“No.” She shook her head and blushed slightly, startled. “I need you to wait on that.”
I had just pushed a button. Leo and Jodi? Nah, not with her antipathy to vamps. Something else. So I pushed. “Yes. You can make it happen. It’s the crime scene on your say-so or Leo.” When she hesitated, I said, “I’ve hunted rogues before. I need to see the scene so I can tell if it looks like anything from past kill sites.”
Beast rumbled deep inside, Never hunted liver-eater. Which was true, but not something I was ready to contribute to the conversation. More gently, I added to Jodi, “Leo can make it happen if you won’t. But I’d rather work with you, not him.”
“You’re pretty chummy with Leo. He makes sure I call him Mr. Pellissier.”
“I’m sure he’d like me to be polite too.”
Suddenly Jodi smiled, a wry pull of lips. “You yank his chain like you yank ours?”
I didn’t like being transparent, but I did like the smile, so I answered honestly. “More.”
Jodi chuckled under her breath and stood. “My ass’ll be in the grinder if it gets out you were on a crime scene. Try not to screw with the evidence or bring trace in. And you step where I say and not one step farther.”
“Thanks,” I said, standing slowly, trying for humble and appreciative. I was pretty sure it worked because Jodi led me to the crime-scene van and handed me paper and plastic PPEs. It turned out I needed all the personal protective equipment. The house was a bloodbath. Another trite term. But the only one that fit.
CHAPTER 21
The Lord of the Manor
I stood just inside the front door, the window where the rogue entered to my left. A trail of blood splatters marked the wall from the window for six feet, evidence that he’d wounded himself badly on the glass. It was the kind of splatter arterial blood makes, pulsing sprays, arcs that dribbled down the wall. Ten feet inside the door was a blood-drenched leather recliner where a man had once sat. His body had molded the chair to his form; now blood pooled in the depression. It still looked damp, tacky to the touch. There were two slippers on the floor under the foot-rest, which was up, the back of the chair pushed nearly flat, facing the TV.
The man, or what was left of him, was in several pieces. His torso, the largest chunk, was beside the chair, as if he had been pulled to the floor after the kill and feasted upon. The abdomen was gone, all the way to the spine, the pelvic bones exposed. The chest cavity was nearly as clean, ribs ripped up and out of the way, internal organs missing.
I felt gorge rise, a sick reaction to the butchery. I had slaughtered rogue vamps. I had taken down prey with Beast, so blood and butchery weren’t foreign. However, even with that experience, this level of wanton carnage was hard to take.
Beast rose to the surface, taking me over with shocking swiftness. Holding me down, seeing through my eyes, she studied the kill from a predator’s viewpoint. She focused intently on the scene. She parted my lips slightly, so she could pull in the scents, memorizing, breaking them down into their individual protein structures. Learning. Blood, feces, urine, all human. Blood from the liver-eater, rank and foul, old death and rot. And blood from something else. From what the rogue became in the process of taking on the form of the male victim. Some other scent, nearly familiar, tantalizing. Totally free from rot.
It looked like the liver-eater had taken the body apart by brute force, not the way hungry predators ate in the wild. In nature, a predator ate the soft tissue first: internal organs, fat, large muscle mass of buttocks and thighs. Later, feasting down to connective tissue. Finally, tearing at tendons and cartilage, separating limbs one by one.
Hard to tear ribs loose. Usually eat upward from abdomen, then tear ribs apart to gnaw later, or give to cubs to train to eat meat.
We stared. The head was against the wall to the hallway. He still had a thatch of short red hair on his scalp. His face had been eaten away, along with tongue and eyes. The empty cavity of the brain was visible through the sockets, yet the jaw was still attached. I understood from Beast that big cats got at the brain later too. After the soft tissue and jaw were long gone.
I spotted a leg and an arm under the kitchen table, well gnawed. The left leg was in the hallway. Well, two left legs were in the hallway, along with other parts of victim number two. I remembered the thumps I had heard from the house while in raptor form. The sounds made when a body was being pulled apart, tossed around, and consumed?
I became aware of Jodi watching me. I blinked Beast back down and closed my mouth, hoping I hadn’t slurped air across the roof of my mouth like Beast did. I schooled my face into disgust. “This is the . . .” I let my words trail off as if shocked. Beast found that amusing. “This looks like a bunch of animals got to them.”