Free Magic Bites by Ilona Andrews Page A

anyway. Corpse after corpse after corpse, torn, disemboweled, drenched in their blood. It made me ill.
    "Seven," I murmured, holding the pictures by their edges as if the blood on them would stain my fingers.
    "Yours?"
    "Every one." He reached over to tap one of the shots. "This one. Zachary Stone. The alpha-rat. Tough, vicious sonovabitch."
    I tried to see beyond the blood, focusing on the injuries. "Something chewed on him."
    "Something chewed on five of them. And would have chewed on the other two as well if it wasn't scared away."
    A little light went off in my head. "Greg was working on this."
    "Yes. And keeping it quiet. The People want power. They lust after it the same way their vampires lust after blood. They see us as rivals and they'll attack any weakness. To admit that we can't take care of our own is a weakness. Nataraja would cream his jeans if he knew."
    "You think they are responsible?"
    "I don't know," he said, his face grim. "But I'm going to find out."
    It made sense. The Order had little love for the Pack, which was too organized and dangerous for their liking, but faced with a choice between the People and the shapeshifters, the Order would side with the Pack. Greg could have been tailing a vampire when something killed him, preventing him from revealing what he saw or was about to see. The vampire could have been caught in a struggle. Or the vamp could have been following Greg when something killed him because he was getting too close. Or…
    "I would like to speak to Corwin," I said.
    His face showed no reaction. "Is he a suspect?"
    There was no point in lying. "Yes."
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    "Done," he said. "You'll have your talk. On our premises."
    "That's fine."
    "I did my part," he said.
    I took the m-scan I stole from the morgue and spread it in the dirt.
    "What am I looking for?" he asked.
    "These." I pointed to the yellow lines.
    "Looks like a scanner malfunction."
    "I don't think so."
    He frowned. "What would register yellow?"
    "I don't know. But I know an expert who might."
    "You have something more to go on, besides that?"
    There was the hair, and I considered not telling him about it. Forewarned is forearmed. And he didn't give me anything that I couldn't have gotten from the knight-protector. Theoretically. Still, the Beast Lord saved me a lot of work and I doubted the texture of Corwin's hair could be altered so severely that DNA mapping would not match it to the sample.
    The Beast Lord looked at the photographs, shifting through them with marked slowness. He looked almost human. I realized that I was biased. Biased against Nataraja and his college of death-devotees, with their clinical indifference to tragedy and murder. For them, a dispatched vampire and a comatose journeyman equaled a loss of an investment, costly and inconvenient, but ultimately not emotionally painful. The man in front of me, on the other hand, had lost friends. They were people he knew well and they had placed themselves in his charge. The Pack leader's ultimate duty was to protect his Pack—and he had failed them. As he looked at the snapshots of their deaths, his face reflected determination and anger, cold crystallized anger, born of guilt and grief. There was an old word for that kind of anger.
    Wrath.
    This I understood. I felt it every time I thought of Greg. I'd have to be very careful from now on, because I was no longer neutral. If the Beast Lord did kill Greg, I would have to work harder to convince myself of his guilt.
    To think that I had found a kindred spirit in the Beast Lord. How touching. Greg's death was making me lose my mind. Perhaps I could hack off the murderer's head while the Beast Lord held him down.
    "Several hairs were found at the scene," I said. "The medical examiner's office doesn't know what to make of them. They contain fragments of both human and feline genetic sequences. It's not any kind of shapechanger that the ME's analysts have seen. It's weird as hell and no, I don't have the exact printout