“Clementine examined what was left of the bodies, but nothing came of that,” she continued. “The most intact was the one Barry chased down, but we shifters don’t leave a lot behind.”
I still had vivid memories of the one Tarvers had taken apart, and I couldn’t see how one of the large shifters could leave much behind.
“Does the name Dr. Sigridsen mean anything to you?” I asked. The line was silent for a long time. “Mary?”
“Yes,” she said flatly. “I’m not allowed to explain that, though. Look, are you okay entering Clan territory?”
“I woke up in it on the weekend,” I reminded her.
“I’m going to call Tarvers,” she told me. “The equivalent to your guy’s Manors is the Lodge. The one in Calgary is a sports bar named Victor’s in the northeast. Meet us there in an hour.”
“Okay,” I agreed slowly. She gave me the address.
“Sorry for the mysteriousness,” Mary said quietly. “You’ll understand once Tarvers explains, I promise. See you soon.”
She hung up, presumably to call Tarvers, and I put my phone down, feeling more than a little confused. Apparently, the shifters there had dealt with Dr. Sigridsen. And the only way I was going to find out more want to head to the Lodge and meet with Tarvers.
I sighed and grabbed my coat. It was a Friday night, and I suspected it was cold outside.
I MISSED NOT JUST one but two bus connections on my way to the northeast and ended up taking over an hour and a half to get to Victor’s. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting—I was figuring it would be a biker bar or something similar, with brawly tattooed men smoking outside by the rows of motorbikes. Instead, Victor’s was a quiet sports bar buried in a residential strip mall.
There was a row of motorbikes but also a moderately full parking lot of cars. Two young men, one the fair-haired shifter from the other night who Mary had called Barry, loitered outside the entrance. From the way the one I didn’t know moved before Barry waved him to relaxation, both were carrying.
“Tarvers is waiting for you,” Barry told me. “Booth at the end on the left.”
“Thanks.” I nodded to the shifters and entered the bar.
The inside was plain but solid. The booth tables were heavily mounted wood, and even the freestanding ones looked bolted to the floor. The bar looked like it had started life as one giant tree—presumably from somewhere not Calgary—and been hacked into shape. The lights were just dim enough to hide what I was sure were permanent stains on the bar.
Two giant flatscreen TVs hung above the bar, showing the progress of a hockey game and holding the attention of most of the bar’s patrons. I don’t think I saw a single human in the bar, though.
I followed Barry’s directions and found the two shifters waiting for me. Mary looked up at me with a bright smile, and Tarvers simply grunted and gestured me to a seat, sliding a whiskey on ice across the table to me.
“You’ll want the booze,” he said grimly as I sipped at the whiskey and coughed as it burned its way down.
“How did you come across Sigridsen?” the leader of Calgary’s shapeshifter population asked.
“You know what I was asked to investigate,” I told him. That I hadn’t been asked by Oberis was a detail they didn’t need to know, and I was more comfortable not telling them. “I asked some questions up at the airport and was told a story about a cargo container of cadavers coming into the city about nine months ago—and Dr. Sigridsen signed for them for the university. Except no one at the university knows anything about this, and she hasn’t worked for them for a year.”
“No, she hasn’t,” Tarvers said, a grim satisfaction in his voice. “We’re pretty sure she knows that if we find her, she’s dead.”
I looked at him, surprised. Most inhumans generally ignored the human populace half the time and looked down on it the rest. We weren’t much noted for specifically trying to hunt down mortals.
“Maybe you should start at the beginning,” I suggested.
Tarvers nodded and took a gulp of his beer.
“Clementine was the first of us in a while to go through higher education,” he told me. “While we have more control when we change than myth tends to suggest, it’s still risky to spend that much time in purely human company.”
“Barry’s younger brother Abraham followed Clementine in,” he continued. “He’s a wolf shifter, so it was a bit riskier, but Clem had shown us it could be done. The year Clem graduated as a doctor, Abraham entered pre-med. One of his first teachers was Dr. Sigridsen. We didn’t know, then, that the fae Courts had issued a hunter warning on the bitch.
“Abraham made it into his second year without an issue, and then something—we’re not sure what—went wrong,” the big bear shifter said quietly. “Sigridsen got suspicious and started stalking him. She was good—the bitch hunted fae, after all. It was around this time I mentioned what was going on to Oberis, who warned us that there was a hunter at the school.
“It was too late.” Tarvers drained the remnants of his beer and gestured for the waitress to bring him another. “Abraham had mentioned to us that he was starting to feel nervous, so when Oberis told me about the hunter, I took five good men and rushed to the campus. We found his dorm room destroyed—every sign of a struggle.
“We found later that Sigridsen had taken him by surprise and injected him with a silver nitrate–laced tranquilizer. He almost killed her regardless, and she almost killed him with the tranquilizer, but in the end, she took him alive.”
Mary hadn’t said a word the whole time Tarvers had been talking; now she laid a hand on her clan leader’s shoulder and squeezed, sharing a sad smile with me.
“It took us two weeks to find who had taken him and where,” the big Alpha finally continued, his voice quiet and pained. “She nailed him to a table with silver and dissected him. And then, when he regenerated, she did it again. And again. And again. She was studying him, like he was an animal, only worse. No animal could have survived what was done to him. A human, an animal, even a fae would have died by the end of the first day. She repeatedly dissected him and studied his regeneration for two weeks.”
“Powers,” I cursed softly.
Tarvers lapsed into silence, and Mary squeezed his shoulder again and then continued the story for him.
“I was on the strike team that went in after him,” she told me. “One of my first tasks for the Clan, actually, was scouting out the site. We hit her house in the middle of the night, trying to capture her, but it turned out she’d trapped the place. Barry was badly injured, as were several others, and she escaped—but we got Abraham out. But...she broke him, Jason,” Mary said, her voice tired. “Broke his mind like a twig—he’d been repeatedly tortured for weeks.
“That was a year ago,” she continued. “Sigridsen vanished, though we don’t think she left the city. Abraham is only now starting to show some improvement under continuous care and therapy.”
“If we find that bitch, she is dead a thousand times over,” Tarvers growled. “From what you said, she’s now dealing with feeders. But in a year of searching, all we’ve been able to be sure of is that she’s in the city. We have police and government contacts, but she hasn’t registered a change of address since we destroyed her house.
“So, yes, Jason, we know who she is,” he continued. “I don’t know how much use knowing what we know is to you—we haven’t found her. But if you do…” He paused. “If you can’t get us there, understand that she is far more dangerous than a human should be and utterly without comprehension of us as people. Kill her first. Kill her hard.”
With that, Tarvers finished his beer and stood up, leaving Mary and me alone at the table. She switched around to slide up next to me.