Free Not Until Moonrise by Heather Hellinger Page A

she brought herself to accept the fact that he was dead.
       He would have been better off dead.
       There was no time for guilt or loneliness now. Now she had to focus on the problem. Jackson was alive, and in all likelihood that meant he was no longer human. He was waiting for her, and she didn’t yet know where, or why.
       She was seated at the kitchen table with her third cup of coffee and her fifth cigarette when the phone rang again. This time it was her cell, vibrating wildly against the coffee mug. She tensed, but the number flashing across the screen was familiar, and she punched the answer key.
       “This couldn’t wait until dawn?”
       “Crime waits on no man.” Eddie’s voice was obnoxiously cheerful for it being half past four in the morning. “On no woman either, for that matter. Meet me at the diner in thirty.”
       Kate took a long drag off her cigarette. “I guess you couldn’t call someone else.”
       “Hey, I thought you were saving up for retirement. A woman of leisure by thirty, wasn’t that the plan?”
       “Yeah, well. I was thinking of maybe taking a vacation. Go to Jersey, get a tan.”
       “Forget the tan, Morgan. This one’s for you.”
       Of course it was. She’d had a feeling it would be from the minute she recognized Eddie’s number.
       She stared blankly at the room around her. Kitchen shelves empty of all but a few cans of soup, junk mail cluttering the counter, and trash can overflowing with takeout containers. She’d never been good at things like shopping or cooking. Jackson was the housekeeper. He cleaned with a wry smile and rags made of ripped up Metallica T-shirts too threadbare to wear any longer. He said he didn’t mind that her job earned more in one week than his bartending gigs brought in all year. He said he liked taking care of the place, and being there when she got home. But she had always wondered.
       In the back of her mind she had spent two years wondering—if Jackson was alive, if he had chosen to leave her, was this part of the reason?
       In the end it didn’t matter. Whatever the reason, Jackson had made his choice knowing there would be consequences.
    _______
     
    “The town of Porter,” Eddie Carman said, when the waitress had left their table, and they were alone with the smells of bitter coffee and burnt toast. “It’s a backwater shithole in the foothills upstate. But I guess you know that already.”
       Kate sipped her coffee with a grimace, and set the cup aside. The diner was a shithole, too. Someday it would finally go out of business, and they’d have to find a seedy new place to meet. She let herself wish for a moment they could go to Starbucks like normal people. But she supposed normal people didn’t meet to discuss the extermination of werewolves.
       Eddie was watching her, waiting for an answer he had already read in her file.
       She sighed. “Yes, I know Porter. I was born there, for Chrissake.”
       “There’ve been three deaths so far. All of them badly mutilated. Severed limbs, disemboweled… you get the picture.”
       “Identifiable?”
       “Identifiable and identified.” Eddie consulted the manila file in front of him, then slid it toward her. “Adam Greene, Noah Kincaid, Joshua Kutcher. They were all natives.”
       She had asked the question idly, but the answer sent a trickle of cold down her spine. She had to school her features into blandness as she glanced over the crime scene photos.
       Noah, don’t do this, please—
       “We went to school together,” she said. “But I didn’t know them well. They played football. I think my step-brother was friends with them, with Adam and Noah at least.”
       “Adam and Noah were the first victims. The third, Kutcher, we think the killer was interrupted. A couple of kids went out to an abandoned farm last night and found him in the barn, still alive and trying to talk. He died before the ambulance got