Inseparable

Inseparable Book 2, Chapter 4: I Got Nothing

Nash

I pretended to be asleep until Daphne slipped out of the room, and then I dropped my arm with a sigh. She was exactly the kind of girl I tried to avoid in my personal life.

First of all, she was too pretty, in that fresh-faced, innocent, girl-next-door kind of way. She had her long hair up in a ponytail and I had an obsceen urge to pull out her scrunchie and let it fall loose around her shoulders. And I know those urges would only get me into trouble.

Second of all, she was entirely too curious. She asked too many questions, and she was actually listening to my answers. Most women only asked me questions so that they could hear themselves talk, they didn’t really care about my replies. But Daphne was sharp enough to see the holes in my cover story, and that too, was dangerous.

And third of all…well I didn’t have a word for it, but there was something about her that made me feel kind of crazy when I was around her. Like she filled up so much space in my head that I couldn’t think about anything else. I was consumed by her, the way she looked the way she smelled, the way she smiled, the way she narrowed her eyes when she caught me lying. It completely muddled my mind until everything else became blurry and unimportant.

Even though I really DID need to sleep, I rolled off the bed before the girl could come back from the mess hall. I might as well start my investigation early tonight. I jumped into my jeep (with a fake set of plates on, registered to my alias Nathan Straight) and started cruising around the town that encircled the campus.

I felt like I was searching for a needle in a haystack. There had been three murders around the university in the last three months. The victims didn’t seem to have anything in common, and so far the official cause of death was mauling by a rogue bear in the area. There were now warnings posted everywhere that hikers and bikers and anyone who ventured into the woods around town should exercise “extreme caution.” The local gas stations were now stocking bear repellan spray and there was talk of a special prize for the hunter that brought in the bear.

So far the deaths of three random and unrelated students hadn’t gathered much attention from the media or the local law enforcement, but it had caught the attention of a guy I know named Josiah Salvador. See, he was concerned that the deaths weren’t from a wild animal gone rogue, but from a supernatural creature. I might have blown off such a theory a year or so ago, but that was before I met Salvador and his wife, and learned that they were werewolves. That werewolves and other shifters lived all around us, disguised as ordinary humans. Normally they lived in their own settlements, called packs and they like to keep a pretty low profile, as much as possible. They even took care of their own law enforcement on their own lands, much the way that the reservations had their own tribal police.

The problem was, this creature wasn’t on pack lands, and Salvadore wasn’t sure who he was or where he came from. So Salvador had hired me to go in undercover and check it out. If the murderer was a rogue werewolf, Salvador wanted to take him out before the media got wind of it.

Josiah had just went through hell and back to clear his name after some kind of drug traficking fiasco. He didn’t need his face on the television again, not when the relations between ordinary humans and shifters was still new and tenuous at best.

So I had gone undercover as a student to investigate the murders. I’d already been to all three crime scenes, but there wasn’t much left to find after the victims remains had been cleared away. All three murders took place in isolated spots not far from open forest land. There was signs of struggle, like the victims had tried to fight their way out, but ultimately they were overpowered, and shrudded apart.

I had read the police reports, studied the photos and the autopsies. All three victims appeared to have been clawed open and torn apart. The claw marks did appear consistent with a bear, but according to my research they were too deep and too wide to have been a local Eastern Black Bear. It was more consistent with a grizzley, but there were no grizzlies in the Green Mountains. There had been no teeth marks on any of the victims, and no evidence that the creature that shredded them like confetti had tried to feed on their remains. All the parts and pieces, and even an approximation of their blood volume was all present and accounted for at each crime scene.

Why would a bear rip three young men apart, but not eat any of the fresh meat?

Apart from the immediate area around the bodies, there was no sign of a bear leaving or arriving on the scene. There were no prints, no hair samples, no scat, nothing indicating there was any wild animal living or hunting in the vicinity. Which supported Josiah Salvadore’s theory that a shifter had approached the victims in human form, and had then transformed into their animal form at the scene of each individual murder.

So now I was patrolling the town without a clue what or who the hell I was looking for. There hadn’t been any action for a few weeks, so it was entirely possible that the killer had accomplished his mission and left the business of murdering college kids. Or perhaps if he was a serial killer, he had simply left the university and moved on to another location to start his killing spree afresh. I was unlikely to simply drive up on him in the night.

I wasn’t kidding about living on fast food. I hit the nearest drive through and then continued my rounds with a bag full of cheeseburgers, greasy fries and a large iced tea to fill my belly while I spent the evening walking the trails and paths around the university, looking for anything, or anyone who looked suspicious.

Recently I had set up securty for a quirky young writer. She had often fed me with steaks, burgers and shrimp while I was on duty. Man, I missed Robyn. But now that her attackers were behind bars, and she lived with her two husbands, she really didn’t need me present to monitor her security. Truthfully, it had gotten a little boring, so I was glad when Salvador called me with the bear-murder case.

I parked the truck off the street, walking distance from one of the bike paths that circled the university. During the day it was frequented by joggers and cyclists, by night it was supposed to be closed to the public. But I usually found one or two rule-breakers as I made my rounds. There were late-night exercisers, some rebelous teenagers smoking weed and drinking cheap beer, and some lovers who were looking for a romantic moonlit walk. No one I would suspect of brutally slashing a strong, healthy young man into ribons like pasta noodls.

After I had done a loop on the bike path, I vered off to a short two mile hiking path that looped through the woods, trailed along the creek for a short distance and then doubled back toward the school. Unlike the bike path, the hiking trail was very dark. The tree branches overhead blocked out the moonlight, and I had to tread carefully not to trip over exposed roots or stones. I had a headlamp in the back of my jeep that would have made the hike a lot easier, but I didn’t want to announce my presence.

Not that I would be able to hide, if there really was a homodical werewolf wandering these trails. According to my friends, werewolves had exceptional senses of smell, even when they were in their human forms, and they could see very well at night and hear much better than the average man.

A werewolf would see, hear and smell me coming.

I had rounded a corner and was now walking near the creek. I could hear the soft sounds of water somewhere to my right, down the embankment. It was actually very peaceful, walking alone in the night time, listening to crickets chirp and frogs croak and the musical sounds of the water. The night air was cool and sweet and here and there I could see the stars through the breaks in the tree canopy. I stopped for a moment at a spot where I could see the creek below, moving slowly and lazily between sandy banks.

For some reason, my thoughts turned back to Daphne. What would she think of this stroll through the woods in the dark of night. Would she be afraid of the night sounds, the soft call of a barn owl, and the distant yip of a coyote? Would she complain about the buzz of the occational mosquito? Or would she be as comfortable out in nature as I was?

I was so absorbed in my thoughts that I was startled when a scream ripped through the night. I was coming from the path behind me, where I had already passed. I turned and raced back through the darkness, retracing my steps, trying to stay on the path without falling headlong over the obstaceles in the way. The screaming went on, seeming to grow closer, like they were moving toward me even as I was moving toward them.

Then I heard another sound. The dull roar of an animal, but I couldn’t tell exactly what animal I was hearing. Was it a bear? A mountain lion? Could it have beent he snarl of a wolf? And then abruptly, all the sound ceased. There were no more screams. No more growls and snarls, no roars. There didn’t even seem to be any more crickets or frogs. The forest was completely silent.

I might not be a werewolf, but even I could smell the coppery scent of blood in the air. I slowed down, and pulled out my cellphone, letting the small built in flashlight illuminate the ground in front of me.

“S.hit,” I said, covering my mouth with my hand reflexively. The gore before me was so terrible that it was difficult to tell that the remains were even human. The head had been completely severed from the body and was laying in brown pineneedles on the side of the tree. The body had been disembowled, and the organs were scattered around, with some intenstines caught in the branches of a bush, while a liver was near the toe of my shoe.

I lifted the light to the surrounding forest, but I knew the killer was long gone. It had taken me at least ten minutes to get from the creek to the kill site. It had given the murderer plenty of time to get away. I slowly and carefully circled, looking for any clues that might reveal the identity of the beast. When I reached the head by the tree, I squatted down, and swore again.

The first three victims had been men. But this one was a woman, her blond hair was curly, there were gold hoops in her ears and her eyes were wide open in horror. Her jaw apeared to have been torn from her face before her head was torn off her neck, and was now missing.

I swallowed down the vomit in my throat. I’ve seen a lot of things, horrible things, both in the miliatry and in the civilian world, but this was definitely in the top ten of the most brutal deaths I had ever witness.

I scrolled through my phone and found the number for Josiah Salvador. He took the call with a sleepy growl. “This better be good,” he said by way of greeting.

“It’s not good,” I informed him. “I’ve found another body. Man, I was only maybe a quarter of a mile away when it happened, but it was over in seconds.”

I heard Salvador swear on the other end, and a woman’s voice ask, “What’s wrong?”

“So you got nothing?” There was an accusatory tone in his voice.

“I got nothing,” I confirmed grimmly. I was so close, I could hear the woman screaming before she died, but I hadn’t been able to get back to her to save her. And I still couldn't confirm who, or what had killed her.

I had failed.