“Where is she?” Her tone was as close as Becca had ever heard to a shout coming from Lizzie Blackhawk. The deputy was inside the hardware store the moment that Becca unlocked the door and turned the lights on.
Becca wondered who she was talking about and why she hadn’t just called. But only for an instant. “What are you talking about?” Becca asked, the question automatic. It had to be Erin. Something had happened to Erin. Her stomach plummeted through the floor. They were so close to the full moon as it was. Had she changed early and escaped or something?
Becca tried to brace herself for the worst. She hadn’t slept a wink all night as it was, tossing and turning and obsessing over all the things that could go wrong, had gone wrong. An angry deputy hadn’t been among them, though certainly werewolves had.
Lizzie’s eyes narrowed as she stared at Becca, her expression suggesting that she was a woman pushed to the brink and beyond. Her lips parted to let what looked liked they’d be some choice words out.
Shelly and Pete walked through the open door behind her at exactly the right moment to interrupt whatever the deputy had been about to say. “Hi. What’s up, Lizzie?” The confusion on Pete’s face was echoed in his voice.
Lizzie whipped around and stalked up to Shelly. From where Becca stood, it looked like her hackles were up. Or would have been, if she’d had any. “What have you done with her? I was going to handle it. Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re about to get us into?”
Shelly’s face mirrored Becca’s own puzzlement for an instant. Then, Becca could see the Alpha rise to the challenge. She darted over to the door and very gently closed it behind all of them, flipping the sign to “Closed.”
When she turned around, Lizzie and Shelly were glaring at each other. Becca stepped cautiously to Shelly’s side. “Maybe we should go in the back and you can tell us what’s happened, Lizzie. I know I don’t know what you’re so upset about and I’m guessing they don’t either.”
The deputy glared at her again, shoulders rigid, then back at her cousin. For a wild instant, Becca feared that both of them were going to turn and fight it out in Peterson’s Hardware. Lizzie looked like she was going to manage to change on sheer willpower alone right now, magic or no magic.
Something in Becca’s tone must have convinced her though, because after what felt like an hour, she stepped back and jerked her head toward the back room. Shelly led the way, Becca trailed after her and the deputy stalked after them.
“Right. I’ll just open up the store.” Pete’s mutter would have been inaudible to human ears. Becca was torn between giggling and going back to help him. But if she did that, there’d be no one to mediate between Shelly and Lizzie. And that didn’t seem like a good idea.
She squared her shoulders and followed them into the room. Lizzie closed the door behind her, stopping it just short of a slam. “Erin’s gone. There’s nothing on our security cameras, so wherever she went, I’m guessing it wasn’t down to the corner for coffee. I can’t think of anyone else who would have stopped by just to let her out, can you?”
Shelly stepped forward as Becca gasped. “What the hell do you mean ‘she’s gone’? It’s a prison. You’ve got cameras. You’ve got guards. How do you lose a full grown woman?” She whipped around to Becca. “Tell her what we were doing last night.”
Becca could feel her mouth open and shut like a fish gasping for air. What did Lizzie mean? She couldn’t be gone. Where would she go? “We were at Circle House for the afternoon, then at Shelly and Pete’s for dinner. Ask him or the kids. I left late and we sure weren’t planning a jailbreak then.” Her voice sounded like it belonged to someone else, someone who spoke with a tinny, hoarse whisper.
Lizzie smacked the wall behind her with her open palm, the sound echoing through the little room and making Becca jump. “Then who helped her? Yeah, we’ve got guards and cameras. You know what they saw last night? Nothing. Not a damn thing. Someone or something put the camera on a loop. All it showed was Erin sleeping. And why they didn’t see anyone go past is anyone’s guess. Who else can do that besides the Pack?” Lizzie raised her hand and ran her fingers through her hair with a quick jerky movement.
Becca’s jaw dropped and her brain spun. Someone had...taken Erin? The thought was more than she could process.
Shelly dropped with a thump into the tired armchair next to the desk. It looked like every emotion in the book galloped across her face, sometimes two at a time. Finally she gave a tiny cough, almost a growl. “I won’t deny that I was thinking about it, planning it, if we couldn’t get her bailed out before the full moon. But I was going to give the lawyer another twelve hours before we did anything drastic.”
The lawyer? Becca could feel her eyebrows rise like they were on cords. What if he had something to do with this? Though as she thought about it, she was hard-pressed to find a reason for what she was thinking, apart from thinking that he wasn't what he seemed to be. Not unless Shelly had only promised to pay his firm for successful results or something, and that seemed unlikely. Maybe Erin had gotten freaked out about the full moon and their lack of progress and escaped on her own. Now that seemed a possibility she should keep to herself, once she’d thought of it.
When she started paying attention to the other two women again, Lizzie was giving her a considering look. “Got an alibi for last night after you left Shelly and Pete’s?”
“Uh...” She looked at Shelly for help. Unless Clyde counted as an alibi, she had nothing. “I didn’t do it. I wanted to. But I didn’t.”
There was nothing but silence and tension for a really long couple of minutes. Then Lizzie sighed with frustration. “Do either of you know anyone else who could have done this? I’m not ruling out Erin herself, mind you. It just seems weird to me that she’d turn herself in only to turn around and escape. But I can believe that she could have been talked into it.”
Shelly shrugged, the gesture acknowledging Lizzie’s comment without admitting anything. “I’d like to know the answer to that myself. But I’m more concerned about whether or not Erin is safe. That’s my priority.” She stood, meeting her cousin’s eyes.
Lizzie’s walkie-talkie beeped from her belt. She pulled it out and frowned at them. “I need to answer this. Can I get a minute alone? Police business.”
Dismissed, Becca and Shelly went back into the store. Pete was waiting on a customer and smiling like nothing was wrong. Shelly reached out and touched Becca’s shoulder lightly. “We’ll get her back and we’ll figure this out.” She hesitated, then asked, “It wasn’t you, was it? I won’t tell her until I have to.”
Becca snorted. As if she was ever that good of an actress. “Nothing to tell. I wish I had! Then I’d know where she was and that she was safe.” Becca struggled against the tears that were threatening to pour down her face.
Lizzie walked out of the room behind them. “We got an ID on the body that was in Erin’s trunk.” Her tone was grim and Becca flinched away, not ready to hear more bad news. “It was a guy from the group Annie brought in, one Leroy Callan.”
“Leroy?” Becca gasped. When last she’d seen the medic, he’d been in the midst of a gun battle at the trailer where they’d been holding her captive. She assumed he’d been killed when it blew up or arrested later when the Pack rescued Shelly or run off or something. He hadn't been with Anderson and Annie at the cave.
But there was no need to ask why Erin would have wanted to kill him herself if she’d run across him: he’d given Becca and Shelly the slayer’s “cure.” Becca was still having nightmares and some aftereffects, and Shelly wasn’t talking it about it much, a bad sign in itself. Somehow, it was easier to imagine Erin killing somebody like him than almost anyone else.
Becca rubbed her forehead and wondered whether she should look relieved or upset. Something that combined her knowledge of her own innocence and the suggestion that Erin might have done this in self-defense was clearly the way to go. “Maybe he tried to cure her,” she mumbled finally.
Shelly twitched, but it was Lizzie who spoke, her expression impassive. “I’d like to have you come by the morgue to confirm the ID, Becca, since you’re one of the few people around here who dealt with him when he was still alive. Can you spare her for an hour?”
This second question was to Shelly, not her. Becca sent out a deep and fervent hope that her boss would say that she couldn’t be spared, but Shelly disappointed her by nodding in agreement instead.
Shelly and Lizzie exchanged a few words that Becca didn’t quite catch before Lizzie left the store. Becca trailed reluctantly after her like she was on an invisible leash. “How bad is he messed up?” Her brain was full of all kinds of gory images from TV and movies. It would be like one of those forensic lab shows, she just knew it. The kind where the bodies looked like bony hamburger. Breakfast roiled in her stomach.
“You’re a werewolf and you’re this big of a wimp?” Lizzie’s sunglasses were back down over her eyes as they climbed into her car. “I won’t deny that it’s pretty bad and that you’re likely to be able to confirm that it’s him based on your sense of smell and not by the way he looks. But it’s not like he had a bunch of other ‘acquaintances’ in these parts so I don’t have too many other people to ask.”
And it gives you a chance to cross-examine me again to see if I’m holding out on you. Becca bit back that thought, as well as the second one: Shelly would recognize his smell, too. The deputy was doing her job and it wasn’t as if Becca knew anything about what Erin had done or why. She had no secrets to betray. Somehow, that hurt the most, if she stopped to think about it.
But this wasn’t the time to wallow. Instead, she asked another question that had been on her mind. “You spend any time at Circle House?” There would be no harm in changing the subject, at least for a little while.
“Of course. My grandma and one of my great aunts are living up there now. I try to go over and visit every couple of weeks or so and drag my kid along. I guess Shelly finally got around to taking you over there and introducing you around. Who’d you end up talking to? And more importantly, what did they tell you?”
Becca told her about their visit, right up through the story about the rogue wolf and what had happened to her and her family. She paused a minute. “Was that your family, the ones who took in the kids?”
“Yep. My aunt. I knew them a little, growing up. They were grown up by the time I got old enough to tag around after them. Jimmy was a nice enough guy, though he smoked too much pot back then. Sara...Annie was always the dominant personality of the two. Not too surprising that she was picked to change.” Lizzie fell silent, her expression thoughtful.
Becca snorted. “You’d think the valley’s magic would make better choices. It’s had enough practice.”
“Well, she wasn’t always the Annie you met. Back when she was plain old Sara Ann, she was a pretty decent choice. At least until she really went off the rails about everything and that Anderson asshole made it worse.” Lizzie pulled up into the parking lot of the county building and parked. “And don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing. I’m not that easily distracted. You’re still on my suspect list, at least until I find out what happened to Erin.”
“But in the meantime, I get to look at a mangled corpse,” Becca muttered. “Not like I’m being punished or anything.”
Lizzie looked at Becca over her glasses. “You’re contributing to an ongoing investigation.” She paused as they got to the steps and frowned at Becca. Her expression softened a little. “Seriously, are you ready for this?”
“No. But I’ll do it anyway. Maybe I can see something your people missed, something to prove that Erin is innocent. Or at least justified.” Becca drew in a deep breath and yanked the front door open, letting out a dull chemical cloud that nearly sent her back down the steps, coughing. “All right,” she added grimly as she caught her breath. Shallow breaths, that was the way to go. Hopefully. “Let’s do this.”
Lizzie smiled a little, but turned her face away as if she thought Becca wouldn’t notice, and led the way to the morgue. She swung the door open into a sterile lab where a couple of techs bustled around the white sheet-covered tables that Becca had been expecting. Why did they use white? Wouldn’t red or black make more sense? Becca had always wondered about that.
But a quick look at the one body that wasn’t covered up drove the question clean out of her mind.
“Oh my god,” she whispered. Lizzie handed her a trashcan without comment. Becca clutched the metal rim like it was a security blanket, but she didn’t throw up. Not yet. After all, hadn’t she done something like this herself? But that was different, her brain insisted. She closed her eyes and hoped with all her heart that this time was different, too.
Then she opened her eyes and tried to make herself focus. The body—she had trouble thinking of it as Leroy—lay on a table near the door. Lizzie hung back to talk to one of the techs, a lanky red-haired man, leaving Becca to approach the table on her own. It took everything she had to walk up to it.
The techs had been hard at work and a lot of his skin had been peeled back or cut open. Becca took a quick look at body parts she couldn’t identify, then looked back into the trashcan. This wasn’t getting her anywhere. It was time to use some of her wolf skills.
She closed her eyes again and gave the air a tentative sniff, trying to rouse her wolf senses to process whatever information the corpse could give her. The chemicals made it nearly impossible. Instead, the wolf in her head urged her to run, to race out the doors away from this artificial hell and into the woods.
At least when it wasn’t urging her to lose her lunch in the trashcan she was still clutching.
The mix of reactions thudded their way through her until she trembled from trying to control herself. Running was only a temporary solution. Lizzie would only make her come back, or so she told herself. She took her mind away from the morgue for a few moments, imagining green, peaceful places in the woods, sunlight dappling green leaves, a stream nearby.
As her panic subsided, she began to smell familiar scents. Then a wave of memories of the trailer and Annie and Leroy giving her their cure swept through her. The wolf within her got distant, dwindling away, getting lost in the remembered fog that came with the injections. But when it surged back, it came with a vengeance. For a wild horrible second, she thought she was going to change then and there.
She struggled for control until it felt like hours before she dimly realized that Lizzie was holding her arm. “Becca? Becca, you still in there? Stay with me.” The deputy’s voice was firm, commanding, and it helped steady Becca, giving her an anchor to pull herself from the past to the present as her lids fluttered open.
A glance at her hands showed nails longer and sharper than they should have been, as well as more than a bit of extra hair. She shook her head and twitched all over like a dog, trying to shake it all off. Even she couldn’t change in daylight, and she had more control over her change than most of the other wolves. Even with the damage that the cure had done. This was all in her head. She just needed to find her way out.
She met Lizzie’s anxious eyes. “Sorry. Too many memories for a minute there. I’m okay. And yes, that’s Leroy all right.” And other than the fact that his death had gotten Erin into trouble, she couldn’t summon a great deal of sorrow over it. But then, Lizzie probably knew that already and might have even shared the sentiment.
Becca closed her eyes and tried not to inhale much. She rolled through the scents she’d already collected in her wolf brain, cataloguing the ones she recognized. Chemicals, techs, Leroy, death: all of these she knew and dismissed. There were other things in the cocktail of smells: a whiff of Erin which sent a pang through her, and something familiar that twisted and braided itself into Erin’s familiar smell.
It was elusive, hovering just at the edge of her consciousness, like a name on the tip of her tongue that stubbornly remained out of reach. Not a person, or at least not one she knew. It was a woodsy scent with a whiff of decay, and her wolf whimpered when she insisted on revisiting it.
But she couldn’t seem to recognize anything more than that. Her eyes popped open and she glared at Lizzie, directing her frustration at the first face she saw. “What is it?” The deputy shook her arm a little in an impatient gesture. “What did you smell?”
Becca bit back a growl. “That’s it: I didn’t. There something that smells familiar, but I have no idea where I’ve smelled it before.” She sighed and pulled her arm free from Lizzie’s fingers. “It might be nothing.”
Lizzie looked like she’d like to shake Becca’s entire body, and not just her arm, but she stepped back and nodded instead. “All right. I’ll get you back to the store and we’ll see if you can remember anything else later. C’mon.” With a nod to the techs, she shepherded Becca out of the morgue and back to the cruiser.