“You think she’s involved?”
Tara shook her head. “No, I think something else is. I know you believe I’m too suspicious of mortal sorcerers, but this stinks of witchcraft. A bargain with a faery creature, hunting a werewolf for her skin. This is human magic of the bloody kind.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Come to Safernoc. See what you can find. We will need to take vengeance for this. Terrible vengeance.”
I wasn’t going to argue. Tara had come through for me when I needed her and I had to do the same. Even if that meant taking a case that didn’t pay and was apparently going to start with me looking at a flayed corpse.
Quietly, because subdued didn’t begin to describe the mood, we went outside and Tara called the car around. Since she’d busted my front door it meant I was leaving all my important documentation where anyone could nick it but what were they going to do? Steal my debts? And if somebody went to the office looking for information the joke was on them. If I couldn’t sort through my filing system a burglar had no chance. Which, now I thought about, it felt shitty because Elise had left my books in good shape but a couple of years of having to sort this stuff out on my own had added the basic administration of my own damned business to the list of things I’d ruined.
Travel with Julian had been all limousines all the way, because she’d been a motherfucking vampire prince and she wanted the world to know it. Tara, on the other hand, had a fondness for the classics, so we were chauffeured to Safernoc in a lovingly maintained Aston Martin DB5. This being Tara, I half-expected her to jump me in the back seat, but instead she lay her head against my shoulder and took my hand in hers.
“I’m sorry about your door,” she said. “I was angry. Last night was difficult for me, and I didn’t like that I was alone.” She turned her face towards me, midway between vulnerable and accusing. “I like even less that you were with a human.”
With Julian I’d got used to having a partner for whom sexual jealousy was an almost total non-issue. Then again, she did spend most of her evening surrounded by half-naked women making come-bite-me eyes, so it would have been mega hypocritical. Tara was different—territorial. And also kinda werewolf-racist. “I know you’ve been through some shit,” I said. “But if you’re going to object to my lovers can you not do it on the basis of species.”
“Lovers is it now?” Her fingers threaded through mine much more gently than she was speaking. “I was hoping you’d at least just think of her as somebody you fucked.”
“I’m not into labels.”
“Grandmama’s right. You make me weak.”
I put my arm around her, which maybe wasn’t the best way to challenge that particular complaint. “You’re not weak, Tara. You just need help with something.”
“I’m supposed to defend my pack. If I can’t, what good am I?”
“Defending people doesn’t mean nothing bad can ever happen to them. You’re a werewolf, not a god. And even if you were, I’ve met an actual god and he came close to losing everything to Sebastian Douglas. This world is full of stuff that can mess you up really, really badly. You’ve saved a lot of people from a lot of shit.”
I wasn’t sure, but I thought she was shaking. Whether it was in fear, anger, or something else entirely, I didn’t know. “They skinned her, Kate Kane. It’s the worst thing you can do to one of my kind.”
“And you’ll find who did it, and you’ll do whatever heinous shit you need to do to settle the score.”
“We don’t even know where to begin.”
I squeezed her hand. “Which is why you brought me in. I don’t have a lot of talents, but finding out who did stuff is how I pay my bills. And it’s true I’ve been a bit lax on the whole bill-paying front lately, but the point still stands. We’ve got this.”
She shuffled down and put her head on my lap. It was terrible road safety but unless we were hit by a truck full of silver bullets she was safe enough. “Will you see her again?” she asked.
“No. She was—it was—I think it was one of those ships in the night deals.” The words fear death by water crept into my head uninvited.
The car pulled out of London and wound slowly through the countryside.
I wasn’t looking forward to the bit that was coming next. I’d seen my fair share of dead bodies, human and otherwise, but they’d all had their skin on. We didn’t talk for the rest of the journey, but I stroked Tara’s hair and she seemed to find that soothing in a way that I chose to interpret as more human and less canine. Not that it mattered right then. For the first time in our relationship it unequivocally wasn’t a sex thing.
We decarred in the forest-shadowed car park at Safernoc Hall, with its slightly-too-on-the-nose fountain with the howling wolves, and walked up to the ancestrally imposing front door, which was already being held open by a small army of servants. As we approached the building, Tara’s bearing shifted from “this is falling apart and I can’t even” to “queen of all I survey”. She made the switch so suddenly and instinctively it was almost jarring, but that was … the deal. Being a hereditary werewolf-aristocrat came with its perks, but space to be vulnerable wasn’t one of them.
With a curt nod at the staff, Tara led me through the house and out the back door into a large and well-maintained garden. Crossing that, she brought me into a frankly excessive conservatory that climbed high with the sorts of fairytale bowers you got at the Chelsea Flower Show. I’d been to a werewolf funeral before and knew how this was going to work—they’d leave her in state before bringing her body to a cairn of stones in the deep woods, chasing the darkness away in a sacred hunt. At the moment, though, for all the pretty surroundings and the ritual, she was just evidence.
Tuffy’s body lay on a bier beside a large lily-strewn ornamental pond. It was ringed with green branches—oak and elm and yew, the ground around her scattered with hyacinth petals. I stared at those petals for a long time, not wanting to raise my eyes and look at the corpse. Tara didn’t give herself that luxury. She walked over to Tuffy’s side and stared her straight in the eye. I got my shit together and joined her. This was going to get ugly. Because—look, I was never Tuffy’s biggest fan but nobody deserved that kind of thing and I’m not exactly comfortable going deep into flayed-corpse detail.
“Fair warning,” I said. “I’m going to need to touch her.”
Tara nodded.
I crouched down and got as close to the dead woman as I could stomach. It was hard to kill a full werewolf—they healed wicked fast unless you cut them with silver, they could still fight you even half bled out, and they could go without food or air or water for a really, really long time. Which meant whatever did this had come prepared, or done something incredibly brutal.
I felt for puncture wounds or broken bones, the raw-meat texture of exposed muscle making me seriously want to gag, and only the fear of letting Tara down stopping me. It was nasty work, but it didn’t take long to find something conclusive—a thin, deep wound just breaking the breastbone and, if my guess about the angle was correct, piercing the heart.
“She’d have been dead when … y’know.” I said. “I know it’s not much comfort but I don’t think she’d have suffered.”