Hunter's Trail

“Why?” Scarlett asked. “I thought you guys didn’t usually attack humans. I mean, Jesse hadn’t, like, cornered her.”

“No,” Will agreed. “I suspect it was a calculation. She figured she’d either distract me enough for her to really hurt me, or she’d kill Jesse, which would hurt you.”

“Oh,” Scarlett said in a small voice. Without looking at him she reached over and grabbed his good hand again. Jesse wasn’t sure she even knew she’d done it. He squeezed her hand briefly and didn’t let go.

“Things are getting worse,” Jesse said quietly.

“Yes,” the alpha agreed. “And it’s only going to get worse the closer we are to the full moon.”

“What happens then?” Jesse asked, alarmed. His stomach was already churning from the adrenaline and soda, and the anxiety wasn’t helping.

“The nova will have to change again,” Will explained. “We all will.”

And he’ll attack more women, Jesse realized.

Will was looking back and forth between the two of them. “I take it the stakeout was unsuccessful.”

“Yeah,” Jesse acknowledged. “It was a long shot anyway.”

“What else have you come up with?” Will asked tiredly. “I noticed Terrence Whittaker was limping badly tonight. Do you know anything about that?”

“Uh . . . yeah . . . ,” Jesse said uneasily. “About that.”

Chapter 23

Will wasn’t thrilled with Jesse’s decision to shoot Terrence Whittaker. Jesse couldn’t really blame him. When the werewolf finally calmed down and they had filled him in on the rest of the investigation, Jesse noticed Scarlett’s eyes drooping and proclaimed that they needed to go get some sleep. He dropped Scarlett off at her van and headed back to his apartment.

It was after three in the morning, but when Jesse climbed into his bed he found himself staring at the ceiling, his brain churning as fast as his stomach. He was still jittery from all the caffeine and adrenaline, not to mention the pain in his wrenched arm. Jesse got out of bed and went over to the kitchenette, where he swallowed three Advil and a liter of water, before making himself a couple of sandwiches. Then he sat down at the little card table that served as his dining area to think about the case.

They needed to make progress before things got any worse for the werewolves—not to mention before the nova wolf had time to change again and kill anyone else. There had to be some sort of logic to the nova’s choice in victims, Jesse reasoned. There had to be. Will had said that the nova would try to create a mate first. And you wouldn’t just go to the Grove, point at a woman, and say, there’s my mate for life, right?

But how would you pick a mate? Or more importantly, how would a man who’d just been turned into a werewolf pick a mate?

That line of thinking got Jesse exactly nowhere, so he went back to trying to figure out how the two victims might be connected. He spent the next hour on his laptop, trying to match both Kate and Leah to the same school, gym, church, anything. It was endlessly frustrating. There was plenty of information on the Internet, but there were also plenty of potential connections that he couldn’t look into. They might have just used the same dry cleaner as the nova werewolf or something.

Jesse paged through Scarlett’s notes again. Both women had been involved in an animal rights groups: Leah had been in PAW, which—judging by the amateur website—was a fairly small, local thing. The PAW members had a web page and a Facebook group, and they got together in person once a quarter to discuss the wolf situation in America. Jesse got the sense from their site that it was mostly about getting together to drink coffee and bitch about legislature.

Kate, on the other hand, had been part of Humans for the Protection of Animals, which was enormous. Jesse spent some time investigating whether the two groups had worked together on anything—a fund-raiser, volunteer opportunity, charity work. There was nothing online to suggest the two groups had so much as encountered each other.

He sent both PAW and HPA a message identifying himself and requesting that a senior member of the group contact him immediately. Then, bleary-eyed and still sore, he pushed the laptop away and finally fell into bed around four thirty.

Just two hours later, however, his phone began to vibrate insistently on the nightstand. Jesse was only dimly aware of its buzzing, and he felt a sleepy surge of gratitude when it finally danced its way off the table and fell to the cheap carpet with a dull thump. But seconds later it began to buzz from the floor, and with a groan Jesse reached down and fished around for it. He cracked his eyelids open and squinted at the screen, seeing a small picture of Glory. That was unusual enough to get his eyelids all the way up. Gloria “Glory” Sherman was the lead forensic pathology technician at Jesse’s LAPD station. She was also the only other human Jesse knew of who was aware of the Old World.

He answered the phone with more of a grunt than an actual greeting.

“Jesse,” Glory said in a low voice. “I’ve got one that you need to see.”

“One what?” he mumbled.

“One murder?” Glory answered, her voice slightly annoyed. “It’s weird. And our mutual acquaintance told me that I was to report anything really weird to you.”

“He did?” Jesse said, digging the heel of his hand into his eye socket, trying to wake up. It was a stupid question. Of course Dashiell was using Glory as a scout for Old World trouble. Most of the time, Jesse had been told, humans who learned about the Old World had their minds pressed to forget, and then went about their lives. If time or trauma didn’t allow for that, though, they were given a choice: join the Old World or be killed by it. Since the odds of successfully turning into a vampire or werewolf had gotten so low, this was often a death sentence, regardless of what they chose. Dashiell was willing to allow Glory to remain alive and human, however, in exchange for the occasional forensic favor. But he also kept leverage—he’d made it clear to Glory that he knew everything about her two children, including where to find them. If Dashiell had told Glory to keep Jesse informed of weird homicides, that’s exactly what she would do.