“Yes, ma’am,” he said, his voice softening. “They’re taking him to the hospital to pronounce him. You can ride with him if you want. I’m sorry. He looked like a nice guy.”Plan A for getting the wacko witch off the accident scene. Right out of the handbook. “Thank you,” I said, wiping my eyes.
“You were the driver, ma’am?” he asked as we walked, and when I nodded, he added, “May I see your license?”
Aw, shit. “Yes, sir,” I said, fumbling in my bag for it. In five minutes the Cincinnati branch of the I.S. would be telling him all about me. We halted at the back of a black I.S. blazer, the tailgate down to show an open kennel. There was a dog out here? Behind me, I heard Ivy and Jenks telling the officers with them that they were my roommates. Oh God. Ivy’s Brimstone. I probably smelled like an addict. Accident. Points. What if they took my license?
The officer before me squinted to see my license in the fading light, smiling when he looked up. “I’ll have this right back to you, Ms. Morgan. Then you can go with your boyfriend and get yourself looked at.” Eyebrows high, he glanced at my bandaged hands and ripped jeans before nodding to Jenks and Ivy and trotting away to leave us with two officers.
“Thank you,” I said to no one. Exhausted, I leaned against the truck. Jenks had been cuffed to the truck, and the two FIB guys moved a short distance, close enough to intervene if necessary but clearly waiting for more I.S. personnel to handle our interrogation. Holding my elbows with my scraped hands, I watched my life swirl down the crapper.
Rubberneckers passed with an infuriating slowness, faces pressed against the windows as they struggled to see in the deepening dusk. My new jeans were ripped almost to the knee. The truck refused to burn. A fourth Were pack wearing military dress uniforms had joined the three already here, all of them edging the limits of the FIB and I.S. officers keeping them back. Had I forgotten anything? Oh yeah. I had helped kill someone, and it was going to turn around and bite me on the ass. I didn’t want to go to jail. Unlike Takata, I looked awful in orange.
“Damn it,” Ivy said, licking a thumb and trying to rub out the new scrape on her leather pants. “These were my favorite pair.”
My gaze went to the truck. The knot in my stomach grew tighter. Leaning, I reclined against the Blazer’s tailgate and silently fumed as I categorized the arriving Inderlanders into their jobs, pulled in from their scattered locations.
The willowy blond witch was probably their extraction specialist, not only comforting information from distraught victims but from testosterone-laden bucks who wouldn’t talk to anyone unless it might get her into bed with them. Then there was the guy too fat to do real street work but who had a mustache, so he had to be important. He’d be good at keeping angry people apart and would tell me he could get me a deal if I was willing to spill. The dog team was at the Mack truck since he was the one who had crossed the yellow line, but I was sure he’d get to the pickup soon, then probably make a little visit over here.
I looked for, and finally found, the officer who was slightly off and took his job too seriously to be safe. This was the guy that no one trusted and even fewer liked, usually a witch or Were, too young to be a fat man with a mustache but too gun-happy to be a data guy. He was walking around the broken pickup, hiking up his belt with his weapon and looking at the girders as if they might hold a sniper ready to take us all out. And don’t forget the I.S. detective, I thought. I didn’t see him or her, but since someone had died, one would show up soon.
FIB officers were everywhere, taking their measurements and pictures. Seeing them in control of the site kind of threw me, but remembering the intensive data the Cincinnati FIB had shared with me during a murder investigation, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised.
Ivy slumped against the side of the I.S. vehicle, arms crossed and thoroughly ticked. She stared at the ambulance Nick was in as if she could kill him by her gaze alone. Me? I was more worried about how we were going to get that truck burning. I was getting the feeling it wasn’t going to happen. A heavy wrecker was inching its way into place, rollers moving with a sedate laziness. Apparently they wanted to get it off the bridge before the news crews showed up.
Slipping out of his cuffs, Jenks levered himself to sit beside me on the tailgate, a pained grunt coming from him. “You okay?” I asked, though clearly he wasn’t.
“Bruise,” he said, eyes fixed to Nick’s blue truck. With an obnoxious beeping, the wrecker backed up to it.
“Here,” I said, pulling my bag around and starting to rummage. “I’ve got an amulet. Ivy never takes any of my amulets, and I’m not used to you being big enough to use them.”
“Why aren’t you using it?” he said, stretching his shoulder with a pained look.
“I have no right to,” I said, my throat closing when I glanced at Peter. I was glad he wasn’t trying to convince me otherwise, and I hardly felt the prick of the finger stick for the blood to invoke it. Ivy shifted, telling me she had noticed the fresh blood despite the wind, but she was the last vamp I had anything to be worried about. Usually.
“Thanks,” he said as he draped it over his head in obvious relief. “I wonder if there’s any way you can make tiny amulets? I’m going to miss these.”
“It’s worth a try,” I said, thinking that unless that truck spontaneously combusted from Ivy’s glare, I’d have about a week to find out. Once the Weres realized the artifact was fake, they’d be knocking on my door. Assuming I didn’t land in jail. I felt as if we were three kids standing outside the principal’s office. Not that I had any experience in that area. Much.
Nick’s truck went atop the wrecker in a horrendous noise of whining winches and complaining hydraulic machinery. The garage guy moved slowly, his dirty blue overalls and cap pulled down low, pressing levers and buttons seemingly at random. The overzealous I.S. guy was telling him to hustle and get his vehicle out of the way before the first news van arrived.
The driver walked with a limp, almost unnoticed amid the FIB and I.S. uniforms, and I thought it rude they made the old man move faster than he comfortably could.
Someone had moved one of the massive construction lights to illuminate the area, and as the distant generators rumbled to life a quarter mile away, a soft glow swelled into a harsh glare, washing out the gray of the fading sunset. Slowly the background rumble became unnoticed. Mind whirling for an idea, I dropped the spent finger stick in my shoulder bag and sighed.
I froze, fingers brushing the familiar objects in my bag. Something was missing besides the remote. Shocked, I stared into the dark fabric bag, tilting it so the growing light would illuminate what it could. The sight of my things scattered on the grating when Nick knocked me down passed through my mind. “It’s gone,” I said, feeling unreal. I looked up, meeting first Jenks’s and then Ivy’s wondering gaze as she pulled herself away from the vehicle.“The wolf statue is gone!” I said, trying to decide if I should laugh or curse that I had been right in not trusting Nick. “The bastard took it. He knocked me down and took it!” I had been right to leave the totem shoved between Jenks’s silk underwear and his dozen toothbrushes. Damn it, I’d have been happy to have been wrong this one time.
“Piss on my daises…” Jenks said. “That’s why he picked a fight.”
Ivy’s bewildered face cleared in understanding. At least she thought she understood. “Excuse me,” she said, pushing herself away from the I.S. vehicle.
“Ivy, wait,” I said, wishing I’d told her what I had done, though it wasn’t as if I could shout that Nick had a fake. I pushed from the tailgate. Pain shot through me, reminding me I had just been hit by a truck. “Ivy!” I shouted, and an I.S. guy headed after her.
“Won’t take but a moment!” she called over her shoulder. She stormed across the closed lanes, uniforms coming from all over to head her off. I moved to follow, immediately finding my elbow in the grip of one of the mustache guys. Images of court dates and jail cells kept me still as the first man to touch Ivy went down when she stiff-armed him in the jaw.
A call went up, and I watched with a sinking sensation, remembering when she and Jenks had taken out an entire floor of FIB officers. But it was I.S. runners this time. “Maybe we should have told her,” I said, and Jenks smirked, rubbing his wrist where his cuffs had been.
“She needs to blow off some steam,” he said, then whispered, “Holy crap. Look.”
His green eyes were brilliant in the mercury light hammering down on us, and my jaw dropped when I followed his gaze to the wrecker. The brighter light made obvious what the shadows had hid before. The garage guy’s hands were spotlessly clean, and the dark stain on the knee of his blue overalls was too wet to be oil.
“Nick,” I breathed, not knowing how he got his hair that dirty white so fast. He was still wearing my disguise amulet, but with the overalls and cap, he was unrecognizable.
Jenks stood beside me, whispering, “What in Tink’s garden of sin is he doing?”
I shook my head, seeing the Weres watching him too. Double damn, I think they knew it was him. “He thinks he has the focus,” I said. “He’s trying to get the original too.”