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She nodded.
According to Ward, Rosemary was adamant that Theodore wasn’t the murder she’d seen, particularly since the poor man had been in wolf form when they’d killed him. According to him—by way of Ward, anyway—they’d known full well what he was.
That made me suspicious.
“Did they keep him stuck in wolf form?” I asked Ward.
Behind me, Kurtz muttered something I couldn’t make out under his breath.
Ward nodded, and Raj sighed audibly.
“Did he know how?” I asked.
“Something injected,” Ward answered. “It sounds a bit like a sedative to me, although he can’t tell me what.”
“Sounds awfully fucking MFM-y to me,” I observed.
But Ward frowned. “The ritual that Rosemary’s describing doesn’t sound at all MFM-y,” he argued. “A ritual knife? The shell thing, if you’re right about that? That’s all magical.”
Fucking hell. I’d been so fixated on the idea that whoever this was had been forcing shifters into animal form and killing them—or at leastshifter, singular—that I’d completely blanked on the contradiction.
Six months away from the job, and my brain was turning to goddamn mush.
“What about those Ordo people?” Raj asked us.
“The Ordo went after all Nids,” I told him. “Not just shifters. And they didn’t bother with either rituals or drugs when they did it.” I met Raj’s golden-brown eyes. “Like Sabrina Estevez.” Raj and I had found her a half-day after she’d been murdered, her body tossed in a field.
Raj blew air out through his nose. “So what I’m hearing is that this murder isn’t like either the Ordo cases or the MFM killings.”
Fan-fucking-tastic.
“Yep. We’ve found a brand fucking new group of murdering psychos,” I answered him.
“One hundred and thirty-seven days,” Kurtz muttered.
One hundred and thirty-seven days before he could stop fucking worrying about the fact that human beings—and Arcanids, to be fair, although I was starting to suspect that humans might be worse—were monsters to one another. Kurtz could buy his RV, and he and his wife could pretend that the world was the way most people thought—just, mostly fair, and safe unless you were a bad person.
Total shit, of course. And that’s not something you can unlearn, so it would come back to haunt him from time to time. Maybe while he lay there listening to crickets and cicadas on a summer night remembering the day he’d had to dig a wolf-shifter corpse out of the back yard of a museum, working blisters into his hands and trying not to wonder how many people Theodore Newton had left behind.
Or maybe that was just me.
Because six months later I still fucking woke up in a cold sweat with the images of skinned shifters burned into the backs of my eyelids, furry bodies swinging from meat hooks with gold hoops in their noses, and—on really bad nights—the bloated corpse of a Xoloitzcuintli dog covered in mud and grime in a salt marsh.
One of those things was the product of my obviously traumatized imagination, but the other two had been all too real.
Maybe I should addGo to therapyto my list of methods of self-improvement, although I really didn’t want to do that. I have exactly the wrong temperament for therapy. I hate talking to people, I hate disclosing shit about myself, and I hate feeling vulnerable.
Guess what therapy does?
And yeah, I get that thepointis to work on the ability to feel vulnerable because whatever the fuck I was doing clearly wasn’t healthy, but. There is always a ‘but’ with me.
With a sigh, I stopped going down that largely unproductive pathway and returned my attention to the hot and sticky yard with its patchy grass, tangle of dead and dying raspberries, and at least two bodies, one canine, one shifter.
And a ghost who insisted that there was another one in there somewhere.
“Rosemary really can’t be more specific about where she saw them bury the other body?” I asked.
I watched Ward’s eyes track over to where the raspberries had been, and figured he was probably watching one of the two ghosts do something.
