Chapter Six
“What is it?” Joe asked when I stiffened.
He and Remy pulled their weapons, and I opened my hand to call magic that could no longer come. After a second of disorientation and then despairing realization, I slipped my demon blade from its sheath.
It began to glow immediately, its heat warming my palm. My blade still had magic, despite cutting through the flesh of the siphoner.
“Blood,” I murmured. “Lots of it. The smell is too strong for one person. I don’t know if the killer is still inside.”
I didn’t have to tell them to be ready.
I turned in a slow circle, noting the fluttering curtain across the street, the rumble of a vehicle about a block away, moving quietly toward us, and the muffled thump that came from inside the house we were there to investigate.
“Here come the morons who think they’re warriors,” Remy said, his voice a low growl. “One of these fine folks must’ve tipped them off.”
“We knew that was going to happen,” I said. “Joe, handle them.”
“No way, boss,” he told me. “I’m going in with you. Remy can kick their fool asses back down the road.”
“Yeah, I can,” Remy agreed.
I reached the rickety porch just as the pickup truck stopped in the street and half a dozen assholes spilled from it, armed with clubs, blades, and possibly guns, though not even the Pocket thugs wanted the police presence guns would bring. They were eager and ready for a fight.
They’d get more than they bargained for.
I left the thugs to Remy and hurried to the front door. “Joe,” I said. “Go to the back. If there’s a trail, follow it.”
“Kait, I’m not—”
I leveled a narrow-eyed stare at him. “Don’t do that. Not now, not ever. Nothing’s different, Joe.”
We both knew things were different, but I knew I was far from helpless, weak, or hobbled simply because my magic was gone. And my people needed to understand that.
He hesitated, but in the end, he raced around to the back of the house as I kicked in the locked door. Inside, the smell of blood was stronger than ever. For a few seconds, all I could do was stand there and let that awfulness overwhelm me.
Then I began to walk through the house, my blade up, my stare constantly moving, Remy’s fight loud through the busted door and thin walls. The place wasn’t big. There were small rooms, cluttered with furniture and garbage despite it being unoccupied.
I found the murder victims in the master bedroom.
They’d been killed there. I’d seen no trail of blood leading to the room, and also, there was simply too much blood inside the bedroom for any of it to have been spilled elsewhere.
Two women so covered with blood it was difficult to see their faces, both slashed to death. One of them lay in a bloody heap on the floor, a rope around her neck. She’d been hanging from the ceiling fan, which had broken. That explained the thump I’d heard.
The women had their hands bound behind their backs. Both were blonde.
And both were human.
I closed my eyes. “Sam,” I whispered. “Tell me you didn’t do this.”
He couldn’t have. Sam wasn’t in Jakeston. He wasn’t.
I called Rick. Reluctantly, almost afraid. If Sam was responsible for this…this carnage, then he was out of control. Again.
“Kait,” Rick said. “What’d you find?”
“Bring a team to Falton,” I told him. “Two murdered women. It’s bad, Rick.”
“Humans?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Do you sense magic or any kind of supernatural element at all?”
If there was no hint of a supernatural in the mix, Rick would be shut out by the human police. And he hadn’t moved departments so he could be shut out of murders in the city—supernatural or not.
“Maybe,” I said. I really wasn’t sure, though I did smell something…different. It may have been the unique and awful scent of a human serial killer. It might have been a supernatural. I just wasn’t sure. “It could be a demon.”
“Demons,” he said, and I could almost see his frown. “Really, Kait?”
I hesitated. “I don’t know. But maybe.”
“Okay. That’s what I’ll tell them, anyway. Now get out of there.”
I dropped my phone back into my pocket and jogged through the house, uneasy. I’d help Remy with the remaining thugs—and if the shouts, screams, and roars were any indication, more Pocket residents had joined the fight. Even Remy Simon could be overwhelmed by numbers.
I needed the fight. I felt lacking, despite my wolf and my blade, simply because I’d been filled with magic for so long. I wanted to prove to myself that I was as strong as ever.
And a little practice was good for a wolf.
The entire street was alive. People stood on porches, cheering as they threw bottles and jars and food.
When someone began blasting music, a skinny man dressed only in once-white briefs ran into the street to dance, sharp elbows and knobby knees flying.
He was promptly knocked unconscious by a flying bottle.
Remy wasn’t uninjured. His face was bloody and one of his cheekbones was already beginning to swell, likely from a club to the face. His shirt was covered with blood, but most of it, I hoped, belonged to his attackers.
“Welcome to the party,” he yelled when he saw me coming.
I jumped off the porch and into the middle of the fight, my frustration and the tiniest thread of doubt making me a little extra brutal.
Then Joe returned, and before I lost the mad energy coursing through my body, the street was littered with humans, and the Pocket was silent.
A hospital emergency department would be full that night. And when they were able, the Pocket thugs would get right back into their trucks and wait for other outsiders to show up so they could attack again.
On the positive side, they kept their violence contained to their sad little town of horrors.
Remy was looking a little scuffed up. “Can I drop you at Shadowfield, Remy?” I asked, frowning at the ginger way he climbed into my car. “Ben can patch you up.”
“Fuck off, Kait,” he growled, slamming his door.
Joe laughed. “Humans are puny.”
“I’d have been a lot less battered if I could’ve used a blade,” Remy said.
“We can’t kill the humans,” I said mildly, attempting to drive back down the street without running over anybody. “You were kicking ass with the club you took from one of them.”
He snorted, then groaned. “Fucking Pocket. What’d you see in there, Kait?”
I told them. Neither of them said a word, and I wondered if they were thinking the same thing I was. Blonde human women butchered by a mad killer.
Of course they’d be thinking the killer was Jakeston’s infamous serial killer.
They’d be thinking it was Sam.
“What did you find, Joe?” I asked, my chest easing when finally, I was on the highway and the stench of Falton was behind me.
“Nothing,” he told me. “I caught a scent but lost it less than half a mile from the house.”
“You’re not a hunter,” Remy said with no little satisfaction. “We can’t expect you to track like one. You should have let him kick human ass, Kait, and sent me after your killer.”
“I tried,” I told him. “But he doesn’t obey my every command.
” I was silent for a few minutes, lost in the blood of that room.
I’d seen a lot of bad shit. I’d killed a lot of people.
But I was far from immune to seeing a roomful of bloody, sad, murdered women.
Finally, I took a deep breath and released it slowly.
“Call Max, Joe. Tell him we’re on our way in. ”
Joe pulled his phone from his pocket. “We’re only a little late. He’ll be happy.”
We didn’t speak again until I parked in front of the building that housed my office.
Remy climbed from my car, murmuring into his cell phone. He dropped his phone back into his pocket and began walking down the sidewalk without a word to me or Joe.
“Where are you off to, Remy?” I asked. He’d left his car at my house. “You can’t walk all the way to Huntersburg.”
“I have a ride coming,” he said, then gave me a jaunty wave and continued on his way. “Enjoy your ghost hunting and call me when you need me.”
I smiled as I watched him go, realizing for the first time that the boogeyman no longer saw me as a monster he would someday need to kill.