Wormwood Summer (San Amaro Investigations #1)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

“—You know what I mean?”

I glanced at the octogenarian to my right and made a slight humming sound, nodding my head. At two o’clock on a Sunday, the park was relatively quiet.

“I thought so. And they’re even having their annual conference here!

This week!” The woman made a tsking sound, surely universal, showing her unhappiness with the situation.

I echoed the sound and her eyes slid off me, back to the ducks she was tossing bread to.

Most of it was landing on the grass, but she didn’t seem to notice, too wrapped up in whatever she was talking about.

I’d tuned her out a while ago, content to let her continue talking and bolstering my disguise.

“Now, I’m not a bigot,” she began, the words the clarion call of bigots of all stripes.

“But I just think if the alchemists are so set on having a big meeting, they could go somewhere with the police force to handle the security! I heard they’re even having one of those big names come down.

Oh, what’s the family? The one from San Francisco. ”

I shrugged and raised my camera, snapping a couple of pictures.

“Did you get good ones?” she asked. “I’m sorry the little ducklings aren’t out right now.”

Across the man-made pond, Dieter made another hundred dollars disappear with a handshake, replacing the bills with a small baggie full of green herbs.

He looked around, his eyes catching on me and…

I’d already forgotten her name. Priscilla?

Portia? Phyllis? But since the San Amaro Police Department wasn’t in the habit of employing retirees in matching tracksuits, he ignored us, eyes narrowing on the pair of joggers passing behind us.

Sure, they looked more like cops, since they were running, and I looked like someone who needed a cane to get to the bathroom. After a long appraisal, he shrugged and propped himself back against the green picnic table he’d claimed for his deals. I rolled my eyes up and sighed.

“I mean, the traffic,” Maybe Phyllis continued. “And it’ll bring out all the Humans Are Humans protesters. Now there are some bigots.”

Someone came close to Dieter, a skinny teen in a black t-shirt. It was going to be another drug deal. I’d been tailing this guy for over a week and all I’d seen was drug deals, the gym, and his pack.

Not that I didn’t believe my client when she said her boyfriend was a lying, cheating scumbag.

But since I’d been tailing him and seen nothing, either his girl on the side had kicked Dieter-the-Cheater to the curb or he was visiting her during the short catnaps I’d been taking every eight hours.

Having watched him, it could have been either.

This was clearly a guy who could make a quickie very quick.

I’d taken the case a few days ago, figuring it would be easy money.

Chelsea Kinney looked like a girl whose idea of a hard day would be a day when her favorite nail salon was closed for renovations.

She wanted photos of her boyfriend cheating, and since, according to her, he was out nearly every night, I assumed it would be the fastest job I’d ever done.

However, he’d proven me wrong, and I had hundreds of photos of drug deals and drunken revelry with his boys to prove it.

I was resigned to photographing another two men shaking hands twice as they traded money and weed, when Dieter-Dieter-Herpes-Breeder waved at the kid and headed for the sidewalk bordering the park.

Careful to stay out of his line of sight, I stood and mumbled a goodbye to Probably Phyllis.

I made my way around the lake, moving a lot faster than someone with my apparent hips could move.

Once I passed out of Maybe Not Phyllis’s eye line, I dropped the glamour and began jogging to catch up with Dieter. My camera bag bounced on my back.

If he looked back now, Dieter would see a mid-twenties guy with tousled sandy hair and blue eyes. I tried to work out, but my job kept me from using any gym membership. Instead, I had the lean look of a scrappy stray dog.

Passing my car where I’d parked it on the street, I patted the hood fondly and slowed my pace so I was far enough behind Dieter he wouldn’t notice me. He was rushing, but he stopped to buy a bouquet from someone sitting on the sidewalk, a bucket of flowers between her knees.

Checking his hair in a storefront, he headed into one of the apartment complexes backing the park.

Jack. Pot.

I walked into the same opening between buildings Dieter had and pulled up short. The two stories of apartments formed a small square with a pool in the middle. Dieter went straight for the center of the square instead of one of the apartments, so I hid most of my body behind the wall.

With a slow, focusing breath, I reached into the air and waved my hand in a slow circle.

It wasn’t a full glamour, as that would take too much time.

It was a kind of crude version of one, though.

If it was a high school essay, the English teacher might tactfully call it a “rough draft.” It wouldn’t fool someone looking directly at me, but most people would just see the wall and their eyes would skip right over me like I wasn’t there.

There was a woman sunbathing in a deck chair near the pool, and she looked about as far from my client as someone could get.

She’d cut her dark black hair into chic, short spikes.

Tattoos wrapped around her torso and, unlike Chelsea, she wore a literal dog tag hanging from an earring which marked her as an out-and-proud werewolf.

Chelsea, with her preppy sweater and ballet flats, looked like the soccer-mom she probably wanted to become some day.

She had the air of a person who would glance askance at a werewolf with a dog tag hanging from an earring and say something ending with “those people.” As far as I could tell, it was an excellent cover, since she was as wolf-y as they came, and both she and Dieter were part of the South Palma pack.

Dieter’s girl on the side pushed up her sunglasses and gave him a once-over, her eyes narrowing on the flowers he held. She smiled at him and waved a hand. Raising my camera, I checked settings, confident with the glamour, they wouldn’t see me.

I snapped a series of photos as Dieter unhooked the pool gate and strode in, his grin broad.

He leaned down and kissed her and yes, that was the money shot because outside of some very niche porn, with a kiss like that, he could not claim she was his cousin or sister.

It got a little heated from there, and I took enough photos to make it clear what was happening without veering into the amateur category on Pornhub.

See, I tried to be as classy as it was possible to be when I spent most of my workday photographing cheaters, going through trash, and following people.

I was an artiste when it came to getting a photo which said, “Hey, this guy is having an affair!” without verging into prurient. I should put that on my business cards.

Parker Ferro

Private Investigator

He’ll get your pictures, but not in a gross way.

I’d been at this long enough to know I could probably even get some photos of them entering the same apartment.

It would add an extra cherry to the evidence Chelsea needed to prove Dieter, drug dealer, boys’ boy, and cheater of the lowest class, was having an affair.

She needed it to be as clear cut as it could be.

See, Chelsea wasn’t trying to get the apartment or the couch in the breakup. Chelsea wanted something more valuable.

Chelsea wanted custody of the SoPa pack.

When she’d explained her plan to me, I thought it was a bit extreme. I’d never heard of an alpha kicking someone out because of a breakup. But she was the pack’s accountant, and Dieter was the pack’s enforcer. They were both ranked high enough they would be dealing with each other all the time.

She thought if she could show the alpha Dieter was disloyal as a partner, the alpha might consider Dieter would be disloyal to the pack. It wasn’t the worst idea I’d ever heard. I knew the SoPa alpha was touchy about fealty.

I had to admire Chelsea’s foresight. Most women would have just thrown his stuff out on the lawn. But she’d been biding her time and playing the game. She wanted the pack and wanted Dieter left with the reputation of having been kicked out of his pack.

For a wolf, I imagined, is would be like getting the reputation of being kicked out of your own family.

Sure, if your family was Maury-level, daytime-tv crazy, everyone might shrug it off.

But if your family had a reputation for being fair, playing by the rules, and being aggressively protective of its members, well, then people were going to think you were the one with a secret baby and the basement full of hair clippings in jars.

Someone bumped into me from behind, their bag full of liquid groceries crashing to the ground. A heavy bottle broke and soaked my jeans in dark liquor. I jerked my leg and danced away from the mess.

“Where the hell did you come from?” the guy with a liver made of steel said.

Wincing, I swore. While I’d been distracted by taking classy-as-f photos of Dieter and his non-pack-approved girlfriend, I wasn’t paying as much attention to my surroundings.

If I wanted to do a full invisibility spell, it would involve convincing light to bend around me, and some elements I didn’t have on hand.

Instead, my rough-draft version just involved convincing people to look around me.

Which worked great if those people didn’t then walk into me.

“Hey,” Dieter’s wolf on the side said. “Who’s that?”

Dieter was squinting at me, the groove between his eyebrows deepening as he glanced from my camera to my face.

“I’ll tell you what he is. Dead.”

I could not believe I was about to be murdered by someone who sounded like he was auditioning for CSI: San Amaro.

I did the only smart thing I could do: I ran.

My best bet was to reach my car on the street.

Dieter saw where I was heading and leapt to block my escape.

Okay, so no car chase in my future. At least he wouldn’t be able to dramatically rip me out through my windshield like he seemed to want to.

I made the strategic decision to run for the park.

He paused to talk to his girlfriend, giving me just the head start I needed.

The park bordered the apartment complex, and some kid had clearly gotten tired of walking around the giant fence the city had put up separating the two, because there was a gaping hole in the chain link that was perfectly child-sized.

Or, in my case, desperate-adult-sized. I squeezed down as small as I could and scrambled through, emerging in a line of trees.

As soon as my feet hit the grass, I knew I’d have a chance.

Before, I’d been dealing with concrete and air, but the grass was more amenable to my needs.

It was used to being crushed by people and cut by mowers.

Grass is aware its place in the universe is to be beaten down and beaten down, and when it’s finally riddled with weeds, grass knows it gets replaced with younger, prettier grass.

All that’s to say grass is a salty, bitter collection of plants that makes me feel like I’m talking to a room full of Danny DeVitos. Would they help me? Maybe. Would they sell me out? Maybe. They’d do whatever they want and screw you for asking.

“Hey, grass.” I tried to be as light as possible.

“Listen, someone’s going to come through and he won’t be able to see me, so he’ll trample you looking for me.

But if you make it seem like I ran to the concrete, well…

” I shrugged. “He’ll definitely get off you faster.

And all I want is to make your life easy. ”

I could feel the curiosity and resignation. Yeah, you got a bridge to sell me, too? I imagined the grass saying. But, like I said, grass was irritated and constantly provoked, which led to contrariness. So half of it said no and the other half said yes.

“Just move my scent like I went to the path,” I murmured. I didn’t have much time and watched with one eye as the grass shifted away from me, passing Eau de Parker blade to blade towards the walking path circling the park.

With that taken care of, I closed my eyes and breathed in a few times before reaching out to the light and twisting it around me. It was still a rough-draft spell, but it was more like a paper I had been at least run through spell check before being turned in.

My plan was simple. I would wait for Dieter to chase my smell to the path, where it would probably be lost with the other scents, and then sneak out the hole in the fence and back to my car.

Right on cue, the fence shook as Dieter scaled it, his body a lot more massive now I was seeing it up close.

I stayed as still as I could, barely breathing.

He leapt down, landing hard on the grass.

I could feel the blades’ explosion of annoyance and pain, like it was coming straight at me with a New York accent.

Hey, you got a problem?

Dieter’s face scrunched into a frown as he sniffed the air, his head twisting. He slowly began to follow the trail the lawn had set up. I backed my way towards the fence and it was going to be a win-win with me escaping and the werewolf chasing his own tail.

Then I heard a crunch under my foot. I’d walked too close to a maple tree and was now surrounded by a minefield of dried, crackly leaves. I could feel the amusement of the grass directly under my feet. It was ready to laugh as I got pummeled by a furious werewolf.

Dieter’s head swung around and I looked for anything I could use.

My eyes caught on a short hill. Squinting, I made out what looked like a dried riverbed.

During the rainy season, it must be a trickle of water.

Still, it gave me an idea. Now I just needed to get clear of Dieter long enough to make it work.

Shoving my camera bag to sit more comfortably across my back, I danced closer to him, keeping my body low.

He was moving toward the leaf I’d crushed slowly, sweeping his eyes back and forth.

When he was about to pass me, I kicked out, slamming my foot against the side of his knee as hard as I could.

He crumpled to the side with a yelp of pain and I turned and ran as fast as I could.

There was a baseball game on the far side of the park, and with my head start, I probably could make it before he caught up with his injured leg.

Behind me, Dieter growled. I had to make this work, because if I didn’t, this was going to get very painful, very fast.