Night Shift by Lilith Saintcrow

  "Clear," I called, and holstered my guns. Montaigne's gusty sigh of relief preceded him through the door.

  "Are you staying for the slicing, Jill?" Stan sniffed, and his bleary gaze skittered away from my breasts, roved over the five bodies on the right-hand side, and came back up to touch my face, uncertain.

  Five autopsies take a lot of time. "I'll take a look, but I'll leave the deli work to you and Monty. I'll need the report.

  This is one of mine."

  Stan's face fell. So did Monty's. They both looked sallow, and it wasn't just the fluorescents.

  "Christ." Monty didn't quite reel, but he did take a step to one side, like a bull pawing the grass, uncertain what to charge. "What the fuck is it?"

  "Don't know yet." That was the truth. "I'll go by the scene, see if I can pick up a trail. From what you're telling me, it either got what it wanted or was scared off by the black and whites. I'm guessing they didn't come in silently."

  He rolled his eyes as Stan rocked back on his heels, stuffing his hands in his lab coat pockets and eyeing both of us. "Suppose you can't tell me anything useful."

  Not yet I haven't even looked at the bodies. "This is hunter's work, Monty. How much do you want me to tell you?"

  Monty shook his head fiercely. If he could have clapped his hands over his ears like a five-year-old, he might have tried to do it.

  Wise man.

  "I'll take a look," I repeated, "and then I'll hit the street and try to find a trail. Nobody gets away with killing our brave blue boys in my city, gentlemen. Stan?"

  He shrugged his thin shoulders, the pens in his breast pocket clicking against each other. "Be my guest."

  He very pointedly didn't offer to unzip the bags for me, or caution me not to destroy any evidence. I couldn't even feel triumphant. Maybe it was just his cold.

  I set my back teeth, the charms in my hair tinkling against each other, and paced cautiously up to the first body bag. Nothing stirred, and none of my senses quivered. I touched the zipper and let out a soft breath, glad the two men were behind me.

  I pulled the zipper down. I have never figured out if it's easier to do it in one quick swipe, like tearing off a Band-Aid, or slowly, giving yourself time to adjust.

  I usually go with the quick tear. Call it a personality quirk.

  The body had been savaged, great chunks torn out. The face had been taken off, and his short cop-buzz haircut had beads of dried blood sticking to its bristly ends. The only thing left intact was the curve of a jaw, slightly fuzzed with stubble. He hadn't shaved, this man.

  "That one's Sanders." Monty shifted his weight, his slippers squeaking a little against the tile. "About forty-five.

  Retiring next month, early."

  A lifer. And before my time. Now he'd never retire. I drew the zipper down more, studying the mass of meat. His feet were stacked neatly between his knees, and his right arm was missing. The ribs were snapped, and the smell boiled up into my nose and down into my stomach, turning into sourness.

  That's hellbreed, and something else. Something I should know. A reek like that is distinctive, and I should be up on it, dammit. Are we looking at a hellbreed working in concert with something else? They're not like that, most of them are jealous fucks. Still, it's possible. But nothing a hellbreed can control smells like this. The shudder bolted down my spine. I drew the zipper up, went to the next one.

  "Kincaid," Monty supplied. "Twenty-eight. Good solid cop."

  I nodded, pulled the zipper down in one swipe.

  This one had a face. A round, blond, good-natured, blood-speckled face. I swallowed hard. The rags of his uniform couldn't hide the massive damage done to this body either—the purple of the torn esophagus, white bits of bone, a flicker of cervical vertebra peering up at me. His throat had been torn out and his viscera scattered. The bathroom stink of cut bowel flooded the chilly air. Both his femurs were snapped.

  Marlow, the third, had been savaged. He'd been the driver in the first traffic unit, and whatever had attacked him had plenty of time to do its work. There was barely enough left to be recognizable as human.

  The fourth—Anderson, Marlow's partner—was the worst. His arm had been torn off, something exerting terrific force to break the humerus just below the shoulder. The force had to have been applied at an angle for the bone to yield before the shoulder dislocated. His other limbs hung by strips of meat. All of them. And his head.

  There wasn't enough of any of them left for an open-casket service.

  As always, the shudder passed and the bodies became a puzzle. Where did this piece go, where did that piece go?

  Then I would catch myself, horrified. These were human beings. Each one of them had gotten up out of bed this morning expecting to see sundown. Nobody is ever really prepared to die, no matter what you see in movies or read in fairytales.

  My stomach churned, a hole of heat opening right behind my breastbone. Marty's Turns were starting to look pretty good. He bought them by the case, he wouldn't miss a few hundred.

  I zipped Anderson's bag back up. Turned to find both Stan and Marty staring at me. "I'll drop in later for the files."

  My eyes burned, stinging, from disinfectant married to the smell of death. "What exactly did the first on-site traffic unit report?"

  "Just 'something weird.' There wasn't a code for it." Monty's paleness had long since passed from cheese to paper.

  "Jill?"

  "I don't know yet, Monty. Give me a little time to work this thing. Have traffic units take precautions; if it's weird and there's not a code, don't stop. Tell the beat cops too—they're vulnerable. If they see anything weird, they're to report so I can get a pattern of movement, but they are not to pursue. Got it?"

  He nodded. "Do you have an idea, at least? I don't want to know," he added hurriedly. "But…"

  But you feel better when the hunter at least has an idea. I know, Monty. I know. I could have given a com-foiling lie. "No." I looked at the bodies, lying slumped under their rubber blankets. All safe and snug, never having to worry about the job or the cold winter again.

  Bile rose in my throat. "No. But I'm going to find out."

  Because whatever this is smells like hellbreed and rips things up like no hellbreed should. The claw shape is strange. If I didn't know better I'd think it was a Were. But no Were, even a rogue, would go near anything hellbreed.

  Great.

  Chapter Five

  False dawn gathered gray in the east, veils of fog from the river reaching up like fat white fingers as I gunned the engine. I winced as my orange Impala's full-throated purr took on a subtle knocking. Need to get that fixed. Should change the oil soon too.

  The interstate—or the Drag, if you're a local—comes up out of the well of the city in slight curves north through Ridgefield toward the capital, striking for the heart of desert and sagebrush once it's out of the low-lying area watered by the river. Coming down into the city it veers through suburbs, taking advantage of the high ground and flying over deep gullies and concrete washes built to siphon off flash floods. Once it hits the actual city limits it becomes three lanes in either direction, jammed during rush hour and perfect for illegal races once normal people are in bed.

  Just south of downtown there's a stretch with hills on either side, thick with trees and trashwood, the green belt going up to chain-link fences facing the blank backs of businesses and warehouses. The scene was still crawling with forensic techs, and when I parked at the periphery a thin, nervous traffic cop came bustling up to tell me to move along—and retreated as I rose out of the Impala, meeting his eyes and keeping my silence. He recognized me, of course.

  They all do.

  I've heard they have a pool on where I'm going to show up and when, and the betting is fierce; there is a whole arcane system of verifying sightings left over from Mikhail's tenure. Hunter sightings are comforting for them; lets them know I'm still on the job.

  It's when I disappear for a while that they get nervous.

&
nbsp; Two lanes of southbound traffic were blocked off, and traffic was extremely light. Still, the infrequent cars were slowing down to gawk, and the scene was being trampled.

  I couldn't blame them. Cops never like to lose one of their own. Most of them were observing a respectful silence.

  Quite a few of them looked like they'd been rousted from bed, too. I saw Sullivan, his red hair catching fire on top of his lanky frame as the sun began its work in earnest. His partner, a short motherly woman in a sweater-coat and knit leggings, stood beside him staring at one of the long garish streaks of wetness on the road. The streaks everyone was hypnotized by.

  Blood doesn't dry as quickly as everyone thinks, even out here at the edge of the desert. It stays tacky-wet for a long time before it turns into a crust. A flat iron tang rose to my nose, like a banner through the stew of humans milling around and the sharp dual stink of hellbreed and something else, something I'd never smelled before.

  Mikhail would have mentioned something like this if he'd ever come across it, wouldn't he? I caught myself.

  Concentrate on the job, Jesus, you're getting punchy.

  Too bad I wasn't going to get any rest anytime soon.

  I threaded my way through the milling crowd. As fast as people arrived others left, to go back to work or home after paying their respects. It was eerily quiet, and the scar throbbed on my wrist, tension and frustration in the air plucking at it. Got to cover that goddamn thing up.

  Word of my appearance spread quickly, a murmur through the crowd. Foster, his sleek dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, was the only one brave enough to approach. Of course, he was my Forensics liaison this month since Pepper was out on maternity leave. He ducked carefully under the yellow tape keeping everyone back—in this crowd, there was no shoving. The mannerly silence was almost as eerie as the palpable grief.

  "Hey, Jill." Dark circles bloomed under Foster's blue eyes, and the silver stud in his right ear glittered. "How you?"

  I don't often use the Forensics liaison; most hunters don't. We work most closely with Homicide detectives and next with Vice; they do the grunt work in getting files ready. Most of the time a hunt goes so quickly we don't have time for that type of legwork, and we don't want the human law enforcement getting close to the nightside anyway. They're our eyes and ears, since a hunter can't be everywhere at once.

  Nobody wants their eyes catching flak.

  "Hi, Mike. Monty called me in." I pitched my voice low, my hands thrust deep in my coat pockets. Leather creaked as I shifted. "What do we have?"

  He was pale under the even caramel of his skin. "A total goddamn mess, that's what. Five goddamn bodies and that rookie bleeding all over everything. The main scene is up in the woods, there." He pointed to the ordered commotion on the hillside. "They didn't get more than twenty feet before something leapt on 'em. Just like shooting fish in a fucking barrel."

  I winced at the mental image. And why would cops get out of their cars and pursue something up a hillside? "Any body parts you can't find?"

  He shrugged. "Too soon to tell. Come up the hill. If Monty hadn't called you I would've. This is grade-A weirdness, just your type."

  "I hate to be pigeonholed." I followed him, skirting the three traffic units parked in standard pattern on the shoulder, inside the cordon of yellow tape. Their lights still revolved, running off the batteries.

  The last car in line had been shredded, its windshield broken and the roof ripped open, jagged metal edges exploding. Bits of broken colored plastic and glass from the lights were smashed to the side.

  Christ. My blue eye didn't see any sparking and smoking of etheric energy, though the whole scene reeked of hellbreed. They are stronger and faster than humans, but a 'breed that could do something like this without sorcerous help…

  What the hell is this?

  The rapidly lightening sky triggered another idea. I glanced overhead. No circling copters yet. "The press?"

  "Captain Bolton's putting together a release about a car bomb or something. We've been able to keep the goddamn vultures quiet so far, but it's only a matter of time." Foster snorted, as if he wanted to spit but couldn't bring himself to do so. The two wide lanes of pavement were streaked and spattered with gore.

  I was surprised the vultures hadn't scented it yet. Last thing we need is footage of this getting out We crossed the ditch, me in a single leap and Mike over a piece of plywood someone had laid down, and plunged uphill into the bushes. The sharp smell of sage and pine stung my nose, mixed with the belching tang of death and that horrible stink of hellbreed and something else.

  Dry fur. Dandruff clotted in drifts. Desiccated, exhaled sickness, as if a dog had crept into a hole to die.

  What is that? I wished I could find something to cover the scar up. Preternaturally acute senses are useful, but it stank.

  There was a clearing ringed with pine trees, their bark tinder-dry and needles crunching underfoot. Silence broken only by the shuffling of the techs' booted feet and occasional muttered directions. Flashes popped, taking merciless pictures, drenching the scene in brief shutter-clicks of light.

  There was so much blood. I've seen plenty of butchery, but this was… The stench of a battlefield hung over the small clearing, cut bowel and wet red iron, as well as the heatless fume of violence. The smell of hellbreed and something else was so deep and thunderous my eyes watered.

  The spindly tree trunks were shredded, and I stopped to examine the deep furrows carved in them. They were all vertical, and my eyes caught a thin reddish glint.

  "What the hell?" I leaned closer, examining the long strands. Red-gold, and with a springy curl unlike anything I'd seen. It was all over, in the scratched furrows and rough bark. "Mike?"

  "What, that shit? Hair. We don't know if it's human or animal yet."

  "Where is it? All over?"

  "All over. On the… the victims too." His voice didn't break, but it was close. "There's even some out on the road, in the blood. Patches of it."

  Weird. "What about the scratches?"

  "Just on the trees around this clearing."

  "Huh." I thought about this, circling the clearing as Mike peeled off to exchange low words with a woman from the medical examiner's office, her dark hair pulled back in a sloppy ponytail. I took care not to disturb the techs at their work, and they took care not to get in my way. We're all happier that way.

  You'd think a hunter wouldn't have to worry about evidentiary procedure and the like, but it always pays not to piss off the techs. And you never can tell when something small and insignificant they find is going to turn a whole case on its head, or spin it so you can see the pattern behind the events.

  The stench was deep and dark enough I had trouble finding a trail. My nose stung and my eyes prickled with tears.

  One slid hot down my cheek and I palmed it away, silver chiming in my hair. The creaking of my boots and coat was very loud in the predawn hush.

  I had unusual difficulty making a coherent pattern out of the scuffed and blood-soaked dirt. The chaos must have been intense at night with nothing but handheld flashlights—not even the current illumination of false dawn and the portable floodlights at the periphery of the clearing, mixing a throat-coating wash of diesel into the equation. I finally gave up on trying to reconstruct the fight. There simply wasn't enough on the hard-packed dirt scattered with pine needles.

  For a moment I imagined being out here in the dark, something chasing me and nothing but a human's reflexes and one police-issue Glock to fight it off with, and my skin chilled.

  I finally zeroed in on a usable trail, but it was a bust. The scent led away from the scene at a sharp angle, back down to the cars; I followed. Then I picked it up again at the edge of yellow tape down on the freeway, and pursued it across the open lane and the meridian before it vanished into thin air. One moment, nose-watering stink, the next, nothing but the smell of damp wiry grass in sandy soil and the scent of morning.

  Dammit. If it's hellbreed it might be
able to mask. A hellbreed and something working in concert? What would work with one of them? Even their own kind don't trust them.

  Still, that's what the evidence points to. Hellbreed plus something else. In other words, a big fucking problem.

  I let out a sharp frustrated breath. Traffic was beginning to pick up, and dawn was well under way. I heard the distinctive thrupping of a chopper and looked up. Channel Twelve had arrived.

  Dammit.

  Chapter Six

  My warehouse smelled like dust and there was nothing in the fridge except a takeout container of fuzzy green something that had once, I think, been chicken chow mein. I pushed the fridge door shut and leaned my forehead against its cool enamel for a moment, inhaling.

  There was nothing I could do just now. When dusk hit I'd start canvassing the city. Anything that smelled that bad was leaving a trail, and that taint of hellbreed would give me a place to start. If any of Hell's citizens were developing a taste for cop, someone would know something, I had just the place to start, too.

  You know what this means. You're going to have to visit him early.

  I pushed the thought away. Hauled myself up and away from the fridge. Eating could wait. I opened up the cabinet over the dishwasher and got out the bottle, poured myself a stiff jigger of scotch, and downed it. Poured another, tipped it down my throat, and relished the brief sting.

  It helped, a little.

  Mikhail had left me the warehouse. Its walls creaked, each sound echoing and bouncing. Nothing could sneak up on me here, between the acoustics and the wide-open spaces. My bed was set out in the middle of its own room, well away from the walls. The sparring-space was clean, swept regularly. A long spear-shape under amber silk hummed on one wall, beside the other weapons, all racked neatly.

  Mikhail's sword hung in its sheath, its clawed finials and long hilt with the open gap in the pommel reflecting golden light. The sheath glowed—worn, mellow leather—the sword drawing strength from the square of sunlight resting over it, metal vibrating with its subliminal song. The skylight above had turned fierce, an open eye letting down a blade of light.