He reached slowly for the handcuffs on his belt, and I realized for the first time the kind of trouble I was in. Even if I could convince the police that I wasn’t the murderer, I would be on their radar forever. My reputation for discretion would be ruined, if it wasn’t already, and I would probably lose my job. I took an automatic step backward, and then three things happened at once: I heard the first sirens, the cop opened his mouth to scream at me, and the werewolf burst into the clearing between us.
It was a male gray wolf, thin but still unmistakably, unnaturally huge, and it ran at an angle pointing straight toward the bodies, probably smelling the meat. The cop swung his gun toward the new threat, looking frightened, and the wolf saw this and tried to reverse directions. But it was too late: with its last few steps, it skidded just a little too close to me. I felt it cross the edge of my whatever, my blankness, and then the change happened in midair. A wolf had taken the leap, and a man crashed to the ground, naked and tumbling. He fell facing slightly away from me, and I saw the cop actually drop his gun with the shock of it.
This time I didn’t hesitate. I turned on my heel and raced back to the van. I threw open the driver’s side door and tossed my bag onto the passenger seat, trying to think over the sound of the police sirens. I started the van and threw it into drive, but instead of turning back toward home, I took the first left, across from the park entrance, and found myself in a small middle-class subdivision. Gotta love LA, where you can cross any street and be in a whole different town. The houses had bars on the first-story windows but not the second, which meant it was a decent, if not completely secure, neighborhood. I took two more quick turns and parked the van on the street near a house that still had its lights on. I turned off the motor and squashed myself down onto the floor in front of my seat. It wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t think I’d be able to get all the way to the highway before the cops came flying by. I tucked my hair under a dark baseball cap, opened the door, and darted around the van to slap on the big logo magnet I have that says Hunt Bros. Cleaning Service. Fake, but since my tax returns say that I am a professional housecleaner, I figured I could always piece together a story if needed. Any eagle-eyed insomniac neighbors wouldn’t have much to go on, just a cleaning service van parked outside a house where people were still awake. I just hoped that the cop at the crime scene hadn’t seen what kind of car I drove. I sent Dash a text message, shielding the phone’s glow with one cupped hand, and crammed myself down between the two front bucket seats to wait it out.
My mind was churning, questions ping-ponging around the inside of my head. What on earth would have done what I’d seen in the clearing? In five years doing crime scenes, I’d never encountered that kind of brutality. With modern technology and modern cautiousness, it’s rare that I even get a complete dead human body anymore. That’s the thing about LA: it might be the second-biggest city in the country, but in the Old World, it has about the prominence of Tucson. This town is a pretty undesirable place for the supernatural to live: there’s not enough space for the wolves, who can’t afford to be stuck in traffic on full moon nights, and the city is too young and too spacey for the vampires. There are probably more witches than anything else, but so many of them are a joke, and most of the rest don’t play with the really dangerous magics. Sometimes one of the werewolves will lose a limb in a fight, or the witches will hex something wrong like that poor dove, but neither faction has many actual casualties anymore. Even the vampires, who regularly feed on humans, have had centuries to learn how to feed without crossing that line to where the victim will die. I’m occasionally called in when the new vamps accidentally kill, but even then, it’s all very obvious. Hungry vampire equals dead human.
But what the hell would have done what I’d just seen? Thinking about the scene in the clearing, I realized that I’d never really had a chance: even if the cops had taken a little longer to get there, there was no way in hell I would have been able to clean up that...mess. It would have taken one person hours just to collect all the body parts. What could I have done?
When thirty minutes had passed, I scooted up into my seat and stepped out to get my logo magnet. Then I tossed my baseball cap on the passenger seat and carefully steered the van farther into the subdivision. It took me a while to find my way back to a major street, but I finally pulled onto Pico and followed it west. When I was sure I knew my way home, I took a deep breath and called Dashiell.
“What happened?” he demanded, before I’d said hello.
“It was too late. There was a cop on scene before I could do much. He saw one of the wolves, Dashiell.”
“He what?” I explained about the werewolf in the clearing. “Who is this cop?” he barked angrily, as though I had personally invited the guy along as my date.
“Uh...I didn’t get a name.”
As a rule, vampires do not sigh in seething annoyance, but Dashiell made a special exception for me. “This would not have happened if you had simply arrived on time, Scarlett.”
“I know it’s bad. I just couldn’t make it there.” I bit down on any further excuses, not bothering to point out that I wouldn’t have had the time to clean up that mess anyway. I’d known Dashiell long enough to know that he was not a big fan of apologies. Apologizing is weak, and weakness tends to make vampires think of prey.
“Scarlett, now is not a good time,” he said. I automatically glanced at the clock on the dashboard. I keep track of the dawn, for obvious reasons, and it was only twenty minutes away. That was going to hurt us: if I can’t get to a crime scene for some reason, Dashiell has to throw his weight and money around to get things buried, and now he wouldn’t be able to do so until after sunset. Why hadn’t I thought of that earlier? “You will come to the estate tonight at eleven thirty to discuss this further.”