Chapter Twelve
My heart slammed so hard against my ribs I was certain there would be a bruise. I licked my lips. My saliva was sour and the blood that coursed through my head was unbearably hot, loud.
I wanted to be the hero. I wanted to know I was doing the right thing, but this was all there was: Sampson, standing in front of me, arms outstretched. Three women dead. I felt my soul going ice cold, felt my body close in on itself.
“Okay.” The voice that came out of my mouth, that punctured the silence, didn’t sound like my own. “Just for tonight.” I said it as a kind of buffer, but Sampson just nodded.
“Where?” he said without looking up at me.
I drew in a slow breath, hoping the surge of oxygen would give me strength. “Down in the basement. The chains that—that used to be in your office are down there.”
“You’ve been waiting for this.”
“No.” I felt my eyes flash. “I’ve been waiting for you. Not like this—it was just—I wanted to keep something of yours. After you left . . .”
Sampson gave a humorless bark of laughter. “Ironic.” He jutted his chin toward my one hanging cuff. “Is that to cuff me for the walk downstairs?”
I shook my head silently and opened Will’s door.
We walked the four flights down to the basement in chilly silence, stopping on the landing just in front of the battered metal door. It was rusted, graffitied, and slightly dented, its shabby appearance betraying its strength.
“Well?” Sampson asked.
I had come this far, but was suddenly feeling unable to take the next step. My feet were rooted to the cement underneath us. Then I felt Sampson’s hand on my shoulder.
“It’s okay, Sophie.”
I let the warmth of his hand travel through me. I stepped forward and sunk my key into the lock. Sampson brushed by me and walked into the basement. “Anywhere in particular you’d like to lock me up?” His tone was jocular, but the glint in his eye was hard anger.
I pointed to a heavy steel pipe and Sampson went and stood there, legs akimbo, arms crossed in front of his chest. I dug the old chains from the cardboard file box labeled LAWSON/LASHAY, #351 and quietly brought them to Sampson, opening the shackles and closing them around his ankles, looping the rest around the pipe. Each click was like a dour stab to my heart, and my hands shook as he held out his final free wrist. I tried to avoid his eyes, but something drew me upward. The derisive look of just a few minutes ago was gone, replaced by a defeated one that made his usually clear, sharp eyes look pale and milky. His gaze was a final silent plea.
I clicked the last cuff on and turned my back.
I thought that final click was going to be the worst, but my angst only grew as I neared the door. I wanted to tell Sampson I was sorry, that I truly did believe in his innocence, but the words were lodged in my throat.
“I’ll be back when the sun comes up,” I mumbled to the floor.
I heard the clink of his chains and his long sigh before I pulled the heavy steel door closed and flicked the lock.
The single light in the apartment vestibule was buzzing, its garish yellow light flickering, casting weird shadows over the tiled entryway. I shivered and hugged my elbows, giving one last glance over my shoulder toward the hallway I had just come from. Guilt was a solid black weight deep in my stomach, weighing on my shoulders. I should have felt some sort of relief, or a surge of energy that pushed me to clear Sampson’s name, but everything about me was raw. I was exhausted, spent, confused. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to lie down and bury myself into my mattress, pull the covers up over my head and wake up in another life.
I was drowning in miserable self-pity when I heard the glass exploding. Jagged pieces of marble-sized glass came rocketing toward me and something huge—and heavy—clocked me right between the shoulder blades. I lurched forward, steeling myself against the back wall and trying to categorize what had happened when I felt someone grab me by my hair, yanking my head back until I thought my spine would snap. I heard individual strands of my hair breaking, felt them popping from my scalp like an army of tiny pinpricks. I tried to breathe, tried to take stock of my situation, but all I could do was see that stupid bare lightbulb wagging above my head.
“What the hell—” I widened my stance and pulled back against my attacker, ignoring the searing ache of my scalp.
I scratched at the wall and tried to regain my footing, but my assailant was strong and had the upper hand. There was another tug and I crashed against the warm body. An arm slung around my neck, tightening against my throat and I felt moist breath, hot lips on my ear.
“I should have killed you when I had the goddamn chance.”
I knew that voice: Feng. But it was bitterer, more tinged with poison than I had ever heard it.
“Feng?” My voice quavered. I was almost too astonished to be afraid. I wriggled. “Let go of me!”
Feng’s pit bull grip loosened a hair, but before I could negotiate a step, she turned me and shoved me hard up against the wall, her hair-pulling hand now at my throat. My shoulders ached, grating against the tile.
Feng’s eyes were liquid fire, her mouth turned into the most hateful grimace I had ever seen. “I’m going to rip your head off, Pippi.”
It wasn’t until I pulled my head back against the wall—doing my best to disappear into it—that I noticed the blood. It was on her hands, on her clothes in spatters and streaks, and now burning into my skin. And it was fresh.
“Whose blood is that?”
Flame in her eyes. “You know.”
I felt Feng’s fingers tightening around my throat, her thumb starting to dig into my windpipe. “No, I don’t,” I choked.
Feng didn’t loosen her grip, but she seemed genuinely stunned, momentarily confused. I clamped my eyes shut and channeled Buffy, doing the best—and probably the only—scissor kick of my life.
I felt Feng’s hard belly against the sole of my shoe. I felt her ribs licking against it, cracking, and I heard her breathless groan. Her fingers slipped from my throat, her nails raking across my skin as she stumbled backward, crumbling in on herself.
In one stunned millisecond, she regained her composure and lunged for me. I thought of Vlad’s combat tutelage and angled my body, leaning into Feng with an elbow across her sternum.
It barely stopped her and she laid her entire body weight into me, both of us flying backward, landing with a painful thud on the tiled floor. Her fisted hand clocked me in the jaw and I felt my mouth instantly fill with thick, velvety blood. I clawed at her face, unable to get any swing back for a punch, and tried to remember something defensively effective.
I started to squirm.
We rolled and jockeyed for position, thighs clamping, fingers fisted then clawed. “Why the hell are you doing this?” I managed to huff.
Feng tightened the strongest thigh muscles I would ever know and rolled herself on top of me. Her cheeks were flushed with effort, and tiny white bubbles were forming at the corners of her mouth. “You killed her. You fucking killed her. You killed them all, you fucking bitch!”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” I howled. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Feng’s fist connected with a bone-crunching strike. My whole skeleton started to throb, my eyes started to water. “Your fucking wolf! Your fucking wolf tore my sister apart. He ripped the shit out of everyone at the restaurant. Fucking animal!”
Feng’s militant struggle slowed insignificantly and a single tear cut through the blood on her cheek. By the time it drizzled to her chin, her eyes were flaming again, her jaw set.
“He didn’t,” I breathed. “He didn’t. He’s been chained up.”
I knew that Sampson had been chained up for just a few minutes. My hands were still cold from clamping the metal around his wrists. I knew that werewolves possessed a lot of nonhuman abilities, but super speed wasn’t one of them. He could have been responsible. There would have been time—plenty of time.
But I kept trying to convince myself otherwise.
But Feng’s maniacal expression remained unchanged. She reached behind her back and my breath caught when I saw the knife.
Mother-of-pearl handle. Glistening, razor-sharp blade. No match for a bass knife, had I even had it. My arms instinctively mashed against the wall, the one handcuff still locked around my wrist banging against the ancient tiles, a battle cry for the end of my life. I curled into myself as the blade came down, nicking the shoulder of my flimsy tank top, making an easy, clean slice through my skin. I used Feng’s technique and threw my entire body toward her, palms shoving at her chest, her face, whatever I could make contact with. The second she began to topple, I rolled.
“That . . . wasn’t . . . him,” I panted as I crawled toward the door.
The vestibule door swung open, raking across my knuckles, and I looked up.
“Alex?”
I saw him lean down, felt his arms dig under my shoulders and pull me to standing. He slammed the door hard before Feng could get to us and she pounded frantically, her hand shooting out the hole that she had made with the rock and going after the lock. I stared down at her flailing hand as it was shredded by the broken glass. Velvety blue-red blood bubbled up from her knuckles and trickled over her fingers. All I could think of when I saw her ruined hand was raw meat.
But Alex wasn’t distracted. He grabbed her hand and yanked her hard enough to smack against the door, then clamped a cuff on her, fixing the other one to the opposite door handle. Feng struggled.
“That’s only going to give us a few minutes.”
“But Nina and Vlad—”
“Can have a fresh meal,” Alex finished. He grabbed my arm and shoved me into his car, flipping the lights to “spastic” and pushing the gas to the floor once he got in.
“You came to save me?” I asked, brushing away a trickle of blood as it ran over my eyelid.
The muscle in Alex’s jaw jumped and I saw his fists tighten on the steering wheel until his knuckles went white. “I was just coming by to tell you about the massacre at the Du place. You weren’t answering your phone, which usually means you’re in a pizza coma or a life-and-death situation.” There was no humor in his voice and his expression remained hard, fixed.
“Are we going there? To the Du place, I mean.”
Alex didn’t answer me, but when he squealed the car on a right-hand turn, I knew.
I was chewing on my thumbnail the whole ride through the city, thinking about Feng chained at the front door—though knowing she had probably already broken out—and Mr. Sampson chained in the basement. I prayed that the rage and fury that were etched on Feng’s face would mean that the second she had freed herself, she would come after us, rather than deciding to go snoop around my building.
“What are you so nervous about?” Alex asked, eyes still focused on the windshield.
“I just got attacked by a crazed werewolf hunter, Alex, and we’re apparently headed to the scene of a bloodbath.”
“So you’re not concerned that the person responsible for said bloodbath is now running loose in the city?”
“Sampson didn’t do this, Alex.”
“And why should I believe that, Lawson? Suddenly you’re telling me the truth?”
I pressed my eyes shut. “Please understand, Alex.”
My plea hung on the uncomfortable silence in the car until we slowed at the mouth of Grant’s Gate. “I know Sampson had nothing to do with this because he’s chained up.” I watched Alex’s profile, his hard jaw and set, determined eyes. “I chained him up in the basement.”
“When?”
“Just before—just before—” I sucked in a shaky breath. “Just before Feng got me.”
“So, Sampson was chained up for what, the last hour? Maybe two?”
I nodded, overtly lying, but still trying to convince myself.
Sampson wouldn’t do this, I reasoned. He promised me . . .
And he spent a whole year pretending he was dead. The realization hit me like a fist to the gut and I felt my lips part, felt the words pressing against my teeth.
But Alex was ignoring me, cell phone pressed to his ear.
I studied the explosion of police officers unrolling crime scene tape and trying to hold back curious onlookers. Squad cars were parked up on sidewalks, giving us a still-narrow street to maneuver down once the office on patrol waved us through.
“We got to the crime scene just over an hour ago.”
I raised my eyebrows, feeling a sense of relief for the first time in weeks. “See?”
“I see that this massacre happened at least ten to twelve hours ago. Were you with Pete Sampson ten to twelve hours ago?”
I opened my mouth, my brain racking through the last several hours of my life: prowling through the UDA, prowling through Alex’s office, running out of the police station wearing fifty percent of a pair of handcuffs . . . knocking on Will’s door, Pete Sampson coming out of the shower.
Just a shower, I told myself.
“You don’t seem to be jumping in with a defense,” Alex noted.
“Why are you so hell-bent on crucifying Sampson?” I roared.
“Why are you so hell-bent on keeping your head in the sand?”
I had never seen that kind of rage from Alex before. It should have frightened me, but it only made me throw my shoulders back, narrowing my eyes in a hard challenge. I had to believe in Sampson—I just had to.
“Get out,” Alex spat. “I want you to see something.”
The sea of police officers parted as Alex flashed his badge and I hurried behind him. It was still unnaturally hot for San Francisco, but now there was something else hanging in the air—something that clawed at my chest and made it hard to breathe. I looked around cautiously, wondering if anyone else felt it, too. No one seemed to; all eyes were saucer-wide and glued to the taped-off door of the Du delicatessen, Chinese America Food Wi-Fi Bathroom for Customers Only.
The silence should have alerted me. At no time in my entire adult life had I known my city to be as eerily quiet as it was now. No one spoke. No birds chirped. No cars backfired, no church bells chimed, no planes whooshed overhead. There was nothing but an impenetrable, unholy silence.
Alex paused in front of a table set up along the sidewalk, blocking the entrance to the delicatessen. A police pop-up tent shaded it, and the table was heaped with all manner of crime scene preservation material. The man behind the table nodded solemnly when Alex showed him his badge, and pushed forward to stacks of hospital-looking garb.
“Put these on.” Alex didn’t look at me when he spoke to me, and I picked up my own stack of disposable crime scene cover-ups.
“These, too?” I asked, referring to the tie-back paper hats left on the table.
Alex nodded, the tension stiffening his body palatable.
“Yeah, it’s that bad,” the guy behind the table filled in, handing me a hat. I saw his eyes go to my cuffed wrist. “It’s couture,” I said hastily.
I tucked my mass of red curls up and nodded to Alex. “I’m ready.”
He grabbed my elbow and steered me to the door. I sucked in a preparatory breath and steeled myself, stepping into the dim delicatessen.
“Holy shit.” It was out of my mouth before I had a chance to think about it, and had I thought about it, I would have screamed. The stark white tiles and Formica tables that I had grown accustomed to in the store were still there, only now they were stained a heinous red. The little anime dolls wielding swords and arrows and daggers were drowning in sticky pools of it, and all around me bodies were scattered in various positions of desperate escape: a small woman’s fingers still curled, clawing the floor as she’d tried to pull herself toward the door; a young boy I recognized from a recent visit was only partially visible as he must have attempted to sprint out the back, and Xian, her bubble-gum-pink baby-doll dress in angry shreds, each tear to the fabric puckered and blood soaked, as if her attacker had had claws—claws that recently drew enormous amounts of human blood.
She had been lain on the counter that she usually stood behind, her body dumped—or positioned—in such a way as to leave no doubt that the woman no longer lived. Her head was cocked at an impossible angle, her arms stripped down to sinew and bone. Her legs were folded daintily, carefully underneath her but on closer inspection they were just that: placed carefully underneath her as they were no longer attached.
There was no warning to the bile that seared my throat and I turned to run, but slid on a pool of half-congealed blood. I flailed, but it was useless and the blood-soaked floor rose up to meet me, my cheek smacking sticky linoleum, my palms sliding against pooled fluids, and when I opened my eyes, the eyes that gazed into mine were the clouded, sightless eyes of the dead.
I felt my stomach seize again, but Alex grabbed me, snatched me up from the ground and held me against him. “No,” I screamed, kicking out and pounding his chest. “Why did you do this to me? Why? I didn’t do this! I’m not responsible for this! I fucking hate you! You insensitive piece of shit!” The tears were coursing down my cheeks, commingling with snot and blood that was not my own. My whole body hiccupped and my heart slammed against my ribs. I didn’t want Alex to touch me; I wanted to scratch out my eyes, to beg God to allow me to unsee everything that I just had. I wanted to be somewhere else, be someone else—even one of the sightless beings ruined on the floor. My whole world was crashing down around me and suddenly everything I knew was false.
“Calm down, Lawson, calm down.” Alex pressed me nearer to him each time I struggled. I could feel his rhythmic heartbeat thumping against my shoulder and suddenly, I was struggling to breathe.
“Why did you do this to me?” I croaked.
Alex scooped me up in his arms now. “I’m sorry,” he whispered into my hair. He carried me across the deli and when he pushed me out through the glass door, the clean smell of the outdoors couldn’t penetrate the heavy stench of death, the metallic smell of blood and ruin that hung all around me, that clung to my nostrils.
Alex set me down gently but still held me close. He looked down at me, his cobalt eyes searing. “I needed you to see what we’re dealing with. What Sampson has done.”
The tremor started deep in my soul. I felt it there, then felt it break into my body, seeping into every muscle, every pore. It ached when it went into my bones and twisted every muscle. Soon my teeth were chattering, and the bitter, bile-laced saliva pooled in my mouth. I wretched.
I wiped the back of my hand across my lips and spat.
“I’m sorry, Lawson. I shouldn’t have brought you here like that. I was just out of ideas. I—you wouldn’t listen to reason.”
“So that”—I jutted my chin—“is your idea of reason?” I held Alex’s eyes until he looked away.
“You had to see.”
“I’ve seen it.” I turned, shrugging out of my crime-scene garb. “But I still don’t see what Sampson has to do with it.”
Alex grabbed my shoulder and spun me to face him. “Really, Lawson? Look at that.” He pointed to the trail of blood that came from the deli. “Whoever did that was not human.”
“And that’s how I know it wasn’t Sampson,” I said.
Alex’s nostrils flared and he let out a deep disbelieving sigh. “Then give me someone else.”
“Nicco,” I said slowly.
Alex pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose, his whole body visibly slumping. “I’m sorry, Lawson. I am really, really sorry. I know this can’t be easy for you and I should have been more sensitive. What do you know about this Nicco guy?”
I started to shake my head. “Not much, but Sampson says he’s out for revenge. And it would make sense, especially if it—if the trail ends here.”
“Remember when you told me that werewolves are very few and far between in this city?”
“Well yeah, because of Feng and Xian.”
“Did you find any active werewolves in the UDA files?”
I swallowed hard. “No, but—”
“Sampson sent you to Mort’s. It took us an hour to get there and he tried to kill you. Do you think that wasn’t a coincidence? Do you think someone who really cared would put you in that kind of danger?”
Tears stung at the corner of my eyes and I blinked slowly, feeling the first tear fall.
“But the files,” I said. “Sampson told me to get the files.” I dug in my shoulder bag, a tiny of flicker of hope all but doused. I found the piece of paper that Sampson had given me. “See?” I held it up. “He told me to look up . . . werewolves.”
Suddenly, my skin was too tight. Everything hurt and my head started to pound. The paper trembled in my fingertips. Alex took it from me and turned it around.
“What is this?”
“It’s a page from a UDA file,” I answered.
“Were you missing a page?”
I shook my head. “No. I was missing a file.”
Alex looked down at the page and shook his head sadly. “Nicco Torres. Werewolf. Deceased, Anchorage, Alaska.”
“No. He’s good,” I said, biting off my words, rage burning tears behind my eyes.
“The good don’t always stay good,” he said, his eyes clearly avoiding mine.
“Sampson told me Nicco was the only other one to survive.” I sighed, dumbfounded, a tremble going clear through to my soul. “It wasn’t Nicco who vowed revenge. It was Sampson.”
Alex licked his lips. “What do we do now?”
I closed my eyes and saw the destruction burned into my eyelids. Saw the torn faces, the ruined bodies, the rivulets of blood. I saw the single tear cutting through the blood on Feng’s face, but I couldn’t pull up an image of Sampson.
“We bring him in,” I said, my voice cracking.
Alex leaned into his car and pulled out his radio, thumb at the ready. “Where is he? I’ll have a car there in two minutes.”
I put my hand on Alex’s arm. “No. Not the police.”
“Lawson, you saw what he did.”
I swallowed as the tears poured down my face in a steady flow. “So you know what he’s capable of. Jail won’t hold him. You’re just going to lose your officers. He’ll go with someone he trusts.”
A cool breeze started to kick up then, and for the first time in days the fog blew in in thick gray blankets. I shivered and held my hands over my bare arms. “He trusts me.”
“Lawson, are you sure?”
I wasn’t, but I nodded anyway. “I need to call Dixon. I need to tell him.” My breath hitched on a sob that wracked my entire body.
This couldn’t be happening.
“I need to tell him to have a team ready for—for him.” I couldn’t say Sampson’s name anymore. The person—the monster—responsible for all this carnage, for lying to me, wasn’t the Pete Sampson that I had known.
That Pete Sampson was dead.
I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the Underworld Detection Agency, each ring of the phone slicing deeper into my heart.
I was doing this.
I was leading Pete Sampson to his death.
Dixon’s voice mail clicked on and I cleared my throat. “Dixon, this is Sophie Lawson. I—I have the werewolf who killed Octavia. It’s—it’s Pete Sampson. He’s here in San Francisco.” It physically hurt to say the words. “I’ll bring him to you.”
I hung up my phone, numbness spreading through my whole body. Alex slid his arm around my waist and nuzzled me to him, but I had never felt more alone, more separate, than I did at that moment.
“Is Sampson secure where you have him?” Alex asked.
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s get your shoulder fixed up first.”
The ambulance was right behind us, and the same paramedic who tended to me at the Sutro Point crime scene went to work cleaning the wound on my shoulder. I recognized him from the Pacific Heights scene , where he’d been handing out paper cups of water to the pup cops after they hurled in the bushes.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” I said, feeling the strange need to insert some bland normalcy in the day. “Torres, right?”
“You’ve got a good memory,” he said without looking up.
“Guess so.”
The paramedic just smiled at me, and silently brushed mercurochrome over the wound. I winced and was about to open my mouth, but was stopped by a bone-rattling scream.
“Medic! Medic!” I heard as people started to mobilize toward the scream.
“It’s Feng,” Alex said.
“We should get out of here.”
“No,” Alex said, with a hand on my good shoulder. “She’ll be taken care of.”
I craned my neck to see two more paramedics restraining a flailing, screaming Feng. I should have been frightened, but my heart just lurched. Feng wasn’t looking for me. Her eyes were focused on the open door of the family restaurant, her cheeks blanketed in a wave of fresh tears, her whole body vibrating under her wails.
“Nick!” One of the paramedics holding Feng said, “We need you.”
My paramedic—Nick, I now knew—looked over his shoulder and then glanced back at me. “You’re almost done, but I’ve got to tend to her.”
“Don’t worry,” Alex said. “I can slap a Band-Aid on her.”
Nick nodded and snatched a fresh pair of gloves out of his medical box before running toward the group restraining Feng.
“I feel really bad for her,” Alex said, watching Nick join the group. Squad cars were starting to leave now and the restaurant was blocked off so most of the curious onlookers had ambled away. Those who remained looked up at the darkening sky with worry-etched faces and moved toward storefronts and awnings.
My cell phone chirped and I nudged it toward Alex as I held one arm up, using the other to poke around Nick’s abandoned medical box for a Band-Aid.
Alex answered the phone and mouthed, Dixon.
My chest tightened, my heart starting to thunder again. “I—I can’t,” I mumbled. Even after all that had happened, I couldn’t be the one to say the words. I couldn’t be the one to tell Dixon, couldn’t be the one responsible for Dixon giving the kill command.
Alex nodded and stepped back, walking behind a squad car for privacy. I sucked in a shaky breath and tried to locate a Band-Aid.
When my hand ran across something furry, I retracted it, disgusted.
“Ugh!”
What kind of injury requires something fuzzy in a first aid kit?
I pushed my hand into the medical box again, my fingertips touching the soft material.
“Fur?”
Shorn pieces, pressed to the back of the kit.
Long, brown—the kind that had been collected at the Sutro Point crime scene. I pulled out the piece and unfurled it, horrified, my eyes scanning the blood, the words.
“Oh my God.”
The paramedic was the contract holder? It didn’t seem right.
I shut the plastic case, my saliva going sour. Carved into the nameplate was the name N. Torres. And everything suddenly became clear.
“Nicco Torres,” I whispered.