“Did you check her teeth?” I asked. The teeth were one of the first parts to show signs of a human turning into something else.
“Yes. Normal human teeth. I had a chat with her. We didn’t get anywhere. So we put her in a cell and called down to the psychiatric unit in the city to come and evaluate her. She was in that cell for about an hour. When Connie went to do her rounds, she found the cell door open and the old lady was gone.”
Better and better. “Nobody saw her leave?”
Beau shook his head. “And the cameras weren’t running, since the magic was up. A group of kids walking home from school saw her take off for the woods. We tried to follow her with bloodhounds, but the dogs refused to track. She’s been gone about ten hours. Since you have not one but two members of the Pack at your disposal, here’s the deal. You track down Jene Boudreaux, and I’ll let you examine the evidence you need.”
Even if the evidence was crap, I still owed Beau. “I’ll take that deal, but I want to see her house. I’d like to know what I’m walking into.”
“Fine by me.” Beau raised his voice. “Robby!”
A lanky blond deputy materialized in the doorway.
“This is Robert Holland,” Beau said. “Robert will go with you and provide assistance and legal authority.”
“Folks,” Holland nodded at us.
“Mrs. Boudreaux has been a part of our community for all of her life,” Beau said. “Her husband drove my sons to school in his armored bus when he was alive. She is known to people. I want it to be understood that even if Mrs. Boudreaux isn’t herself, Deputy Holland is the one who gives the all clear. If violence is inevitable, it must be authorized by one of us.”
Fine by me.
? ? ?
JENE BOUDREAUX LIVED in a small older house typical of the pre-Shift Georgia suburbs: one story, about twelve hundred square feet, a wooden fence and an abundance of plants and hedges up front. The plants had seen better days and the hedges were blocking the windows.
Twenty feet from the house, Derek and Ascanio stopped in unison.
“Odd smell?” I guessed.
“Mm-hm.” Derek inhaled and grimaced. “Smells like hot iron.”
A few feet from the door I smelled it too, a thick, sharp odor. It didn’t smell like anything in particular; it was its own ugly scent that cut across my senses like a knife. Something bad lived here.
Robert Holland put the key into the lock and opened the door. “We confiscated the keys when we arrested her.”
“Did you get to see her at all during any of this?”
He shook his head. “Shannon made the arrest. I do know her. My mother used to run a crafting club, where the older ladies would gather together, socialize, and knit or quilt.”
The knitting circle. More and more of those were springing up, as machine-knit clothes became harder to come by.
“Old ladies come in two flavors: sweet or mean. She was the mean kind. But my momma always tried to include her, until she flat-out refused to come about three years ago.”
The inside of the house was dark. Thick curtains blocked the light. I pulled them aside, letting the day in through the glass patio door. No bars on the frame. Odd. Apparently Jene wasn’t afraid of whatever the magic-fueled night could spawn.
A layer of dust coated the old furniture. Derek tried it with his fingers. “Sticky.”
Not dust, grime. The kind of grime that accumulated after years of willful neglect.
“When did she go weird?” Ascanio asked.
“She was always an odd bird,” Holland said. “She had a real glare on her. I checked the log. We’d been called out before about a year ago. Some kids were playing on the street and being loud. They said she came out of the house and clicked her teeth at them. Scared them half to death. Parents filed a complaint. There were probably incidents before that, but most folks here live and let live, so it’s hard to say.”
Great. Kate Daniels, tracker of old ladies with a biting fetish. And me without my armor.
Derek pulled the glass door open and stepped out into the yard.
No pictures on the walls. No dishes in the sink. Dust on the sink’s edges. Not cleaning is one thing, but when you ran water, inevitably some splashed on the counter. No splash marks disturbed the dust. Ascanio opened the fridge.
“Empty.”
I didn’t have a good feeling about this.
“Kate?” Derek called.
I stepped outside. The yard looked perfectly ordinary. Green grass, shrubs, and bird feeders. Many, many bird feeders in every shape and size. I could see at least two baited cage traps under the bushes.
Derek stepped closer to me.
“I smell one of Roland’s people.”
Great. “Which one?”
“I don’t know. But this scent was at his base when we went to talk to him. Now it’s here.”
I went back inside and moved to the first bedroom. Dark stains marked the round doorknob. I reached into my pocket, drew a length of gauze, wrapped it around the handle, and swung it open.
The stench hit me then, like a slap to the face. Bones tumbled toward me, and I jumped back as they rolled onto the filthy carpet.
“Holy crap,” Holland said.
If the bedroom had carpet at one point, there was no way to tell what color it was. At least six or seven inches’ worth of small animal bones covered the floor. A lot of bird carcasses. A few raccoon skeletons, some cat bones. They probably had a problem with missing pets in this neighborhood. All the bones were clean and smooth. I reached down with my gauze and picked up a small dog’s femur. The marrow had been sucked out.
“Picked clean,” Ascanio said.
She must’ve been throwing them in through the window, because there was no way she could’ve opened the door without all of them falling out.
The bones reeked. Decomposition didn’t smell like that and there was nothing here to decompose anyway. No, this was the sharp odor of the spit she deposited as she licked the bones clean. No wonder the bloodhounds didn’t follow her. This stench made my hair stand on end.
I glanced at Derek. “Can you follow her trail?”
“Sure. Following isn’t a problem,” he said.
“Let’s do that.” I didn’t want her running around unsupervised in my land, especially if my father’s people were involved, although I had no clue why he was interested in her. This wasn’t my father’s magic, structured, almost scientific in its precision. This was something old and dark that crept about in the night.
“What is she, Kate?” Ascanio asked, as we left the house.
“I have no idea.”
CHAPTER
7