The truck came to a stop, the engine still racing, shoving at the debris and the narrow space where I had landed on top of the baristas. One was bleeding.
Need. Want. I reached out to touch the blood, the woman.
“Ingram!” FireWind shouted.
I jerked back. Swallowed the saliva pooling in my mouth. Curled my fists and hugged myself. No, I thought, shoving down the bloodlust. No. No. The need receded. “I’m okay!” I shouted to my boss, breathless. “Three women and I are on the far end of the bar. No one is crushed against the wall.”
The bodies beneath me began to move, struggling to free themselves from the pile. I reached up and caught the bar, lifting myself so they could crawl from beneath me. So that I wasn’t touching them.
“Clear the site!” FireWind said, suddenly inside, his long black hair wild and windblown. “We have a melter.”
A melter. A dead person inside the truck who was melting. Contaminated by the death and decay. Yet who had been driving a truck. Like Cale Nowell.
* * *
* * *
“It was a 1967 Chevy short-bed,” JoJo said to the gathered members of Unit Eighteen. “One owner, bought new. Brett Hudgins, sixty-nine years of age, five-seven, two-forty, retired farmer, widowed in 2010. No relation to Stella Mae Ragel, to the poly marriage, or to the band. No relation to the church. No relation to anyone. The owner was a deacon in his church, tithed regularly, didn’t drink or smoke. According to his son, he went into town this morning to look over a new saddle for his granddaughter’s birthday. He didn’t show up for lunch and didn’t answer his phone. His son activated tracking on his cell and discovered it on the side street half a block from HQ. He had just called police to check it out when he saw it start to move on his cell. He tracked the chase virtually.” Jo looked up at me. “He says there’s no way his dad was responsible for the attack. He says someone did something to his father to make it happen.”
“I believe that,” I said.
T. Laine nodded. “Agreed.”
“Yet he attacked Ingram,” FireWind said. “When did the truck park there? How did a dead man know she was in the building? How did he see with dead eyes?”
“He arrived and parked at eleven-oh-two,” Jo said, “according to nearby cameras. Nell was the first person to leave the building after that.”
“It may have been opportunity and not a specific target,” FireWind said.
I wasn’t sure if that made any difference to me. I was still picking pebbled safety glass and sharp shards of bottle glass out of my hair, clothes, and shoes. I had myriad cuts (none requiring stitches) and a few bruises. I was bloody and sticky. Horribly sticky. I smelled like sugar and caramel and hazelnut, splattered by the crashing flavoring bottles. But my bloodlust had gone silent at the sight of the dead melting man behind the truck windows.
I realized that my bloodlust had not risen at all on this case until now, when I was exposed to the blood of a healthy human. Soulwood didn’t want death and decay bodies. Soulwood knew they were . . . unclean. That was a religious-sounding word, a church word, but it felt right here. They were fundamentally unclean. They didn’t belong here or anywhere. They were wrong.
“There were four injured, including Nell, one seriously,” Jo said. “If Nell hadn’t shoved people out of the way it could have been much worse.”
“Yes. You did well to get so many patrons away from the door,” FireWind said.
“I’d have done even better if there had been time to find a good place to hide. One without a storefront, glass, or civilians,” I said, bitter guilt in the words for the woman with the broken leg and no insurance. “He was targeting me, whether by opportunity or personal intent. I led him straight to them.” Not that I had had other options. I hadn’t known until too late that he was going to crash into the store. I had thought he just intended to shoot me, not take out others too. None of us had been thinking worst-case scenario. None of us had thought that far ahead.
FireWind said, “You did as you were instructed. You followed orders.”
I scowled at him. “Following orders without thinking is stupid.”
JoJo grinned. T. Laine gave a quiet snort. The hallway door blew open.