They’re usually called the breeding pair, and for whatever reason they’re the only ones in the pack who have offspring. That’s the norm. But a Casanova wolf is this weird anomaly in nature where a random male wolf sneaks from pack to pack, having sex with the other females.”

“Why?” I asked, and then felt myself blush. “I mean, apart from having a bunch of sex.”