“Why?” I whispered, voice hoarse, eyes burning.
“Because they could.”
“You said the Nephilim want humans for food, for slaves.”
“Or amusement.” His eyes remained on the carnage. “They must have loved this.”
I gagged. Sure I’d been a cop, and I’d seen bad things, but I’d never seen anything like Hardeyville.
“Lizzy!” Jimmy snapped. “Pull yourself together. We’re gonna have to check them all.”
“What?”
He turned his head. “Someone could still be alive.”
He was right. I followed him, splitting off when we reached the first row, moving in the opposite direction, feeling each body for a pulse.
It wasn’t that simple. As I’d already learned with Ruthie, shape-shifters went for the throat. Defensive wounds on the hands and wrists screwed up those pulse points too. In truth, most of the bodies were so mangled, there was no way they were alive. But I checked them anyway.
Blood crept past my knuckles, washed across my wrists, and started up my forearms. The flies began to dribble inside; I’m not sure how. We had to have only let in a few when we arrived, but somehow they always found their way into a party.
No one had been spared. Men and women. Young and old. By the time Jimmy and I met again at the entrance, I was shivering and shocky.
Jimmy took one glance at my face and his hardened. He grabbed me by the shoulders, and I tensed, expecting him to shake me until my brain rattled. Instead, he turned me around and pointed at something that made me flinch. “See it?”
A baseball cap, the shade of the material unrecognizable as the blood fast turned black in the rising heat, the insignia obscured, but the size revealing it as a Little League cap even before I took in the small, white hand reaching out for it and falling short.
“The only way to live with this is to suck it up and kill them all.” Now he did shake me. Just once but hard. “Can you do that?”
I swallowed, tasting things I never wanted to taste again but knowing that I would, and nodded. “I’m okay.”
He leaned down, peering into my eyes for several seconds, brow creased. He didn’t seem to believe me, but he did let me go. “Good. Now—”
“Hey! Help! Someone help me!”
1 whirled toward the roomful of villagers. No one moved among the dead. How could they? So I spun back, just as a man stumbled from the hallway into the gymnasium.
Tall and thick at the arms and the neck, he had wild eyes. He had blood on him, but then so did we. His salt-and-pepper hair was matted with sweat. His skin was winter pale, his clothes torn and dark in patches. He took one look at the room and stopped, staring, gaping, mouth moving as no sound came out.
“Touch him,” Jimmy murmured.
“Wh-what?”
He jerked his head toward the windows, set high in the walls above the bleachers. Golden light filtered through.
The sun was up.
I lowered my gaze. “Hey, mister,” I said softly, and the guy stopped staring at the dead and stared at me.
His eyes full of fear and grief, he hurried forward. “Thank God you came. I hid and they—” His voice broke.
I offered my hand, and he went for it gladly, almost desperately. I understood the need to connect with someone, to share horror, to lean and be supported.
I’d already begun thinking of how we’d find clean clothes, load the guy into the Hummer, take him to a safer place. Then our hands met, and my hair stirred in a sudden, impossible breeze.
Werewolf, Ruthie whispered.
I turned to Jimmy and said, “Shoot him.”
Chapter 15
The guy disintegrated into ashes at the same time the report of the gun exploded so close I heard nothing but that for several minutes. As I was covered in sweat and blood, the residue stuck to me. I understood how being tarred and feathered had once been a horrible punishment.
“Lizzy?” Jimmy’s voice came from far away, but it actually sounded concerned. What had happened to the tough love? I must have looked even worse than I felt.
I met Jimmy’s eyes, and he frowned at whatever he saw in them. “You okay?”
I blinked. Ash cascaded off my eyelashes like snow falling from the trees. “Dandy.” I sneezed. “What now?”
“We had to—” he began, and I held up my hand, startled in spite of myself at how bloody it was.
Lowering the gory appendage, I said, “You won’t get any argument from me, Sanducci. Let’s move on.”
I was starting to catch the nuances in Ruthie’s whispers, the subtle differences between a warning for a Nephilim and a breed or even a hell-sent vengeance demon.
Just now there’d been an increase in volume and intensity that created a hum at the edges of my brain, a hum that hadn’t been there when she’d told me about Jimmy.
Of course the word werewolf was probably a good clue. They kind of had a reputation for being bad-ass, one I’d been aware of even before I’d known they were real.
Jimmy stared at me for a few seconds, then gave one sharp nod. “We have to torch this place.”