He seemed to have forgotten to count Took among them.
The Hounds weren’t all real werewolves, of course, despite what they implied. The Anakim had helped to nearly eliminate the curse. It turned out the cure was quite simple—a silver knife to the heart of the newly bitten to end the spread. Technically, sufferers had more rights today. The Nations had insisted on protections for their shifting types, and the lycanthropes, even if not quite the same, had been bundled in with them, but there were a lot of nurses and cops who still thought the silver stroke more merciful than life cursed.
The wolves who survived the purge disagreed, and the Hunters had made an uneasy peace with their new allies. They might be monsters, but they hated the Anakim more than humans did.
“When did you get them?”
“After I got the letter,” Liam said. He braced his elbows on the table and pressed his knuckles to his lips. The words filtered out between his fingers. “I pulled every string I could reach, burned all my bridges, called in every favor I was owed or will ever be owed. It finally paid off. Someone finally came through, a week ago. The next day someone gave the first note to my… to a friend… and the next was tucked into my mother’s door. I found the last one in my bed.”
“They wanted to scare you.”
A grim smile twisted over Liam’s face. “They succeeded. When you came in tonight, I thought that maybe I wouldn’t need to defy them. Instead I had to decide who was more important, me or my son. I think it might be the first time I’ve ever picked him. You’ve got what you want, Bennett. Help my son.”
“If I can.”
Took tapped the letters together and tucked them into his pocket. He left Liam to finish the bottle of whiskey.
MORGUES DIDN’Tsmell any better to the undead than they did the living. Even when Took held his breath, he could taste the corruption, coffee, and cheap bleach on his tongue. He could practically feel it in his nose and throat, ready to slip down the next time he took a breath.
The corpse of last night’s competent killer lay on the stainless steel slab. Stripped of combat gear and weaponry, he looked like a dead man with a weak chin and not much left in the way of a foot. His throat had been cut, and his associates had finished the job with a bullet to the forehead. The black hole was punched just above his eyebrows, like a powder-rimmed period to the problem caused by a disposable thug in need of medical attention.
“Alan Beam,” Dr. Forrester said as he pushed his glasses up his forehead to squint at his paperwork. “He’s a two-time felon with previous for arson and sexual assault. That was ten years ago. It looks like he didn’t get religion when he was inside, just this.”
He pointed with his pen at Beam’s naked, pallid chest—not that he needed to. The tattoo was clumsily drawn, all blown lines and rough scars, but the ink had been worked deep under the skin. It was stark black, and each letter was a foot long.
DNR.
It stood for Do Not Rise—not that it was an issue for Beam. The bullet in his head wouldn’t stop him rising to the Kiss, but what came back wouldn’t be much use to itself or VINE, and it was a popular slogan for antivampire paramilitaries of a nonreligious bent. After all, what religious schism could be bitter enough to prevent common cause against the undead? For the likes of Beam, though, it was because Hunters who carved crosses into their arms and had the Word of God in their mouths expected a certain standard of behavior from their recruits. Murder and torture they could turn a blind eye to, but rape was the sort of thing that made it hard to keep up the pretense that you were the good guys.
“How did you get his ID so quickly?” Took asked. He lifted Beam’s arm off the slab and turned it over. As expected, Beam’s fingertips had been scoured clean years ago. There was just a pad of smooth white scar tissue where his prints should be. “Even VINE would have taken a while to run his DNA through the system.”
Forrester used a pen to pull his glasses back down onto his nose as he looked up at Took.
“Luckily enough, he’s a local boy,” Forrester said. “Charleston born, bred, and with an old warrant for burglary hung on his sheet. So he popped up quickly enough, especially since Special Agent Madoc made this a top-priority case.”
Forrester was, by all accounts, a good pathologist, professional enough not toewover corpses or flush at the mention of a handsome man. Took could still… feel… the suddenly quickened blood under night-job-wan skin, smell the cocktail of hormones and spunk on the air.
The scrape of hunger in the back of his throat wasn’t unexpected. His regime of dry little pills was guaranteed to satisfy his dietary requirements, but that didn’t mean theysatisfied.Like a thirsty alcoholic with a glass of milk, it did the job but left the craving. But Took didn’t expect the flash of razor-sharp, wholly hypocritical possessiveness that dug its claws into his spine.
Madoc wasn’t his, would never be his. Even if Took wanted more than last night’s satisfyingly bad idea, which he didn’t, he’d just be an itch for Madoc to scratch. Even if they were together a decade—ten times longer than Took’s longest relationship to date—he’d still be nothing more than a brief digression to the immortal.
Although, he supposed, he was immortal now too.
For a moment, with an indrawn breath of realization, he almost understood the people who acted like he’d come out of that box ahead. Then the taste of death hit his stomach and shriveled his cock—blood soured quickly in the body—and he remembered they were full of shit.
He dragged his attention back to the corpse.
“Any known associates?” he asked.
“Plenty, most of whom wouldn’t have a good word for him,” Forrester said. The flush faded from his cheeks as his mind drifted away from Madoc. “Mr. Beam had a good habit of turning snitch when he needed and a way about him that got the wrong people to talk. ‘All hat and no cattle,’ one of the officers said. SSA Madoc has the file.”
The corner of Took’s mouth twitched in a dry smile. Until today, West’s more-or-less unofficial approval had been enough for Took to forge a fair relationship with the local cops. At least in the morgue, that was apparently now on hold. Forrester wasn’t going to go against the Biters.
God knew, Took couldn’t judge. He’d done the same thing, way back when. It had made sense at the time.
“Thanks for your help,” he said.
Forrester had the grace to look abashed but didn’t back down. He started to turn away, but he hesitated as he frowned at something he’d written down on his pad.
