Skin Trade(159)

“I won’t let her put you in jail,” she said, dark eyes all for her mother, as if I weren’t standing there with a gun in my hand. I hoped I didn’t have to shoot her; it would be like winging an angry Bambi. She just didn’t know any better. The very naïveté of her helped me regain control of the hunger. I took deep, even breaths and thought soothing, empty thoughts.

“Kate,” Phoebe said, “I let my grief get in the way of my better judgment. That is not the marshal’s fault.”

Kate shook her head hard enough for her brown ponytail to whirl around her shoulders. “No.” Then she turned those angry eyes to me. “If I gave you a name of someone who could have done this, would you leave my mother alone?”

“Kate, no!”

“We don’t owe him enough for you to go to jail, and what if he did have something to do with this? Then the next time he killed someone, it would be part of our karma, too. I don’t owe him that.”

“I was his priestess, Kate.”

She shook her head again. “I wasn’t.” She turned back to me. “I’m dating a cop. He said something about the bodies being torn up, and not all of it was wereanimal. I mean, that always makes the news anytime you get a mutilated body. They always blame the local wereanimals first.”

I just nodded. She was in a mood to talk, if I didn’t spoil it somehow.

“But he said that some of the bodies were cut with blades. That the ME had never seen anything like it, and neither had you guys.”

Her boyfriend was way too talkative, but if she’d give me the name, I wouldn’t tell. I might try to find out who it was and tell him to keep his mouth shut, but I wouldn’t rat him out. If she’d just say the name.

“Is that true?” she asked, at last.

“I’m not free to discuss an ongoing investigation. You know that.”

“If it’s true, then you need to talk to Todd Bering.”

“He’s off his meds again,” Phoebe said. “You have to understand that. He’s a good man when he takes his meds, but when he goes off…”

“What’s he on meds for?”

“He was diagnosed with schizophrenia because he heard voices and saw things. He may have been mildly ill, but he is also one of the most powerful natural witches I’ve ever met.”

“What does that mean, ‘natural witch’?” I asked.

“Like you,” Kate said, “your power just came, right? You didn’t have to study, you could just do it.”

“I had to have training to control it,” I said.

“And that’s what we tried to do for Todd.” Kate didn’t sound angry now, she sounded a little sad. I was happy about the sad; it made the receding edge of anger less yummy.

“It didn’t work?” I asked.

“It worked,” Phoebe said, and she sighed, “but when he started getting sick again, he called up things that are never to be touched on our path. There are some things you cannot do and be a good witch.”

I nodded. “So I’ve heard.”

“He called a demon. It felt so awful, like you couldn’t breathe past the evil of it,” Kate said; she was looking at the ground, but her eyes were haunted, as if she could still feel it.

“I’ve felt the demonic before,” I said.

“Then you know,” she said, raising those haunted eyes to me.

I nodded. “I know.”

“It had these big blade-like hooks for hands. As far as I know it’s still inside the circle in his house, but if he gained control of it…” She shrugged.

I looked at them both. “The most likely scenario is that when it gets out of the circle, it just kills him and goes back to where it came from. How likely is it that this Todd Bering is powerful and sane enough to control something like this?”

Phoebe nodded. “He would be capable.”

“You should have reported this to the authorities as soon as you saw it,” I said.

“I thought, like you, that it would escape the circle and kill him. It would be instant karma. I didn’t dream that he would be able to control it, or that he would attack policemen. Rumor says that it was that vampire serial killer and wereanimals. No one said demon or blades. The news reported that the police had been torn apart by claws and fangs.”

We had a serious leak at the Vegas PD, and I would have to report it. Talking to your girlfriend is one thing; talking to the press is another. I couldn’t take the chance that her boyfriend wasn’t our Mr. Chatty.

“Blades, Mom, blades.”

I didn’t correct her that it was both. No need for me to share, too. “I appreciate the information.”