She's No Faerie Princess (16 page)

demons, but she knew Graham's was. She could see it in the set of his shoulders and feel it in the tension that gathered around him the farther he moved toward the site Walker had described to him.

When they got close enough that she began to hear thesound of low voices in the distance and to see lightsflickering in between the tree trunks, though, she didn'tneed the senses of a Lupine to know it was bad. Evenwithout heightened senses she could smell the death. Ittook the heat out of her annoyance with Graham andbrought back the unpleasant roiling in her stomach.

She followed Graham through the thick underbrush, theirprogress nearly silent as they broke through into anuneven clearing that all but glowed with the tension ofdeath and the reaction of the living.

Walker stood at the far side of the clearing with his backto them, his head bent in conversation with a small, dark-haired woman with pretty features and delicate handscovered in bloody rubber gloves.

He sensed Fiona the instant she stepped into the glade. His head shot up and turned toward her, his expressionfierce.

"What the hell is she doing here?"

He moved across the empty space so fast, Fiona didn'teven have time to put Graham between them. She couldsee the woman Walker had been talking to blinking insurprise from behind her lenses, but Fiona was moreinterested in testing Tess and Missy's theory. She lookedcarefully at Walker's face, searching every nuance of hisexpression. For a second all she saw was the old,

familiar anger, but then her gaze shifted to his eyes and

she saw something else. A glint of concern. Of fear.

She felt a surge of optimism and nearly opened hermouth to call him on it, but Graham cut her off. He heldup a hand as if trying to calm the other Lupine.

"Save it," the alpha said. "I've already had this argument with her, and as she pointed out, all of us duked it out just this morning. We lost. You told me on the phone that you thought there was something odd about this kill. If 'odd' equals 'demon,' we need her here."

" 'Odd' could be anything—"

"Not anything Lupine," the woman in the glasses cut in, her voice carrying the short distance between them. "Pardon me, Alpha, but I can tell you for certain it wasn't one of our pack. Or a loner or an out-of-towner. The killer wasn't Lupine."

Graham looked at the woman and nodded, as ifdismissing her apology. "Don't worry about it, Annie. Justfill me in. If it wasn't Lupine, could it have been anotherkind of Other? Feline? Werefolk? Vampire even?"

Annie shook her head. "Definitely not. Just the amount ofblood left here on the scene rules out vamp. I mean, I'm abiologist, not a physician, and my anatomy classes werea long time ago, but I know enough to think this wasn'tanything we're used to dealing with. Have a look."

Graham approached the woman and the body, beingcareful not to disturb anything that looked like tracks or tostep in the pools of clotting blood that trailed like fingersof blackened crimson away from the corpse. Fiona

hurried to follow, trying to ignore the uncomfortable sensation of once again having an angry and sullen Walker stalking behind in her shadow.

She stopped when Graham did, less than two feet fromthe still figure. As she looked down at it, her first thoughtwas that if she hadn't already been told it was human,she wouldn't necessarily have been able to tell. It lookedas if it lay there in pieces, at least three or four largechunks, connected more by proximity than physiology. Something had torn through flesh and bone, tendon andsinew, leaving little recognizable behind. Fiona could seesomething that may once have been blue denim, nowblack in the dim light, and the gory, stringy clumps by Graham's left boot might have been human hair a fewhours before. Now only assumption and optimism wouldattach that label.

Fiona blew out a deep breath and clenched her handsinto fists to keep them from pressing betrayingly againsther stomach. That organ pitched once, then clenched intoa tight fist and retreated to huddle against her spine inprotest. It wasn't really the blood or that gore thatbothered her; it was the emptiness of this thing that usedto be human. There was nothing left, like the soul saw thedesecration of its former home and fled as far and fast asthe wind could carry it. Usually, human spirits clungtenaciously to their bodies and the world they had livedin. That was why their world had so many ghost stories. But in this case, not even a thread of that consciousnessremained. A mercy, probably. If Fiona had seen her ownbody so defiled, she might have turned tail, too.

"At first glance, I admit it does look like a Lupine or

maybe a Feline kill. There are claw marks." Annie's voice

seemed to fade in like a sound track that had been playing for a while before Fiona took notice. "But they're too large for any shifter I've ever heard of, let alone seen. At least eight inches long on average, although it looks like there are two smaller ones used less regularly.

Here," she pointed where the throat should have been, "and here." Where the two largest chunks diverged, below the rib cage. "Anything with talons like that would have to be at least ten feet, minimum, and the biggest were I've ever heard stories about was just shy of nine."

Graham watched with a cool sort of detachment beliedonly by the fisting of his hands at his sides and the leapof muscle in his jaw as he clenched and unclenched histeeth. "Is anything missing?"

Annie shook her head. "Not that I could tell from apreliminary exam, but a trained medical examiner couldsay for sure. Even the uterus and the intestines look to beintact. Externalized, but intact. It's almost like parts werechewed or ripped to look like they'd been eaten, but thisgirl wasn't anyone's dinner. That makes the chances ofthis being a rogue Other kill pretty slim."

Fiona frowned and looked closer. Annie was right. Fionacould see the sausagey line of the intestines partiallyobscured by a ragged bit of cloth with the stomachdraped half out of the gaping hole in the abdominalcavity. Her frown deepened. Predators favored thestomach as a source of vitamins and minerals that couldbe found in the partially digested meal of the prey. It wasusually the first thing to be eaten, but it looked relativelyundisturbed for having been mostly removed.

"Maybe something scared it off before it could feed?"

"I don't think so. The pattern of the wounds is wrong. If something were going to feed, it would have gone for the abdomen and stayed there till it was done, but these wounds here," Annie pointed to the remains of the face, "barely bled, which means they occurred after she was already dead and after the abdomen had already been opened."

Graham swore. "Then this definitely wasn't dinner."

Annie nodded. "It's like I said. It looks like whatever killedher wanted people to think she'd been partially eaten, buthad no real interest in eating her. It's weird. As ifsomeone was trying to mimic an Other kill."

Fiona peered closer at the exposed bottom of the ribcage and then glanced back at Annie. "You're surenothing was missing?"

The other woman blinked at her, looking surprised. "Assure as I can be. It's messy, but I really think it's all here."

"What about the heart?"

"The chest cavity is the biggest intact part here. You can see that nothing went in through the ribs or the sternum."

"But what about something going in from below the ribs?"

Annie blinked again and raised her eyebrows. "I didn'teven think to check that."

Hunkering down beside the corpse again, Annie pulledthe sleeves of her already-spattered sweatshirt up withher teeth, bunching the fabric just above her elbows. Pressing one gloved hand against the body's chest forbalance, she reached down to the space between the two

pieces of torso with the other and guided her hand up

through the rib cage, her brow furrowed in concentration.

"It's like someone carved a tunnel in here," she muttered, finally stopping when the inside of her elbow bumped up against rib bone. Her glasses slid down the bridge of her nose and she blew at a strand of hair that flopped in front of her face. "She's right. It's not here. The heart is gone. But I don't get why anything strong enough to tear all the way through the body wouldn't just reach in from the front and grab it. It would be a lot more efficient."

"Demons don't worry much about efficiency," Fiona

sighed. She had really, really wanted to be wrong.

The female Lupine blanched. "A demon? You think thiswas done by a demon?" Her eyes flew to the alpha,seeking reassurance.

Graham nodded grimly. "It's possible. One was spotted inthe city recently. We were hoping to be able to track itdown before something like this happened."

"But there hasn't been a demon attack around here in… forever," Annie protested. "How did it get here? And I thought demons were basically stupid and brutal. How could it possibly have figured out a way to make its kill look like an Other attack?"

"Demons can only enter this world at the behest of a summoner," Fiona explained. "They have to be called. And once they've been called, they're bound to the summoner until they're released or banished. If a demon under the control of a summoner were ordered to kill someone before feeding, it would have to do exactly that, and splitting the body in half certainly did enough damage

to qualify as demon fun time. Once the body was split, going after the heart from below was probably just easier."

"Not that I wanted it to be an Other," Graham said, "but the fact that it isn't makes things a hell of a lot more complicated."

"I don't know. Having one of our pack turn rogue during the middle of the negotiations would have been pretty messy, so maybe you should look on the bright side."

Graham ignored Annie's suggestion and looked back at Fiona. "What would it take for you to be able to pick up atrail for us?"

Fiona shrugged. "Not too much. The Fae are said to havean inherent connection to things demonic. It shouldn'ttake all that much energy for me to pick up on one, which

I guess is why we won the Wars."

"Shouldn't? You're not certain?"

She made a frustrated face. "Like I said before, therehasn't been a demon sighting where I come from in acouple millennia. I'm working from what I've heard, notfrom personal experience, but I'm pretty sure that's morethan you've got to work with."

"So what do you need to do?"

Fiona did a mental inventory and winced. "Well, I need togather up some more energy. I've used everything Icame from Faerie with, and I haven't been able to gatherany since… since the last spell I cast."

"And you can only get the energy by taking it from

someone like Walker?"

Oh, how Fiona wished Missy were there to give her mateanother swift kick, this time a bit higher than the shin. "Idon't take anything from someone like Walker. Fae don'tsteal energy from other folk; we take the energy that ismanifest around us. The energy I got from kissing Mr. Grumpypants came from the kiss itself, not from him. It'sfate's cruel joke that the attraction between us is the oneenergy source I seem to be able to tap into on this plane. I certainly didn't ask for it."

Graham frowned. "So you're not feeding off him?"

"Do I look like a vampire to you? Sheesh, are all

werewolves so paranoid or is this just my lucky day?"

Annie muffled a laugh. Walker just watched her, hisexpression brooding.

"It's certainly not hers." Graham gestured to the body.

"So if you can help us find out what killed her and where

we can find it without hurting anyone else, you're going to

do it." He turned to Walker. "Kiss her."

"What?"

"Kiss her. Now."

"You've got to be kidding me!"

The alpha growled. "Do I look like I'm in a joking mood,

Walker? I can make it an order if you prefer."

"Oh, please do," Fiona grumbled under her breath. "That

would just do wonders for my ego."

"I don't have time to kick your ass over this," Graham

said, his eyes narrowed and seeming almost to glow in the darkness around them. "Not that it wouldn't give me a great deal of pleasure, but every second we waste fighting about this is a second colder that the trail is growing, and a second longer that whatever killed this girl has to kill someone else. So shut the hell up and kiss the goddamned princess."

Fiona didn't have a chance to protest her amended title. With a muffled curse, Walker spun around, grabbed herby the arms, and yanked her into a furious, aggressive,bone-melting kiss that had her lighting up like Rockefeller Center at Christmastime.

She felt as if she'd turned into a giant lightbulb, with herhead glowing bright enough to illuminate all of Central Park. It staggered her every single time that one touch ofthis obnoxious, stubborn, narrow-minded werewolf's lipson hers could turn her entire world upside down. Shecame from a long line of sidhe, the royal race of Faerie,and every single drop of blood in her veins should havebeen as fickle as theirs. The magic she felt with Walkershould have amused her fleetingly and then left her readyto move on to greener pastures and other lips, but theidea had her stomach doing that unpleasant little danceagain. She didn't want anyone else to kiss her, didn'twant anyone else to touch her, didn't want anyone else'staste clinging to her lips and filling her mouth with honeyand coffee and warm, rich male.