truck full of silver bullets she was safe enough. “Will you see her again?” she asked.
“No. She was—it was—I think it was one of those ships in the night deals.” The words fear death by water crept into my head uninvited.
The car pulled out of London and wound slowly through the countryside.
I wasn’t looking forward to the bit that was coming next. I’d seen my fair share of dead bodies, human and otherwise, but they’d all had their skin on. We didn’t talk for the rest of the journey, but I stroked Tara’s hair and she seemed to find that soothing in a way that I chose to interpret as more human and less canine. Not that it mattered right then. For the first time in our relationship it unequivocally wasn’t a sex thing.
We decarred in the forest-shadowed car park at Safernoc Hall, with its slightly-too-on-the-nose fountain with the howling wolves, and walked up to the ancestrally imposing front door, which was already being held open by a small army of servants. As we approached the building, Tara’s bearing shifted from “this is falling apart and I can’t even” to “queen of all I survey”. She made the switch so suddenly and instinctively it was almost jarring, but that was … the deal. Being a hereditary werewolf-aristocrat came with its perks, but space to be vulnerable wasn’t one of them.
With a curt nod at the staff, Tara led me through the house and out the back door into a large and well-maintained garden. Crossing that, she brought me into a frankly excessive conservatory that climbed high with the sorts of fairytale bowers you got at the Chelsea Flower Show. I’d been to a werewolf funeral before and knew how this was going to work—they’d leave her in state before bringing her body to a cairn of stones in the deep woods, chasing the darkness away in a sacred hunt. At the moment, though, for all the pretty surroundings and the ritual, she was just evidence.
Tuffy’s body lay on a bier beside a large lily-strewn ornamental pond. It was ringed with green branches—oak and elm and yew, the ground around her scattered with hyacinth petals. I stared at those petals for a long time, not wanting to raise my eyes and look at the corpse. Tara didn’t give herself that luxury. She walked over to Tuffy’s side and stared her straight in the eye. I got my shit together and joined her. This was going to get ugly. Because—look, I was never Tuffy’s biggest fan but nobody deserved that kind of thing and I’m not exactly comfortable going deep into flayed-corpse detail.
“Fair warning,” I said. “I’m going to need to touch her.”
Tara nodded.
I crouched down and got as close to the dead woman as I could stomach. It was hard to kill a full werewolf—they healed wicked fast unless you cut them with silver, they could still fight you even half bled out, and they could go without food or air or water for a really, really long time. Which meant whatever did this had come prepared, or done something incredibly brutal.
I felt for puncture wounds or broken bones, the raw-meat texture of exposed muscle making me seriously want to gag, and only the fear of letting Tara down stopping me. It was nasty work, but it didn’t take long to find something conclusive—a thin, deep wound just breaking the breastbone and, if my guess about the angle was correct, piercing the heart.
“She’d have been dead when … y’know.” I said. “I know it’s not much comfort but I don’t think she’d have suffered.”
“I want to know who did this.” Tara’s eyes were yellow again, but I thought I could also see tears misting at their corners.
There were no other wounds—and that in itself told me something. Fighting a werewolf was messy and killing one in a single shot meant you had to either be unbelievably lucky or unbelievably good. “I’m going to need to turn her over,” I said reluctantly. “She was stabbed, but I think I’m looking at the exit not the entrance.”
Wordlessly, Tara walked around to her packmate’s head, and I took the feet. We turned the body as gently as we could, and I tracked the line of the wound to where I thought the attack should have come in. Soon enough I found it, a wider wound driven in through the spine, with a force that said something supernatural had moved quickly and decisively. There was