“I want to know who did this.” Tara’s eyes were yellow again, but I thought I could also see tears misting at their corners.
There were no other wounds—and that in itself told me something. Fighting a werewolf was messy and killing one in a single shot meant you had to either be unbelievably lucky or unbelievably good. “I’m going to need to turn her over,” I said reluctantly. “She was stabbed, but I think I’m looking at the exit not the entrance.”
Wordlessly, Tara walked around to her packmate’s head, and I took the feet. We turned the body as gently as we could, and I tracked the line of the wound to where I thought the attack should have come in. Soon enough I found it, a wider wound driven in through the spine, with a force that said something supernatural had moved quickly and decisively. There was a vague professional comfort in knowing I’d been right, but set against the circumstances it was pretty minimal. We turned her face up the moment I was done, and Tara put the body back into the closest she could get to a restful position.
The next bit was going to be harder. Well, harder in some ways. I opened my mind to the Deepwild again and let my senses sharpen. Somewhere I heard my mother laughing—thinking about it, a skinned corpse on a bed of leaves was probably in the opening verse of her version of My Favourite Things. There was an overwhelming smell of blood and death and flowers, which knocked me back a moment, but pushing through it, I started checking for any traces the attackers might have left behind. I tried her mouth first—she was a werewolf and if she’d been defending herself at all it would have been fangs not fists. There was definitely blood on her teeth—I swabbed up a sample of it and sealed it in an evidence bag. I did the same with her fingernails. More blood. With the flaying it could have been hers but I didn’t think so, or at least not completely.
“I might have what I need,” I said.
“If you’re going to need to pay for a laboratory,” Tara told me, looking at my samples, “then money is no object.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think this is the kind of thing a lab would be able to help with.”
“Then what are you going to do?” She led me out of the conservatory into the crisp autumn air.
“Something that might look a bit weird and disrespectful.” I took the first swab out of its bag, let my mother’s power flow a little stronger, and very cautiously licked it. The taste of blood made my mother sit up and take notice fucking sharpish, but I’d braced myself for this, and whether it was the years of practice or the preservative effect of pickling my brain with alcohol for the past year or so, I found fighting her off easier than it had been. Still, the flavour of it, even that minute trace mixed with wolf-spit and mourning, ran through my body like a shot of neat absinthe. My hunter’s instincts rose and the voice of my heritage told me I had tasted a predator. Blood on blood on blood. “Vampire,” I said. I pocketed the teeth-sample and tried the one from the claws. The same—that reduced-down fortified tang of stolen life and centuries of darkness and murder. “She fought one. There may have been others and…” I rolled the sensation around my mouth like I was on some poncy wine course. “This is familiar. This is somebody I know.”
Tara growled that horrible bestial growl which reminded me that she was more animal than human on a bad day. “If it’s Julian Saint-Germain, she will die for it. Slowly.”
I put a hand on her arm. “No. I’d—I’d know if it was Julian, she’s … distinctive.” Wine and rose-leaves, eyes like lapis lazuli. One day she’d be out of my head.
“Douglas?”
That was more possible, but it felt wrong somehow. The Prince of Wands was an ancient being of terrifying power but he would have tasted different, like dust and stone and closed doors and secrets. “Give me a moment.” I shut my eyes and let the sense-memory take me. Every vampire’s blood was unique, a rich red distillation of everything they were, everything that drove them, and everything that had driven their progenitor, and their progenitor’s progenitor back down the centuries to whatever accident of dying had founded the bloodline in the first place.
This one was a creature of dark passion, hot hunger, jealousy that burned like quicklime. It was driven by love of a sort, but a love that came from the cold and the night.
“Fuck me. Patrick?”
“That child?” Tara’s voice was filled with a rage you only saw in mobsters and serial killers. “He would not dare.”
She was right, he wouldn’t. Although technically he wasn’t a child, he just acted like one. But for all I thought he was an unbearable little wankstain, he wasn’t the sort to go around murdering werewolves. He certainly wasn’t the kind to do something that felt so occult. If it didn’t have a problematically vulnerable teenager attached, he usually wasn’t interested. “It’s not just that he wouldn’t dare he … wouldn’t.” A thought hit me. “Oh my god, it’s her.”
“Her?”
“His—vampires have a lot of words for it: sire, creator, philetor. The vampire who made him. Yelena was her name. You said yourself there was witchcraft involved here, and I think she was a witch when she was alive. She’s … kinda like Patrick, only older, smarter, a girl, and she can do magic.”
Tara looked unconvinced. “And what would she want with me and mine?”
“I don’t know, and honestly I’m a little bit scared to find out.”
She nodded. “Come.”
I followed her across the grounds and into the dark of the wood. Next stop, the scene of the crime.
8
The King & the Queen
As we approached the edge of the deep forest, the strange borderland between here and not here that the wolves of Safernoc were sworn to guard, Tara shrugged off her dress and shifted into the form of a gargantuan golden wolf. I placed a hand on her back, feeling her muscles shift under her fur as she padded through the undergrowth. I wasn’t sure if I was doing it for my comfort or hers.
It was still only a little past noon, but between the canopy and the pervading sense of supernatural menace, the woods were soon night-time dark. Then there was that ice-water chill that you got when you passed out of the normal world, and I was standing under a full hunter’s moon in a land of snow and shadows. Tara set her nose to the ground and started searching out a scent. I could have joined her: tracking by a combination of smell and occult predator’s instinct is one of the many weird gifts I can thank my mum for, but drawing on her power while in the realm of a completely different faery lord was probably asking for trouble. I’d once discovered, more or less by accident, that I had the power to annexe bits of other faeries’ realms on behalf of the Deepwild, and it was something I was keen to avoid doing unless I really meant to.
At last we came to a bloodstain on the snow. It stood out starkly in the moonlight, the only spot in the entire realm that wasn’t pure black and white. “Here.” Tara was back in human form. Seeing her naked in the cold made me want to wrap my coat around her for reasons that were absolutely one hundred percent to do with gallantry. Not that the weather seemed to bother her—clearly I could add sub zero temperatures to the list of things that didn’t stop werewolves.