Inked

grandmother.
    Heat roared through me. He pushed something into my blood-soaked hand. A flat plastic card, and a flap of leather.
    “Finish what she started.” He breathed brokenly, but I was too numb to ask him what he meant. The old man’s eyes fluttered shut.
    “Maxine,” Grant murmured, bent over his cane, his fingers brushing my shoulder. “He’s almost gone. I can see it.”
    Even I could see that. My eyes burned from seeing it. I heard sirens in the distance, and Zee crept close on all fours, peering at the dying old man with peculiar familiarity. Raw and Aaz were close behind him, twins in every way except for a dash of silver on Raw’s chin. Dek and Mal uncoiled from my hair, making small sounds of distress.
    “Ernie,” Zee rasped, but the old man did not open his eyes. All his intensity, his desperation, had bled out of him. His breathing slowed. His muscles relaxed.
    I watched him die.
    Grant’s hand tightened on my shoulder. I sat very still, hardly able to breathe—afraid to breathe—a small part of me crushed with inexplicable grief. I did not know this man, but I felt like I should have. I should have.
    Zee sighed, running his claw through the old man’s spreading blood. He placed the tip on his tongue, tasting, and glanced over his shoulder at the others, shaking his head. I would have to ask, but not yet. I could hardly swallow around the lump in my throat, and there was an ambulance coming; and with them, the police.
    I tore my gaze from the old man, and glanced down at what he had given me. The plastic card was a hotel key, and I held it up over my shoulder. Grant took the key without a word, and slid it quickly into his pocket.
    The other item was far less mundane. It was leather, and covered in an intricately inked design that resembled roses. But it was not normal leather. At least, not from anything that had moved on four legs.
    I was holding a flap of human skin.

2
    NO escape. The old man named Ernie was dead in front of my Mustang, but even if his body hadn’t been blocking the car, it would not have felt right to simply leave him. He had been murdered. Murdered, while looking for me. And those two things, I feared, were related.
    The police arrived with the ambulance. We stood aside as the EMTs checked the old man’s vital signs and came to the obvious conclusion. And then we stepped aside even more as the police cordoned off the area and took us back to their vehicle for questioning.
    Before they were done, a black sedan rolled up. Two familiar men got out. They took one look at us, whispered to each other, and then walked to the dead old man. Hovered, crouched, poked and prodded with latex gloves on their hands. I tried not to watch them. Or think about the hotel key and leather burning a hole in Grant’s pocket. Red eyes blinked lazily from the shadows, and two hot tongues rasped the back of my neck.
    When Detectives Suwani and McCowan were done with their cursory examination, they held three plastic bags, which they passed off to one of the uniforms waiting on the sidelines. Then, with careful deliberation, they walked over to where we were waiting.
    Suwani was a slender black man, not quite as tall as me, but lean, with a sinewy strength that started at his hands and wrists, and no doubt reflected the rest of his trim body. McCowan, on the other hand, had already lost most of his neck behind his sagging chin, and the rest of him was built like the love child of a dump truck and an elephant. Big, lumbering—kind of cute, kind of soft, kind of bullheaded—kind of this, kind of that, which I suspected was just a mask, given that his eyes were anything but dull or dithering.
    Suwani gave me a sharp once-over, but only McCowan stared at the low neck of my dress, his gaze traveling down my legs and then up again—barely reaching my face. Grant cleared his throat. “Gentlemen. I wish we could have met again under better circumstances.”
    I wished we had not met again at all, but those were the breaks. Suwani nodded, and looked at me. “Did you know the victim?”
    “No,” I said. “We were coming back from a party, and found him in front of my car.”
    “You have a bad habit of collecting corpses,” McCowan replied. “Last time we met there was a dead man who had your name in his pocket. And now another corpse just happens to be found beside your car. You sure you didn’t know him? Or that he didn’t know you ?”
    Grant frowned, and this time when he spoke there