I was grouchy and irritated and acting like an idiot. I knew it would pass, but for now I rode the annoyance, letting it power me as I helmeted up and took off on Bitsa, leaving behind the itchy, uncomfortable feelings left over from taking a shower with Bruiser. I wove over to Langenstein’s on Arabella Street for meat, forgetting it wasn’t open all night, and, even more frustrated, drove around for half an hour, finally stopping at a twenty-four-hour fast-food place and buying a bucket of chicken. Cooked. But they might have called the cops if I’d ordered it raw. I strapped it to my bike, stopped for gasoline, bottled water, and candy bars, and wove around until I found the morgue.
The New Orleans Coroner’s Office and Forensic Center was on Martin Luther King Boulevard, in a busy, well-traveled part of town. The building was three stories of new, post-Katrina construction, well lighted, and patrolled by cops. And for the moment, a van was parked at a loading bay in the back, the doors of the van open, the loading bay brightly lit. Two cops stood near a corner stealing a smoke.
There was no wooded place to shift nearby, which wasn’t helpful; I needed privacy and calm to call on my magics. I located a private home with a recently planted flower and ornamental tree garden and pulled Bitsa off the street into the shadows under a short Japanese maple tree. I knew that she would be okay where I left her—one good thing about having a police presence nearby and a witchy locking system on the bike was that Bitsa wouldn’t get stolen. Standing in the shadows, I listened, scented, and watched for people, security cameras, and anything else that might cause me trouble. Satisfied that I was alone and unobserved, I strapped on the travel bag, opened the bucket of chicken, undressed, and pulled the fetish necklace out. The bones and teeth of a female bloodhound clacked and rattled.
I had acquired the bones from a taxidermist I frequented in the mountains. I had asked him to keep an eye out for any large mammal carcass he might find, and he had called me several times over the years, having acquired dead animals he thought I might like. He had stripped the flesh from the bones and teeth and strung them onto necklaces for me, believing that I was into some strange voudon practice. I had never set him straight. Someday the strange things people believed about me were gonna come back and bite me. Hard. I set the bloodhound necklace around my neck and sat in the midst of ferns, protected from eyes on the street by azaleas and big-leafed hostas. And I ripped off the bandages Evangelina had so carefully applied.
I had never tried the bloodhound form before, but I needed a really good nose right now. I closed my eyes and blew out hard, searching for a calm center, which eluded me for a number of reasons: Beast didn’t like it when I shifted into any creature other than big-cat, my emotions were ragged and on edge because of Bruiser, I was angry because Rick hadn’t called, and seeing the stupid photos. And getting naked in my own walled garden was one thing, but getting naked in a private yard was very different. It took too long, but eventually I was calm enough to feel my skinwalker energies rise.
I held the necklace and relaxed, listening to the night breezes, feeling the pull of the three-day, sharp-pointed moon, still thin, far overhead. I felt the beat of my heart in my throat, in the palms of my hands, and the soles of my feet as I slowed the functions of my body, slowed my heart rate, let my blood pressure drop, my muscles relax, as if I were going to sleep. I lay on the ground beneath the trees in the humid air, leafy ferns a cushion.
Mind slowing, I sank inside, my consciousness falling away, all but the purpose of this hunt. As always, I set that purpose into the lining of my skin, into the depths of my brain, so I wouldn’t lose it when I shifted, when I changed. I dropped deeper. Lower. Into the darkness inside where broken, painful memories danced in a gray world of shadow, blood, and doubt. I heard a drum beating a measured beat, steady and slow, smelled herbs and the scent of fresh smoke. The night wind seemed to cool and freshen. As I dropped deeper, I sought the fetish and the memory of form and structure hidden in the inner snake lying inside the bones and teeth of the necklace, the coiled, curled snake, resting deep in the cells, in the remains of the marrow.
I took up the snake and I dropped within, like water flowing across a sandy streambed, like sleet peppering the ground with a bitter icy shush of sound. Grayness enveloped me, sparkling and cold as the world fell away. And I was in the gray place of the change.
Beast was sulking far out of sight, and my mind was empty and private and alone.
My breathing deepened. Heart rate sped up. And my bones ... slid. Skin rippled. Hair, brown and black and sleek, sprouted. Pain slid like a knife between muscle and bone. My nose and jaw compressed and grew forward. My nostrils drew deep. My shoulders and hips ground and scraped as bone flowed into new shapes.Minutes passed until I came to myself, panting, tongue hanging out, hot belly on the cool dirt. Hungry, I thought. I stood and shook, ears and loose skin slapping, rippling, and sliding over deeper tissue. I huffed a breath and the smells of the city hit my scent receptors. It was like being blindsided by an odoriferous Mack truck. Ten seconds later the scents and chemical compounds were categorized and compartmentalized by the newly expanded olfactory center in my brain in a way that was unique to this canine species. Ten seconds after that, they had been recognized and identified by my normal human mental abilities, and grouped by similarities. Dogscatsrats, menwomenchildren, overworked toilets and unwashed bodies, oilexhaustgasoline, cigarettemarijuana, beer-liquor, antsroachesfleas. Instantly I began to itch and raised a back paw to scratch the side of my neck. Dang fleas.
Unexpectedly, Beast rose from the depths of my consciousness and peered out through my eyes. Ugly dog, she thought contemptuously. Bad eyes. She was right. Bloodhounds weren’t bred to depend on sight. She sniffed through the elongated nose of the bloodhound and crept a little closer to the forefront of my brain, which was odd for her. Good smells, she thought at me. Good nose on ugly dog, she amended with reluctance.Not ugly, I though back. Just not feline. Beast huffed back in disdain.
I looked around and, satisfied that I was alone, began rooting in the chicken carton. I pulled out legs and breasts and wings and crunched down. One good thing about being a shape-shifter, if I got bone splinters, they were gone as soon as I shifted back. I ate the entire box of extra crispy chicken and biscuits, leaving the mangled paper bucket scattered in the garden.
Stomach satisfied, I trotted through the shadows and into the street, to the open bay door of the morgue. I swerved out of sight of the two uniformed cops standing at the back of the building; they were smoking and discussing wives with the I-can-tell-you-a-better-story tone that men use for women they have been with a long time. I caught a strong scent of newly dead body and blood, some of it in the van beside me, most of it on the air and inside the building. Underneath that was an older scent of big-cat-human-female. Safia.
I slinked around the van and sat hidden behind a wheel and tire, looking for and spotting static video cameras. I judged the limits of their field of view and knew there was no way to avoid them all, but I was betting that the camera feeds went directly to digital storage and were not monitored by a human who might raise an alarm that a dog had gotten in. Considering I could end up in the dog pound if caught, I was betting a lot. I heard the two cops grind out butts and walk out into the night, stretching their legs. I slipped in and, just like that, I was inside.
To call it a morgue was not quite sufficient, not descriptive enough. There were offices and storage rooms with files. There was a room marked REC. EQUIP., which I guessed held photographic, video, and audio recording gear. There was a chapel that could have been used for any religion or none, where I guessed they stashed grieving families. There was an autoclave room that was unlit, and a laboratory area staffed by two lab techs who worked to music blasting through a CD player. To my now-supersensitive nose, the place reeked of cleaning supplies, chemicals, solvents, and bodies in various stages of decomposition.
At the end of the hallway, I rose up and touched my paw to a steel plate on the wall. The door opened with a whoosh. I’d found the area of the morgue that was similar to what I might see on TV and in movies: an evidence collection room, an autopsy room, and a body storage area that hummed with individual refrigeration units and a larger walk-in, multiple-body fridge at the back. To my new nose, the place reeked.
No one was in sight, and it was easy enough to follow the scent path to the body storage unit where Safia was, in the middle row of drawers. Though I no longer had hands to open the refrigerated unit, my paws were strong. I raised up on my hind legs, hooked the latch with a paw, and pulled. Icy air and the stench of death roiled into the room. The tray began to slide out. Balancing myself on the drawer, I walked on my hind paws, following its movement. When the tray was fully extended, I pressed a red arrow withaVshape below it, and slowly the tray began to drop. It seemed like a nifty device to keep employee back injuries to a minimum in a day and age of fatter, heavier Americans—which meant fatter, heavier corpses.
When the tray was down fully, I was able to drop to all fours and study the girl. Bloodhound eyes aren’t the best, and the poor vision is obscured by folds of skin; ears flop down over the ear canal, affecting hearing; but the nose is so sensitive that it beats any other dog in the canine kingdom. I sniffed and snuffed, pulling the scents in over the olfactory receptors in my nose, the blend rich, textured, layered, and intense. Smelling so many scents at once seemed to affect my pleasure centers, because I didn’t want to stop breathing in the heady mixture. While I drew in the new scents, I began to separate them into their individual components and categories.
Because she hadn’t been autopsied, as I stood over Safia I smelled blood and internal organs, water that had been used to wash the body, hair products, harsh and floral soaps, gunpowder, an unusual fishy smell that might have been her supper, and in her sweat, the pheromones of fear. The cat had been terrified when she died.
I confirmed Safia as the big-cat who had followed the werewolves when they hunted on Beast’s territory. The one who watched them kill without killing any deer herself. I should have parsed her scent when I met her and shook her hand, but with all the vamp- and were-smells in the ballroom, I’d missed it.