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“Fuzzykins is a tough girl,” I assured him. “She’s just biding her time until she comes on out. I’m sure she has a warm box to curl up under.”
He blinked and focused on me. “Oh, sure, Kara.” He stood and looked down at the various supplies with a crestfallen look, and I felt a stab of guilt for sending him on this wild goose chase. “Well, maybe y’all can use all this next time you look for her?”
“I know we can,” I said brightly. “Fuzzykins absolutely loves turkey. Isn’t that right, Eilahn?”
“Loves it,” she agreed.
He brightened at that. “All righty then!” He adjusted his gun belt, and I had no doubt that if he’d had a hat he’d have tipped it to Eilahn. “I’ll see y’all around then!” Whistling, he returned to his cruiser. We watched him drive off, and Eilahn shook her head.
“Humans are weird,” she muttered.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “You pretty much nailed it.”
My cell phone rang. “Now what?” I moaned. I didn’t need to look at the caller ID to know it was the Beaulac PD dispatcher. I was on call for the weekend, and I’d yet to get through a Sunday on call without getting a message from the dispatcher. It wasn’t always a murder—in fact it rarely was, fortunately—but it never failed to be something I had to actually go to the scene for. Luckily, I didn’t pull weekend call more than once a month. Plus, it wasn’t as if I had anyone at home who wanted me around on the weekends.
Well, except for my demon roommate, but she was pretty good at fending for herself.
I listened to the dispatcher’s terse delivery, confirmed that I would be on my way, then hung up. “I guess we won’t be finishing the warding up tonight,” I said.
“We will finish it tomorrow,” Eilahn stated, voice firm. “It is even more evident that you require multiple sanctuaries.” With that she turned and strode toward the motorcycle parked beside my car. I frowned down at the blood on my jacket. I had a spare in my office that I could grab. That should be enough. And I had an umbrella in my car if it started to rain.
I even had a demon bodyguard. I was set for anything.
Chapter 2
“This is wrong,” I stated, infusing my words with as much emphasis as possible in order to convey to anyone listening just how intensely I felt about this. “So so SO wrong.” I zipped my spare jacket higher as a shiver wracked me. “It’s unnatural. It’s worse than unnatural. It’s…” I struggled to think of an appropriate word.
“It’s snow, you weirdo,” Sergeant Scott Glassman retorted.
“This is the Deep South!” I wailed. Fluffy little flakes of madness swirled on the chill breeze and dotted the knit cap covering Scott’s bald head. “It was nowhere near this cold an hour ago.”
“It’s called a cold front. Ninth grade science.” He stood with a hip cocked and a thumb tucked into his belt by his gun, looking every inch the “good ol’ boy” street cop that he was. We’d been teammates when I was on the road, and Scott had taught me more than a few tricks for dealing with the rural mentality. He made sergeant about the time I became a detective, and I had no doubt he’d someday be in charge of the Patrol division.
“Yeah, well,” I grumbled, “we’re not supposed to have snow down here!”
Scott let out a snort. “Would you rather have freezing rain?”
“I’d rather not have anything freezing, thank you very much.” I scowled and dug my hands deeper into my pockets. “I put up with hurricanes and the misery of Louisiana summer so that I don’t have to put up with snow or sleet or any other form of frozen wetness.”
“My god, you’re a weenie,” Scott said.
“I don’t like the cold!”
Scott turned to eye me, pursing his lips. “Well maybe you should try, oh, I don’t know, dressing for the weather?”
I hunched my shoulders in a vain attempt to keep the nasty little snow-bits from wiggling their evil way down my collar. “I didn’t know it was going to be this cold. Or snowy. ”I hissed the last word.
The stocky cop gave me a suitably withering look. “What, you don’t own a computer to check the forecast? A smart phone? A television? And is that really a Members Only jacket? I didn’t think anyone wore those anymore. Were you even born when that thing was made?”
I couldn’t exactly tell him that I’d been too busy putting a magical security system on the PD to check the weather, or that my other—warmer—jacket had been clawed by a demon. “Bite me,” I snarled instead.
His only reply was a laugh.
We were in the parking lot of the Beaulac Nature Center—which was a fancy name for a trail that wound through the woods and swamp. The “Center” part of it consisted of a shack not much bigger than a utility shed, and a Plexiglas-covered map of the immediate area. The lot was a mostly flat stretch of old gravel and sparse grass—barely big enough to hold the two Beaulac PD police cruisers, crime scene van, my unmarked and two other vehicles—an ancient and battered Peugeot, and a spanking new silver BMW.
The sight of the crime scene van pleased me. That meant that Crime Scene Technician Jill Faciane was already on the scene and doing her thing. A transplant from the New Orleans PD, who’d moved to Beaulac after Hurricane Katrina, she knew her shit, worked quickly and efficiently, and was my kind of smartass. Procedure dictated that crime scenes had to be processed before detectives could go tromping all over them, but if Jill was working I had solid hope that I wouldn’t have to stand out in the cold any longer than necessary.
I dug into the pockets of my jacket in the desperate hope that I’d left some gloves in them from last year, but all I found was an old wadded up Kleenex that probably had some ancient germs on it. I didn’t see any trash cans around, and I didn’t feel right casually littering out here, so I reluctantly stuffed the old tissue back down into my pocket, hoping that any germs it carried were long dead.
