Dying Bites: The Bloodhound Files-1 (32 page)

“I’ve never killed anyone before,” I say. I can barely hear myself.

“I’m sorry,” he says. And the most amazing thing is, he sounds sorry; they aren’t just the meaningless words you repeat to comfort someone when you don’t know what else to say. He sounds even sadder than I do.

“You wrecked your bike.” I don’t want to talk about my own pain, so I try to bring up his. Zerkers carry everything they own on their bikes; they treat them like their own children, they—

“It’s only a bike,” he says. “Was, I mean.”

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I pull back and stare into his eyes for a second. A little part of my brain is whispering that maybe this isn’t such a good idea.

Or maybe it is, counters a different part of my brain. Maybe exactly what you need right now is a good old-fashioned mattress dance, with no strings attached.

Getting involved with a thrope biker isn’t—

Isn’t what? Responsible? The last thing you need right now is more responsibility. This is about pure release, not hearts-and-flowers. He’s here, he’s hot, and he definitely won’t call you in the morning.

Unlike Tanaka?

That stops me. It’s a little soon to be contemplating another bad decision. And besides, Bearbreaker’s connected to the suspect—and not as a member of law enforcement.

That doesn’t mean he’s guilty of anything. But he was at the crime scene—

“Oh, the hell with it,” I say, and there’s a knock at the door.

“Jace?” It’s Charlie. I’m suddenly on my feet, feeling as guilty as any teenager busted by her parents.

“Yeah, come on in.”

“The door’s locked.”

When did I do that? “Just a second.”

Charlie strides into the room, glances at the bed. “Still out cold, huh?”

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I look over, see that Bearbreaker is lying motionless with his eyes closed. I utter a silent thank-you and say, “Yeah, hasn’t moved a muscle.”

“Thought I’d let you know I just talked to Duvalier on the phone. He says he’s got the situation under control and we probably won’t see reprisals.”

I frown. “Why not? I mean, we wrecked three of their bikes and killed two of them.”

“Yeah, there’s going to be paperwork on that. I don’t do paperwork.”

“I’ll do the damn paperwork. Why no reprisals?”

“Zerkers aren’t organized like a regular pack. Each one takes responsibility for their own actions. Even when they ride together, it’s just for convenience—the only loyalty they have is to their own individual survival.”

“So the ones we busted up have had enough, and the others don’t give a crap?”

“More or less.”

I’m not sure how far I trust that assessment, but right now it’s a gift horse I have no urge to perform exploratory dentistry on. “That’s good. Uh, I still think it’s a good idea to keep watch, though—you mind playing lookout a while longer?”

He studies me for a second more than I’m comfortable with. “Sure. Give me a call when I can come down, all right?”

“What? No, I mean, just give it a few more minutes, that’s all—”

He’s already gone, closing the door softly behind him. I sigh.

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“Smooth,” Bearbreaker says.

“You should go.”

“Sure. Mind giving me a lift? My wheels are in the shop.”

“Oh, crap.”

“And by ‘shop’ I mean ‘graveyard.’ “

“I’m sorry about that. Looks like you’ll just have to do the four-legged thing—I think the sun’s almost down, anyway.”

I stride over to the heavy drapes and pull them open. The moon has been up for hours, but it looks like the sun only set a few minutes ago.

It takes a second for it to sink in.

Bearbreaker is up off the bed and halfway to the door by the time I get my gun out.

“Hold it!”

He stops, looks back. It’s the first time I’ve pulled my gun in weeks that anyone’s even hesitated, though he doesn’t seem exactly frozen in fear.

“Why haven’t you transformed?” I demand.

“Why haven’t you?”

Neither of us answers—neither has to. Same question, same answer.

“You’re not the only one with access to artificial wolf pheromones,” Bearbreaker says.
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“You’re no pire.”

“I’m as human as you are, Jace.”

“Who are you?”

“You already know.” He grins. “Call me Aristotle, please.”

My God. I’ve got him. My ticket home, right here in front of me. “Get down on the floor.”

“No. I wanted to meet you, Jace. Talk to you, get to know you. Now that I have, I’m going to leave. I have things to do . . . and you have things to think over.”

“The only thing I have to think over is where I’m going to shoot you.”

“You’ll have to kill me, Jace. I won’t let them take me alive. And somehow, I don’t think you’ll do that.”

I stare at him, my gun aimed squarely at his chest. He stares back.

Oh, crap.

ELEVEN

Afterward, I feel kind of sick.

It’s understandable, I guess. I mean, I almost made out with the guy. I didn’t know who he was at the time, but—

None of that matters now.

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I go to the bathroom, clean up a little. Wash my hands and face. Stare at myself in the mirror and think about the fact that I’m not the same person I was when I got up this morning. I talk pretty tough, but a wolf that snarls doesn’t have to bite.

Can’t remember who told me that—probably a thrope. Anyway, it means that as long as I had a gun to wave around, I didn’t have to actually shoot anyone. That worked pretty well until I came to a world where they weren’t afraid of guns . . . until someone called my bluff and forced me to lay down my cards.

I did. Turned out I was holding a dead man’s hand.

“A dead thrope’s hand” would be the more accurate turn of phrase, but I don’t think the zerker I killed would care much about that. He’s beyond caring about anything but what they carve on his tombstone.

Not Stoker, though.

I couldn’t shoot him. I don’t know why, exactly—partly because I was still in shock over my first shooting I guess, partly because I realized that if he were dead, I might have one hell of a time proving to Cassius he was Aristotle Stoker. Bye-bye, ticket home.

But it was Stoker. I knew it in my gut. And even though I don’t want to admit it, the last part of the reason I couldn’t shoot him was simply my refusal to reduce the human population of this place by one more soul.

So I let him go, and now I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do. What am I going to do next time, wave as he rides off into the sunset? Shoot him in the leg and hope he survives after the Ruger’s blown open his femoral artery? Or hope I survive when he hops over, takes my gun away, and uses it on me? He said he wouldn’t be taken alive—

and after what he went through at that Yakuza blood factory, I believe him.

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No. Next time, it’s him or me. I can’t let him keep slaughtering thropes and pires. They’re people, dammit, people with kids and families and friends. They’re not monsters, and I have to get my head in the game if I want to save any of them.

When Charlie comes back, I tell him Bearbreaker felt better and left. I don’t tell him anything else.

“I can’t believe you let him go,” Cassius says. His voice is around the same temperature that the tundra was back in Alaska.

I meet his eyes defiantly. “I didn’t think he was a flight risk. His bike was totaled; we were in the middle of nowhere. I’d established a relationship of trust and planned on using it to gain more information.”

If my Urthbone mojo worked on pires I could tell just how angry Cassius is, but this subzero routine is like watching a glacier and trying to figure out how fast it’s moving. He taps a few keys on his computer without taking his eyes off me, which is a little unnerving. “You should have brought him in.”

“I could have,” I admit. “But I didn’t think he’d give us anything. He’s a professional hired gun—mercenary, I mean—and I doubt even an accessory-to-murder rap would scare him. I figured the cautious approach was better.”

“You were wrong. Learn from it, do better next time.”

He looks down and starts typing. After a moment I realize that he’s done talking to me. I get up and leave, hoping I haven’t come down with frostbite in the last five minutes.

Two days later there’s another victim.

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I can’t help but wonder if it’s because of me. True, serial killers almost always escalate—but Stoker has a specific agenda, and he’s organized enough to stick to it. So did he move his timetable up because of me?

If so, he needn’t have bothered. I haven’t told anyone about his posing as Bearbreaker, mainly because I’m not sure it would do any good. Yeah, a seven-foot muscleman tends to stick out, but he’s got a werewitch on his payroll and she could probably make him look like anything. Well, anything but the bogus description he gave us in the first place.

The one thing I do know is that what I saw wasn’t a trick. Eisfanger’s little ghost rat told him Bearbreaker wasn’t using any kind of glamour, so I guess he really is that . . . large.

The next victim is a lot closer to home—Montana, to be exact. By now I’ve got it down to a routine: study the video of the previous vic on the way there, try to get as much data as possible from local law enforcement already on the scene, have Gretchen crunch the numbers and look for patterns on the fly.

This time, though, it’s a little different. For one thing, Cassius and Gretchen come with me.

The message is clear: I’ve screwed up and need supervision. I wish I could argue with that, but I can’t. I’m kind of glad, actually—Gretch is the closest thing I have to a female friend in this world, and I could use someone to talk to.

Not that there’s a lot of talking on the way there. We’re taking a chopper this time, and since it’s daytime we’re basically flying inside a sealed, windowless bubble separate from the pilot—who apparently thinks that a helicopter ride should duplicate the experience of a roller coaster as closely as possible. It’s extremely noisy, too; I feel like I’m in a barrel going over Niagara Falls again and again.

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“Here’s the situation,” Cassius says. I have to ask him to speak up; my hearing isn’t as keen as Gretchen’s. “The signal is coming from a small cabin just outside of Missoula, Montana. It’s not as isolated as the previous sites. We have the cabin surrounded by agents, but nobody’s gone in yet. Windows are sealed; nothing’s visible from outside.”

“He’s deviating from his pattern,” I say. “Getting closer to population centers. There’s an implied threat, there. And this is only the second time he’s left a victim inside a building.”

“The first time the vic was a pire,” Gretchen says. “Perhaps this one is, as well—the local population leans heavily toward hemovores.”

“We’ll see when we get there,” Cassius says.

We touch down in the field directly beside the cabin. Both Cassius and Gretchen have put on their daywear gear, long black gloves of shiny plastic and tight black masks that tuck into their collars. Smoked-glass goggles finish the outfit. Gretchen is wearing pale green slacks and a yellow blouse, while Cassius is dressed in his usual black suit with a dark red tie. Together, they look a bit like yuppie terrorists. I’m dressed in typical Bureau style, a black suit pretty much a match to Cassius’, while Charlie’s wearing a charcoalgray two-piece, with matching snap-brim, alligator-skin shoes, and a pair of dark shades—he makes all of us look shabby.

We climb out of the cabin and into a sun-drenched field of yellow wheat stubble, with the cabin no more than a hundred feet away. Four thrope agents are stationed around it, holding crossbows at port arms and generally looking menacing.

The agent in charge, a thrope with reddish brown fur in chain-mail body armor, lopes over and gives Cassius the rundown in sign language. Cassius nods and motions us to follow him.

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The cabin itself is no more than a shack, peeling tarpaper roof and unpainted wooden walls gone gray with age. The windows I can see have little glass left, but all that shows behind them is black.

Cassius pulls the rickety door open. Behind it is a wall of black plastic, no more than three feet from the door, sealing off the rest of the room. It has a hatch of sorts set into it, a zippered flap probably taken from a tent and duct-taped into place. The flap’s been reinforced with more black plastic.

Cassius doesn’t hesitate. He unzips the flap. Bright, golden light spills through the opening, followed immediately by the stench of burned meat.

The room has been sealed, every square inch, with black plastic and duct tape. A car battery sits in one corner, wires trailing from it to the satellite broadcaster nearby and to a metal cot in the center. The cot is bolted to the floor, and the victim is bound spreadeagled to the cot; the second set of wires lead into the vic’s mouth.

Gretchen hands out paper booties for everyone to put on over their shoes, and the three of us enter. Charlie stays outside.

The body is of a young female pire. She’s naked. Cause of death appears to be—well, the middle of her body is gone. It looks as though someone took a blowtorch and burned a swath from her groin to the center of her face. And lying right in the very center of that swath is a long, flexible tube, no more than a half inch in diameter, giving off the soft golden glow that’s illuminating the room.