“I think they might have enjoyed the killing. There’s no way to tell when a killer is this controlled,” he said.
“How does any of this help us catch them?”
He shook his head and looked back at the biggest part of the body. “I don’t know.” He sounded tired again.
I looked down at the body. There was still enough of his chest and stomach left to show that he’d had muscle tone. He’d hit the gym, and it had done him no good at all. He would be another clanless tiger, a survivor of an attack rather than one born into a family group. The Harlequin were killing only the clanless right now, because they were searching for certain tigers. They were searching for gold tigers. A bloodline supposedly destroyed during the reign of the First Emperor of China, but hidden in secret by some of the Harlequin. Hidden from the other Harlequin and from the Mother of All Darkness; the fact that they’d managed to hide them from her when she was at the height of her powers said just how good the Harlequin were at subterfuge. They would have run the world’s best witness protection program ever.
We’d hoped they’d stop slaughtering the clanless tigers when the gold tigers made their public debut to the other tiger clans, but though we’d made it public that we had all colors of the tigers with us in St. Louis, the Harlequin were still hunting and killing the weretigers. It seemed so pointless.
I stood up, waiting for my bad knee to protest squatting too long, but it didn’t. I realized my “bad knee” hadn’t been bad in a while. I was Jean-Claude’s human servant and metaphysically tied to several wereanimals. I healed faster than human-normal, but I hadn’t realized I’d lost the old aches and pains from past injuries. When had that happened?
Edward stood beside me, and he favored one leg a little. He had an injury on that one from a hunt that went bad. I thought, How old is Edward? Will he age and I won’t? Will my ties to the supernatural keep healing me? It was a weird thought to think that Edward might grow older faster than I did.
“You’ve thought of something, what?” he asked.
I opened my mouth, closed it, and tried to think of something else to say out loud. “Why keep killing the tigers?” I said.
“You mean now that they know you and Jean-Claude have your own gold tigers in St. Louis?”
“Yes. They were supposed to kill the clanless tigers to keep us from getting the gold tigers to bond with metaphysically. It’s too late, Edward, we’ve already done that, so why keep killing the other tigers?”
“Maybe they’re looking for a specific weretiger.”
“Maybe, but why, or who, and again why? There’s nothing to be gained by it.”
“I can think of one thing they’ve gained,” he said.
“Okay, what?”
“They’ve separated you from Jean-Claude and all the other people you’re metaphysically tied to. In St. Louis you have enough bodyguards to make up a small army. Here, it’s just you and the police.”
“You think they’d risk attacking me with the cops around? I mean, the whole concept of these guys is that no one knows they exist. They’re really invested in being this big dark secret.”
“If Mommie Darkest told them to kill you, would they risk being outed to the human police?”
“Maybe,” I said, and then I had another idea. I wasn’t sure it was worse, but it scared me more. “Her first idea was to take over my body. She wanted to kill me only after she realized I was too powerful for her to move into me.”
“Are you as powerful out here hundreds of miles away from Jean-Claude and the rest?”
I thought about it, really made myself look at it. “Metaphysically, no. I’m safer if I can touch my master and animals to call.”
“Maybe they’re killing the tigers to keep you out here.”
“You think they’ll try to kidnap me?” I asked.
“If she still wants your body, yes.”
“And if she just wants me dead, then that works better out here, too,” I said.
“It does,” he said. He was looking out at the edge of the field. He was checking the perimeter for danger, trying to see the Harlequin hiding in the trees along the edge of the green, summer field.
“I don’t sense any wereanimals,” I said, “and walking in full daylight is incredibly rare. I’ve only met three vampires that could do it.”
“If they’re these ultimate spies, would you be able to sense them?”
“I think so,” I said.
He glanced at me, then went back to scanning the area. “That’s pretty arrogant.”
“Maybe, but I’d still know if there was a preternatural close to us.”
He spoke without looking at me, “Please, tell me this isn’t the first time you wondered if this was a trap for you.”
“I thought they didn’t know the gold tigers were in St. Louis. They should have stopped killing the others after they learned that. It’s one of the reasons we made it public.”
“So either it’s a trap to keep you away from St. Louis or Mommie Darkest forgot to rescind her order.”
“What do you mean?”
“Would they slaughter the weretigers until she ordered them to stop, even if it made no sense?”
I thought about it. “The ones that are loyal to her are fanatically loyal, so I think they might.”
“So either she forgot to tell them to stop, because she’s busy doing something else . . .”
“Or she’s just that crazy,” I said.
He nodded. “Or she’s that crazy, or they’re waiting to either kidnap you, or kill you.”
“Fuck,” I said.
“You need to talk to Jean-Claude.”
“I thought you didn’t like him,” I said.
“You don’t like Donna either,” he said.
“So we each don’t like the people that the other one loves.” I shrugged.
“You need bodyguards, Anita.”
“Why not just go home to St. Louis?” I said.
“The Marshals Service frowns on us leaving a case in the middle of it, but that’s not the problem.”
The other marshals were moving toward us. I moved closer to Edward, and asked, “Then what is the problem?”
“How would you go home?”
I frowned, but answered. “I’d get on the first plane I could catch and go home.”
“The police would drop you off at the airport, and then you’d be alone.”
“What?”
“You’d be in the airport, and on the plane alone, Anita. If I really wanted to take you and it was important to not be seen doing it, that’s what I’d be waiting for, you alone, away from the other police, and Jean-Claude.”
I leaned close, speaking low. “So what do I do?”
“Have some guards come in from St. Louis.”
“How do I explain that to the other cops?”
“We’ll think of something.” And then I knew the other marshals were too close to talk more, because Edward’s face folded into a grin. His face lit with that charm that Ted always seemed to have. If there was an Emmy award for hired killers, Edward would so have won.
I wasn’t nearly that good, but I managed a pleasant blank face to my fellow marshals. They asked, “See anything that’ll help us catch these bastards?”
Edward and I dutifully said, “No.”
2
I HAD BEEN called into Marshal Raborn’s office. It was a neat, square room. The only thing in the room that was messy was the desk, as if he’d straightened every edge in every file cabinet, and then left file folders on his desk overnight and they’d bred into short, unsteady towers of paperwork. Raborn was the local marshal in charge. If I’d been a regular marshal he’d have been more in charge of me, and Edward, but the preternatural branch was rapidly becoming its own entity, which meant Marshal Raborn was frustrated. He seemed to be particularly frustrated with me.
“There have been rumors for decades that Seattle has a weretiger clan,” he said.
I gave him blank cop face, polite, interested, but blank. Every group of wereanimals, or kiss of vampires, runs its business slightly differently. The white tiger clan of Las Vegas and the vampires are very public about who they are, and what they’re doing. The red tiger clan of Seattle, not so much. In fact, Seattle wasn’t aware they had a tiger clan in residence. The queen of their clan liked it that way. Wereanimals were still people under the law, so they’d never been legal to kill on sight the way vampires had been before the new vampire citizen laws went into effect, but once someone shifted into animal form a lot of people panicked and a lot of wereanimals got shot. I’d been on the receiving end of more than one attack by a wereanimal, so I sympathized, but at the same time some of my best friends turned furry once a month. I was a little conflicted. Marshal Raborn thought so, too.