Skin Trade

Bernardo moved closer to me, studied my face hard. He spoke low. “Are you planning on killing him?”

“When he comes for me, yes.”

“Why is he going to come for you?”

“Because someday I’ll disappoint him. Someday I won’t be able to keep being his little serial killer pinup, and when he thinks I’m less fun alive than I would be dead, he’ll try for me.”

“You don’t know that,” Bernardo said.

I looked out at the lake of dried blood and the big, graceful man moving through it. “Yeah, I do know that.”

“She’s right,” Edward said, softly.

“So, the two of you are planning to kill him, but you’ll work with him until he crosses the line.” He spoke very low, almost a whisper.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Yes,” Edward said.

Bernardo looked from one to the other of us. He shook his head. “You know, sometimes the big guy doesn’t scare me as much as the two of you.”

“Only because you’re not a petite brunette woman. Trust me, Bernardo, if you fit his vic profile, you’d have a whole new level of creep about the big guy.”

He opened his mouth, as if to argue, then closed it. He finally nodded. “All right, I’ll give you that. But unless you’re going to kill him today, let’s get to work.” He walked away from us, but not toward Olaf. He wouldn’t help us contemplate killing Olaf, but he wouldn’t exactly stop us, either.

I wasn’t sure where Bernardo fell on the good guy/bad guy scale. Sometimes I wasn’t sure Bernardo knew, either.

13

TWO HOURS LATER we’d learned all the warehouse could tell us. There were crates that had been used as coffins. They’d been shot to hell by the M4s that the team had carried. If the vampires had been in the crates at the time it would have been a kill, but there was no blood on the inside of any of the crates.

Olaf had padded back to us, soundless, somehow, in his black boots. “I thought it was an explosion, but it wasn’t. It’s almost as if there was something here that could bleed and incapacitate, but not kill right away. But whatever did this left no trace on the ground. There are no footprints at the center of the blood pool except for the boot tracks of the police.”

“How can you tell that it was designed to bleed and incapacitate, but not kill?” I asked.

He’d given me that arrogant look out of his deep, caveman eyes. It was the old Olaf peering out, the one who’d thought that no woman could be good at this kind of work. Hell, women to him weren’t good at anything.

“That look makes me not want to admit this, but I want to solve this more than I want to be cool.”

“What look?” he asked.

“The look that says I’m a woman, and that makes me stupid.”

He looked away, then said, “I do not think you are stupid.”

I felt my eyebrows go up. Edward and I exchanged a look. “Thanks, Otto,” I said, “but pretend I can’t look at a concrete floor and track the events of a crime on it, and just explain… Please.” I added the please, because we were both trying to be nicer to each other. I could play nice.

“The blood pattern, the markers on the floor. The pictures and video will confirm it, but this was a trap, not with a bomb or human soldiers but with something that could”-he made a waffling motion with one hand-“hover, but still attack. I saw something similar to this once before.”

He had everyone’s attention now. “Tell us,” Edward said.

“I was on a job in the Sandbox.”

“Sandbox?” I made it a question.

“Middle East,” Edward answered.

“Yes, it was a group of terrorists. They had a sorcerer,” Olaf said, then looked way too thoughtful for comfort.

“Don’t say the T-word,” Bernardo said, “or they’ll bring in Homeland or the Feds, and it will get out of our hands.”

“When I do my report, I will have to say what I have seen,” Olaf said. The flirting was gone; he was all business. He was colder, more self-contained this way, and once I’d thought scary. Now that I had his version of flirting to compare it to, the business side of him was by far my favorite.

“When you say sorcerer, are you using it the way we do in the States?” I asked.

“I do not know.”

“Sorcerer means someone who gets their magic from dealing with demons and evils here,” Edward said.

He shook his head. “No, a sorcerer is just someone who uses their powers to harm and never to do good. We did not have a practitioner, as they say here, with us. So I cannot speak knowledgeably about the magic, other than the damage it caused.”

“How similar to this was it?” I asked.

“I need to see the bodies before I can be sure, but the blood pattern doesn’t look the same. The bodies in”-he stopped as if he wasn’t allowed to say the place name-“where I was were substantially different. The bodies there were torn apart, as if by some unseen force that left no tracks and no physical evidence other than its victims.”

“I’ve never heard of Middle Eastern terrorists being willing to work with magic. They tend to kill any witches they find,” Bernardo said.

“They were not Islamic,” Olaf said. “They wanted to send their country back to a much older time. They thought of themselves first and foremost as Persian. They felt that Islam had weakened them as a people, so they used older powers that the Muslims with us thought unclean and evil.”

“Wait,” Bernardo said, “you were working with the locals?”

“You do a lot of that,” Edward said.

I glanced at him and couldn’t read past the blank face, but he’d admitted he had worked in the Middle East. That was news to me, though not a surprise.

“The men working with us would have gladly killed us a week before, but we were all in danger.”

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Bernardo said.

We all nodded.

“So this may be some kind of Persian bogey beast, not a demon but something similar.”

“As I said, we had no practitioners with us, so I can only say the damage seems similar, but not the same.”

“Okay, we’ll see if we can find anyone in town who knows more than I do about pre-Islamic Persian magic.” I looked at Edward. “Unless you know more than I do, which is nothing.”

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Don’t look at me,” Bernardo said.

I bit back the first reply, which was, We weren’t. It would have been mean and not entirely true. He’d found out information from the deputy for us. “Okay, we’ll see if there’s anyone in town who knows more than we do, or even at some university. There’s an expert out there somewhere.”

“Academics aren’t always good with real-world information,” Edward said.

“Right now, we have zero to go on, which means any info is better than where we are.” I shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt to ask.”

The homicide detectives called Marshal Ted Forrester over to talk. Edward went, turning to the more open face of his alter ego. I knew that his “Ted” face actually hid more. It was interesting that none of the rest of us