“Maxine Kiss,” he whispered, chilling me to the bone. “I have a…message…from Jean.”
I knew only one Jean. My grandmother.
Heat roared through me. He pushed something into my blood-soaked hand. A flat plastic card, and a flap of leather.
“Finish what she started.” He breathed brokenly, but I was too numb to ask him what he meant. The old man’s eyes fluttered shut.
“Maxine,” Grant murmured, bent over his cane, his fingers brushing my shoulder. “He’s almost gone. I can see it.”
Even I could see that. My eyes burned from seeing it. I heard sirens in the distance, and Zee crept close on all fours, peering at the dying old man with peculiar familiarity. Raw and Aaz were close behind him, twins in every way except for a dash of silver on Raw’s chin. Dek and Mal uncoiled from my hair, making small sounds of distress.
“Ernie,” Zee rasped, but the old man did not open his eyes. All his intensity, his desperation, had bled out of him. His breathing slowed. His muscles relaxed.
I watched him die.
Grant’s hand tightened on my shoulder. I sat very still, hardly able to breathe—afraid to breathe—a small part of me crushed with inexplicable grief. I did not know this man, but I felt like I should have. I should have.
Zee sighed, running his claw through the old man’s spreading blood. He placed the tip on his tongue, tasting, and glanced over his shoulder at the others, shaking his head. I would have to ask, but not yet. I could hardly swallow around the lump in my throat, and there was an ambulance coming; and with them, the police.
I tore my gaze from the old man, and glanced down at what he had given me. The plastic card was a hotel key, and I held it up over my shoulder. Grant took the key without a word, and slid it quickly into his pocket.
The other item was far less mundane. It was leather, and covered in an intricately inked design that resembled roses. But it was not normal leather. At least, not from anything that had moved on four legs.
I was holding a flap of human skin.
Chapter 2
No escape. The old man named Ernie was dead in front of my Mustang, but even if his body hadn’t been blocking the car, it would not have felt right to simply leave him. He had been murdered. Murdered, while looking for me. And those two things, I feared, were related.
The police arrived with the ambulance. We stood aside as the EMTs checked the old man’s vital signs and came to the obvious conclusion. And then we stepped aside even more as the police cordoned off the area and took us back to their vehicle for questioning.
Before they were done, a black sedan rolled up. Two familiar men got out. They took one look at us, whispered to each other, and then walked to the dead old man. Hovered, crouched, poked and prodded with latex gloves on their hands. I tried not to watch them. Or think about the hotel key and leather burning a hole in Grant’s pocket. Red eyes blinked lazily from the shadows, and two hot tongues rasped the back of my neck.
When Detectives Suwani and McCowan were done with their cursory examination, they held three plastic bags, which they passed off to one of the uniforms waiting on the sidelines. Then, with careful deliberation, they walked over to where we were waiting.
Suwani was a slender black man, not quite as tall as me, but lean, with a sinewy strength that started at his hands and wrists, and no doubt reflected the rest of his trim body. McCowan, on the other hand, had already lost most of his neck behind his sagging chin, and the rest of him was built like the love child of a dump truck and an elephant. Big, lumbering—kind of cute, kind of soft, kind of bullheaded—kind of this, kind of that, which I suspected was just a mask, given that his eyes were anything but dull or dithering.
Suwani gave me a sharp once-over, but only McCowan stared at the low neck of my dress, his gaze traveling down my legs and then up again—barely reaching my face. Grant cleared his throat. “Gentlemen. I wish we could have met again under better circumstances.”
I wished we had not met again at all, but those were the breaks. Suwani nodded, and looked at me. “Did you know the victim?”
“No,” I said. “We were coming back from a party, and found him in front of my car.”
“You have a bad habit of collecting corpses,” McCowan replied. “Last time we met there was a dead man who had your name in his pocket. And now another corpse just happens to be found beside your car. You sure you didn’t know him? Or that he didn’t know you?”
Grant frowned, and this time when he spoke there was a faint melody in his voice, soft and filled with a thread of that old familiar power. He could do things with his voice. Change people. He could reach inside the heart of a soul and make something new. I could not imagine a more dangerous ability—nor a man whom I trusted more to wield it.
Grant was the last of the Lightbringers, just as I was the last of the Wardens, and the two of us should never have met. But we had, and now I was the only person who could keep him alive while he used his gift. We were bound together. Our hearts shared the same steady rhythm. Even now, I felt his pulse riding mine, soft and warm as a coil of sunlight.
“What did you learn from his body?” Grant asked, his voice sliding through me with a shiver. I could not be affected by his power—nor the boys—but I felt the ripple nonetheless. Zee said it tickled. I had told the little demon that it made me uneasy.
Suwani blinked. McCowan swayed ever so slightly. But then their gazes cleared, and the black detective coughed into his hand. “He had a gun in his possession. Recently fired. Shots were reported near here less than an hour ago. We were called out to investigate, which is why we arrived so quickly.”
“He killed someone?”
“We don’t know that,” Suwani said, and then frowned, as though he wasn’t quite certain why he was talking so much. “But there was a body, a young man. Heavy drug user. His arms were so eaten up with needle tracks he had started injecting into his leg.”
“Anything else?” Grant held his gaze, but this time it was McCowan who stirred.
“The old fellow’s name was Ernie Bernstein,” said the burly man, rubbing his brow as though he had a headache. “Israeli passport in his suit jacket, along with a thousand dollars cash. Nothing else on him except for that gun.”
Nothing except a hotel key, and a piece of human skin.
And a message from my grandmother, dead now for more than thirty years.
The distinction between human and animal skin was subtle, especially when aged and treated. Human skin was softer than animal, fine and supple, even more so than lamb; and thin, with a delicacy that belied its inherent strength. Most people would have been unable to tell the difference. That I could was not something that made me proud, but I had seen human skin before, dried and preserved for horrific reasons. It was not something I would ever forget. And it was on my mind now as Grant and I climbed the steps to his apartment: the entire top floor of the former furniture factory that housed his homeless shelter.
The detectives had driven us home to the co-op. My car was part of evidence. Luckily, there were three little demons in my life who were capable of playing housekeeper when they wanted to, and when I had opened up that door—slowly—there were no knives to be found on those vintage leather seats; no chewed-up baseball bats, rusty nails, decapitated teddy bears, or issues of Playboy. Sixty seconds of good hard work. All they had left behind was a decorative square pillow that had not been there before, and that had i love the police embroidered on it in big red letters.
My boys. Such comedians.
I carried my high heels in one hand, and held Grant’s with the other as he made his way slowly up the stairs. His jaw was tight, but not entirely with pain. It had been a hard night. Zee paced through the shadows ahead of us, while Dek and Mal—now that I was in a safe place—uncoiled from my neck and slithered down my arm to join Raw and Aaz in the shadows.