Blood's Shadow: The Lycanthropy Files, Book 3 Read online

  “Laura,” I barked into the phone once I got into the elevator bay. “Open a Council Investigation on Bartholomew Campbell for sexual harassment immediately.”

  “Will do, Boss. Do you have solid proof?”

  “Not yet,” I said, but I’d just found the scrawled phone number at the bottom of page three. “But I will soon.”

  The elevator that picked me up was the only one that went all the way to the basement. I wouldn’t have remarked on it, but the smell of kerosene and pipe smoke—the same odor I’d picked up in the forest behind the Institute on the day LeConte was murdered—hung faintly inside. I doubted a human would have picked it up, and perhaps not even a weaker lycanthrope. Campbell hadn’t smelled of it, so who did? I pushed B for the lower level.

  The doors opened into a white-painted corridor that ended in a metal door. I followed the smell down the long hallway to the end and to a set of stairs. No light illuminated the stairwell, so I felt my way down two flights to a locked door. I took out a handkerchief—thankful I’d kept that remnant of my earlier life when men carried them all the time and before the ubiquitous paper tissue had made an appearance—and felt around the door through it so I wouldn’t leave any fingerprints.

  The rough surface of the wall stopped at a cool, smooth edge, and below it, squares—a keypad. I listened to make sure no one else was down there, took out my phone, and used the torch app. The metal keys didn’t show any wear, and I wished I had my fingerprint kit with me so I could see what numbers had been pushed most frequently and make a guess at the code. Perhaps Jade could enlighten me. I’d call her that evening right after I phoned Selene to confirm our date for the following night.

  It was after five by the time I made it back to Lycan Village, and I stopped into Marley’s for a pint. David Lachlan waved me to an empty stool beside him.

  I joined him and ordered one of the local brews, which I knew to not be too bitter.

  He held up the small glass of whiskey he was already halfway through. “It’s amazing, lad, how this witches’ brew and the fizzy stuff you’re about to drink are made from the same basic ingredients, but it’s what’s done with them that matters.”

  My beer arrived, and I clinked it to David’s glass. He tossed it back, thunked the glass on the bar, and gestured for another.

  “That’s your fifth, Lachlan,” Troy, the regular evening barkeep said. “D’you have a way home?”

  “I’ll take him,” I said. “But maybe you should give him a water first.”

  “Aye.”

  “Since when do you care about the state of my mornings?” David asked.

  “If you’re going to wake up with something ugly in your bed, it needs to have looked pretty the night before. That’s not going to apply to you, my friend, unless you’ve got a magic mirror.”

  “Ha!” He clapped me on the back so hard I saved my beer by an act of grace and possibly a small miracle of the suspension of gravity.

  I wiped the spilled beer off my hand. “Watch it—you’re wasting those good grains.”

  “And malts and hops and god knows whatever else they’ve got in there.” He squinted bleary eyes at the amber-colored liquid. “It’s all in what you do with it, isn’t it? What you do with what you’ve been given.”

  Troy slid a glass of water, no ice, in front of David, who scowled at it. “Nothing good in that lot. Just hydrogen and oxygen. Nothing that’ll wet a man’s throat.”

  “Drink your water, Lachlan, and I’ll give you another whiskey.” Troy rotated his massive shoulders in a seeming stretch, but the action flexed his biceps.

  David nodded. “Fine, fine, I got it. I’ll drink the blasted water, but you better make that last one a double.”

  “Sure, I’ll pour it from the tenth instead of the fifth and size it accordingly,” Troy said with a grin, and I laughed.

  David, obviously too drunk to understand fraction-related humor, just said, “That’d be grand.”

  Troy made sure David killed off the water before he gave him another whiskey.

  “Now I’ll be pissing all night,” David grumbled. “Haven’t broken the seal yet.”

  “Here’s to a werewolf-strength bladder,” I said, and we toasted to our good fortune.

  “Aye, that’s one of the good things about what we are. There’s plenty of bad too.”

  He lapsed into gloomy silence, and I sipped my beer and let the events of the day run through my head. I’ll admit to lingering on the kiss from Reine and the conversation with Selene and skipping over the unpleasant encounters with the Campbells. Cora had to know what her husband was up to. We didn’t have highly developed senses of smell for nothing, and detecting relationship infidelity was easier for us. On the other hand, if she was going to treat him as a true alpha, he could mate with as many females as he wanted.

  No, I wasn’t going to embrace my wolf side to that extent. I was fine straddling the line between animal and human. Wolves never drank alcohol, after all, and that was what sometimes made life bearable.

  I shook my head. My thoughts had become morose like David’s. “What’s with you, anyway?” I asked him.

  “What do you mean?” He looked at me sideways.

  “You’re testing your lycanthrope tolerance and bladder strength, and you’ve made some comments indicating you’re not happy with something. There’s nothing worse than a werewolf in a philosophical mood.”

  His shoulders heaved, and I couldn’t tell whether it was a shrug or a sigh. “I’ve been thinking about the letter, Lad. I shouldn’t have given it to you. I’ve just put you in more danger.”

  “Danger comes from lack of knowledge, not too much.” Max’s complaints about how if they could study blood magic, it would be less dangerous came to mind.

  “You weren’t getting shot at with silver arrows before I gave you the letter. I told your Da I’d take care of you if something happened to him, and I can’t fail now.”

  This was news to me, and it unlocked something. The flood of memories kept me from saying anything. I recalled David as having been a peripheral presence in my life during my short childhood and what felt like an even shorter adolescence before my first change at age thirteen. My mother, a human, had long suspected and feared I’d end up like my Da.

  At that point, I’d gone to the Council School—it hadn’t been a disciplinary academy then—and found out about my kind and the special kind of responsibility we had to keep our hormones under control when we had the power of an apex predator. I graduated and went on to Oxford at age seventeen and was made Council Investigator at age twenty-two, no other family members being available to fill the appointment. David had been the one to orient me to the Council and my role on it, but I hadn’t thought there was anything odd or significant about it.

  “Let’s not talk here,” I said. “I’ll grab some food and take you back to your place. Troy, two roast beef sandwiches, take-away.”

  “Good move,” Troy said. “Bread’ll help. Chips with those?”

  “Yes, the more absorbent material, the better.”

  In ten minutes, we were on our way in my car. David slumped in the passenger seat, his eyes closed. The late sunlight gilded the sides of the trees we passed, and I felt the thrum of energy that comes with twilight in old forests. Today it was stronger than usual, and I kept one eye out for Reine’s ilk and/or ghosts, friendly or otherwise. As if on cue, I heard the voice from the backseat.

  “Poor fool couldn’t hold his whiskey when something was bothering him. He’s a better celebratory drinker.”

  “I don’t have time to deal with you now,” I said as quietly as I could through clenched teeth.

  “Sorry,” David said. “Then why did you offer to take me home?”

  I cursed our preternatural sense of hearing. “Not you, you daft fool, you must be hearing things.”

  “Or you are,” h
e said.

  “Right. Either way, just focus on not throwing up in my car.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you if I need you to pull over.”

  We arrived at Laird Hall without incident, and David waved away my offer to help him.

  “I was drinking whiskey before you were even thought of, pup,” he told me and almost careened into the door. He righted himself.

  “Then you’ve had time to learn to pace yourself better.”

  “The nightmares, my boy. The nightmares.”

  At least yours aren’t ambushing you in the bathroom. I took the key that kept missing the lock from his unsteady grip and let us in. In spite of our long association, this was the first time I’d seen Laird Hall. The castle had been built back in the Victorian era once history had afforded enough distance from the Battle of Culloden for the families who’d been on the wrong side of the war to come out of hiding and reestablish themselves. However, the family constructed it on the original site of their medieval fortress, and some of the old stone had been incorporated into the new castle. It gave the place a patchwork old and new atmosphere, and David had continued the tradition, sometimes to a ludicrous degree, as I saw in the den, where a suit of armor stood by a large flat-screen television.

  “Is it standing guard?” I asked, pointing to the armor.

  “Old Gareth there provided a great reception boost when we were still dependent on aerials. Drink?” He held up a crystal decanter and a glass.

  “No thanks. One of us needs to have his wits about him.”

  “We both do.” He poured a glass of water from another fancy-looking pitcher and sat in a large leather armchair. I took the one beside it, opened the bag with the sandwiches, and passed him his dinner. The combination of the savory gravy-meat aroma with the old castle smells brought to mind the feasts that must have occurred here and in the original Laird Hall. I felt like I straddled several points in history and blinked to clear the dizziness and bring myself back to the present and the warm, heavy sandwich in its paper in my hands. We ate in silence for a few minutes.

  “Do you have the letter?” David asked.

  “No, it’s at home in my safe, but I wish I’d brought it back to you.” I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice but must have failed.

  “Nightmares get you too?”

  “No, worse. I must be going nuts because things got strange after you left. It’s just not possible for what happened to be real.”

  He barked a laugh. “Right, because it makes perfect sense that we should turn into large predators at the full moon.”

  “Touché, but I don’t appreciate it invading my home.”

  “What’s haunting you?”

  “Not sure yet.” I didn’t want to tell him who it was. If he felt that badly about having failed my father, then who knew what he’d do if he knew the ghost was likely hanging around? Especially considering David’s drunken state, although he seemed to be returning to lucidity fairly quickly.

  He nodded. “It’ll let you know somehow what it wants. Damn ghosts are nothing if not persistent.”

  “Very true. By the way, just how closely involved were you in my life? I remember you being there, but it’s all foggy.”

  He snorted. “That’s because you couldn’t bother to sit still long enough to see what was right in front of you, and I couldn’t get too close.”

  My male suspicion kicked in immediately. “Did you and my mother…?”

  He almost choked on a bite of roast beef and coughed until he cleared it. “No, Mary was a beautiful girl, but she wasn’t for me. Plus, she never stopped mourning your father. The day the telegram came was the day the lass started to die.”

  The look in her eyes, reinforced by the bathroom vision, came back to me. Or maybe it had never left, and I knew he spoke the truth. She’d never been the same, and when she’d gotten cancer at age forty-three, she hadn’t fought it, just slipped away.

  “I can’t imagine my father would have wanted that for her.”

  “Nor do I, but that was her decision. I did my best to watch over the two of you and convince her to take care of herself, but I had to do it without putting the two of you in more danger. I’d gone to the Continent for a couple of years, and that’s when she got sick. By the time I returned, it was too late.”

  “For what?”

  “I could have convinced her to seek treatment, such as it was back then, if I had been able to talk to her about it sooner. Of course she never mentioned it when I called. When I returned and saw how sick she was, the disease had already spread to her bones.”

  I nodded. “And she died soon after.”

  “Leaving you without both parents. It was another way I failed your Da.”

  The way he looked at the swords hanging on the wall concerned me. “You’re particularly morose tonight. What does all of this have to do with the letter? What kind of danger were you afraid of putting us in, besides getting shot at with silver arrows?”

  He balled up the sandwich wrapper and threw it into the bag. “There’s something I need to show you, but it will have to wait for another time. I need to look for it in my archives, and I had to build up some liquid courage to go into the dungeon.” He shook his head. “Talk about ghosts.”

  I checked my watch. It was getting late, and I needed to call Selene to confirm our date the next night and Jade to set up a meeting. Plus, David blinked sleepily at the candles in their sconces. Perhaps he had managed to pickle himself into oblivion and now, with a full stomach on top of it, found sleep difficult to fight.

  “I’ll leave you, then.”

  “Aye, and be careful of what lurks in the forest.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Once I returned to my house, I left Selene a voicemail confirming I’d pick her up the next day at six o’clock and the address, which Laura had sent me. I wondered what Selene’s plans for the evening could be, but it was none of my business unless she was hanging out with the scar-faced assailant, in which case she wouldn’t invite me along, anyway.

  My next call was to the number Jade had given me on the third page of the itinerary printout. She picked up on the second ring, and it sounded like she was in a club somewhere.

  “Oh, right, I remember you!” she shouted over the music, and I had to hold the telephone away from my ear.

  “Can we meet tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Can’t. Campbell pushed the trip up so the whole happy fucking family can be together.” Her level of sarcasm indicated she was either pissed drunk or pissed angry, maybe both. “Meet me out tonight.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  She rattled off the name of a bar in Inverness, which was about forty kilometers away. I told her I’d be there as soon as I could.

  “Don’t rush, love,” she said. “I’m supposed to be out recruiting other young lovelies like myself for Bartholomew’s harem so we can pretend he’s the big bad wolf and let him chase us all over the islands. Might as well let me find a few stupid ones so I can say I’ve done my job.” She rang off and left me looking at my phone with a mix of disgust and confusion.

  “What does a seventy-something-year-old who looks like a thirty-year-old wear for clubbing?” I asked myself and looked in my closet. The weather forecast said the temperature would drop, so I chose a green shirt, khaki pants, and white sweater I hoped wouldn’t get spilled on. Not that it mattered overmuch—I’d learned long ago not to become too attached to clothing. Nothing ruined garments like changing into a wolf without getting undressed first, but sometimes it couldn’t be helped.

  The bar Jade had specified was near the others in Inverness’s city center. I lucked out and found street parking not too far away in an alley. I walked a block and found the place called Raven’s on a narrow street that had been closed to automobile traffic. It sat at the bottom of a tan stone building, and blue light
spilled through its windows and onto the cobblestone sidewalk. Again, the juxtaposition of old and new disoriented me, but a tug on my sweater brought me back to the present. I looked down to see Alexander, the little clairvoyant from the school, grinning up at me.

  “Mister Gabriel?” he asked.

  “Hello, Alexander,” I said. “Where are your parents?”

  He gestured over his shoulder, where a man and a woman stood with tolerant but uncomfortable expressions on their thin faces. Alexander’s mother had a takeaway bag in her right hand from one of the restaurants I’d passed. I raised my hand, and they reluctantly waved back.

  “What is it?” I asked as I walked toward them to introduce myself, but Alexander held me back with another tug to my sweater.

  “They know who you are from the Council,” he said. “Father recognizes you from the pub. I have a message.”

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t go into the blue place. It’s not safe for you.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I didn’t ask who she was. You said not to strain myself, but she had fishes in her hair.”

  Reine. “Thanks, Alexander. You have a good evening.”

  He looked up at me with those serious brown eyes. “You’re going in there, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t feel like getting into a conversation about the trustworthiness of the Fey. If the pub wasn’t safe for me, I needed to find out why since it could potentially impact Council dealings. If everything did turn out fine, it would be one more reason not to trust the white-blonde fairy the next time she appeared.

  “It’s complicated,” I told the boy.

  The “bullshit” look he gave me seemed out of place on his small face. “That’s what grown-ups say when they don’t want to explain something. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He turned and walked back to his parents. His father waved, and I recognized him as one of the other lycanthropes I occasionally encountered at Marley’s. I made a mental note to talk to him chap-to-chap one night about his strategy of “toughening Alexander up” by sending him to the Council School. Meanwhile, I had a mysterious woman to meet.