Read Online Death Blows: The Bloodhound Files-2 by DD Barant - Free Book Online Page B

around.”

    “Yeah, all right.”

    After Charlie leaves I go for a walk. It’s raining out, which isn’t surprising—this is Seattle, after all. That’s okay, though; I do some of my best thinking while walking in the rain.

    Dark, damp streets. Cars make that noise they only make on wet pavement. Neon shimmers off puddles on the tops of newspaper boxes. I jam my hands in the pockets of my trench coat and trudge into the night, questions percolating in my brain.

    Question number one: Was the killer really crazy? The crime scene was certainly bizarre, but I was living in a bizarre world. The comic book references were strange, but they had a certain internal logic—after all, the victim himself had appeared in a comic book. I keep seeing that grinning green skull in the red mask, crackling with little arcs of electricity, and shiver. Dealing with organized psychopaths always gives me a very particular feeling, like I’m standing on top of a cliff; a cliff where the world makes sense right up to the edge, then drops away into a howling abyss of insanity. That cliff is where my quarry lives, close enough to normalcy to fool his friends and neighbors but one step away from sacrificing everyone he knows to the great Spider God that lives in his brain. And no matter how many times I’ve been on that cliff, I always get the same sickening little tingle in the pit of my stomach, the dizzying vertigo of madness.

    That’s what I feel right now.

    That’s what my intuition says. The facts are still open to interpretation: A valuable mystic item is missing, and the victim had powerful known enemies. This could still be a glorified robbery or a revenge killing I don’t fully understand.

    Question number two: What isn’t Cassius telling me? Yes, Gretchen is one of his people and he protects his people like a pit bull does her pups, but the Bravo Brigade was a government team. Cassius knows more about them than he’s letting on, and when I have enough information I’m going to have to confront him.

    Question number three: How much does Gretch know? Was she aware of Aquitaine’s other identity, or did he keep it a secret from her? Could Gretchen be a suspect—or even one of the Brigade?

    The Brigade consisted of a pire, three thropes, and two lems. Two males, two females, two asexual beings. All sorts of possibilities for office romance, though I get the impression that pires and thropes don’t hook up with each other too often—and the lems just don’t go there at all.

    Question number four: Is Wertham really dead? I haven’t seen a body, and reports of his demise are kind of vague; in the comic, he’s killed by an exploding volcano. Dramatic, but the kind of thing that makes exhuming a body difficult.

    I sigh. A line of crows perched on the edge of a chain-link fence eye me suspiciously but make no move to leave, raindrops gleaming on their oily black feathers. The fence surrounds what used to be a gas station, now an empty square of patchy gravel; stunted weeds and white PVC out-gassing pipes stick up here and there like the periscopes of subterranean submarines.

    I start to head back the way I came. I don’t get very far, because there’s a group of people up ahead blocking the sidewalk. I never noticed them approach, but there they are. They’re standing facing me, not moving, in the shadows between two streetlights. Half a dozen, maybe.

    The one in the center is obviously a thrope, his lupine silhouette a head taller than any of the others. His yellow eyes are only slits. He pads forward a few steps, the rest of his group staying where they are, and stops just at the edge of the pool of light I’m under. I still can’t see his face, but his blackfurred, claw-tipped hands are now clearly visible.

    Thrope mouths aren’t shaped for human speech, so they’ve evolved their own sign language. I’ve become fairly fluent, but even if I wasn’t there’s no way I can miss what he signs.

    Hello, Jace