"Zee is one of the rare fae who can tolerate metalhis friend is not. Jail would be very painful for most fae."
She tapped the end of her notebook on the table. "So the point of all of this is that you say that a fae who cannot lie told you Zee didn't kill O'Donnell. That won't convince a jury."
"I was hoping to convince you."
She raised her eyebrows. "It doesn't matter what I think, Ms. Thompson."
I don't know what expression was on my face, but she laughed. "A lawyer has to defend the innocent or the guilty, Ms. Thompson. That's how our justice system works."
"He isn't guilty."
She shrugged. "Or so you say. Even if Zee's friend can't lieyou aren't fae, are you? At any rate, no one is guilty until convicted in a court of law. If that's all you have to tell me, I'll go talk to Mr. Adelbertsmiter."
"Can you get me into O'Donnell's house?" I asked. "Maybe I can find out something about the real murderer." I tapped my nose.
She considered it, then shook her head. "You've hired me to be Mr. Adelbertsmiter's attorney, but I feel some obligation to you as well. It would not be in your best interestnor in Mr. Adelbertsmiter's best interestto prove yourself somethingother than human at the moment. You are paying for my services, so the police will look at you. I trust they won't find anything."
"Nothing of interest."
"No one knows that you canchange?"
"No one who would tell the police."
She picked up her notebook and set it down again. "If you have been reading the papers or following the national news, you'll know that there are some legal issues being brought up about the werewolves."
Legal issues. I suppose that was one way to put it. The fae, by accepting the reservation system, had opened up the path for a bill to be introduced in Congress to deny the werewolves full citizenship and all the constitutional rights that came with it. Ironically, it was being proposed as an amendment to the Endangered Species Act.
Ms. Ryan nodded sharply. "If it comes out that you can become a coyote, the court might find your testimony inadmissible, which might have further legal consequences for you." Because they might decide I was an animal and not human, I thought. "Anything you find would be flimsy evidence even if it was admitted. The court is not going to have the same view on your reliability as Zee apparently did. Especially as you will have to declare yourself a separate specieswhich might be a very dangerous thing for you to do at this time." The werewolf bill wouldn't passBran had too much influence in Congressbut I was neither werewolf nor fae, and the same protection might not cover me.
She frowned and moved her notebook restlessly. "You should know that I belong to the John Lauren Society."
I looked at Kyle. The John Lauren Society was the largest of the anti-fae groups. Though they maintained a front of respectability, there had been allegations last year that they had funded a small group of college-age kids who had tried to blow up a well-known fae bar in Los Angeles. Luckily their competence hadn't matched their conviction and they'd only managed to do a little minor damage and send a couple of tourists to the hospital for smoke inhalation. The authorities had caught them rather quickly and found an apartment full of expensive explosives. The kids had been convicted, but the authorities hadn't managed to build a case against the larger, wealthier organization.
I had access to information not available to the authorities and I knew that the John Lauren Society was a good deal dirtier than even the FBI suspected.
Kyle had found me a lawyer who not only disliked faeshe'd like to see them eliminated.
Kyle patted my hand. "Jean won't allow her personal beliefs to interfere with her job." Then he smiled at me. "And it will make a point, having someone so active in the anti-fae community defending your friend."
"I'm not doing it because I believe he is innocent," she said.
Kyle turned his smile to her and it became sharklike. He seldom showed anyone that side of him. "And you can tell the newspapers and the jury and the judge thatand it still won't stop them from believing that he must be innocent or you wouldn't have taken the case."
She looked appalled, but she didn't disagree.
I tried to imagine working a job where your convictions were an inconvenience that you learned to ignoreand decided I'd rather turn a wrench no matter how much better her paycheck was than mine.
"I'll stay away from the crime scene, then," I lied. I wasn't a fae. What the police and Ms. Ryan didn't know wouldn't hurt them. The coyote is a sly beastie and no stranger to stealthand I wasn't about to let Zee's fate depend wholly on this woman.
I'd find out who killed O'Donnell and figure out a way to prove him guilty that didn't involve me telling twelve of my peers that I smelled him.
I picked up a couple of buck burgers and fries from a fast-food place and drove home. The trailer was looking as spiffy as a seventies single-wide could. New siding had made the porch look tacky, so I'd repainted it gray. Samuel had suggested flower boxes to dress it up, but I don't like living things to suffer unnecessarilyand I have a black thumb.
Samuel's Mercedes was gone from its usual spot so he must still be at Tumbleweed. He'd offered to come with me to meet with the lawyerso had Adam. Which is how I ended up with just Kyle, whom neither of the werewolves looked upon as a rival.
I opened the front door and the smell of crock pot stew made my stomach rumble its approval.
There was a note next to the crock pot on the kitchen counter. Samuel had learned to write before typewriters and computers rendered penmanship an art practiced by elementary school children. His notes always looked like formal wedding invitations. Hard to believe a doctor actually wrote like that.
Mercy, his note said with lovely flourishes that made the alphabet look like artwork. Sorry, I am not here. I promised to volunteer at the festival until after tonight's concert. Eat something.
I followed his advice and got out a bowl. I was hungry, Samuel was a good cookand it was still a few hours until dark.
O'Donnell's address was in the phone book. He lived in Kennewick just off Olympia in a modest-sized house with a neat yard in the front and an eight-foot white fence that enclosed the backyard. It was one of the cinder block houses that were fairly common in the area. Recently someone had been of the mistaken impression that painting it blue and putting shutters on the windows would make it look less industrial.
I drove past it, taking in the yellow police-line tape that covered the doorsand the darkened houses to either side of it.
It took me a while to find a good parking spot. In a neighborhood like this, people would notice a strange car parked in front of their house. Finally I parked in a lot by a church that was not too far away.
I put on the collar with the tags that gave Adam's phone number and address as my home. One trip to the dog pound had left me grateful for this little precaution. I didn't look anything at all like a dog, but at least in town there wouldn't be angry farmers ready to shoot me before they saw my collar.
Finding a place to change was a little more challenging. The dog pound I could deal with, but I didn't want to get a ticket for indecent exposure. Finally I found an empty house with a realtor's sign out front and an unlocked gardening shed.
From there, I only had to trot a couple of blocks to O'Donnell's house. Happily, O'Donnell's backyard fence ensured his backyard was private, because I had to change back and get out the picks I'd taped to the inside of the collar.
It was still close enough to summer that the night air was pleasanta good thing since I had to pick the damned lock stark naked and it took me too long. Samuel had taught me to pick locks when I was fourteen. I hadn't done it a lot since thenjust a couple of times when I'd locked my keys in my car.
As soon as I had the door open, I replaced the picks inside my collar. Bless duct tape, it was still sticky enough to hold them.
A washer and dryer were just inside, with a dirty towel laid across the dryer. I picked it up and wiped the door, doorknob, lock, and anything else that might have picked up my fingerprints. I didn't know if they had something to check for bare footprints, but I wiped the floor where I had taken a step inside to reach the towel, then tossed it back on the dryer.
I left the door mostly shut but unlatched, then shifted back into coyote, hunching under the gaze of eyes that weren't there. I knew, knew that no one had seen me go inside. The gentle, gusty wind would have brought the scent of anyone skulking about. Even so, I could feel someone watching me, almost as if the house was aware of me. Creepy.
With my tail tucked uncomfortably close I turned my attention to the task at hand, the sooner to leavebut unlike the fae houses, this one had seen a lot of people in and out recently. Police, I thought, forensic team, but even before they had come there had been a lot of people in the back hallway.
I hadn't expected an obnoxious boor like O'Donnell to have a lot of friends.
I ducked through the first doorway and into the kitchen, and the heavy traffic of people mostly faded away. Three or four light scents, O'Donnell, and someone who wore a particularly bad male cologne had been in here.
The cupboard doors gaped and the drawers hung open and a little askew. Dish towels were scattered in hasty piles on the counter.
Maybe Cologne Man was a police officer who searched the kitchenunless O'Donnell was the sort who randomly shoved all of his dishes to one side of a cupboard and stored his cleaning supplies in a pile on the floor instead of tucked neatly in the space under the sink behind the doors that hung open, revealing the empty dark space beneath.
The faint light of the half moon revealed a fine black powder all over the cupboard doors and counter tops that I recognized as the substance the police use to reveal fingerprintsthe TV is a good educational tool and Samuel is addicted to those forensic, soap operamystery shows.
I glanced at the floor, but there was nothing on it. Maybe I'd been a little paranoid when I'd wiped the place where I'd stood on the linoleum with bare human feet.
The first bedroom, across the hall from the kitchen, was obviously O'Donnell's. Everyone from the kitchen had been in here, including Cologne Man.
Again, it looked like someone had gone through every cranny. It was a mess. Every drawer had been upended on the bed, then the whole dresser had been overturned. All of his pants' pockets had been turned inside out.
I wondered if the police would have left it that way.
I backed out of there and went into the next room. This was a smaller bedroom, and there was no bed. Instead there were three card tables that had been flung helter-skelter. The bedroom window was shattered and covered with police tape. Someone had been angry when they'd come in here, and I was betting it wasn't the police.
Avoiding the glass on the floor as much as I could, I got a closer look at the window frame. It had been one of those newer vinyl ones, and the bottom half had been designed to slide up. Whatever had been thrown through the window had pulled most of the framing out of the wall as well.
But I'd known the killer was strong. He had, after all, ripped off a man's head.
I left the window to explore the rest of the room more closely. Despite the apparent mess, there wasn't much to look at: three card tables and eleven folding chairsI glanced at the window and thought that a folding chair, thrown very hard, might break through a window like that.
A metal machine that looked oddly familiar had left a dent in the wall before landing on the ground. I pawed it over and realized it was an old-fashioned mail meter. Someone had been sending out bulk mail from here.
I put my nose down and started to pay attention to what it had been trying to tell me. First, this room was more public than the kitchen or first bedroom, more like the back door and hallway had been.
Most houses have a base scent, mostly a combination of preferred cleaning supplies (or lack thereof) and the body scents of the family who live in it. This room smelled different from the rest of the house. There had beenI looked again at the scattering of chairsmaybe as many as ten or twelve people who came to this room often enough to leave more than a surface scent.
This was good, I thought. Given the way O'Donnell had rubbed me wronganyone who knew him was likely to have murdered him. HoweverI took another look at the windowthere hadn't been a fae or any other magical critter in the bunch that I could tell. No human had taken out the window that wayor torn off O'Donnell's head either.
I memorized their scents anyway.
I'd done what I could with this roomwhich left me with only one more. I'd left the living room for last for two reasons. First, if someone were to see me, it would be where the big picture window looked out onto the street in front of the house. Second, even a human's nose could have told them that the living room was where O'Donnell had been killed and I was growing tired of blood and gore.
I think it was dread of what I'd find in the living room that made me look back into the bedroom, rather than any instinct that I might have missed something.
A coyote, at least this coyote, stands just under two feet at the shoulder. I think that's why I never thought to look up at the pictures on the wall. I'd thought they were only posters; they were the right size and shape, with matching cheap Plexiglas and black plastic frames. The room was dark, too, darker than the kitchen because the moon was on the other side of the house. But from the doorway I got a good look at the framed pictures.
They were indeed posters, very interesting posters for a security guard who worked for the BFA.
The first showed a child dressed in a fluffy Easter Sunday dress sitting on a marble bench in a gardenlike setting. Her hair was pale and curly. She was looking at the flower in her hand. Her face was round with a button nose and rosebud lips. Bold letters across the top of the poster said: PROTECT THE CHILDREN. Across the bottom, in smaller letters, the poster announced that Citizens for a Bright Future was holding a meeting the November eighteenth of two years ago.
Like the John Lauren Society, Bright Future was an anti-fae group. It was a lot smaller organization than the JLS and catered to a different income bracket. Members of the JLS tended to be like Ms. Ryan, the relatively wealthy and educated. The JLS held banquets and golf tournaments to raise money. Bright Future held rallies that mostly resembled the old-fashioned tent revival meetings where the faithful would be entertained and preached at, then passed a hat.
The other posters were similar to the first, though the dates were different. Three of them were for meetings held in the Tri-Cities, but one was in Spokane. They were slick, and professionally laid out. Stock posters, I thought, printed at the headquarters without dates and places, which could be added later in Sharpie black.
They must have been meeting here and sending out their mailings. That's why there had been so many people in O'Donnell's house.
Thoughtfully, I padded into the living room. I think I'd seen so much blood the night before that it wasn't the first thing that struck me, though it was splattered around with impressive abandon.
The first thing I noticed was that, under the blood and death, I caught a familiar scent that was out of place in this room. Something smelled like the forest fae's home. The second thing I noticed was that whatever it was, it packed a tremendous magical punch.
Finding it, though, was more problematical. It was like playing "Find the Thimble" with my nose and the strength of the magic to tell me if I was hot or cold. Finally I stopped in front of a sturdy gray walking stick tucked into the corner behind the front door, next to another taller and intricately carved stick, which smelled of nothing more interesting than polyurethane.
When I first looked at the stick, it appeared unremarkable and plain, though clearly old. Then I realized that the metal cap wasn't stainless steel: it was silver, and very faintly I could see that something was etched into the metal. But it was dark in the room and even my night eyes have limits.
It might as well have had "A Clue" painted in fluorescent orange down the side. I thought long and hard about taking it, but decided it was unlikely to go anyplace, having survived O'Donnell's murderer and the police.
It smelled of wood smoke and pipe tobacco: O'Donnell had stolen it from the forest fae's home.
I left it alone and began quartering the living room.
Built-in bookshelves lined the room, mostly full of DVDs and VHS tapes. One whole bookshelf was devoted to the kind of men's magazines that people read "for the articles" and argue about art versus pornography. The magazines on the bottom shelf had given up any pretense of artjudging by the photos on the covers.
Another bookcase had doors that closed over the bottom half. The open shelves at the top were mostly empty except for a few chunks ofrocks. I recognized a good-sized chunk of amethyst and a particularly fine quartz crystal. O'Donnell collected rocks.
There was an open case for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang sitting on top of the DVD player under the TV. How could someone like O'Donnell be a Dick Van Dyke fan? I wondered if he'd had a chance to finish watching it before he died.
I think it was because I felt that moment of sorrow that I heard the creak of a board giving way beneath the weight of the house's dead occupant.
Other people, people who are completely, mundanely human, see ghosts, too. Maybe not as oftenor in broad daylightbut they do see them. Since there had been no ghosts at the death sites in the reservation, I'd unconsciously assumed that there would be none here as well. I'd been wrong.
O'Donnell's shade walked into the living room from the hallway. As some ghosts do, he grew clearer in bits and pieces as I focused on him. I could see the stitching on his jeans, but his face was a faded blur.
I whined, but he walked by me without a glance.
There are a very few ghosts who can interact with the living, as much a person as they had been in life. I got caught once talking to a ghost without realizing that's what he was until my mother asked me whom I was talking to.
Other ghosts repeat the habits of a lifetime. Sometimes they react, too, though I usually can't talk to them. There is a place near where I was raised where the ghost of a rancher goes out every morning to throw hay to cows who are half a century gone. Sometimes he saw me and waved or nodded his head as he would have responded to anyone who'd approached him in life. But if I tried to converse with him, he'd just go about his business as if I weren't there at all.
The third kind are the ones born in moments of trauma. They relive their deaths until they fade away. Some dissipate in a few days and others are still dying each day even centuries later.
O'Donnell didn't see me standing in front of him so he wasn't the first, most useful kind of ghost.
All I could do was watch as he walked to the shelves that held the rocks and touched something on the top shelf. It clicked against the fake wood shelf. He stood there for a moment, his fingers petting whatever he touched, his whole body focused on that small item.
For a moment I was disappointed. If he was just repeating something he'd done every day, I wouldn't learn anything from him.
Then he jerked upright, responding, I thought, to a sound I could not hear and he walked briskly to the front door. I heard the door open with his motions, but the door, more real than the apparition, stayed closed.
This was not a habitual ghost. I settled in, prepared to watch O'Donnell die.
He knew the person at the door. He seemed impatient with him, but after a moment of talk, he took a step back in invitation. I couldn't see the person who came inhe wasn't deador hear anything except the creaks and groans of the floorboards as they remembered what had happened here.
Following O'Donnell's attention, I watched the path of the murderer as he walked rapidly to a place in front of the bookcase. O'Donnell's body language became increasingly hostile. I saw his chest move forcefully and he made a cutting gesture with one hand before storming over to confront his visitor.
Something grabbed him around the neck and shoulder. I could almost make out the shape of the murderer's hand against the paleness of O'Donnell's form. It looked human to me. But before I could get a good look, whoever it was proved that they were not human at all.
It was so fast. One moment O'Donnell was whole and the next his body was on the floor, jerking and dancing, and his head was rolling across the floor in a lopsided, spinning gyre that ended not a foot from where I stood. For the first time, I saw O'Donnell's face clearly. His eyes were becoming unfocused, but his mouth moved, forming a word he no longer had breath to say. Anger, not fear, dominated his expression, as if he hadn't had time to realize what had happened.
I'm not a terrific lip reader, but I could tell what he'd tried to say.
Mine.
I stayed where I was and shook for minutes after O'Donnell's specter faded. It wasn't the first death I'd witnessedmurder is one of those things that tend to produce ghosts. I'd even cut someone's head off beforethat being one of the few ways you can make sure that a vampire will stay dead. But it hadn't been as violent as this, if only because I'm not strong enough to rip someone's head off.
Eventually, I remembered that I had things to do before someone realized there was a coyote running free in a crime scene. I put my nose down on the carpet to see what it could tell me.
Distinguishing any scents at all here proved difficult with O'Donnell's blood soaking into couch cushions, walls, and carpet. I caught a hint of Uncle Mike's scent in one corner of the room, but it faded quickly, and though I searched the corner for a while, I never caught it again. The Cologne Man had been in the living room, along with O'Donnell, Zee, and Tony. I hadn't realized Tony had been one of the arresting officers. Someone had been sick just inside the front door, but it had been wiped up and left only a trace.
Other than that, it was like trying to pick up a trail in the Columbia Center Mall. There had simply been too many people in here. If I was trying to pick out a scent, I could do thatbut trying to distinguish all the scentsit just wasn't going to work.
Giving up, I went back to the corner where I'd scented Uncle Mike just to see if I could pick him up againor figure out how he managed to leave only the barest trace for me to find.
I don't know how long it was there before I finally looked up and saw the raven.
CHAPTER 5
It watched me from the hall doorway, as if it had simply found the open back door and flown in. But ravens are not night birds despite their color and reputation. If there had been nothing else, that alone would have told me that there was something off about this bird.
But that wasn't the only thing. Or even the first.
As soon as I caught the glitter of the moon's light in the shine of its feathers, I smelled itas if it hadn't been there until then.
Ravens smell of the carrion they eat overlaying a musty sharp scent they share with crows and magpies. This one smelled of rain, forest, and good black garden soil in the spring. Then there was its size.
The Tri-Cities has some awfully big ravens, but nothing like this bird. It was taller than the coyote I was; easily as big as a golden eagle.
And every hair on my body stood up to attention as a wave of magic swept through the room.
It took a sudden hop forward, which moved its head into the faint light that trickled through the windows. There was a spot of white on its head, like a drop of snow. But what caught most of my attention were its eyes: bloodred, like a white rabbit's, they glittered eerily as it stared right at meand through me, as if it were blind.
For the first time in my life I was afraid to drop my eyes. Werewolves put great value on eye contactand I'd blithely used that all my life. I have no trouble dropping my eyes, acknowledging anyone's superiority and then doing whatever I please. Among the werewolves, once dominance was acknowledged, the dominant werewolf could, by custom, do no more than cuff me out of his waywhile I then ignored him or plotted how to get back at him as I chose.
But this wasn't a werewolf, and I was consumed with the conviction that if I moved at all, it would destroy methough it was not making any sign of aggression.
I value my instincts, so I stayed motionless.
It opened its mouth and gave a rattling cry, like old bones shaken roughly in a wooden box. Then it dismissed me from its notice. It strode to the corner and knocked the walking stick to the floor. The raven took the old thing into its mouth and without so much as a glance over its shoulder took flight through the wall.
Fifteen minutes later, I was well on the way back homein human shape and driving my car.
Being not exactly human myself and raised by werewolves, I'd thought I'd seen just about everything: witches, vampires, ghosts, and a half dozen other things that aren't supposed to exist. But that bird had been real, as solid as meI'd seen its ribs rise and fall as it breathed and I'd touched that walking stick myself.
I'd never seen one solid object go through another solid objectnot without some pretty impressive CGI graphics or David Copperfield.
Magic, despite Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, just doesn't work like that. If the bird had faded, become immaterial or something before it hit the wall, I might have accepted that as magic.
Maybe, just maybe, I'd been like the rest of the world, accepting the fae at their face value. Acting like they were something familiar, that they were constrained by rules I could understand and feel comfortable with.
If anyone should have known better, it would be me. After all, I well understood that what the public knew about the werewolves was just the polished tip of a nasty iceberg. I knew that the fae were, if anything, worse about secrecy than the wolves. Though Zee had been my friend for a decade, I knew very little about the fae side of his life. I knew he was a Steelers fan, that his human wife had died of cancer shortly before I met him, and that he liked tartar sauce on his friesbut I didn't know what he looked like beneath his glamour.
There were lights on at my house when I pulled the Rabbit into the driveway and parked it next to Samuel's Mercedes and a strange Ford Explorer. I'd been hoping Samuel would be home and awake, so I could use him as a sounding boardbut the SUV put paid to that idea.
I frowned at it. It was two in the morning, an odd time for visitors. Most visitors.
I took in a deep breath through my nose, but couldn't catch a whiff of vampireor anything else. Even the night air smelled duller than usual. Probably just a leftover from the shift from coyote to human. My human nose was better than most people's but quite a bit less sensitive than the coyote's, so changing to human was a little like taking out a hearing aid. Still
Vampires could hide their scent from me if they chose to.
I shivered in the warm night air. I think I would have stayed out there all night, except that I heard the murmur of guitar. I couldn't see Samuel playing for Marsilia, the mistress of the vampire seethe, so I climbed up the steps and went in.
Uncle Mike sat on the overstuffed chair Samuel had replaced my old flea-market find with. Samuel was half-stretched out on the couch like a mountain lion. He played idle bits of music on his guitar. He might look relaxed, but I knew him too well. The cat who was purring on the back of the couch, just behind Samuel's head, was the only relaxed person in the room.
"There's hot water for cocoa," said Samuel, without looking away from Uncle Mike. "Why don't you get yourself some, then come tell us about Zee, who put you on the scent of their murderer so they could go kill him. Then tell me what you've been doing tonight that would leave you smelling of blood and magic?"
Yep, Samuel was ticked at Uncle Mike.
I riffled through the cupboards until I found the box of emergency cocoa. Not the milk chocolate with marshmallow kind, but the hard stuff, dark chocolate with a bit of jalapeño pepper for flavor. I wasn't really upset enough now to need it, but it kept me busy while I thought about how I might keep matters peaceable. Real cocoa needs milk, so I put some in a sauce pan and began heating it up.