Emmett Dubois was a werewolf.
I ran to the far end of the lot where the van was parked, then drove to the front of the building. Annalise was waiting at the curb, scowling at me as I approached. Had I just said that I liked her? I decided it was time to stop being stupid and start hating her again.
I opened the door for her. She climbed in. She didn’t put on her seat belt. “What took you so long?”
I was not in the mood to share information. If she wanted something from me, she was going to have to give something. “Tell me about the last time you were in Hammer Bay. Tell me about the last time you met with the Hammer family, and about the tall man with the walking stick.”
She didn’t answer. She looked at me closely for nearly a minute. I realized that I was still breathing hard, and my hands were shaking. The adrenaline had not left my system yet.
I began to get uncomfortable.
Finally she said in a low voice: “The tall man with the walking stick was named Eli Warren. He was a peer in the society.”
“Were you his wooden, um…”
“No,” she said. “I was his apprentice. And his toy.”
Saying that cost her something. I could hear it in her voice. But I pushed. “Where is he now?”
“I killed him,” she said. “He betrayed the society. He sold spells, then used the society to hunt down his customers. I figured out his game and told the society. They told me to kill him. I did. As a reward, they gave me his spell book.”
“Do you think the spells we’re facing here came from Eli’s book? Could he have sold them to the Hammer family way back when?”
“I don’t know. Each spell book is unique. Even if they contain the same spells-and most have at least a couple of spells in common-the marks are never identical. But the society excised a lot of Eli’s book before they passed it on to me. I certainly don’t have a spell that would make people around me breathe spirit fire. But he and I did come here, just before I puzzled out his scam.”
“Do you have a spell that could turn a person into a werewolf?”
“That’s a pretty specific question. The answer is no, but I do have a spell that makes my sense of smell as keen as a wolf’s for a short while. To track people. I never use it, though. Now I ask why you ask.”
“While I was getting the van just now, I was stalked by a wolf. Right down in the morgue. The woman you were talking to was dead. Her throat was torn out.”
Annalise’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t say anything.
“I think it was Emmett Dubois,” I said.
“How certain are you?”
“Well, not terribly certain. I saw what looked like a police uniform on a table near the body, all neatly folded, and I did just make an enemy of him. And the magic detector went nuts when I touched it to him.”
“But you didn’t see him change? He didn’t say, ‘I’m going to change into a wolf and rip your heart out’?”
“No. Does he have to?”
“No,” she said. “We can kill him anyway just to be safe. But if he’s carrying spells or infected with a predator, we should watch him to see if he’s not alone.”
I nodded. “Thanks for trusting me.”
“You’re earning it,” she said. “And you’re useful. But remember whose side you’re on.”
We stopped at the supermarket again and bought more beef, a roll of aluminum foil, and a leg of lamb. This time, Annalise came inside with me and picked the cuts she wanted. As we were walking back to the van, I asked: “Is the pain getting bad?”
“You don’t understand.”
“Okay. Very bad? What if we got you some painkillers? Even something as lame as ibuprofen ought to help.”
“You don’t understand,” she said again. “I’m dying.”
I stopped and stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“Inside the van,” she said.
We climbed in, and I shut the door.
“There’s a spell called golem flesh, right? It’s a protective spell, like our tattoos, only better. For some reason, it shows up in almost all the spell books. No one is sure why, but pretty much everyone gets it.”
I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. How did spells “show up” in books? But this wasn’t the time to interrupt.
“When Eli first recruited me, he laid these tattoos on my skin. I wasn’t his wooden man, but…” Her voice trailed off. “When I was my own person again,” she continued, “I cast golem flesh on myself. As I said, nearly everyone in the society has it. It protects your whole body, not just the parts that are marked, and you can still feel things.”
She paused. I knew what she meant. The tattoos on my chest and arms were numb. The enchanted skin in those areas couldn’t feel anything-not pain, not cold, not heat, not a human touch. And Annalise was, as far as I’d seen, nearly covered with them.
