Dead Spots (Scarlett Bernard #1)(6)
“Okay!” Molly crossed the living room and pulled the blackout drapes, then settled herself in the easy chair on the back wall by the window. It’s the farthest seat from the TV, but after some experimentation, we had discovered that it was directly under my bedroom. Molly never misses a chance to age, especially this close to dawn. Vampires die when the sun comes up, but in my radius, Molly can stay up and finish her movie. Of course, that meant she’d die when I left the radius again to come downstairs, but we’re both used to lots of transitioning back and forth. It happens. I sometimes wonder what Molly’s ideal age is—twenty-two? twenty-eight? thirty-five?—but I haven’t got the guts to ask. Whenever she gets there, I’ll have nowhere to live.
I stripped off my work clothes, pulled on the ancient XL Chicago Bears jersey I inherited from my father, and crawled into bed. But the adrenaline hadn’t yet faded enough for me to sleep. I stared at the ceiling, thinking about my all-time worst crime scenes. Once, a witch had burned to death—I know, the irony—when a spell had gone wrong. There had been a dead child once, too; that had given me months of nightmares. But both times had been accidents, witch magic or vampire feeding gone too far. This was deliberate. It had looked like the battlefield in one of those medieval war movies. Barbaric. I pulled the blankets tighter. At this point, it takes quite a bit to rattle me, but that scene had done it. I closed my eyes, willing sleep to come.
It took a long, long time.
Chapter 3
As he knelt in the clearing, Officer Jesse Cruz really wished he could just go back to a couple of weeks ago.
It had only been nine days since his promotion, to plainclothes office third grade, and there were times when he imagined he could still feel the starchy itch of his uniform collar, the poky little Officer Friendly pin he used to wear to all the schools. His first week at the new precinct had featured a lot of cracks about his looks and his Officer Friendly gig, and Jesse had been shy enough as a kid that he had never really learned how to make friends by teasing back. But his mother was an old-school Mexicana, convinced that the greatest troubles of the world could be fixed with food bribes, and apparently Jesse had inherited this viewpoint. At 2:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, he had been standing in a twenty-four-hour bakery picking out donuts for the rest of the night shift. He had felt awkward in his sport jacket, unable to shake the feeling that everyone in the bakery knew he was a cop. And being a cop buying donuts...Well, it’s embarrassing.
Not that trying to buy friends with baked goods isn’t kind of embarrassing in itself, he had thought as he walked back out to the unmarked car. Jesse was buckling his seat belt—Officer Friendly always does—when he had heard the call come over the radio, the code for a multiple homicide. Jesse listened as the dispatcher described a clearing in La Brea Park, and he felt a thrill in his stomach when he realized just how close he was already. He started up the car, sticking the little domed flasher on the roof with one hand, and felt a shiver of excitement as he sped out of the parking lot. Maybe he’d even be the first one there.
The second that he would replay, over and over, was the moment when he’d actually dropped his gun. The girl with the bright-green eyes had startled him, and obviously the body...parts...in the clearing were beyond gruesome, but he was doing okay at that point, he’d thought. Then Jesse caught movement out of the corner of his eye and glanced over in time to see the giant dog bound toward them. He’d felt a pang of regret as he clicked off the safety—Jesse loved dogs—but before his finger could even tighten on the trigger everything had changed.
Not a dog. A naked man.
Working on autopilot, he had swooped down and picked up the service weapon, aiming for the guy’s chest, but the guy had remained motionless, curled up on the ground. Let’s try this again, Jesse had thought, loopy with shock, as he rose and began to circle around the blood again, toward the naked man. “Police! Don’t move!” he’d shouted, keeping a few feet away as he got far enough around to see the guy’s face. It was a normal human face, sort of wispy and pinched-looking, and if the guy hadn’t been stark naked, Jesse almost might have convinced himself that he hadn’t just seen a giant husky change into a person. No way had he seen a giant husky change into a person, right?
The guy—who was actually kind of little and scrawny when you saw him up close—finally opened his eyes and started to pull himself to a sitting position. “Stop!” Jesse had ordered, and the smaller man sort of shook himself and met Jesse’s eyes. Then his gaze darted around the clearing, and when he looked back to Jesse, there was an almost mischievous grin spreading across his face. Before Jesse could open his mouth to speak again, the guy pulled himself into a ball and rolled forward, a look of intense concentration on his face. Jesse stared, completely speechless, as limbs started to move under the man’s skin, as if they were stretching in two directions. His skin started to sprout tiny hairs, but before Jesse’s eyes could even adjust to this development, the dog—not a dog, Jesse thought numbly, a wolf—was back. It had taken maybe twenty seconds.
The animal shook its fur, panting a little, and without a glance back at Jesse, it turned and raced off into the darkness. Jesse had fallen back to his knees, and for the first time, he really looked at the carnage in front of him. What the hell?
That was how the next cops on the scene found him—Officer Friendly on his knees in the bloody mud, looking stunned. And for the first time, he wanted nothing more than to go back in time and undo his promotion. Officer Friendly never had to deal with wolves that were sometimes naked guys.