Blue Moon (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 8)

33

The body lay in a small clearing. I knew it was human because they told me it was. It wasn't that the body didn't look human, exactly. The shape was there enough that I could tell it was lying on its back. It was more that my mind refused to acknowledge that this could have been a human being. My eyes saw it, but my mind kept refusing to put the pieces together, so it was like looking at one of those pictures where you stare and stare until the hidden shapes spin out in 3-D relief. It looked as if there had been an explosion of blood and flesh, and the body had been at the center of it. Dried blood spread out from the body in every direction, as if when the body were moved there'd be a body-shaped clean spot, like an ink blot.

I could see all that, but still my eyes couldn't make sense of it. My mind was trying to protect me. It had happened before -¨C once or twice. The smart thing would be to turn and walk away. Let my mind have its confusion because the truth was going to be one of those mind-blasting moments. I'd jokingly told Henderson at the top of the hill that some things stain the mind. It wasn't funny now.

I forced myself to look at it, forced myself not to look away, but the summer heat wavered around me in a sickening rush. I wanted to cover my eyes with my hands, but I settled for turning away. Covering my eyes would look silly and childish, like blotting out the worst of a horror movie.

Henderson turned when I did. If I wasn't going to look at the body, then he wouldn't, either. "You okay?"

The world stopped spinning like a ball that had slid to a stop. "I will be." My voice sounded breathy.

"Good," he said.

We stood that way for a few seconds more, then I took a shallow breath. I knew better than to take a deep one this close to the body. I had to do this. Trolls didn't do this. No natural animal did this. I turned slowly around to face the body. It hadn't gotten any better.

Henderson turned with me. He was the man in charge. He could take it if I could. I wasn't sure I could, but since I was out of other choices ...

I'd borrowed surgical gloves. Someone had offered me heavier plastic gloves to go over. AIDS, you know. I declined. One, my hands would sweat. Two, if I had to feel the body for clues, I wouldn't be able to feel shit. Three, with three vampire marks on me, I didn't sweat AIDS anymore. I was free from blood-borne disease, so I'd been told. I believed Jean-Claude on this one because he wouldn't want to lose me. I was a third of his triumvirate. He wanted me safe. In the back of my head a voice said, He loves you. The voice in the front of my head said, Yeah right.

"Can I track up the blood pattern?" I asked.

"You can't get close to the body unless you step in the blood," Henderson said.

I nodded. "True. So you've videotaped it, gotten all your pictures?"

"We know how to do our job, Ms. Blake."

"I'm not questioning that, Captain. I need to know if I can move the body around, that's all. I don't want to fuck up the evidence."

"When you're done with it, we'll be bagging it up."

I nodded. "Okay." I stared down at the body and suddenly could see it. All of it. I hugged my arms across my stomach to keep my hands from covering my eyes. The nose had been bitten off so that it was just a bloody hole. The lips were torn away until teeth and the bones of the jaw were visible under the drying blood. The muscles of the jaw were missing on the side facing me. Whatever had done this hadn't just taken a quick bite. It had sat down and fed.

So many bites, so much missing flesh, but most of it too shallow to kill. I said a short prayer that most of the bites were postmortem. Even as I prayed, I was pretty sure I wouldn't get a good answer; there was too much blood. She'd been alive through most of it. Intestines spilled out of the ripped jeans in a dried nest covered in thicker things than blood. The outhouse smell of her lower intestines being ripped would have faded by now. One smell dies, but there's always another. Her body had started to ripen in the summer beat. It is a smell that is hard to describe, both overwhelmingly sweet and bitter enough to gag. I took shallow breaths and stepped onto the dried splatter.

Something moved through me like a phantom blow. The hair on the back of my neck tried to crawl down my spine. That part of my brain that had nothing to do with cars or indoor plumbing and everything to do with running and screaming and not thinking at all, was whispering now. It was whispering that something was wrong. Something evil had been here -¨C not just dangerous, evil.

I waited to see if the feeling would grow stronger, but it faded. It faded like a bad memory, which probably meant I'd walked through the edge of some kind of spell -¨C or rather, the remnants of one, a nasty one.

You didn't call something this evil without a circle of protection either for the sorcerer to stand in or for the beastie to be put inside of. I searched the ground, but there was nothing but blood. The blood didn't form a circle of protection. It was just splatter, mess, no pattern.

I should have known there wouldn't be anything that obvious. The police aren't practitioners of the arts, though that is beginning to change, but you can't be a cop long and not look for signs of magic when the shit is this strange.

The scene looked undisturbed, but that didn't mean it was undisturbed. If someone were really good at magic, they could make you not see something. Not true invisibility. Humans don't do that. Physics is physics. Light hits a solid object and bounces. But they can make the eye reluctant to see, so that you keep looking past something and your mind doesn't register it. Like looking for a set of car keys that is sitting in plain sight, lost for two days.

I squatted beside the body. I didn't have the coveralls I usually wore at murder scenes and didn't want the blood to soak into my jeans. I was still hugging myself. There were things here that someone didn't want us to see. But what?

Henderson called, "We found the wallet. Do you want the ID?"

"No," I said. "No." I wasn't being clever. I just didn't want a name, an identity for the thing at my feet. I'd done the trick of turning the body into an it. It wasn't real. It was just something to be studied, examined. It had never been real. To think anything else at that moment would have had me vomiting all over the evidence. I'd done that only once, years ago. Dolph and the gang had never let me live it down.

The eyes had been clawed out and left to dry into blackened lumps on the cheeks. Long hair was plastered along the side of the face, stuck to one shoulder. Maybe blond hair from the color. But it was hard to tell with all the soaked blood. The long hair made me think female. My eyes traveled down and found the remains of clothing. The blouse had been reduced to a lump of cloth under one arm. The chest was bare. One breast torn completely off. The other deflated like a balloon as if something had eaten the flesh out of the middle, like a kid sucking the jelly out of a donut.

It was an unfortunate choice of metaphors, even in my own head. I had to stand up. I had to walk away, blowing air out very fast and too shallow. I went to stand beside one of the trees that edged the clearing. I had to take deep breaths, but that meant the odor went down strong. That sweet, sweet smell slid along my tongue and coated the back of my throat until I couldn't stand the thought of swallowing but didn't know what else to do. I swallowed, and the smell slid down, and my morning coffee inched up.

I had two comforts. One, I'd managed to get outside the blood pattern to vomit. Two, I didn't have much in my stomach to come up. Maybe this was one reason that I've stopped eating breakfast. I get a lot of early-morning body viewing.

I knelt in the dry leaves and felt better. I hadn't thrown up at a crime scene in a long time. At least Zerbrowski wasn't here to rib me about it. I wasn't even embarrassed. Was that a sign of maturity?

Male voices behind me. Sheriff Wilkes saying, almost yelling, "She's just a civvie. She shouldn't be here. She isn't even licensed for this state."

"I'm in charge here, Sheriff. I say who stays and who goes." Henderson wasn't yelling, but his voice carried.

I grabbed the tree trunk to help me stand, and my arm tingled so hard it almost went numb. I stood, pushing away from the tree, nearly falling, but I kept my feet. I looked up the smooth trunk. About eight feet up was a pentagram carved into the bark of the tree. The cut had been darkened with blood. With the dried blood rubbed into it, it was almost invisible against the dark grey bark, but there was also a spell of reluctance on it. So that no one had looked, not even me. Only when I touched the tree did I sense it. Like all illusion, once you see it, you know it's there.

I looked at the other trees and found a bloody pentagram carved into each one. It was a circle of power, of protection. A circle formed of blood and the land itself. Wiccans -¨C witches -¨C can use their power for evil if they're willing to pay the price in karma. Whatever you do, good or ill, comes back to you threefold. But even a wiccan gone bad wouldn't carve up a tree. Had the trees, the land, themselves, been invoked? That might mean an elemental. They could be nasty. But they didn't feel evil. They felt angry if you messed with their land, but they weren't evil, more angry-neutral. I'd gotten that whiff of evil as I passed through the circle. Evil with a capital E. There just aren't that many preternatural critters that trip that particular wire.

"Captain Henderson," I said. I had to say it twice before they stopped arguing and looked at me.

They both looked at me. Neither looked friendly, but at least I knew who they were mad at: each other. Local cops don't like anybody horning in on their turf. It was normal for the local police to resent outsiders. But I knew that Wilkes had more to protect than his turf. He must be frantic having real cops here now. But now wasn't the time to spill the beans. I had no proof. Accusing a policeman of corruption tends to upset the other cops.

"Did you see the pentagrams on the trees?"

The question was strange enough that they both stopped being angry and paid attention. I pointed the pentagrams out, and like all good illusion, once I showed them, they could see it. The emperor has no clothes.

"So?" Wilkes said.

"So, this was a circle of protection, of power. Something was called here to kill her."

"The marks on the trees could have been here for days," Wilkes said.

"Test the blood on the pentagrams," I said. "It won't be hers, but it will be fresh."

"Why isn't it the victim's?" Henderson asked.

"Because they used the blood to seal the circle. They had to have the blood before the death."

"It was a human sacrifice then," Henderson said.

"Not exactly," I said.

"This was a troll kill," Wilkes said. He didn't sound sure; he sounded desperate.

Henderson turned to him. "You keep saying that, Wilkes. You keep saying it was trolls."

"That biologist herself said it looked like primates. It sure as hell wasn't a person. There aren't that many primates running around the Tennessee hills."

"She said humanoid," I said.

They both looked at me again.

"Dr. Onslow said humanoid. A lot of people assume humanoid means primate, but there are other options."

"Like what?" Wilkes said. His beeper went off. He checked the number, then looked at me. "Excuse me, Captain Henderson."

Henderson looked at me. "Do you and the sheriff have some sort of history, Ms. Blake?"

I frowned. "History? How?"

"He was very certain that you shouldn't be anywhere near this body. He was also very certain that this was a troll kill. Very certain."

"Who called you guys then?"

"An anonymous tip."

We looked at each other. "Who suggested I get to join the fun?"

"One of the EMS crew. The man's usual partner met you last night."

I shook my head. "I don't know him."

"His regular partner is a girl. Lucy something."

That explained Lucy's medical knowledge, and why she wasn't working on the day of the full moon. Don't want to be around fresh blood with the moon almost full. Too tempting. Too chancy.

"I remember her vaguely, I guess." I remembered her more than vaguely, but the last time I'd seen her was just after I'd murdered someone, so I was going to be fuzzy on the details. For one awful moment, I wondered if Henderson had been trying to trick me and the body was really Lucy. But the height was wrong. The woman had been tall, not my size. Most of the women that Richard dated were short. I guess if you've got a body type you like, you stick to it. My choice of victims seemed to be a lot wider.

"Why did they need a power circle, Ms. Blake?" Henderson asked.

"To keep in what they called."

He frowned at me. "Like you said before, the foreplay is getting tiresome. Just tell me what the fuck you think it was."

"I think they called a demon."

His eyes widened. "A what?"

"A demon," I said.

Henderson just looked at me. "Why?"

"When I crossed the circle, I got that feeling of evil. No matter how monstrous the critter, it doesn't feel the same as something dedicated to evil and no other purpose."

"You see many demons while you're out slaying vampires, Ms. Blake?"

"Once, Captain, just once. It was ... " I stepped out of the circle of power, and I felt better. They'd done their best to hide the traces, but things like this have a tendency to cling. "I was called into a case that they thought was a vampire, but it was demonic possession. The woman ... " I stopped again because I didn't have words for it, or no words that wouldn't seem silly, melodramatic. I tried to tell the story by sticking to the facts. Me and Sergeant Friday.

"The woman had been an ordinary housewife, mother of two. She'd been a diagnosed schizophrenic, Captain. Her particular brand of craziness was almost a multiple personality disorder, but not that clear-cut. She was like the little girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good. A model churchgoer, teacher of Sunday school. She canned her own vegetables, sewed doll clothes for her girls. But when she was bad, she slept around, abused the kids, hung the family dog from a tree."

Henderson raised an eyebrow at that. For a cop, it was pure shock. "Why wasn't she in a hospital?"

"Because when she took her medicine, she was the good mother, the good wife. I talked to her when she was 'well,' and she was a very nice person. I saw why the husband tried to hold on to her. It was tragic in the true sense of the word that her own brain chemistry was destroying her life."

"It's sad, but it's not demonic," Henderson said.

"Neighborhood pets were vanishing, showing up drained of blood. I traced it to the woman. Her history of mental illness had raised flags with the cops. So far, just sad, right." I stared off up the hill at the cops and the techs and everyone. They were not looking down the hill. No one wanted to hang around this one. Even if you aren't truly sensitive to the psychic, we all have survival instincts that work better than we do. Everyone would be reluctant on this one, and they wouldn't know why.

"You still with me, Blake?" Henderson asked.

"Sorry. The night we arrested her, two uniforms had had to drag her out of another man's bed, handcuffed. They didn't have another female on site that night, so I rode in back with her. She was loud and boisterous, flirting with the men, being snotty with me. I don't even remember what I said, but I remember the look on her face when she turned to me. We're riding in this dark police car, and as she turns her head to look at me, the hair on my body stood up. There were no glowing eyes, no smell of sulfur, Captain Henderson, but I felt evil rise off of her like some disturbing perfume." I looked at him, and he was scrutinizing my face like he was trying to memorize it. "I don't scare easy, Captain, but for that instant, I was scared. Scared of her, and it showed on my face, and she laughed, and the moment was gone."

"What did you do?"

"I recommended they do an exorcism."

"Did they?" he asked.

"Not the police, but her husband signed the papers for it."

"And?" Henderson said.

"And it worked. If she stays on her medication, the mental illness is under control. The possession didn't cause the schizophrenia."

Henderson nodded. "We all get the lecture in training that mental illness can open a person up to demonic possession, Ms. Blake. It's like PCP but weirder."

"Yeah," I said. "PCP doesn't cause people to levitate."

He frowned at me. "Did you witness the exorcism?"

I shook my head. "I won't talk about it. I especially won't talk about it here and now. Words have power, Captain. Memories have power. I won't play into it."

He nodded. "Are you positive humans didn't do this?"

I shook my head. "They ate her to death. It ate her to death. A person might be able to bite your throat out and do some of this damage, but not all of it."

"If you told me this was a possession, I'd call my chain of command and start looking for a priest; but Blake, do you know how rare overt demonic attacks are?"

"Probably better than you do, Captain. I get called in for all sorts of weird shit."

"Have you ever seen a demon kill a person by straight attack, not trickery?"

"No."

"Then how can you be so sure?" he asked.

"I told you why I'm sure, Captain. Once you've been in the presence of the demonic, you don't forget what it feels like." I shook my head and fought the urge to take another step away from the body.

"But I'm not an expert on demons, Captain Henderson. I suggest you contact a priest. I'm also not an expert on this kind of magic. Call a local witch to look it over. They may be able to give you more information. The best I can do is general stuff."

"Could you have called a demon and made it kill her?"

I frowned at him. "What are you talking about?"

"Just answer the question, Ms. Blake."

"I raise the dead, Captain. I don't do demons."

"A lot of people don't see that big a difference between the two."

"Great, just great. You call me down here. I tell you it's black magic, and now you're going to blame me. I don't feel like being the toasty end of a witch hunt, Captain Henderson."

He smiled. "Just answer the question. Could you do it?"

"No, I could not do this. Trafficking with the demonic taints the soul. I may not be a perfect Christian, but I am trying."

"Fucking vampires taints the soul, too, Blake."

I stared up at him. I looked at him for several long seconds, because what I wanted to do was hit him or scream at him. No, hit him. But I couldn't do that. I settled for one of those smiles you get sometimes when what you really want to do is hurt someone.

"Fine, Captain, fine. This was powerful magic, and I have a reputation for powerful magic. It's not your fault that you don't understand the vast difference between the two schools of magic. Lack of education, can't hold that against you." My voice said plainly that I wanted to. "But if I were going to kill someone, I'd probably just shoot them. That would at least put me near the middle of the suspect list, not the top."

"I heard that about you. That you were a shooter."

I looked at him. "Heard from whom?"

"Cops talk to one another, Ms. Blake. If she'd shown up with a bullet in her head, then I might believe you did it."

"Why would I kill some unknown woman?"

"But she isn't unknown, Ms. Blake." He was watching me very closely.

I glanced back at the body. I looked down the length of it. There was nothing that I recognized. Of all the women I'd met since I came here, none were tall enough for the body. Except one.

I turned back to him and felt the blood drain from my face. "Who is it?"

"Betty Schaffer, the woman who accused your lover boy of rape."

The world swam in stripes of color and heat. Someone was holding my elbow, and only that kept me standing. When my vision cleared, Henderson had my arm, and Wilkes was back. "Are you all right, Ms. Blake?" Wilkes asked.

I looked him right in the eyes and didn't know what to say. Betty Schaffer had been worse than murdered. If the ritual was done right and the person was in jeopardy, not pure, like being a traitor or a liar or lecherous, then the soul could be taken with the life. I'd only seen one body that had been killed in ritual for a demon, and it had been nothing like this. The sacrifice had been killed with a knife, but the soul had been taken. And I couldn't raise the body. If a demon was involved with the death, then the body was just so much clay. I had no power here.

Wilkes couldn't have called a demon. None of his men had the power. Who could have done it? No one I'd met since I arrived had that kind of power and that kind of taint.

Before I could think of anything to say, Wilkes spoke first. "You've got a call. I think you should take it."

He was afraid I'd talk. Trouble was, I didn't have any proof of anything. Hell, I didn't even know what was going on. What was on this ordinary looking land that was worth killing over? Why did the trolls have to be gotten rid of? Was it just so the land could be sold? Or was there a darker purpose? Someone had called a demon to try to make it look like a troll kill. I knew why they'd done it, but not who. I even knew why it was Betty. She'd compromised herself, put herself at risk for that kind of ceremony.

Movies try to give us shit about needing virgins and purity for sacrifice, but true evil doesn't want to kill and send purity to heaven. True evil wants to corrupt good, and once the good are dead, they are beyond the devil's reach. But the impure, to sacrifice them, to kill them -¨C well, the devil gets his due.

Wilkes took my arm as if to help me.

"Don't touch me, Wilkes. Don't ever touch me again."

He let his hand fall. Henderson was watching us like he was seeing more than we were telling. Cops are good about that. Give them anything suspicious, and they'll put two and two together and make ten to twenty-five to life.

Wilkes looked at me. "Could it be werewolves?" His voice was quiet.

I couldn't keep the shock off my face. I fought to regain my nice, blank face, but it was enough. Wilkes knew what Richard was -¨C somehow he knew -¨C and he'd try to blame Betty's death on Richard. Werewolves were a good scapegoat, and a lot more fun to believe in than demons.

He pulled a cell phone from his pocket. He punched up a number. "She's right here." He handed the phone to me.

Henderson was watching us like we were entertaining. I took the phone. The voice on the other end was a man, and I didn't know him.

"I am Franklin Niley, Ms. Blake. I think it is time we meet face-to-face."

"I don't think so," I said.

"Wilkes told me that you have spoiled our little plan about blaming those pesky trolls for the death. But it is not too late to blame your lover. How many people will believe his innocence once they find out he is a werewolf?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

I had to turn my back on Henderson's alert eyes. His attention was a little too intense. Wilkes wasn't watching me. He was watching Henderson. Unfortunately, turning around put me back to staring at the corpse. I turned to the side and stared off through the trees.

The voice on the phone was cultured, almost too well-mannered for comfort. "Come, Ms. Blake, let us not play games, the two of us. I know what Mr. Zeeman is, and once he's accused, a simple blood test in the jail will prove me right. He'd lose his job, his career, and perhaps be executed. You have hired an excellent attorney; my congratulations. But if he is convicted, then it is an automatic death sentence. Juries have a strong tendency to convict monsters."

"I'm listening."

"Meet me at the diner in town. A public place, so you'll feel safe."

"Why do you want to meet?" My voice was growing progressively lower, whispering.

"To beg you one last time to leave town, Ms. Blake. I have no wish to come against you. The spirits say that to come against you is death."

"Spirits?" I whispered.

"Meet me, Ms. Blake. You and Mr. Zeeman. Meet me, and I promise you it will all be over. You will leave town and all will be well."

"I don't trust you."

"Nor should you," Niley said. He laughed, deep and rich. "But meet me at the diner, Ms. Blake. I'll answer your questions. I'll tell you why I want the land. Once my people have made sure you're not wearing a wire, I'll answer any direct question you have. Surely that tempts you."

"You sound like a man who knows a lot about temptation, Mr. Niley."

He laughed again. "Money tempts many people, Ms. Blake, and I have a great deal of it."

I'd been walking slowly away from Henderson. "You going to offer me money?"

"No, Ms. Blake, that is what won a certain officer of the law to my camp -¨C and his men. I do not think money is the key to your soul."

I didn't like the way he said that. "What do you want, Niley?"

"To talk, that is all. I would swear to you or promise you your safety, but I do not think you would believe me."

"You got that right."

"Come to me, Ms. Blake. Let us talk. After I have answered your questions, then you can decide whether to leave or stay. Now, would you be so kind as to put the sheriff back on the phone?"

I turned back to the waiting men and held up the phone. "He wants to talk to you again."

Wilkes came for the phone. It was just the two of us by the body when he tried to take the phone. I held onto it. I leaned in close to him and said, "Money doesn't spend in hell, Wilkes. The devil deals in a different coin."

He jerked the phone from my hand and walked away into the trees, listening to the voice in his ear. The voice that had offered him money to sell out everything he was or might have been. The motive I understood least of all for murder or betrayal was greed. But damned if it wasn't a popular motive for both.