License to Ensorcell Read online

  “No one noticed the wolf when you did this?”

  “I’d drive him out at night. I’ve got a dog grate in the back of the SUV, and if anyone saw us, they’d just think he was a German shepherd or something.”

  “Did anyone search the area around the body?”

  “Jack did with a couple of his guy friends.”

  “Your husband knew about the lycanthropy?”

  “Of course. I wouldn’t have married him without telling him about my family. I thought for sure he’d break off the engagement, but when he didn’t, I knew I’d found the right man.” She sighed and looked away. “Finally.”

  “So, then,” Nathan picked up the thread again. “Someone did search the area.”

  “Yeah, and they found blood drips from Pat’s wounds, and they led to a place where the grass was all matted down, like someone had been sitting there. I don’t know if it was the killer or Pat. Jack said there wasn’t any fur that he could see.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone took photos or searched that place for further evidence.”

  “No. Stupid sheriff!”

  “What about dropped shells? Spent bullets, that would be.”

  “Jack found a couple near the squashed-down grass. He told me the shooter must have used a really high-powered rifle, a military sniper’s rifle, he called it, some kind of foreign gun. The SPCA guy told us that he could have been a long way away from the wolf when he ...” Kath let her voice trail away. A single tear trickled down her cheek. She wiped it off on her sleeve, leaving a smear of cat hair on her face.

  “Your husband knows something about guns?”

  Kath sat up straight and stared at him wide-eyed. “Yeah,” she said at last. “He used to hunt before he married me. I told him I’d leave him if he ever killed another animal. Now he, uh, does target shooting. Paper stuff, you know.”

  “Yes, a pleasant enough hobby.” Nathan clicked off the recorder and stood up.

  I joined him and after a moment, so did Kathleen. “Thank you for your time,” Nathan said. “This case does have parallels with three others that I’m investigating.”

  “Like that poor girl they found the other night?” Kath said.

  “Yes, exactly.” Nathan paused as if he’d just thought of something. “This is a long shot, but I don’t suppose you know a young woman by the name of Miriam Greenbaum? She came from Fresno originally.”

  “Oh, for sure I do! I mean, I don’t know her, but she’s the girl Pat bit.” She looked my way again. “Don’t you remember that? He didn’t mean to, but jeez, were her parents frosted!”

  “I do remember now,” I said. “The summer when the grandparents took us camping in Yosemite.”

  “Right, and you kept sneaking off with that young ranger, the cute one. I’m not surprised you don’t remember Miriam.”

  I refused to look Nathan’s way. “The suspicions about that relationship were totally unfounded,” I said in a steely cold voice. “But didn’t the biting incident happen the first time Pat changed?”

  “The second. We just pretended he was our family dog,” Kathleen said to Nathan. “He was only thirteen then, so the wolf was just dog-sized. But her parents threatened to sue, so Grandpa had to pay all the medical bills and stuff. If the rangers had impounded Pat—God, who knows what would have happened when he changed back.” She glanced my way. “So it was a good thing you and that ranger were—”

  “He was just being kind to the family,” I said, again in the steely voice. “Out of respect for our grandparents’ age.”

  “Oh, yeah sure, Nola! But anyway, Miriam was so dumb! You should never just go up to a strange dog and try to pet it.”

  “So my father used to tell me.” Nathan forced out a smile. “Well, thank you again.”

  We all walked out onto the porch so Kathleen could unlock the gate with her electronic device. Since I’d left my sunglasses in the car, I stood blinking at the green of the garden to let my eyes adjust to the light.

  “The rhododendrons are doing well this year, huh?” I said.

  “Yeah, but there aren’t as many hummingbirds as there used to be.” She sighed with a shake of her head. “It’s all the damn chemicals people use.”

  “You sure it doesn’t have something to do with your surfeit of cats?”

  “Nola!” She rolled her eyes heavenward. “They don’t eat the birds. I told them not to.”

  When we got back to the car, Nathan stripped off his jacket and laid it in the backseat. Kathleen kept the heat up so high in her house that he’d been sweating. Normally the very idea of a sweaty guy would have turned me off by itself, but on him it smelled oddly good, acrid, yes, but at the same time, intensely male. I put my reaction down to spending time in my sister’s menagerie, an uprush of animal instincts in answer to the pheromones. I rolled down the car windows to let them escape.

  “Your sister,” Nathan said abruptly. “She’s not quite right in the head, is she?”

  “Say what?” I snapped.

  “Not quite all there.” He frowned at me. “I’m trying to be tactful.”

  “You’re not succeeding.”

  “Very well, then. She’s stupid, isn’t she?”

  I wanted to shove him out of the car and drive off, but since it was his car, and he was a cop, I decided against it.

  “I wouldn’t call her that.” I tried not to snarl. “She’s just never had to depend on her intelligence to get what she wants in life.”

  “Not with looks like that, no. Pity.”

  Rather than get into a nasty argument, I started the car. As we headed back to the city, Nathan sat silently, staring out the car window at the random suburbia of San Anselmo. Once we were back on Highway 101, I headed for the Golden Gate Bridge. Nathan watched the green hills roll by until we passed Mill Valley.

  “If I remember correctly,” he said then, “lycanthropy’s supposed to be spread through werewolf bites. In the superstitions about it, that is.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard those, too. One theory is that it’s a virus carried in saliva. Pat, though, just inherited it somehow from some ancestor. Maybe the virus installed itself in the family genes or something. I guess that can happen. I’m no geneticist.”

  “Obviously not.” He continued to stare out the window. “Have you read that police report yet?”

  “I haven’t, no, just glanced at it. I got hung up in Pat’s journals.”

  “Well, the Romero girl fought back. When he shot her, the killer must have been at point-blank range, judging from the wound analysis. She got her claws into him at some point. The technicians managed to extract some blood and a trace of skin from under her fingernails and from a smear on her back that was too far from the wounds to be her own blood.”

  “DNA evidence! When will you find out the results?”

  “In a couple of weeks.”

  “Weeks?”

  “Nola, it’s not like the shows on television.” His voice dripped scorn. “These things take time, particularly with a small sample like this. Still, I have hopes it’ll match another sample we have, from the consular official’s apartment.”

  “I hope it doesn’t turn out that the official’s someone else that Pat bit. That’s a joke, by the way. As far as I know, the only person that Pat ever snapped at was the Greenbaum girl. He was too young then to control himself when she startled him.”

  “I see. I hate to admit this, but a pattern’s beginning to emerge here, if, that is, there really is such a thing as werewolves.”

  “Oh, come on, Nathan! Do you really doubt it?”

  “No, I don’t, not anymore. I just don’t like believing it.”

  Three concessions in one day. Somewhere a celestial slot machine was ringing “jackpot!”

  “If Mary Rose bit Johnson,” I said, “things could get real interesting for him.”

  Nathan did the last thing I would have expected from him. He laughed, a real honest laugh instead of his usual morbid chuckle. Since I was busy dodging traffi
c on the freeway, I had to keep my eyes on the road. When the traffic began to slow down and thicken on the Waldo Grade, I risked a glance at him. That grin of his—I reminded myself to keep from melting and concentrated on the traffic.

  The flow of cars stayed slow all the way through the rainbow tunnel. As soon as we hit the cooler air at the western exit, the traffic began to crawl. Since we had a couple of hours till the evening rush, I wondered if we had an accident ahead, but the electronic “CAUTION” sign on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge stayed dark.

  “What is that?” Nathan said suddenly. “Out to sea, up about forty-five degrees from the horizon, in the fog bank.”

  By then we were making five miles an hour because every driver on the highway was gawking at the sky. I could safely look and see a thick gray wave of fog oozing toward the bridge, a perfectly normal phenomenon except for the pair of bright green lights dancing inside it. They behaved in the classic manner of UFOs: flying too fast for normal aircraft, changing direction abruptly, glowing and flashing as if they signaled to someone on the ground.

  “I’ve never seen them in daylight before.” I turned my attention back to the sea of crawling cars ahead. “The fog gives them just enough of a dark background to be visible.”

  “Yes, but what are they?”

  “Chaos lights. I’ll bet the flying saucer people are going to have a field day over them, though. They want to believe in spaceships so badly.”

  Nathan made a strangled noise deep in his throat. I risked a quick glance at him and found the grin replaced by the reproachful stare.

  “I don’t know exactly what they are,” I went on. “No one does, except they’re manifestations of the Chaos principle. What we call matter is mostly empty space, you know. All kinds of things can slip through the cracks.”

  “Is that your idea of an explanation?”

  “As much of one as I can give you and still drive. Weren’t you briefed about my agency’s mission?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t believe it. I suppose I’d better try.”

  The pair of lights whipped around one another, then raced off, heading out to sea. After a few seconds they disappeared in a white flash that turned the fog around them silver.

  CHAPTER 4

  AS SOON AS THE CHAOS LIGHTS SHUT themselves off, the traffic picked up speed and began to spread out. I managed to get into the far right lane at last. Just past the toll booth I made the quick turn that leads onto the back road to the Palace of the Legion of Honor and from there to a crosstown route. Instead of choking on the traffic fumes along Park Presidio, you travel through trees and get a nice view of the Pacific Ocean puddling at the foot of the cliffs. We’d gone about halfway up when Nathan asked me to stop.

  “We need to discuss something,” he said.

  I pulled over and parked in a shady spot on the gravel shoulder. Down below the ocean stretched out, shrouded in the gray of approaching fog. Nathan turned toward me, but in the bucket seats he could get no closer, particularly with the gear shift threatening to make seducing me a moot point. I figured he wanted to ask more about the Chaos lights, but instead he brought up the most recent murder.

  “The Romero girl’s body is going back to her family tomorrow,” Nathan said. “Serial killers have been known to attend the funerals of their victims. They keep a good distance away, of course, at the cemetery, but the bastards like to watch the families mourn. I don’t know when they’ll schedule the funeral, but I thought we should go and keep an eye out.”

  “Good idea. I might be able to make contact with the Hounds that way.”

  “With what?”

  “The Hounds of Heaven. The pack my brother belonged to, good Catholic werewolves all.”

  Nathan muttered something under his breath. “Just when I think I’m used to all of this,” he said eventually, “you come up with some sodding tidbit like that.”

  “I didn’t come up with it. That’s what they’re called in Pat’s journals.”

  Nathan opened the car door and slid out. I had a brief moment of wondering if he was going to throw himself off the cliff in despair, but instead he merely opened the back door and got out his suit jacket. With the fog racing in, the wind had turned cold. He took his holstered handgun out of the glove compartment and strapped it on before he put on the jacket, then got back in the car.

  “I’ve got Agency business to tend to tonight,” I said. “I’ll drop myself off at my place.”

  “Nola, aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “What?”

  “That someone wants to kill you. You’re living in an apartment overlooking a busy street, with big windows where you insist on sitting, a perfect target. Now you’re planning on going back there alone.” He paused for effect. “At night.”

  The wind seemed to have gotten into my blood and chilled my bones. I thought of the creature I’d caught spying in the lobby of the office building and shivered.

  “Actually, it’s even worse than that,” I said. “I was planning on going out alone to talk to a couple of Agency stringers. One of them works in the Tenderloin. Know what that is?”

  “Oh, yes. Your police made a point of telling me.” He crossed his arms over his chest like an angry schoolteacher.

  Which may be why Sister Peter Mary appeared on the hood of the car, about half life-size. When I went to high school, most of the teachers were laypeople, thanks to the emptying of the convents in the ’70s and ’80s, but for religion class we had a nun, black habit, bobbing white wimple, and all. I’d heard that some years previously she’d gone to her reward in heaven. Now she dropped back down to point her ruler at me like the weapon it had always been in her hands.

  “Lust,” she said, “can kill. Remember Bathsheba.”

  As visitations went, this one lacked all justice. Wasn’t I trying to avoid emulating Bathsheba despite Nathan’s obvious qualifications to be one hell of a David? Sister Peter Mary slowly dematerialized, ascending back into heaven, I assumed.

  “Thanks for the warning,” I said.

  “You’re welcome,” Nathan said, “though I have the distinct feeling you weren’t talking to me.”

  “I wasn’t, actually. Sorry.” I managed a smile. “Just one of my—uh—visions, I guess you’d have to call them.”

  He sighed and uncrossed his arms, then turned in his seat to look straight ahead.

  “What gets me,” I went on, “is this crop all seem to have religious content. That’s probably because of the Hounds.”

  Nathan continued staring out the windshield. I remembered St. Joseph di Copertino and let the subject drop. Still, Nathan had spoken the truth about my putting myself in danger. If danger existed—I’d not received a single warning since the day Aunt Eileen first met me on the street, not about assassins, at any rate, only about Nathan himself.

  Sometimes I’m slow. The tarot reading finally fell into place along with the latest vision. Lust kills. Sister Peter Mary had been right, though not quite in the way she’d meant. What most people would call sexual desire comes from the Qi flowing between two people. What summons the flow depends on the desiring person’s psychology, whatever they find sexually attractive for whatever reason. Nathan and I attracted each other enough to pour out Qi, surrounding both of us in what amounted to a thick psychic fog. While it was physically uncomfortable for him, it made my talents impossible to control.

  “Tell you something,” I said. “I’d be safer if you weren’t around.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.” He slewed around to face me.

  “You told me that first day that you prefer to work alone.”

  “Yes, well. That was before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before I realized you have suicidal tendencies. Why do you think you’d be safer alone?”

  “I’m good at avoiding being noticed. You’re not.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “Bastard!”

  We both began staring out the windshield. I could either
tell him the truth or just put up with him acting like a bodyguard, even though my raw physical feeling for him was causing nothing but problems. I could see a third option, allowing us to balance out the Qi in the usual way, but that would bring problems of its own.

  “You were lying,” he said eventually.

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “I’m not going to apologize.”

  “What makes you think I wanted you to?” At that point, I realized that our conversation had sunk to the level of thirteen year olds, and for reasons appropriate to that age. I thought up a half-truth as a cover story. “Nathan, look, I’m sorry. I’m all to pieces, thinking about Pat.”

  “Well, yes, you must be.” He turned toward me again. His Byzantine eyes radiated genuine sympathy. “I just don’t want you to join him.”

  “I’m not real keen on leaving this wicked world the same way he did, no. All right, I won’t go down to the Tenderloin alone.”

  “Fine. With me along you’ll be a lot safer.”

  “You can’t stay with me twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Why not? I’ve got my suitcases in the boot.”

  “No. You’re not moving in.”

  “I was planning on sleeping on the floor of your lounge.”

  Oh, yeah? I thought. For how long? Five minutes? Aloud, I said, “I can protect myself. I know you don’t believe in things like ensorcellment, but they work.”

  “Against a military sniper’s rifle fired from a hundred meters away?”

  “How is your body on my floor going to protect me from that?”

  “It won’t, of course, but if someone tried to break in, they’d have a surprise waiting for them. Nola, why aren’t you taking this threat seriously?”

  “I’ve wondered that myself.”

  “Look.” He made a fist with his right hand and punched it into his left palm. “My superiors must have believed that the kind of talents your Agency offers are essential to this case. I scoffed at first, but I’m coming around to their way of thinking. I need your help, so damned if I’m going to lose you to the psychopath we’re hunting.”

  I considered the offer on its merits. Beyond the problem of the superfluous Qi that Nathan and I were generating, I suspected that Johnson had talents of his own that allowed him to interfere with my extra senses. If I had a bodyguard, I could take the risk of scanning for him. If he physically followed the scan back to me, Nathan would be waiting to surprise him.