They stayed inside a long time, as the sun dropped lower and shadows lengthened. I heard snatches of soft-voiced conversation through the windows, but I didn’t bother to listen; I didn’t have to—the rank odor of death rode the heated air. The liver-eater had indeed munched on the house’s occupants. Yet I had seen someone exit the house and drive away, which made my half-contemplated and unvoiced speculation correct. The man I saw leave was more than a glamour; like me, the liver-eater must have the ability to shift into another shape, but in his case, he ate his victim, then shifted using the ingested DNA, and strolled out. Just like in the ancient legends of liver-eater. But this one didn’t have a long fingernail.
Beast huffed. Little cat steal Beast. Jane steal Beast. Thief-of-soul.
Despite the heat, cold shivered through me like an icy electric shock. What I did was an accident, I thought. What the liver-eater does isn’t an accident. It’s black magic. Blood magic. Ancient Cherokee blood magic. And shifting changed his basic scent. The rogue could be anybody, anywhere, even someone I had spent time with, talked to. Sunlight might not damage him except when he was in vamp form—how the heck did I know? He could be vamp, witch, or human. Maybe he could look like one of the true-dead whose bones had been disturbed. Had he found enough genetic material to shift into an older vamp’s shape? So, what did I know? He hadn’t attended Katie’s blood gathering. He’d watched and then come out to feed.Yeah. . . . I started cataloguing who had been at the gathering.
The whole time Jodi did her cop thing, I sat, relaxed in my chair, sunglasses hiding my eyes, speculating, letting my mind wander over impossibilities that might not be so impossible. I knew Jodi was letting me wait, hoping I was stewing, deliberately ignoring me. Her way of getting me back for my attitude. As soon as I worked through all the impossibilities, her ploy began to work. I had people to talk to, alive and dead. If I wasn’t going to get inside—and I surely wasn’t—then I needed to be on the move.
Instead, I sat as cop cars piled up in the street and as media vans with satellite dishes arrived. One van had a cherry picker mounted on top, allowing a cameraman a bird’s-eye view of the crime scene. As the news crews set up, the neighbors began to come home to be informed and questioned by the cops. Across the lawn, I heard their shock and smelled their fear. And then the sun set and I started to get hot under the collar, which had to be Jodi’s intent.
Beast, on the other hand, loved every minute of the cat and mouse. And unlike me, she liked lying half asleep in the heat of the sun, if not the fire ants and the mosquitoes that came out to feast. And she liked the game playing. Ambush predators were patient.
I have sharp claws, she thought at me. Human female has only a gun she has been told she cannot fire. She is not Big Cat. She is not even alpha in dog or wolf pack. Not alpha in cop pack. She is nothing.
“She’s a cop who wants to lay a crime on me,” I murmured back, my voice lower than a whisper, my eyes closed behind my glasses against the final rays of late-day glare. “She’s a cop with access to the prints in the woods and the blood on the window and the forensic evidence inside the house. DNA evidence.”
Snake that lies at heart of all things? Beast asked.
“Yes.” Though Beast was unable to grasp the concept of DNA, she understood the snake. “DNA evidence that might prove skinwalkers exist.”
Humans will not see truth. They will say blood is spoiled.
By spoiled, I understood that she meant contaminated. She was probably right. Unlike more primitive peoples, intellectual, well-educated humans just pretended the things they didn’t understand didn’t exist. It was how vamps had survived so long among humans.
Liver-eater is not skinwalker like Jane.
“Fine. So what is liver-eater?”
“Say what?”
I opened my eyes and shoved back the glasses. Jodi was standing in front of me, lips pursed. I’d been so intent on the inner conversation that I hadn’t heard her walk up, but I knew I had spoken too softly for her to hear. I rolled my head around on my neck as if stretching from a nap, and smiled sleepily at her, letting Beast have her way. I extended my arms and laced my fingers like a pianist, pulling on muscles from shoulders to fingertips, cracking two knuckles, as if I had been asleep while she worked, sweating in the heated house. “Sleep talking. Can I go now?” Asking to leave was a sure bet for being made to stay. And leaving before I knew what she had found inside was not what I wanted.
“No. I want to know how you found this place.”
I didn’t bother sitting up, but dropped my sunglasses back over my eyes. I could see that brought all her instincts to the fore and so I smiled. “If you want to see my eyes while you question me, you can take a chair and not make me look into the sunset.” I shrugged, the same in-your-face shrug I had perfected at the children’s home to keep the girls off my back. Bullies need for their marks to care, and despite the fact that Jodi was a cop doing her job and that job was for the benefit of the welfare of the citizens of New Orleans, yada, yada, she was still trained to be a bully. And I just flat-out didn’t like bullies. Not at all.
With ill grace, Jodi took a chair. “How did you find this place?