Broken Soul

I nodded to Eli and he climbed the rocks—the ones still whole and not reduced to rubble—taking the highest point. Using his equipment, he scanned the yard on the other side and nodded to me. I shut off the flash and pulled on Beast’s strength, leaping high, grabbing the brick top, and swinging over the fence, to land in a crouch. Mud flew up from my feet and I realized I was still barefoot. The breeze was silent but steady from upriver. All I smelled on it was food and rain and exhaust. All I heard was rain pattering down and cars and music from several directions.

One hand on the brick, I scanned Katie’s back garden with Beast’s night vision, a sheen of greens and grays and silvers everywhere. I sucked in scent through my lips, over my tongue, and across the roof of my mouth, trying to scent silently. I smelled rain, rain, and more rain, the ozone of lightning, and, faintly, just at the edge of my ability in this form, blood. Vamp blood, mixed varieties. Leo’s blood . . . He had stopped bleeding before Katie him took away. But—

“Holy crap,” I whispered to myself. If Katie killed Leo, or let someone else kill Leo, she would move to Master of the City by right of succession, according to Mithran law. Leo had been unconscious and gravely injured from the silver of my stakes, and I had let the one person guaranteed to benefit from his death at my hands take him off.

“Holy crap,” I said again. To Eli, I said, “Clear.” No louder, but not for the headset, I said, “Brute. Get over here.”

Two seconds later the wolf landed beside me and mud flew all over me. Brute, when he had been able to achieve human form, had weighed in at more than three hundred pounds. He was still that in wolf form. “Cute,” I said, wiping spatter off my face. “Sniff out everything from here to the house, please. Then I’ll ask a few questions. Okay?”

Brute made a low Rrrr sound in the back of his throat, which I took as affirmation, and started quartering the yard like a police detective might at a crime scene. I had a sudden vision of Rick and Brute working together, taking the same steps, following the same procedures, but working as a team. Minutes passed as I stood in the mud, rain falling on my shoulders. Troll, Soul, and Eli appeared at a back window of Katie’s, silhouetted by dim light from the hallway beyond. Someone had been smart, not adding new scents to the scene.

Brute covered the yard and reached the back door to Katie’s before he raised his head to look over his shoulder at me. His white coat was drenched with the slow rain, as was I, and his paws were muddy to the knees. He barked, the tone telling me he was done. I slogged to him through the wet grass, my jeans dragging, and the back door opened to let us both in. There was a length of plastic on the floor in the back entrance and a stack of towels. And four working girls in various stages of undress. I accepted a large towel from Troll and dried off while Soul, kneeling on the plastic, applied another towel to the wolf.

As we both worked at drying off the rainwater, I said, “Brute.” The wolf lifted his crystalline eyes to me, sat down, stared, and waited. Soul stopped drying him and put her hand into his ruff again, her eyes on me too. I said, “I need answers. Let’s start with: Did Katie and Leo and Derek land on this side of the fence?”

Brute nodded once up and down. It was a strange sight, seeing a wolf mimic human behavior. I wondered whether I looked that odd when I responded to questions like a human when in animal form.

“Okay. Did they make it to the door?” Brute shook his head side to side, no. “Was there a fight?” Brute nodded. “Close to the fence?” He nodded.

“Did the fight continue for a while?” He nodded. I took a slow breath. “Did anyone die in the fight?” Brute shook his head and I let the breath out. “Do you recognize the attacker or attackers’ scent?” He nodded again. “Was it Peregrinus?” Brute’s big head dropped and rose slowly.

“Was anyone injured?” The skin and hair over Brute’s eyes wrinkled, and I recognized his inability to answer the question. “Did you smell fresh blood?” Brute stared hard at me and dipped his head. I said the names, pausing between each for an answer. “Leo’s? Katie’s? Derek’s? Peregrinus’? The Devil’s?” I got a solemn nod with each name.

Soul said, “Peregrinus has the hatchling, Leo, and Katie. There is nothing he cannot do once he controls them.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking that over. “We have a limited time period to fix it all. First question is, how did they get out of the yard?”

Eli knelt and rolled towels to form a square on the plastic. “Here’s the fence at our back courtyard. Here’s Katie’s back door. There’s a long alley from Katie’s backyard to the street down this side, but it’s locked and a camera records everything there. There’s no side yard here.” He pointed to the other side, where Katie’s and the house being remodeled next door were so close that you’d have a difficult time getting an old-fashioned phone book between the walls. “So we have a fight that took place in a rain- and thunderstorm, in a locked garden area. Brute? How did they get out?”

Brute whined softly, looking at the towels and up to Soul.

“Brute is having some difficulty thinking in human terms,” Soul said, her tone gentle. “We think his brain has been too long in wolf form. It’s okay, Brute. Can you show us if we go outside, in the yard?” Brute whined and thumped his tail before nodding. He turned and put a paw on the door, which left a muddy smear before Troll opened it. I followed the werewolf stuck in wolf form into the dark.

Outside, the rain had stopped and there was only the gurgle of water running off the roofs and through gutters, and the heavy fall of collected rainwater dripping from plant leaves and house eaves. Distantly, I heard cars splashing through the rain and jazz from uptown, R & B from downtown. The wind was still moving downstream, carrying the ever-changing scent pattern.

Nose to the ground, Brute trotted around the yard, circumscribing an area about twenty feet round. Most of the yard. Several times he put his paw down as if indicating something important on the grass or on a plant. “Soul, what’s that mean, when he puts his paw down?”

“He smells blood.”

“A lot of blood, then,” I said, counting back to eight different places just in the circumference.

Brute trotted to the side yard and put his paws up on the building next door to Katie’s, the building where I had heard hammers and skill saws earlier in the week, where the construction was taking place. I looked up and saw that a window on the attic floor was broken. “Crap,” I said to Eli. The breeze had carried all scent from the window away from us, so I hadn’t noticed it. I was too wedded to the nose and not enough to the eyes. “We suck as investigators,” I continued. “You found the sniper out front. But I’m betting we had someone watching the back from the attic of that house.”