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  “Yes, until this minute, I’d have said Duke was a good man, a good cop, a good husband, and a good father.”

  “Then let’s go find him. He still needs to drive us to the crime scene.”

  “I can drive us, Anita.”

  I shook my head. “I want Duke where we can keep an eye on him.”

  “I won’t let a prisoner be killed on my watch,” Frankie said.

  I studied her face. “So if Duke comes back in here and tries to shoot Bobby again, you’ll shoot him to protect your prisoner?”

  She nodded. “It’s my job.” She sounded sure of herself, but her eyes weren’t so sure.

  “Maybe you would, but let’s not force you to make that choice, Deputy.”

  She let out a breath and some tension went out of her shoulders. “I appreciate that, Marshal Blake.”

  “So would I, if our roles were reversed.”

  Newman holstered his gun and went for the door. “Let’s go find Duke.”

  I used my body to hide the movement of my right hand from Frankie, because I drew my gun. I thought the danger was over, but I hadn’t much liked being a fish in a barrel for Leduc. Maybe he was a good man, but even good men can be pushed to a point where they go bad.

  6

  WE FOUND DUKE leaning against the side of his big SUV. I smelled the bitterness of the cigarette smoke before I saw the bright orange-red tip glow with the intake of his breath. He threw the cigarette to the paved road with a practiced flick of his fingers.

  “I gave up smoking twenty years ago, but it’s just like riding a bike.” He fished breath mints out of his pocket and popped several in his mouth.

  Newman walked up to him as if the last few minutes hadn’t happened. I hung back, my gun held against my thigh. Leduc seemed calm enough that I could probably holster it, but it might be a little awkward if he noticed me doing it.

  “You’re holding that gun against your thigh nice and sneaky, Blake.”

  “Not sneaky enough,” I said, and changed how I was holding the gun to a more natural position, business end pointed politely at the ground, as I moved up behind Newman. I kept my distance from Leduc. Guns are great from a distance, but too close and it can turn into a wrestling match. Struggling over who has control of your gun is a bad idea. I tried to avoid it.

  “I’m just an old hand at this, Blake. I’ve seen all the tricks and lived to talk about it.”

  He wasn’t calling me Anita anymore. It’s easier to shoot Blake than it is to shoot Anita. You think first names don’t matter, try looking down the barrel of a gun at a perfect stranger. It’s easier to pull the trigger. Let them tell you Hey, I’m Jimmy, or Armand, or Gustav, and it’s a little harder to go bang. Leduc knew how close he’d come to shooting me, and he was trying to distance himself from it, from me, from whatever emotional mess was inside him. I felt sorry for him and his daughter, but not sorry enough to forget or forgive what had happened.

  Leduc offered the breath mints to Newman and me, but we both shook our heads. He seemed utterly calm. It was such an abrupt change of moods that to most people it would have seemed impossible, but I’d seen other police officers, soldiers, first responders of all kinds go from that level of emotionalism to outwardly cool and collected. Is it healthy to stuff our feelings that hard and fast? No, but sometimes it’s the only way you can hold your shit together enough to do your job. When first responders fail at their jobs, people die.

  Normally you’re supposed to act like nothing happened. They ignore it, and you ignore it, but I couldn’t do that today, or not entirely. I wouldn’t break Bobby’s confidence about his uncle helping the sheriff out, but beyond that, we needed to talk.

  “What the hell were you trying to prove in there, Blake?” Leduc asked. His voice was still calm; it even held an edge of amusement. It was a very good act.

  “Nothing to prove. Just trying to keep our prisoner from getting shot.”

  “You’re going to be executing him. Does it really matter when and how?” The amusement was leaking out of his voice.

  “Yeah, it matters,” I said.

  “If Bobby attacks someone else, then we can shoot him in self-defense, but if he’s not a danger, then it’s manslaughter at best and murder at the worst,” Newman said.

  “Frankie and I would both testify that we thought Blake was in danger. Hell, Win, you had your gun pointed along with us.”

  “Once Blake told me that she had the situation under control, I believed her.”

  “Well, I haven’t worked with the marshal before, so forgive me if I didn’t feel so confident.” Leduc looked at me then and asked, “How did you get Bobby to calm down? Once a shapeshifter’s eyes go, the rest usually follows.”

  “Do you have much experience with shapeshifters, Sheriff?” I asked.

  He frowned hard enough that the dim light couldn’t hide it. “Not personally, but when this happened, I did some research online.” Something must have shown on my face, because he added, “I know you can’t believe everything you read on there, but with a crime like this, I didn’t have time to run to the library.”

  “Eyes are the first thing to go, but most Therianthropes with experience can fight their way back if the eyes are the only thing that changes,” I said.

  “How long is a person supposed to wait before we defend ourselves or another officer? Eyes, teeth, a tail? How are we supposed to know when the point of no return is, Blake?”

  It was a good question, but I didn’t have a good answer or a satisfying one. “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  I sighed and holstered my gun. I couldn’t stand there forever with it bare in my hand. This wasn’t a matter of guns now, nothing as concrete as that. “How much control the individual Therianthrope has on his inner beast. How close it is to the full moon.”

  “I was told Bobby had perfect control of his animal side, but after what he did to Ray and what just happened in the cell, I don’t think his control is perfect.”

  “Perfection is a pretty high bar, Sheriff,” I said.

  “When you turn into a man-eating beast once a month, I think perfection is the minimum I’d want.”

  I couldn’t win this argument, if it was an argument. Whatever it was, I stopped putting energy or words into it. I was done with trying to convince Leduc that lycanthropes weren’t monsters. A lot of people believe that supernatural citizens are people just like the rest of us until they see what preternatural strength and power can do to a natural citizen. Then suddenly they want to change their votes. I couldn’t even blame them. I’d spent years thinking that the vampires I executed were soulless monsters, so it was okay to kill them. I was saving the lives of their future victims. It had all seemed so morally black-and-white until I’d met enough humans who were as evil and murderous as any vampire. Then I began to question my morality. It’s a slippery slope once you start that kind of soul-searching. The kind that can lead you to fall in love and be about to marry one of the soulless undead. My grandmother Blake had informed me over the phone that I was damned if I married Jean-Claude, damned for all eternity. So many reasons I didn’t visit home much.

  “If Bobby is guilty, then he’ll die for his crime,” I said, “but I’m not convinced he is guilty.”

  “I told you, Blake, he is the only wereanimal we have in this area. It has to be him because it can’t be anybody else.”

  “Did you check the body for signs of abuse?” I asked.

  “It was abused all to hell.”

  “She means sexual abuse,” Newman said.

  Leduc looked at us both as if we’d said something so outrageous, he just couldn’t believe his ears. “What the hell are you talking about, Win?”

  “The blood on Bobby’s groin . . .”

  Leduc took a few steps away from us, then circled back like he was pacing in one of his own cells. “W
hat the fuck, Win? Isn’t it bad enough that Ray is dead and Bobby did it? I will not add to the scandal and pain for his family by even hinting about that kind of shit.”

  “Sheriff,” I said, “the blood evidence on Bobby Marchand is all wrong. It’s not in the right places even if he’s guilty.”

  “That’s your opinion, Marshal.”

  “It’s an opinion backed up by a decade of working cases involving the supernatural.”

  “Anita has been called as an expert witness multiple times, Duke. It’s one of the reasons I wanted her help.”

  “Fine, she’s an expert on the supernatural. That doesn’t give her the right to tell me we need to check Ray’s body for sexual assault. That’s just crazy talk. I believe that Bobby killed his uncle in some sort of animal rage, but I do not believe that he would . . . do that to the only father he’s ever known.”

  I wanted to ask if there had ever been a hint, even the faintest whiff of talk, about the possibility that Ray Marchand had been abusing his nephew. I wanted to ask, but I didn’t, not yet. I stuck to known facts. “Then how did the blood get all over Bobby Marchand’s groin?”

  “I don’t know!” Leduc yelled, his voice raw with pain.

  “We could have Dale look at the body,” Newman suggested.

  “Who’s Dale?” I asked.

  “Local coroner,” he answered.

  “I will not call Dale and ask him to look for signs of sexual assault on Ray’s body,” Leduc said. “I won’t do it. We already have Bobby for the murder. We don’t need anything else.”

  “We don’t need it to get a warrant of execution and kill Bobby—that’s true. But if the coroner checks for sexual abuse and doesn’t find it, then the blood all over Bobby’s groin has no reason to be there, just like most of the blood evidence on his body. It might give us enough to get a stay of execution,” I said.

  “He did it,” Leduc said, and he was fumbling in his pocket for cigarettes even while he growled at me.

  “But what if he didn’t?” Newman said. “What if Bobby is innocent and we don’t figure that out until after I kill him for the crime? I couldn’t live with myself if I let that happen.”

  “Then give the warrant to Blake.”

  I thought about the feel of Bobby’s skin, how warm he was, how alive he was, and I shook my head. “I came up here to help Newman get as much truth, justice, and the American way as possible. I did not come up here to take over the execution because he’s gone squeamish.”

  “I’m not squeamish,” Newman said, and he looked really unhappy with me as he said it.

  “I know that, Newman. I just meant that I’m not up here to take over the warrant. I stopped pinch-hitting on warrants of execution a few years back. The only reason I’ll take over a warrant now is if the first marshal is too injured to continue.”

  “Or dead,” Newman said.

  I nodded. “Or that.”

  “I won’t talk to Dale about abuse of the corpse,” Leduc said. “If you want to talk to him about shit like that, call him yourself.”

  “I will,” Newman said.

  “Good luck, because he won’t believe you either, not about this.”

  “You’ll believe that Bobby clawed his uncle to death, but not that he might have abused him either before or after death?” I asked.

  “Death is clean and over. What you’re hinting at is neither.”

  “I’ll call Dale from the car when we follow you over to the crime scene,” Newman said.

  “You were right earlier, Win. You know the way.”

  “No, I think you were right the first time, Duke. I think you should take us.”

  Leduc looked from one to the other of us and then studied Win’s face longer. Whatever he saw there made him stamp out his second cigarette and say, “I’d like to promise you I’m not a danger to Bobby anymore.”

  “You can’t promise that, Duke,” Newman said.

  “No, and neither can Frankie or my other deputies. If he shifts in his cell, we will have to shoot him, because nothing inside there is strong enough to hold him, not even the bars.”

  “If he does a complete change of form, then it will be a justified shooting,” Newman said.

  “I didn’t see any cameras in the cell area,” I said.

  “There aren’t any,” Leduc said.

  I opened my mouth to say something that Newman obviously thought we’d all regret, because he said, “Let’s get out to the crime scene. The faster Blake and I make up our minds, the faster we get this settled.”

  “Have it your way, Win.” Leduc got in his SUV, rolled down the window, and was already lighting another cigarette. Apparently, he’d decided that quitting twenty years ago had been a mistake, and he was going to make up for lost time.

  Newman and I got into his car and followed the sheriff out of town. It felt a little bit like we were being escorted out of town like in an old Western movie. I wasn’t sure why I thought of that. Maybe too many Western-movie marathons with my dad when I was a kid, or maybe I’d had too many guns pointed at me since I got into town. Maybe.

  7

  WE FOLLOWED THE sheriff’s taillights in silence for a few minutes. We sat in the darkness of the car with only the faint glow of the instrument panel to chase back the darkness. Once we left the town behind, it got seriously black, with the trees like half-seen giants on either side of the road. This far from the full moon on a cloudy night, the headlights seemed to carve tunnels out of the darkness.

  “Damn, it’s dark up here this far from the full moon,” I said.

  “Stargazing is good, and sometimes you can see the aurora borealis.”

  “Wow, that is dark,” I said.

  “What did you do to calm down Bobby’s animal half?” he asked.

  I don’t know why, but the question caught me off guard. “Magic,” I said.

  “Really?” he said, and glanced at me.

  I shook my head. “No, not really.” Then I thought about it and wasn’t so certain. Newman knew my background, so I tried for some of the truth. “I knew he’d smell my . . . the lycanthropy in my blood.”

  “How did that help?”

  “Sometimes, if you can smell another beastie, it can bring you back to yourself.”

  “So, I couldn’t do it?”

  “No,” I said.

  He sighed. “I was hoping it was something you could teach me.”

  “Do not try hugging lycanthropes once their eyes have changed, Newman. You don’t have lycanthropy, so you’d just smell like food.”

  “Is there anything I could do to keep someone from shifting, like through the cell bars maybe?”

  He was so earnest about learning the job, it made me think harder and try to teach better. “If you knew them, if they were friends, you could talk about human memories and maybe bring them back in time.”

  “How about if I just knew the names of their spouses and kids, things like that? Could I talk them back to human by just reminding them about their lives, even if I didn’t know them personally?”

  “Maybe, but only if you’re on the other side of the cage from them. And it depends on how long they’ve been a shapeshifter. If they’re newbies, then it won’t work. Once their eyes go, the rest will follow. They just don’t have the control to do anything else at the beginning.”

  “What about bringing in family members to try to talk them down?”

  “Absolutely not. You’d be endangering them. One, they’re civilians, and two, think of the guilt if someone came to after being in their animal form and realized they’d killed people they loved. Don’t ever put anybody in that situation.”

  “Okay, you’re right. That would be . . . awful.” He shook his head hard enough that his hat slid out of place. He shifted it back with one hand, the other staying on the steering wheel, and he added, “Awful
seems like such an inadequate word, but I can’t think of another one.”

  “You don’t have to find the right word to understand how terrible something will be or why you want to avoid it,” I said.

  “Terrible. That’s a good word,” he said.

  “Horrifying, heartbreaking, anguish, torment, suffering: I’ve got dozens to describe some of the things I’ve seen over the years.”

  “Why do you still do it, then, if it’s so terrible?”

  And just his asking that so early in his career after moving up to bumfuck nowhere, which had sidelined his career, let me know that Winston Newman was contemplating a change.

  “So that I can help people like Bobby Marchand.”

  “I couldn’t have saved him back there. I barely saved you,” he said. I couldn’t see his face clearly in the dimness of the car, but I saw his hands tighten on the wheel and knew some of the emotions prompting it.

  “I got into this job to kill monsters so I could save lives, and then a weird thing happened. I stopped being certain of who the monsters were.”

  “You fell in love with a vampire,” he said as if that explained it.

  “No, I knew a man named Willie McCoy. He was a two-bit hustler, not a friend, but I knew him before he died and after he came back as a vampire. He was still Willie, still himself. That’s what started me rethinking things. If vampires were soulless monsters, then Willie should have been very different after he died, but he wasn’t. So, if that part was wrong, then maybe it was all wrong.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Before I started dating Jean-Claude. Honestly, I think if Willie McCoy hadn’t died and come back as himself, then I might never have dated Jean-Claude or any supernatural.”

  “Wow, I never think that clearly about what I’m feeling. It’s impressive,” he said.

  I laughed. “Neither do I. Neither do most people, but I’m in therapy now. It’s helped me realize a few things.”

  “You’re admitting to another marshal that you’re in therapy?” he said, and made it sound almost joking.