it: sire, creator, philetor. The vampire who made him. Yelena was her name. You said yourself there was witchcraft involved here, and I think she was a witch when she was alive. She’s … kinda like Patrick, only older, smarter, a girl, and she can do magic.”
Tara looked unconvinced. “And what would she want with me and mine?”
“I don’t know, and honestly I’m a little bit scared to find out.”
She nodded. “Come.”
I followed her across the grounds and into the dark of the wood. Next stop, the scene of the crime.
8
The King & the Queen
As we approached the edge of the deep forest, the strange borderland between here and not here that the wolves of Safernoc were sworn to guard, Tara shrugged off her dress and shifted into the form of a gargantuan golden wolf. I placed a hand on her back, feeling her muscles shift under her fur as she padded through the undergrowth. I wasn’t sure if I was doing it for my comfort or hers.
It was still only a little past noon, but between the canopy and the pervading sense of supernatural menace, the woods were soon night-time dark. Then there was that ice-water chill that you got when you passed out of the normal world, and I was standing under a full hunter’s moon in a land of snow and shadows. Tara set her nose to the ground and started searching out a scent. I could have joined her: tracking by a combination of smell and occult predator’s instinct is one of the many weird gifts I can thank my mum for, but drawing on her power while in the realm of a completely different faery lord was probably asking for trouble. I’d once discovered, more or less by accident, that I had the power to annexe bits of other faeries’ realms on behalf of the Deepwild, and it was something I was keen to avoid doing unless I really meant to.
At last we came to a bloodstain on the snow. It stood out starkly in the moonlight, the only spot in the entire realm that wasn’t pure black and white. “Here.” Tara was back in human form. Seeing her naked in the cold made me want to wrap my coat around her for reasons that were absolutely one hundred percent to do with gallantry. Not that the weather seemed to bother her—clearly I could add sub zero temperatures to the list of things that didn’t stop werewolves.
“This where you found the body?”
“Insofar as where has any meaning in a place like this, yes.”
There was that. Crime scene analysis was hard enough for the police with their clean-rooms and their luminol. It was tougher for us independents, and when the scene in question was a snowbound metaphor in a faery-dominated pocket reality, there wasn’t a whole lot anybody was likely to get from conventional methods. Still I walked over to the bloodstain where Tara was crouching and gave it the once over. The snow was disturbed past the point of usefulness. But then it would have been, the pack would have had to recover the body, after all, and you couldn’t do that without leaving footprints.
Still I could make out the extent of the bloodshed, and extent was the word. The spot where the body had been found was still soaked through a day later, even a light smattering of fresh snowfall not able to cover the wads of red ice that were packed into the ground. She’d probably been skinned where she’d fallen.
“What was her name?” I asked. I’d known Tuffy—by sight at least, and honestly to no better than a fifty-fifty guess—for years but I’d never known what she was really called.
“Tabitha Fford-Larson.”
I wasn’t going to ask how you went from that to “Tuffy” but then maybe “Tabby” had sounded too feline. The site of the death wasn’t going to tell me much—there’d been werewolves standing all around it and they’d obliterated anything I could have usefully learned from the immediate scene. But further out the snow was less trampled, and while it had drifted and flurried, obscuring a lot of the marks that I could have used to do the full Sherlock Holmes bit, I did manage to find something interesting: Two sets of footprints, nearly covered over, leading away from the scene. One of them, when I brushed the fresh snow aside to look at the older hardpack beneath, bloody.
“She had two attackers,” I called over my shoulder. “One was with the