Charming (9 page)

It was almost a relief when the police came visiting the next morning.

8

T
here were two men arrayed behind Sig when I opened the front door. One of them was a hamster-cheeked chunky guy with freckles and an unruly patch of brown hair. He smelled like mint toothpaste and cheap deodorant and dried semen, and his sweat contained a long history of heavy meat meals. He was in his late thirties or early forties, and you could tell the guy still had some muscle beneath the fat. There was nothing likable about him on the surface—his already small eyes were narrowed and watchful, and the words “Don’t Fuck with Me” were tattooed all over him in body language, but there was nothing immediately threatening in his manner either. There was a bulge beneath his jacket at the right hip that was almost certainly a holstered gun, and probably a large one at that, and he was dressed respectably enough in the kind of modest suits that working-class cops wear, a plain wedding ring on his left hand. I decided that he was the cop I’d seen in the alley.

The other man was taller than me by about four inches and shaped like an inverted bowling pin. His head, shoulders, and chest were all massive, developed to the point where his thick
hips and legs looked skinny by comparison. He was in his late fifties or early sixties, the dome of his head shining out as if it were a mountain peak and his white hair the snow melting off it. I guess that would mean that the patchy white beard hanging off the crag of his chin was like frost or something. Similes aside, what was really cold about him was his eyes. They were pale blue, openly hostile, and infinitely weary. It was a strange combination. I hated him on sight.

And if he didn’t have at least two weapons hidden under his shapeless gray trench coat, I was an Ankou’s uncle. He smelled like a lot of things… some kind of muscle liniment, Nicorette, beef, cabbage… but the dominant smells were gun oil and wolfsbane and rage.

Unless there were other unaccounted-for people working with Sig, this was the psychic who had led her to the bar. He sure as hell wasn’t a cop.

“How’s it going, Sunshine?” Sig asked me cheerfully. “You look like hell.”

It was nine in the morning, and she was wearing the same clothes she’d had on the night before. I was wearing an Amazing Spider-Man T-shirt and a pair of jeans I’d hurriedly pulled on over my boxers. “Bad dreams,” I mumbled.

“You should have just gone without sleep like me,” she informed me unsympathetically, then nodded at Chunky Cheeks before I could respond. “This is one of my contacts on the police department, Detective Ted Cahill.” After the briefest of pauses, she then indicated the older man by moving her eyes sideways and tilting her head. “And this is Stanislav Dvornik, my… friend.”

“Am I pleased to meet you?” I asked Cahill. I was addressing him because he was a police officer, but also because I instinctively knew that the best way to piss the older guy off would
be to ignore him. Something about the way Sig had hesitated before calling Dvornik her “friend” suggested things I didn’t even want to think about for a variety of reasons.

Cahill smiled mirthlessly. “No you’re not, wolf-boy,” he said. “Any more than I’m pleased to meet you. But I’m not here to arrest you or kill you, if that’s what you mean.”

Definitely the voice of the cop in the alley.

“These are some of the people I told you about last night,” Sig said in answer to my expression. I’d given her a mild glare for form’s sake. “The ones who helped me clean up.”

“Do Valkyries need permission to come into someone’s house?” I asked her.

She smiled faintly. “No. But I’m not rude either.”

I raised my eyebrows at that but didn’t comment directly. “I was just fixing breakfast. Are you hungry?”

Her eyes lit up and an enthusiastic smile spread over her face. It made her look like the young woman she looked like, if that makes any sense. I stared at that smile until my heart pounded on my chest as if it were trying to get my attention. “Hey, you!” my heart yelled. “Breathe, stupid! The air-conditioning in here sucks!”

“I’m starving!” she said. “These two would hardly let me eat anything at the IHOP.”

“You had two plates piled high with pancakes and sausage!” Cahill protested. “The waitresses were looking at your figure and trying to decide whether to call an exorcist or a contract killer.”

“Ted exaggerates,” Sig informed me primly.

“Well, I made plenty,” I said, turning around so that they could follow me into my house. “Even for another bottomless pit.” It was true. I needed to empty my refrigerator anyway, and I wanted to stockpile as many extra calories as I could in case Steve Ellison really did have any surviving hive members.

I watched them follow me in the silvered glass mirror in the front hallway. A rapt expression came over Sig’s face as the smells from the kitchen reached her. Ted was watching Sig with fond bemusement, and Dvornik was watching me watch him watch me with a look of undisguised loathing on his face. He wasn’t going to look away first, and we stared at each other until I ran out of mirror.

“Those keys I took off the vampire… I guess you found his car somewhere nearby?” I asked nonchalantly as we made our way through the living room. We didn’t have much to weave through. What’s the point of strategically placing guns and ammunition under removable floorboards all over your house if you’re going to cover them with carpeting and furniture? The only things in the room were two bookcases and a rocking chair with a quilt over it next to the woodstove.

“We did,” Sig confirmed. “His name is—was—Alex Faulhaber. We checked his apartment out this morning.”

Meaning they’d used one of the keys on the ring to let themselves in. I paused and looked at Sig inquiringly. Dvornik had stopped and was staring at the katana I’d placed back on the wall after the sun came up. It wasn’t casual curiosity. Cahill was watching Sig and me. That wasn’t casual curiosity either.

“The real find was above the apartment,” Sig continued. “There’s a huge attic space over the whole complex, no windows. They had turned it into a warren for human-size rats. They had cut doors in some of the partitions, nailed planks over rafters to make new floors, and cut out roof supports here and there to make headroom. We found a niche with four mattresses up there, and lots of clothes with bloodstains on them. Stanislav checked a few of the tenants, and they had puncture holes in easy-to-conceal places and their eyes weren’t dilating normally.”

Uh-huh. One of the signs that someone has been mentally mind-mucked by a vampire is that their pupils are slightly enlarged and don’t dilate as rapidly as usual. I have no idea why. Something about the way the mental command to enter a trance state actually travels from one pair of eyes to the other, through the optic nerves and up the brain stem. The vampires had probably been feeding regularly off the tenants in the apartment building while conditioning them to ignore any unusual sounds coming through the ceiling. It would be like living above a takeout restaurant.

I resumed walking. “What about the cell phone? Did you get anywhere with that?”

There was a pause, not a long one, but noticeable. “We handed it over to a friend,” Sig said. Her tone implied that she wasn’t going to tell me the friend’s name and that I shouldn’t ask. “He’s going to get back to us later.”

I wondered if it was the black guy with the van or yet another someone else. It was nice that she was protecting
someone’s
privacy.

“We were hoping you might be able to point us in a new direction,” she added as I entered my kitchen. “We didn’t really have time to talk, and if your sense of smell is as developed as you say it is, I thought that maybe you might have…”

Sig trailed off as I reached into a drawer to the side of my sink and pulled out Steve Ellison’s wallet. Cahill’s hand had flipped his coat aside and moved to the butt of the gun I’d spotted earlier. I flipped open the wallet to show Steve Ellison’s driver’s license and handed it to Sig.

She examined it wordlessly. Then Sig looked up at me, her bright blue eyes narrowing as if she were sighting a gun. “You didn’t take this off of him in the alley. There’s no way I missed that.”

“No,” I said. “You didn’t.”

Sig worked it out. “You lifted it off of him in the bar,” she said accusingly. “You
wanted
him to come back after you when there weren’t any bystanders around.”

“I thought he was a lone rogue,” I admitted.

She shook her head grimly. “I knew you wouldn’t have just turned a heat seeker loose on the streets. It’s why I went back to see what you were up to. Things just weren’t adding up.”

“I’m glad they didn’t,” I said, a little uneasily. I got that she was supposed to be some kind of psychic and that Valkyries were traditionally good judges of warriors and all that, but it still made me uncomfortable to hear her talking about me as if she knew me.

“You mind if I see that?” Cahill asked Sig, and she handed him the wallet while I went back to my meal preparations.

Breakfast was salvageable. The pound or so of fried potatoes were a bit black around the edges, but they’re good that way. The sausage gravy boiling away in a big skillet had evaporated a little, but there was still plenty of it after I stirred the layer that had skimmed over on the top. The tray brimming with biscuits had a minute to go on the timer (they were two cans worth of Pillsbury home-style, not made from scratch or anything), and I’d shoveled the bacon and eggs onto platters and covered them before answering the door. The waffles were colder than I like, but I could reheat them without ruining their texture too much.

My kitchen is old-fashioned and doesn’t have a counter where people can sit—hell, it doesn’t have a dishwasher or a trash compacter—but the upper half of the dining table is visible from the adjoining room. Dvornik and Cahill sat where they could watch me as I got the biscuits out of the oven. I didn’t take it personally.

Sig stayed up and set out some plates and coffee cups and silverware (it was real silver) while Cahill made a few pointed comments to her about werewolves apparently not having to worry about cholesterol either. I offered to make him a salad while I was carrying in the sausage gravy, and he suggested that maybe I’d like my breakfast going up my ass instead of coming out of it for a change.

It was a very uncouth comment. He and I were going to get along fine if he didn’t try to kill me.

“Love what you’ve done to the place,” Sig murmured dryly as she passed by me carrying butter and jelly from the fridge. The dining room and kitchen weren’t decorated any more elaborately than the living room. No photos, no knickknacks, just basic furniture, some wind chimes in case any sudden materializing presences displaced air, and a couple of vases with flowers that were mostly an excuse for having containers of holy water lying around.

“I like to pack light,” I told her, taking a jug of syrup out of the pantry.

Finally everyone was eating. Well, Sig and I were eating. Cahill was drinking coffee and watching us morosely while taking a few desultory bites of bacon. Dvornik wasn’t touching anything.

“You’re a good cook,” Sig observed through what should have been a mouthful of fried potatoes while she slathered butter over a waffle. Her food was going down fast.

I looked at her skeptically, spearing a third piece of sausage on my fork so that it looked like a shish kebab. “You have a long life span and a huge appetite, and you’re not a good cook?”

“It goes against my feminist principles,” she said mock-haughtily.

“Every now and then she forgets what happened the last time and tries to cook again,” Cahill told me. “You know how
some people kill plants they try to take care of? She murders lasagnas and casseroles.”

“This is all fine and dandy, I’m sure,” Dvornik said disgustedly. His Slavic accent was thick and phlegm-filled. It was the voice of a lifelong chain-smoker who was a few years past his expiration date. “Now we’re all good friends who trust each other.”

He turned to Sig. It was the first time he’d taken his eyes off me since looking at my sword. “You wanted to tell him two things. Tell him so we can leave.”