• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Jason Schulyer.”

He shook his head. “Name doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“I don’t know who you are either,” Jason said, with a smile.

I frowned. “You know Merlioni, I don’t know your first name. I can’t introduce you.”

He flashed those pearly whites at me. “Rob, Rob Merlioni.”

“You don’t look like a Rob.”

“My mama doesn’t think so either, she’s always after me—Roberto, I give you such a nice name, you should use it.”

“Roberto Merlioni, I like it.” I introduced them more formally than I think I’d ever introduced anyone to anyone at a crime scene. Merlioni was stalling, he didn’t want to go back inside.

“There’s a box of gloves in the kitchen, on the counter, help yourself. I’m going outside for a smoke.”

“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said.

“I just started.” He looked at me, and his eyes were haunted. “I’ve seen worse, Blake, hell we’ve waded through worse together, you and me, but I’m tired today. Maybe I’m gettin’ old.”

“Not you, Merlioni, never you.”

He smiled, but not like he meant it. “I’ll be back in a few.” Then the smile widened. “Don’t let Dolph know I didn’t make your driver wait outside.”

“Mum’s the word,” I said.

He went out, closing the door softly behind him. The house was very quiet, only the rushing hush of the air conditioning. It was too quiet for a fresh murder scene, and too still. There should have been people all over the place. Instead we stood in the small entryway in a well of silence so thick you could almost hear the blood in your own ears, thrumming, filling the silence with something, anything.

The hair at the back of my neck stood at attention, and I turned to Jason. He was standing there in his baby blue T-shirt, his peaceful face behind the mirrored shades, but the energy trickled off of him, raised the skin along my arms in a nervous creep.

He looked so harmless, pleasant. But if you had the ability to sense what he was, he was suddenly not harmless, or pleasant.

“What’s with you?” I whispered.

“Don’t you smell it?” his voice was a hoarse whisper.

“Smell what?”

“Meat, blood.”

Shit. “No,” I said, but of course his creeping energy along my skin raised my own beast, like a ghost in my gut. That phantom shape stretched inside me like some great cat waking from a long nap, and I did smell it. Not just blood, Jason was right, meat. Blood smells sort of sweet and metallic like old pennies, or nickels, but a lot of blood smells like hamburger. You know it’s going to be bad, really bad, when a human being is reduced to the smell of so much ground meat.

My head lifted, and I sniffed the air, drew in a great breath of air and tested it. My foot was on the bottom step of the stairs before I came to myself. “It’s upstairs.” I whispered it.

“Yes,” Jason said, and there was the thinnest edge of growl to his voice. If someone didn’t know what they were listening to, they’d have thought his voice was just deeper than normal. But I knew what I was hearing.

“What’s happening?” I asked, and I was still whispering, I think because I didn’t want to be overheard. Maybe that was why Jason was whispering, or maybe not. I didn’t ask. If he was fighting the urge to run upstairs and roll around in the murder scene, I did not want to know.

I hugged my arms, trying to rub away the goosebumps. “Let’s go get those gloves,” I said.

He looked at me, and even through the glasses I could feel him struggling to remember what I was saying, or rather what the words meant.

“Don’t go all preverbal on me, Jason, I need you here with me.”

He took a deep breath that seemed to come from the soles of his feet and slide out the top of his head. His shoulders hunched then straightened like he was trying to shake something off.

“I’m okay.”

“You sure?” I asked.

“I can do it, if you can.”

I frowned at that. “Am I going to have more trouble?”

“I don’t have to go up into that room, you do.”

I sighed. “I am so tired of this shit.”

“Which shit?” he asked.

“All of it.”

He smiled. “Come on, marshal, let’s go