Page 16 of Smoke & Ashes
“If you’re going to need to pay for a laboratory,” Tara told me, looking at my samples, “then money is no object.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think this is the kind of thing a lab would be able to help with.”
“Then what are you going to do?” She led me out of the conservatory into the crisp autumn air.
“Something that might look a bit weird and disrespectful.” I took the first swab out of its bag, let my mother’s power flow a little stronger, and very cautiously licked it. The taste of blood made my mother sit up and take notice fucking sharpish, but I’d braced myself for this, and whether it was the years of practice or the preservative effect of pickling my brain with alcohol for the past year or so, I found fighting her off easier than it had been. Still, the flavour of it, even that minute trace mixed with wolf-spit and mourning, ran through my body like a shot of neat absinthe. My hunter’s instincts rose and the voice of my heritage told me I had tasted a predator. Blood on blood on blood. “Vampire,” I said. I pocketed the teeth-sample and tried the one from the claws. The same—that reduced-down fortified tang of stolen life and centuries of darkness and murder. “She fought one. There may have been others and…” I rolled the sensation around my mouth like I was on some poncy wine course. “This is familiar. This is somebody I know.”
Tara growled that horrible bestial growl which reminded me that she was more animal than human on a bad day. “If it’s Julian Saint-Germain, she willdiefor it. Slowly.”
I put a hand on her arm. “No. I’d—I’d know if it was Julian, she’s … distinctive.” Wine and rose-leaves, eyes like lapis lazuli. One day she’d be out of my head.
“Douglas?”
That was more possible, but it felt wrong somehow. The Prince of Wands was an ancient being of terrifying power but he would have tasted different, like dust and stone and closed doors and secrets. “Give me a moment.” I shut my eyes and let the sense-memory take me. Every vampire’s blood was unique, a rich red distillation of everything they were, everything that drove them, and everything that had driven their progenitor, and their progenitor’s progenitor back down the centuries to whatever accident of dying had founded the bloodline in the first place.
This one was a creature of dark passion, hot hunger, jealousy that burned like quicklime. It was driven by love of a sort, but a love that came from the cold and the night.
“Fuck me. Patrick?”
“Thatchild?” Tara’s voice was filled with a rage you only saw in mobsters and serial killers. “He would notdare.”
She was right, he wouldn’t. Although technically he wasn’t a child, he just acted like one. But for all I thought he was an unbearable little wankstain, he wasn’t the sort to go around murdering werewolves. He certainly wasn’t the kind to do something that felt so occult. If it didn’t have a problematically vulnerable teenager attached, he usually wasn’t interested. “It’s not just that he wouldn’t dare he … wouldn’t.” A thought hit me. “Oh my god, it’s her.”
“Her?”
“His—vampires have a lot of words for it: sire, creator, philetor. The vampire who made him. Yelena was her name. You said yourself there was witchcraft involved here, and I think she was a witch when she was alive. She’s … kinda like Patrick, only older, smarter, a girl, and she can do magic.”
Tara looked unconvinced. “And what would she want with me and mine?”
“I don’t know, and honestly I’m a little bit scared to find out.”
She nodded. “Come.”
I followed her across the grounds and into the dark of the wood. Next stop, the scene of the crime.
8
The King & the Queen
As we approached the edge of the deep forest, the strange borderland between here and not here that the wolves of Safernoc were sworn to guard, Tara shrugged off her dress and shifted into the form of a gargantuan golden wolf. I placed a hand on her back, feeling her muscles shift under her fur as she padded through the undergrowth. I wasn’t sure if I was doing it for my comfort or hers.
It was still only a little past noon, but between the canopy and the pervading sense of supernatural menace, the woods were soon night-time dark. Then there was that ice-water chill that you got when you passed out of the normal world, and I was standing under a full hunter’s moon in a land of snow and shadows. Tara set her nose to the ground and started searching out a scent. I could have joined her: tracking by a combination of smell and occult predator’s instinct is one of the many weird gifts I can thank my mum for, but drawing on her power while in the realm of a completely different faery lord was probably asking for trouble. I’d once discovered, more or less by accident, that I had the power to annexe bits of other faeries’ realms on behalf of the Deepwild, and it was something I was keen to avoid doing unless I really meant to.
At last we came to a bloodstain on the snow. It stood out starkly in the moonlight, the only spot in the entire realm that wasn’t pure black and white. “Here.” Tara was back in human form. Seeing her naked in the cold made me want to wrap my coat around her for reasons that were absolutely one hundred percent to do with gallantry. Not that the weather seemed to bother her—clearly I could addsub zero temperaturesto the list of things that didn’t stop werewolves.
“This where you found the body?”
“Insofar aswherehas any meaning in a place like this, yes.”
There was that. Crime scene analysis was hard enough for the police with their clean-rooms and their luminol. It was tougher for us independents, and when the scene in question was a snowbound metaphor in a faery-dominated pocket reality, there wasn’t a whole lot anybody was likely to get from conventional methods. Still I walked over to the bloodstain where Tara was crouching and gave it the once over. The snow was disturbed past the point of usefulness. But then it would have been, the pack would have had to recover the body, after all, and you couldn’t do that without leaving footprints.
Still I could make out the extent of the bloodshed, and extent was the word. The spot where the body had been found was still soaked through a day later, even a light smattering of fresh snowfall not able to cover the wads of red ice that were packed into the ground. She’d probably been skinned where she’d fallen.
“What was her name?” I asked. I’d known Tuffy—by sight at least, and honestly to no better than a fifty-fifty guess—for years but I’d never known what she was really called.
“Tabitha Fford-Larson.”
I wasn’t going to ask how you went from that to “Tuffy” but then maybe “Tabby” had sounded too feline. The site of the death wasn’t going to tell me much—there’d been werewolves standing all around it and they’d obliterated anything I could have usefully learned from the immediate scene. But further out the snow was less trampled, and while it had drifted and flurried, obscuring a lot of the marks that I could have used to do the full Sherlock Holmes bit, I did manage to find something interesting: Two sets of footprints, nearly covered over, leading away from the scene. One of them, when I brushed the fresh snow aside to look at the older hardpack beneath, bloody.
