Page 8 of Blood & Bone

Ramsey didn’t turn. His eyes stayed on the ditch, on the body, on the boots pointed at the sky. His hands didn’t move from his sides.

June turned. Gabriel’s truck was coming up the shoulder, dust rising behind its tires in a pale plume that caught the light and held it. Black. Older than Ramsey’s. The kind of vehicle that had been on these roads long enough to know every rut by heart.

She looked back at Ramsey. He hadn’t moved. The stillness held.

The goat bleated again. Louder this time or seeming louder against the new silence that had arrived with the second engine. June waited.

Gabriel’s truck door opened and closed. Voices gathered at the fence line. Low, measured, the cadence of men who had arrived at something irreversible and were now dividing the labor of bearing it. June heard them without listening. Her attention had drifted back to the ditch, to the body, to a wrongness she’d registered and filed and couldn’t stop registering.

She didn’t mean to crouch again. Her knees did it without consulting her brain, an old reflex whenever something needed looking at and her hands were the ones available to look. She went down beside Deacon’s body, closer this time, and looked at his throat.

The wound was a single cut. Horizontal, positioned just below the jawline, running from the left carotid across the midline to the right. The edges were smooth. Not ragged. Not torn. The kind of cut made by something sharp moving through tissue in a single, uninterrupted pass. No hesitation marks. No secondary tracks where the blade had caught or skipped. One motion. Clean.

June had seen knife wounds. She’d seen animal bites. She’d stitched enough torn flesh to know the difference between something that happened in struggle and something that happened with precision. This was precision. The margins of the cut were even, the tissue retracted slightly along both edges exactly as it did when a blade cut clean and the body had time to respond before the blood pressure dropped. Not teeth. Teeth left punctures, tears, irregular margins where the jaw had closed and the skin had given way unevenly. This was a blade. Or something close to it. Something that cut rather than tore.

She looked at the blood. There was plenty on Deacon’s collar. A dark ring soaked into the canvas, dried now to a stiffened crescent that followed the line of the cut. But the ground underneath him told a different story. The grass was stained, yes. Dark in patches where the blood had pooled and soaked in. But the volume was wrong. A carotid transection should have produced arterial spray. Should have left a fan pattern on the grass, on his shirt, on the dirt around his head. Should have shown the violence of what had happened in that ditch.

This looked contained. The blood was there, but it was where it had been placed, not where it had landed. His throat cut somewhere else, the body laid here after, carefully, boots to the sky, the blood following gravity to the low points of his collar and staying there.

The body itself was too still. Too arranged. Deacon Pruitt had been a big man. If something had jumped him in the dark, if there had been a struggle, the ground around him would show it. Trampled grass, boot marks, the telltale disturbance of a body hitting dirt with force behind it. This grass was compressed, yes, but evenly, set down here, not thrown.

June sat back on her heels. Ramsey was ten feet away, his back to her, talking to Gabriel in a voice too low to carry. She could see the line of his shoulders, the set of his head, how his hands hung at his sides, exactly as they had when he’d first arrived. He hadn’t moved. The conversation happening behind her was happening in the particular language of men who had lost one of their own and were now dividing the world into before and after.

She could have turned around. Could have said, The cut’s too clean. The blood’s wrong. He wasn’t killed here. Could have offered the observations as data, as pieces of a puzzle that didn’t fit the shape everyone was reaching for.

She didn’t. The words assembled themselves in her head and she let them sit there, filed, uncatalogued, because the moment she spoke them aloud they would become something else. They would become a case. A defense. An argument for the nest that sat in the Hollis place at the end of the gravel road, and June was not in the business of making cases for vampires. She was in the business of fixing what was broken and reporting what she found, and what she had found was a body in a ditch with a wound that didn’t match the scene and blood that didn’t match the wound.

Interpretation wasn’t her job; observation was. She had observed. The rest belonged to someone else.

Gabriel’s voice carried across the fence line. Not raised. Not lowered. The flat register of a man who had stopped asking questions when he already knew the answers delete. June couldn’t make out the words. She didn’t try.

She stood up. Her knees protested. She’d been crouching too long, and the damp had worked its way through the denim. She brushed the grass from her palms against her thighs. The goat was waiting at the Calloway barn. Prolapsed eye. She had an appointment, and appointments were the kind of thing that kept moving forward regardless of what happened in ditches on county roads.

She stepped over the fence. The barbs caught at her sleeve again and she unhooked herself the same way she had the first time, without looking down. Gabriel was at the fence line now, one hand on the top wire, his eyes on the ditch. He didn’t look at her as she passed. Ramsey didn’t turn. The conversation had settled into whatever shape conversations took when the men who conducted them had moved past shock and into the quieter, more dangerous territory that came after, deliberate, watchful.

June got in her truck. Started the engine. Pulled onto the road without looking back.

The county road unspooled ahead of her, gravel giving way to patchwork asphalt, the fence lines receding into pasture on both sides. The morning had fully arrived now. Light everywhere. No shadows left to hide in.

She drove. The wound sat wrong the entire way. Not in her stomach. June’s stomach had been conditioned against queasiness by ten thousand hours of blood and tissue and the smells of things that lived and died under fluorescent lights. It sat wrong in her head. In the place where observations lived before they became conclusions, and conclusions lived before they became actions. Actions had consequences she could measure in advance if she was careful.

The clean edge. The missing blood. The staged stillness of the body. She turned them over. Each one. The way she’d turn over a radiograph looking for the fracture the owner hadn’t mentioned. Or a blood panel, hunting the value that didn’t belong. Looking for the thing that explained the rest.

Nothing explained it. Not yet. Not with the data she had.

The Calloway barn came into view around the next bend. White clapboard, roof patched in three places, the weathered look of a building that had stood long enough to stop caring what anyone thought of it. The goat would be in the east paddock. Prolapsed eye. Routine. Fixable.

June parked. Killed the engine. Sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel and the morning light full on the windshield and the wrongness of Deacon Pruitt’s throat riding with her, settled into the passenger seat, not getting out.

She got out of the truck. Closed the door. Walked toward the barn.

The wound turned over. Again. And again. And again.

CHAPTER 3

The living room of Gabriel’s house wasn’t built for a dozen grown men. The furniture had been worn down to its bones by thirty years of wolf meetings and pack arguments and the press of bodies that needed to be in the same room when something broke. Tonight the walls felt too close. The ceiling too low. The argument had been running for ten minutes by the time June’s truck pulled up the drive, and nobody had stopped to let anyone else in.

Gabriel stood at the center of the room with his back to the fireplace. The hearth behind him was cold, no fire had been lit in it since summer, and the mantle carried the patina of a house that had stopped trying to be anything but functional a long time ago. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. The room had gone quiet on its own about thirty seconds after he walked in, the same quiet that fell over rooms when Gabriel Andrews decided it was time.