Blood Trail

They seemed pleased she was so quick on the uptake. "It must be frustrating. ..."

    Marie shrugged. "It's not so bad."

    "Don't you ever want to tell people what you can do? Show them your other shape?"

    Stuart's growl sounded very loud and very menacing in the shocked silence that followed. The girls looked as though she'd suggested something obscene. "Okay. I guess not." Don't judge them by human standards. Try to remember that. "What about special friends?"

    Storm and Cloud were unreadable. Marie and Jennifer looked puzzled. "Boyfriends?"

    Both girls wrinkled their noses in identical expressions of disgust.

    "Humans don't smell right," Stuart explained, shortly. "That sort of thing never happens."

    "They don't smell right?"

    "No."

    Vicki decided to leave it at that. She really wasn't up for a discussion of werewolf breeding criteria, not at this hour of the night. There were, however, two things that had to be covered.
    The first still made Vicki uncomfortable and, in almost a year of working for herself, she hadn't come up with a less than blunt way of bringing it up. "About my fee. ..."

    "We can pay it," Stuart told her and only nodded when she mentioned the amount.

    "All right, then," she laced her fingers together and stared into the pattern thus formed for a moment, "one more thing. When I find whoever is doing this, what then? We can't take him to court. He can't be held accountable for murder under the law without giving away the existence of your people."

    Stuart smiled and, in spite of the heat, Vicki felt a chill run up and down her back. "He will be accountable to our law. To pack law."

    "Revenge, then?"

    "Why not? He's killed two of us for no reason, no cause. Who has better right to be judge and jury?"

    Who indeed?

    "There's no other way to stop him from killing again," Henry said quietly. He thought he understood Vicki's hesitation, if only in the abstract. Ethics formed in the sixteenth century had an easier time with justice over law than ethics formed in the twentieth.

    What it came down to, Vicki realized, was a question of whose life had more value; the people here in this room or the maniac, singular or collective, who was picking them off one by one? Put like that, it didn't seem to be such a difficult question.

    "The three people you have, then, I'd like to check them out."

    "We already checked," Donald began but Stuart cut him off.

    "It's too late to do anything tonight. We'll get you the information tomorrow."

    As Vicki had already been told, they'd attempted to deal with this themselves after Nadine's twin had been shot. She wasn't surprised that they'd done some checking. She wished they hadn't; in her experience, amateurs only muddied the waters. "Did you find anything?"

    Stuart sighed and ran both his hands back through his hair. "Only what we already knew; Dr.
    Dixon is a very old man who hasn't betrayed us in over forty years and isn't likely to start now.
    Arthur Fortrin went north at the end of July and won't be back until Labor Day weekend. And Colin's partner, Barry, had both the skill and the opportunity."

    Vicki tapped her pen against the paper. "That doesn't look good for Barry."

    "No," Stuart agreed. "It doesn't."

    "Hey, Colin! Wait a minute. ..."

    Colin sighed and leaned against the open door of the truck. There really wasn't anything else he could do; leaping inside and roaring off in a cloud of exhaust fumes would certainly not make things any better. He watched his partner cross the dark parking lot, weaving his way around the scattered cars belonging to the midnight shift, brows drawn down into a deep vee, looking very much like a man who wanted some answers. Exactly the situation Colin had been trying to avoid.

    "What is with you, Heerkens?" Barry Wu rocked to a halt and glared. A line of water dribbled down his face from his wet hair and he swiped at it angrily. "First you act like a grade A asshole all shift, then you slink out while I'm in the shower without so much as a 'See you tomorrow,' or a 'Go fuck yourself.' "

    "You're my partner, Barry, you're not my mate." As an attempt to lighten the mood, it was a dismal failure; Colin could still smell the anger. He did his best not to react to it, catching the growl in his throat before it rose to an audible level.

    "That's right, your partner - let's set aside the fact I thought I was your friend - and as your partner I have a right to know what it is that's got you tied in knots."

    "It's pack