Page 15 of Smoke & Ashes
Travel with Julian had been all limousines all the way, because she’d been a motherfucking vampire prince and she wanted the world to know it. Tara, on the other hand, had a fondness for the classics, so we were chauffeured to Safernoc in a lovingly maintained Aston Martin DB5. This being Tara, I half-expected her to jump me in the back seat, but instead she lay her head against my shoulder and took my hand in hers.
“I’m sorry about your door,” she said. “I was angry. Last night was difficult for me, and I didn’t like that I was alone.” She turned her face towards me, midway between vulnerable and accusing. “I like even less that you were with a human.”
With Julian I’d got used to having a partner for whom sexual jealousy was an almost total non-issue. Then again, shedidspend most of her evening surrounded by half-naked women making come-bite-me eyes, so it would have been mega hypocritical. Tara was different—territorial. And also kinda werewolf-racist. “I know you’ve been through some shit,” I said. “But if you’re going to object to my lovers can you not do it on the basis of species.”
“Loversis it now?” Her fingers threaded through mine much more gently than she was speaking. “I was hoping you’d at least just think of her as somebody you fucked.”
“I’m not into labels.”
“Grandmama’s right. You make me weak.”
I put my arm around her, which maybe wasn’t the best way to challenge that particular complaint. “You’re not weak, Tara. You just need help with something.”
“I’m supposed to defend my pack. If I can’t, what good am I?”
“Defending people doesn’t mean nothing bad can ever happen to them. You’re a werewolf, not a god. And even if you were, I’ve met anactual godand he came close to losing everything to Sebastian Douglas. This world is full of stuff that can mess you up really, really badly. You’ve saved a lot of people from a lot of shit.”
I wasn’t sure, but I thought she was shaking. Whether it was in fear, anger, or something else entirely, I didn’t know. “Theyskinnedher, Kate Kane. It’s the worst thing you can do to one of my kind.”
“And you’ll find who did it, and you’ll do whatever heinous shit you need to do to settle the score.”
“We don’t even know where to begin.”
I squeezed her hand. “Which is why you brought me in. I don’t have a lot of talents, but finding out who did stuff is how I pay my bills. And it’s true I’ve been a bit lax on the whole bill-paying front lately, but the point still stands. We’ve got this.”
She shuffled down and put her head on my lap. It was terrible road safety but unless we were hit by a truck full of silver bullets she was safe enough. “Will you see her again?” she asked.
“No. She was—it was—I think it was one of those ships in the night deals.” The wordsfear death by watercrept into my head uninvited.
The car pulled out of London and wound slowly through the countryside.
I wasn’t looking forward to the bit that was coming next. I’d seen my fair share of dead bodies, human and otherwise, but they’d all had their skin on. We didn’t talk for the rest of the journey, but I stroked Tara’s hair and she seemed to find that soothing in a way that I chose to interpret as more human and less canine. Not that it mattered right then. For the first time in our relationship it unequivocally wasn’t a sex thing.
We decarred in the forest-shadowed car park at Safernoc Hall, with its slightly-too-on-the-nose fountain with the howling wolves, and walked up to the ancestrally imposing front door, which was already being held open by a small army of servants. As we approached the building, Tara’s bearing shifted from “this is falling apart and I can’t even” to “queen of all I survey”. She made the switch so suddenly and instinctively it was almost jarring, but that was … the deal. Being a hereditary werewolf-aristocrat came with its perks, but space to be vulnerable wasn’t one of them.
With a curt nod at the staff, Tara led me through the house and out the back door into a large and well-maintained garden. Crossing that, she brought me into a frankly excessive conservatory that climbed high with the sorts of fairytale bowers you got at the Chelsea Flower Show. I’d been to a werewolf funeral before and knew how this was going to work—they’d leave her in state before bringing her body to a cairn of stones in the deep woods, chasing the darkness away in a sacred hunt. At the moment, though, for all the pretty surroundings and the ritual, she was just evidence.
Tuffy’s body lay on a bier beside a large lily-strewn ornamental pond. It was ringed with green branches—oak and elm and yew, the ground around her scattered with hyacinth petals. I stared at those petals for a long time, not wanting to raise my eyes and look at the corpse. Tara didn’t give herself that luxury. She walked over to Tuffy’s side and stared her straight in the eye. I got my shit together and joined her. This was going to get ugly. Because—look, I was never Tuffy’s biggest fan but nobody deserved that kind of thing and I’m not exactly comfortable going deep into flayed-corpse detail.
“Fair warning,” I said. “I’m going to need to touch her.”
Tara nodded.
I crouched down and got as close to the dead woman as I could stomach. It was hard to kill a full werewolf—they healed wicked fast unless you cut them with silver, they could still fight you even half bled out, and they could go without food or air or water for a really, really long time. Which meant whatever did this had come prepared, or done something incredibly brutal.
I felt for puncture wounds or broken bones, the raw-meat texture of exposed muscle making me seriously want to gag, and only the fear of letting Tara down stopping me. It was nasty work, but it didn’t take long to find something conclusive—a thin, deep wound just breaking the breastbone and, if my guess about the angle was correct, piercing the heart.
“She’d have been dead when … y’know.” I said. “I know it’s not much comfort but I don’t think she’d have suffered.”
“I want to know who did this.” Tara’s eyes were yellow again, but I thought I could also see tears misting at their corners.
There were no other wounds—and that in itself told me something. Fighting a werewolf was messy and killing one in a single shot meant you had to either be unbelievably lucky or unbelievably good. “I’m going to need to turn her over,” I said reluctantly. “She was stabbed, but I think I’m looking at the exit not the entrance.”
Wordlessly, Tara walked around to her packmate’s head, and I took the feet. We turned the body as gently as we could, and I tracked the line of the wound to where I thought the attack should have come in. Soon enough I found it, a wider wound driven in through the spine, with a force that said something supernatural had moved quickly and decisively. There was a vague professional comfort in knowing I’d been right, but set against the circumstances it was pretty minimal. We turned her face up the moment I was done, and Tara put the body back into the closest she could get to a restful position.
The next bit was going to be harder. Well, harder in some ways. I opened my mind to the Deepwild again and let my senses sharpen. Somewhere I heard my mother laughing—thinking about it, a skinned corpse on a bed of leaves was probably in the opening verse of her version ofMy Favourite Things. There was an overwhelming smell of blood and death and flowers, which knocked me back a moment, but pushing through it, I started checking for any traces the attackers might have left behind. I tried her mouth first—she was a werewolf and if she’d been defending herself at all it would have been fangs not fists. There was definitely blood on her teeth—I swabbed up a sample of it and sealed it in an evidence bag. I did the same with her fingernails. More blood. With the flaying it could have been hers but I didn’t think so, or at least not completely.
“I might have what I need,” I said.
