Kitty Raises Hell

“A few years,” I said. “I didn’t know him well. We weren’t best friends or anything.”

“But you were both werewolves? Part of the same pack?”

“That doesn’t mean we all walk around arm in arm singing ‘We Are Family.’ The pack here is pretty standoffish, to tell you the truth. I only ever see most of the others on full-moon nights.”

She turned a quizzical expression to me. “Where exactly do you all go on full-moon nights?”

“I’m not going to tell you that, Detective.”

Unsurprised, she shrugged and continued on. The question had been offhand and unimportant, but I wondered if maybe we needed to start driving out to Kansas or Wyoming, to make sure no one bothered us.

“Did Mr. Cabrerra smoke?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. I’d never seen him light up, and he didn’t smell like someone who smoked. Now there was an interesting set of smells a werewolf could spot from a mile away. Detective Hardin smelled like that: sooty, musty, sharp.

“Did he work with fire at all? Was he a welder, a mechanic, anything that would have had him in contact with open flames, or with anything volatile?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Why?”

“I’m just trying to rule out all the logical explanation, because the illogical one has everyone twitching.”

Detective Hardin, as head of the Denver PD’s newly established Paranatural Unit, got all the cases that made people twitch. She’d landed in the position by accident, but she seemed to be thriving in it. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view.

We paused outside a room. So this was it. I braced. Ben curled his hand around mine.

She took a deep breath and said, “What do you know about spontaneous human combustion?”

I hadn’t braced well enough, because I blinked at her, dumbstruck. “What?”

“I thought you knew about all this supernatural crap,” she said. “Spontaneous human combustion, the idea that a human body can, for unknown reasons, suddenly generate enough heat to ignite.”

“I know the definition,” I said. “I can’t say I’ve ever encountered it. Ever.” I’d never even had a crazy person call in to the show wanting to talk about it, and that was saying something.

“Well. It’s on the list of what might have happened to Mr. Cabrerra. It’s on the bottom of the list—but frankly, it’s about as likely as anything else, based on what I’ve been able to come up with. There’s no reason he should have burned to death in the middle of his apartment, when nothing else caught fire.”

Fire. Burning. The smell of sulfur and brimstone. The smell from last full-moon night, the van at Flint House, and the fire at New Moon.

I shook my head at the door we stood in front of. “Detective, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think I can do this.” I didn’t want to have to smell Mick burned and carry that memory with me forever.

“It’s not that bad, Kitty.” She touched my arm briefly. “Not as bad as you’d expect.”

She opened the door. The room was small, sterile, with a linoleum floor and tiled walls. It seemed more like a doctor’s office than what I’d pictured a morgue being like. A couple of plastic chairs stood against the wall, and a gurney rested in the middle. A body lay on it, a sheet drawn up to its bare shoulders.

He looked like Mick. I recognized him, short black hair, stocky frame, wide nose, and round cheeks. He hadn’t been burned to a crisp, but he had been burned. His face was red, like a sunburn. Blackened scorch marks reached up from under the sheet, streaks climbing his neck to his chin. His hair looked singed, scorched. It was like he’d been caught in a flash explosion at the level of his heart.

Ben and I stared for a moment. I kept wondering what had happened. The protection spell, the potion Grant had given me—it didn’t work. The thought almost pushed me to panic, because it meant none of us was safe. New Moon, my human family, everyone I’d given the jars to, all of it was for nothing.

But no, I’d given Mick a jar of the potion yesterday—and he’d scoffed at it. I’d have to find out if he had used it—he probably hadn’t. Maybe this thing killed him simply because it could.

I should have done more. I should have protected him. Inside, Wolf howled.

“Do you need a minute, or are you ready to leave?” she said.

I closed my eyes and turned toward the door. “I’m ready.”

Hardin led us to a nearby conference room, where we could talk. She offered coffee, but I wasn’t thirsty.

“We got the call about ten last night,” she said. “Someone in Mr. Cabrerra’s apartment building smelled smoke coming from his unit. The building manager couldn’t find the source, and Mr. Cabrerra’s door was locked. The manager called the fire department; they broke in and found the body. Nothing else had burned. As I understand it, werewolves aren’t indestructible, they’re just really tough to kill without the magic silver bullet. Am I right?”

“You need to take the heart or cut off the head. Or do so much damage they can’t heal before they die of blood loss,” I said.

She nodded. “The medical examiner performed an autopsy last night. His heart was destroyed—we assume that’s what killed him, that if it hadn’t gotten to his heart he might have survived. But this is what has the ME wigged out. He burned from the inside out. It’s like someone reached inside him and lit a blowtorch.”

Numb and confused, I said, “This is why you brought up spontaneous human combustion?”

“Unless you know of some other weird, unlikely phenomenon that could cause something like this.”

I looked at Ben, who shrugged and said, “Hey, you’re the expert.”

Why did people keep thinking that? I must have been doing a good job of fooling everyone. Werewolves were werewolves—that didn’t make them any more prone to having unlikely things like this happen to them, did it?

As a matter of fact, it did. This thing had already proven it would go after the whole pack, not just me. A moment of dizziness made me hold my head to steady myself. I had to make this stop. There had to be a way to make this stop.

Ben put his hand on my leg, and the touch anchored me. Brought me back to the table, the conference room, Hardin, the horror of the situation. Didn’t stop tears from falling.

Hardin watched me. “You do know something. What is it?”

Once again, I explained the trip to Vegas, the cult, the sacrifice, the attacks, Grant’s potion, and my suspicion that Mick hadn’t used it. If nothing else, there’d be no such thing as a secret Babylonian cult lurking in Sin City anymore. Everybody was going to know about it at this rate. Not that everyone believed me. I’d have thought that Hardin would be beyond disbelief after everything she’d seen and studied, but her expression was blank.

She said, “That doesn’t get me any closer to figuring out what happened or who to arrest.”

“Yeah, well, sorry about that.”

“What’s the likelihood of this happening again?” she asked.

Likely. Very likely. I didn’t want to think about it, so I turned away, biting my lip.

“Do you want to talk about some kind of police protection?” she said. She was being as nice as she’d ever been to me, but her voice was still businesslike, almost harsh, when what I wanted was for someone to pat me on the head and say, “There, there.”

Ben said, “Police protection isn’t going to do a whole lot of good for people burning up from the inside.”

“I can’t sit around doing nothing,” she said, scowling.

“Trust me, Detective, as soon as I find the magic spell that will make all this go away, I’ll let you know,” I said.

She made an offhand gesture that might have been saying, touché. “I’ll keep digging on my end. But the usual request applies: If you find out anything, let me know, right?”

“You too, I hope.”

“Will do. Thanks for stopping by.”

She escorted us to the front door, said the farewells, then went back in. I almost said something to her about taking a break, getting some sleep, food, fresh clothes. I was worried about her and didn’t want her to burn out—metaphorically or literally, given the circumstances. Every time I saw her she looked harried beyond all reason. But the door closed, she was gone, and I lost my chance.