Free Circus of Blood by James R. Tuck

1
    If my heart wasn’t armor-plated with scar tissue, it would have broken for the girl who was hooked up to IVs and fighting for her life.
    Someone had tried to beat her to death.
    She lay on a bed, a tiny, frail thing. Ugly bruises spread under her skin like oil slicks, almost black under her olive tone. One side of her face was swollen, puffy, like it had been injected with water. The other side was covered in gauze that already needed changing. More bandages wrapped her body, holding together fractures, stabilizing them in the hope that her body could knit itself back together.
    If she hadn’t been a Were-bat, then this would’ve been an autopsy. My throat was tight with anger when I spoke.
    “What’s her name?”
    “What? Oh, hold on.” Larson flipped back in a chart that was on his lap. “Here it is. Identification has her name as Fallene McCollum, age nineteen.”
    “Track down any kin of hers?”
    “Kat’s on it.”
    Kat was Larson’s girlfriend. She was my sister first though. Not my blood sister, my sister of choice. She helps me run the business that funds my war on monsters, and is a miracle worker when it comes to finding information on the Internet. If this girl had family in the foothills of Bangladesh, assuming that Bangladesh actually has foothills, then Kat would track them down.
    “When was she found?”
    “About two hours ago.”
    Right after sundown. “How bad is she?”
    Larson let out a quick puff of air, blowing away a strand of hair that had fallen over one eye. The hair was bright, carrot-cake red that looked darker now that it was longer. It blended into his beard, making him look a little like a crazed hippie Jesus.
    Slender fingers skimmed the chart again, flipping pages as he gathered information to tell me. One page ruffled loose, sliding off his lap. It flipped back and forth, riding air currents to the floor where it slipped under the rubber edge of the wheel on his chair.
    He leaned over to snatch it up, the wheel on the other side tilting up about two inches. I jerked forward, hand out to stabilize him before I even thought of it. Daggers shot out of his eyes at me.
    “I’ve got it. This damned chair won’t beat me.”
    I stepped back and let him strain for it. It would have been easier and quicker if I had just reached down and gotten the damn paper, but that wasn’t the point.
    Larson had been wheelchair bound since helping me defeat a crazy hell-bitch named Appollonia. Back then he’d been a wannabe vampire hunter. Winding up in the wheelchair had pretty much put an end to that.
    Since then, he had proven to be capable and quick-minded. Now he functioned as the doctor to the lycanthrope community we had.
    I don’t know if that technically made him a veterinarian or not.
    He saw patients at a clinic Kat had used my money to build for him. It had medical facilities and a laboratory, and had been retrofitted to be wheelchair accessible.
    That’s why he was the one Fallene had been brought to.
    Fallene. It was a sweet name. She looked like a sweet girl. I held on to her name as I looked down at her, repeating it over and over in my head like a mantra. I knew nothing about her except she was young and someone had decided to try to beat her to death. I would hold on to her name as a talisman of vengeance as I hunted out whatever was responsible for this.
    One thing I knew right now was that it wasn’t anything human. Fallene was a lycanthrope. Even a frail young girl of a lycanthrope was stronger and faster than me. No matter if she was or wasn’t a fighter, no normal human would be able to do the amount of damage I was looking at to her.
    Unless she got run over by a truck.
    So we were looking at something supernatural.
    Larson rocked back upright, paper trapped between thumb and forefinger. “Aha!” He shuffled the escapee back into the chart and scanned some more lines.
    “Anytime you’re ready.”
    “Oh, sorry. Distracted.” He looked up at me. “She has