Hit List

“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.

He seemed to want me to say something, so I said, “Sorry, I haven’t been on the ground long enough to pick up rumors yet.”

“There are weretigers here, Blake. I know there are.” He gave me a steely, penetrating look out of a pair of gray eyes the color of gunmetal. It was a good hard stare. Bad guys probably folded like cheap card tables when he gave them the stare, but I wasn’t a bad guy.

“Obviously,” I said, “we have a known survivor of a weretiger attack as our victim here.”

“Don’t get cute, Blake,” he said, in a voice as hard as the cold stare.

“Sorry, just a natural ability on my part.”

He frowned at me. “What is?”

“Being cute, or so I’m told.” I smiled at him.

“Are you flirting with me?”

“Nope.”

“Then what’s with the smart remark?”

“Why am I getting solo treatment in your office, Raborn?”

“Because you know more than you’re telling about these killers.”

Only years of training kept my face blank; only the slightest movement of one eye, almost an involuntary twitch, gave it away. It was the closest thing I had to a tell, as they say in poker. I covered it by smiling at him. I made it a good smile. I’d found that most men got distracted by it. I was buying time while I thought about what to say.

I shook my head, still smiling, as if he amused the hell out of me. What I was thinking was, Does he actually know anything, or is he just fishing?

“Do I amuse you, Blake?”

“A little,” I said.

He opened the folder in front of him and started tossing out photos of body parts as if he were dealing cards. I wasn’t smiling by the time he finished covering the desk in gruesome pictures.

I gave him angry eyes then. “You should see it in person, Raborn. It’s much worse.”

“I’ve seen the latest crime scene,” he said.

“Good for you, now what do you want?”

“I want the truth.”

I resisted a terrible urge to say, “You can’t handle the truth,” but the thought helped kill some of the anger. I gave him calmer eyes and said, “The truth about what exactly?”

“Are there weretigers in Seattle?”

“I haven’t been here long enough to know where to get a good cup of coffee. I don’t think I should be the one you’re asking. You’ve got a preternatural branch that is local to your area. They should know more than I do about the local wereanimals.”

“They should, but somehow everywhere you go you know more monsters than the rest of us.”

I shrugged, and didn’t have to fight to look bored. “Maybe it’s because I see them as people, not just monsters.”

He motioned at the photos spread out on his desk. “Whatever did this isn’t human. Nothing human could have done this.”

I shrugged again. “I can’t speak to that. I’m not in forensics and I’ve got cop friends who tell some mean stories about humans on PCP.”

“PCP would make them strong enough to do it, but it also makes them crazy,” Raborn said. “They could do the violent killings, maybe, but not this.” He pointed at one photo. “This is precise. PCP doesn’t make you precise, it makes you a fucking animal.”

Since Edward and I had put that observation into our reports, I wasn’t surprised to hear him repeat it back to me. “Like a wereanimal?” I asked.

“You know what I meant.”

I sat up straighter in the chair because the gun at my back was digging in a little, which meant I was slumping. We were averaging three hours of sleep, and a different time zone every day was beginning to take its toil.

“I’m not sure I do, but if you called me in here to grill me about the local wereanimals, I just got here less than four hours ago. I’m good at gathering information about the local preternatural scene, but I’m not that good. No one is that good.”

“What’s killing the weretigers?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Why are they being killed?”

“Why does any serial killer choose his victim?”

“So you know it is a he.”

I sighed. “Statically speaking, over ninety percent of all serial killers are male. Using he as the pronoun is probably accurate, but, you’re right, I don’t know that it’s a he. Though female serial killers are more likely to use poison or a gun; a blade is more typical of male serial killers. Whoever is killing these victims is sure of his skill with a blade, and that he has the strength to get the job done before the weretiger can fight back. That level of physical confidence is usually male, rather than female.”

He looked at me, but there was a touch less hostility in his face. “That’s true.”

“You seem surprised that I knew that,” I said.

He settled back in his chair and looked at me, but now it was an appraising look. “I’d been told that the only reason you have more executions than anyone else in the preternatural branch is that you’re fucking the monsters, so they talk to you, but maybe that’s not all of it.”

I gave him an unfriendly look, and then it seemed too much trouble. I leaned forward in the chair. “Look, Raborn, if I were living with a group of men and having sex with all of them, and everyone were human, the other cops would still hate it, or they’d see me as a slut. But my live-in sweeties are vampires and shapeshifters, so the