Flesh Circus

Oh, holy fuck. The gun would be useless on a swarm like this. I skipped back twice, almost ru

It felt like tiny hairy feet ru

The bugs imploded, darkness shrinking into tiny red pinpricks that glowed like cigarette cherries before green smoke puffed out of the place in the world they had occupied. The vapor thi

“Jill?” Saul’s tone was neutral, leashed impatience.

“Goddammit.” I let out a short, sharp sigh. “I think we can cross normal homicide off the list for this one.”

“You think?” Sarcasm turned to curiosity. “What was that?” His eyes sheened with gold-blue briefly, rods and cones reflecting differently from a human’s.

“Don’t know yet. Could have been one of Lorelei’s defenses.” Although it didn’t do her much good, if that’s her. “Could have been the same thing that tried to strangle the hostage.” Much more likely, but anything’s possible. I eased forward, my left hand still playing with the whip handle. It was the equivalent of a nervous flinch. “I’m go

“No dice. I’m staying with you.” He sounded like he meant it, too.

“I can’t wait for Montaigne here. I’ve got other shit to do.” I took another step forward, doing my best to avoid the claret spread on the floor. Blood looks black at night, even human blood. Hellbreed ichor is always black, but it’s thin and doesn’t splatter the same way human fluid does.

You have to see a lot of both before you can tell the difference with a glance, though.

“Goddammit, Jill.” He sounded upset. It was so unlike him I paused and glanced over my shoulder. His eyes were orange-tinged; they get all glowy when he’s excited, like a ’breed’s. But Weres are as different from hellbreed as it’s possible to be. “I’m not a cub.”

You just look tired. I’m trying not to burden you more. “You’re right, you’re not. You’re my partner, I need you here.”

“Jill—”

I edged forward another step, every sense alert. “You can wait in the car if you’re not going to help.” Might even be the best thing, the way this is going.

It was Lorelei. Her black dreadlocks lay in fat limp ropes, soaked with clotted blood and daubed with bone beads and bits of glittering onyx. She hadn’t been dead long, I was guessing. There wasn’t much insect life.

Except for the cockroaches. Each with a pinprick of red light on its back, coming out of the gloom and vanishing into smoke.

This is not good.

She lay between the back hall and the kitchen. There was something bubbling on the stove. It didn’t smell like spaghetti. In fact, it was a thin brew with nameless chunks of something stringy floating in it, and the remnants of sorcery popping and fizzing on the water’s surface. I flicked the heat off, examining the brew.

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. I should have left it on, but who knew what would happen when it finished cooking, especially in a house full of forensic techs? And contaminating the scene was a small thing compared to the fire risk, especially when I was sure this was one of my cases.

How about that for ironic? If this was a regular garden-variety murder I wouldn’t be touching anything.

I passed my right hand through the steam, greasy moisture scumming my palm. Sniffed deeply. It smelled like greedy obsession and musk, sex-drenched sheets left to rot in a dark hole.

Ugh. Nasty, nasty. What were you doing, Lorelei?

Three good Cuban cigars lay on the clean counter, next to a bottle of Barbancourt rum. The charms in my hair shifted uneasily. Right next to the unopened rum was a fresh bottle of Florida water and a jar of cornmeal.

She’d been preparing to do something, and the longer I waited the harder the traces would be to decipher. My right palm skipped through the steam once more, and yet more grease-laden steam touched my skin. My blue eye was hot and dry, the right watering from the smell. Cool air touched the rest of me, air-conditioning working overtime—Lorelei liked it cold as a tomb in here.

Get it, Jill? Cold as a tomb? It wasn’t fu

Probably no shortage of people who wanted her dead, for one reason or another. But she hadn’t survived this long as a black sorcerer by being careless or weak, and there was nobody I could think of with usable psychic talent and a vendetta against her.

And there was the slight matter of loa in a young man who shouldn’t have them, the very same loa in an older man who shouldn’t have had them so strongly, and a series of attacks on a hellbreed and a Trader hostage.

The commonality was voodoo, but I couldn’t assume they were all directly linked—or could I?

Hunters are trained pretty thoroughly not to make assumptions. But we’re also trained not to discount the thing that’s staring us in the face. It’s a fine line to walk.

My concentration narrowed. One thing at a time.

Poking, probing, my hand motionless in the steam, the rest of the world shut itself away. Saul had gone quiet and quiescent, watching my back. Intuition flared and faded, trying to track the traces of sorcery through a shifting mass of intention and weird, sideways-skipping dead ends.

It faded and flared maddeningly, and I came back to myself, exhaling a short dissatisfied huff of air. “Goddammit.”

“Nothing?” Saul asked cautiously.

“Nothing I can see from here. I’d have to go between to track this one.” Goose bumps crawled over my arms as I said it, and I hurried to give him the last half of what I was thinking. “Don’t worry, I’m not pla

“It’s not necessary?” He sounded dubious, but the relief of knowing I wasn’t going between probably made him sound that way.

“Not at this point. I still have a couple other things to track down, like our other victim’s other address. And I’m going to go see Mama Zamba. If it’s a voodoo feud, she’ll know about it. If it’s not, she’ll want to know someone’s messing around on her turf, and she’s far from the worst ally in a situation like this.” I backed cautiously away from the stove. The surface of the water still roiled greasily, but the sorcery was fading. It hadn’t been completed, so all the work and effort Lorelei had put in it was bleeding away, blood from a wound. “If nothing pans out with her, I’m going to have to go see Melendez. Jesus.”

“You’re not going to either of them without me.” Flat and quiet.

I turned on my heel and opened my mouth to tell him I’d go wherever I had to, but the look on his face stopped me. Saul looked worried, dark circles under his eyes and his mouth a tight line. His hands had curled into fists—shocking, first because he was a Were, and second because he was always so even and steady. He was too calm to be believed most of the time, and I didn’t realize how much I depended on that calm until he was gone.