Denied--A Novel of the Sazi Page 5

  “I think I’ll try the Happy Birthday Surprise today. I was saving that one for my actual birthday later this month, but today I am happy that I am alive.”

  “Your birthday is this month?!” Rachel let out a little squeal. “That’s great. We’ll have a big party! One thing Luna Lake does well … the only thing really, is parties.”

  She tried to wave off Rachel’s enthusiasm. “There is no need, truly. In our femily, most birthdays aren’t much different than any other day.”

  “What sort of things did you do back in Serbia?”

  “Oh, it was nice. When I was little, Mama would make a white sugar cake. White sugar had to be bought in the city, so we didn’t have it often. But once Bojan got older, he took over the baking. He is such a good baker, and he made pies that neighbors would come from all over to buy. He never needed white sugar. He would use fruit for the sweet, but you would never know the sugar was missing.

  “For my sixteenth birthday, which is one of the special birthdays, when I am officially woman, he make me a black cherry torte that I can still remember.” She remembered back, fondly, feeling a smile pull at the corners of her mouth. “That was the same year the femily gave me hope chest. Papa and Samit carved it from a great dead tree from the forest. They must have spent the whole year making it. It is so beautiful, with patterns and a beautiful deer carved on the lid.

  “Mama filled it with linens she’d embroidered, for me to start my own femily. I’d never even seen her pick up a needle, so it was a big surprise.” She could see it in her mind, at the foot of her bed, covered with a thick crocheted blanket that she would pull up over her feet for cold nights. “It’s still in my room, waiting for me to come back.”

  Rachel’s voice grew soft, and the other woman’s hand touched hers. “You miss your life back there, don’t you?”

  Anica pulled her attention back to the present and the tired laughter of the people around her, some new friends like Rachel, others strangers. “Yes. But also no. My life isn’t what I’d planned when I was tiny. That birthday, it was both happy and very sad, because even though Mama and Papa were trying hard to make it happy, they knew I could never have the life they would hope for me. I could smell their sad.

  “We cut ourselves off from most of our friends after the attack. Nobody courted me, I could not attend parties in the village. I could never marry someone from the village. We couldn’t risk people dropping by near the full moon. Samit and Bojan were too aggressive and I could change at any time. It was a lonely time.” She looked around her again, and there were only smiles when people met her eyes. “But here, nobody stares or moves their eyes away when I walk by. I know I made people afraid in Serbia. People couldn’t help themselves and they didn’t understand why, I don’t think. But they feared us.”

  Rachel didn’t seem to know what to say, but Anica could smell her sad. Dalvin arrived at the table just then, carrying a metal tray with one … large mountain of color that had burning candles and even lit sparkling sticks of metal that smelled of gunpowder! He smiled. “I told S.Q. this really was for a birthday, and she sort of went over the edge. When I saw her piling on the scoops, I figured I’d skip ordering for the rest of us.”

  Even Rachel was a little stunned. “Wow! That is … impressive!” She pulled out one of the burning sticks as Dalvin stole a chair from another table. “Have you ever played with sparklers?”

  Anica shook her head, a little nervous about Rachel waving one around. “They are very pretty. But do they explode?”

  “Nah. You just wave them around and make patterns in the air until they fizzle out. Little kids play with them on the Fourth of July—Independence Day here in the U.S. We didn’t have any this year because of the burn ban. But normally, we have a big fireworks display over the lake and the kids run around town with these.” She plucked the other one out of the ice cream and handed it to Anica and showed her how to write her name in the air. The letters appeared golden for a moment and then disappeared. It was gaining attention from people around them, and soon there were more such sundaes leaving the front counter and the whole room was lit up with sparklers. It felt very festive.

  Dalvin noticed and gave a little smile, his teeth snow-white against his dark skin. “Everyone is tired and scared right now. Nothing like sparklers to lighten the mood a little.” He took a spoonful of a scoop of ice cream that was slightly orange. “Mmm, peach. I do love homemade ice cream.”

  “Yep,” Rachel agreed as she dug into a scoop of chocolate on the other side. “Skew makes most of her own product. She buys the toppings and bars, but the ice cream is all hers.”

  “Hey, you guys!” Anica looked up with a mouth full of strawberry topping and some sort of green ice cream that tasted of nuts. Scott Clayton was waving from the door where he and her brother, Bojan, were just walking in the shop. The man with the waist-length blond hair with a streak of white that matched his owl feathers had quickly made friends with her brother since they’d arrived. Bojan cooked and Scott hoped to one day open an herbal medicine shop. Her brother was teaching the other man cooking, while Scott was helping Bojan find edible natural foods in the forest. “It looks like you could use some help with that before it melts.”

  Rachel nodded. “Absolutely. Find some chairs and some spoons and dig in. There’s no way we’ll finish this.”

  Anica took another bite. “Oh! There’s cake in here too!” Bojan sat down next to her, smelling happy for the first time she could remember since they’d arrived in America. It made her smile at him and he smiled back. “Try some of the green. It’s interesting.”

  Bojan took a bite. “It’s a sort of nut, but I don’t know what sort.”

  Scott replied, “It’s green, so pistachio.” He pointed with his spoon. “I used to work here. The orange is peach; the caramel color is either black walnut or—” He dug at it with the spoon. “Yep, black walnut. And, wow, she even threw licorice in here. Brave woman! Try the black, Anica.”

  She’d been sort of avoiding that scoop but tentatively put a little on the spoon and sipped it off the spoon. She grimaced and shook her head. She had finally found something she did not like here. “No. I do not think so. That flavor should not be with ice cream.”

  Dalvin noticed and aimed his spoon right for it. “Ooo. I love licorice ice cream. I’ll take that one off your hands.” He turned the whole plate so that it was right in front of him.

  “Please,” Anica agreed. “I will try some other colors.” She liked the berry-flavored ones, so moved to a pink scoop with obvious chunks of strawberry. It quickly got the harsh taste of the licorice out of her mouth.

  Rachel pointed with her spoon at Scott’s clothing, which was surprisingly clean. “You have not been on the fire line. Slacker,” she said with words of scorn, but the words didn’t match her scent, which was warm and playful.

  “True. We’ve been on the food line instead. Gotta keep the troops fed. Man alive, are there a lot of extra people in town. We’re cooking our fingers to the bone. We just came over here for a quick soda on our break, but this is even better.”

  “With practice comes skill, Scott.” Her brother, like Rachel, sounded stern, but there was happy in his scent. She liked the smell of happy—bright and citrusy, with oranges and lemons and something musky.

  Rachel nodded and then motioned at Bojan with her chin. “Bojan, Anica was telling us about the black cherry torte you made her for her sixteenth birthday and how good your pies are. What made you start baking?”

  Bojan finished another mouthful of the green pistachio ice cream before answering. “It start with raspberries. We have a large farm, very big, and we would lose many berries that were overripe. Once they’re picked, we must sell them very quickly. If we cannot, they spoil.”

  Anica nodded. “But they do not spoil so quickly if we cook them into syrup. Mama would cook the juice down to syrup for days. You started helping her when you got so sick, yes?”

  He nodded. “Not sick, but it was
a bad cough. I was ten or twelve, I think. Before Anica went missing. It would not go away. The doctor said I was not a sort of sick that there was medicine for. But I could not work in the fields, or go to school, because they would send me home, afraid I would make others cough. So I helped Mama stir the juice. It would turn bitter if we didn’t stir it often. The cough was not so bad in the kitchen. Mama would be so tired stirring that I would help cook the meal at night. Papa and Samit would be very hungry, so I had to make a lot of food. Making the food made me happy. At first, it was not very good. But I got better. Mama helped me learn how to spice and use different pans.”

  Anica felt her eyes roll and she smiled. “He lies. He was always good cook. Even at first. It was better than Mama’s, and she knew it.”

  “So what was the cough?” Scott asked. “I haven’t seen you cough here, even with the smoke.”

  Anica laughed, nearly spitting chocolate syrup on Dalvin across the table. She covered her mouth with a tiny paper napkin and cleaned her lips. “Sheep.”

  Bojan’s face flushed pink and smelled of embarrassment, but he nodded. “Sheep. It was allergy. We had sheep at house, but there were no windows in kitchen. There were sheep in pasture near school. Always there were sheep. I thought sneezing was for allergy, not coughing.”

  Dalvin raised his brows. “No wool sweaters for Bojan for Christmas, I guess.”

  “No,” Anica responded. “Not wool. Actual sheep. Bojan would help shear and would cough so bad it scared the animals. Papa would send him inside. But when the wool was brought in to wash—” She raised her hands. “—nothing.”

  “Is true,” Bojan said, dabbing at his mouth with a patterned cloth from his pocket. He hated paper napkins. He always carried at least two cloths—one cotton and the other silky. “The doctor could not explain. He was sure it was the fleece, but it was something else. We still do not know what. We sold sheep at house, and fifth-year school was not near sheep. I am happy there are not so many sheep here too.”

  The door opened again, accompanied by the bright bell ring, and the breeze carried something inside that the bear inside her couldn’t ignore. She lifted her nose, turning so sharply to trace the source that she nearly hit her nose on Scott’s elbow. Blood.

  An image appeared in her mind with the scent. A kitchen she didn’t recognize, spattered with red. She could see a hand with nails painted nearly the same color as the liquid that dripped onto the floor. A wide gash, ragged and raw, had opened the wrist and traveled upward out of her line of sight.

  Bojan noticed the scent at nearly the same moment. She could see him as a faint overlay of the kitchen. His happy scent went metallic and serious. “Someone is hurt.”

  But Anica knew it was more than that. “No. Someone is dead.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Stepping carefully on the tiled floor to a place where he could squat down and survey the murder scene, Tristan tried to think like an investigator. It wasn’t what he was trained for, but the scent he was chasing definitely came in this direction. He flicked his tongue out repeatedly, trying to capture the person’s smell again, but the coppery blood overpowered the trail.

  He pulled a cell phone from his pocket, purchased at the airport when he realized his international phone wouldn’t work in this area. He dialed a number he knew by heart and waited as it rang. “Hey, it’s me. I need a favor. How soon can you get to Washington?”

  The response in an amused baritone nearly made him drop the phone. “Already on the way. I’m about an hour away from town. It was a half hour until I got detoured around a wildfire.”

  “What?! Why?” A part of him was insulted; while another part, relieved.

  “I started thinking when you left here—which is always a mistake. You’re like another friend of mine: a hunter, not a cop. You tend to cause the aftermath, not try to figure it out.” One thing about Bobby … he was a realist, and didn’t judge. “And, you’re a little out of practice, even as a hunter. If he-who-can’t-be-named really is there, like Ahmad claims, you’ll need help. Even Ahmad did, if you recall.”

  “So what should I do now? I have a dead body in front of me, and a town full of helpful humans who are fighting the fires.”

  A pause. “Crap. Forgot about the firefighters. There’s probably military roaming around too. Is the dead person Sazi?”

  He flicked his tongue in the direction of the woman again. She was in the late twenties, maybe early thirties, and—“Yep. A she-wolf. Mauled by claws. There’s too much blood for me to chase down what sort of claws. Your tongue will know better.”

  “Okay, first, let me rule out the obvious: Did you kill her?”

  It was barely worth a response, but he’d asked for Bobby’s help. “No. I’ve never seen her before. I just got here and she’s probably an hour dead.”

  “Then secure the scene. Don’t touch anything, and keep anyone else out until I get there. The blood scent will start to draw a crowd. Are there any townspeople you can trust?”

  A strange feeling came over him, sort of a fuzziness that made it hard to think, or respond.

  “Ris?”

  He shook it off after a moment. “Yeah, sorry. Amber is here, and the town’s Alpha seems the law-abiding sort from the lecture he gave me about keeping away from his people. That’s where I was an hour ago.”

  The blurry edge in his mind persisted but didn’t get any worse as Bobby chuckled into his ear. “Well, can’t beat that for an alibi. Get out of the house now, before you accidentally touch something.”

  Tristan stood and retraced his steps backward out the small living room to the front door. He stared at the door for a moment and swore. “Of course, now my fingerprints are on the doorknob. Should I wipe them off?”

  “Don’t bother. I doubt your prints are in the system. And anyone with a decent nose will know you were inside. Did you touch the body? Even a little?”

  “You know I did. I was following a trail, trying to get a scent.”

  “Let it go. Just secure the scene and keep everyone out until I get there.” The call went dead, leaving Tristan with nothing to do but wait by the small house in the woods.

  Breaking of branches in the distance said Bobby was right about the scent of blood bringing the crowds. The first out of the brush was a small bear, nose in the air following the scent. A second, larger bear was right behind, followed by the pretty black girl and her boyfriend, Dalvin. He licked his lips, catching the scent of sunshine and meadow from the little bear who was apparently Anica’s animal form.

  Dalvin, barely out of breath from what Tristan presumed was a run from town, stepped past the others toward him and pointed at the door. “Davies, right? I’m going to have to ask you to step aside. I have reason to believe someone is injured inside that house.”

  “Long past injured, I fear,” Tristan said with a shrug. “But I can’t step aside, I’m afraid.”

  He took a step closer. “I’ll ask again. I’m Wolven. Step aside before I make you.”

  Tristan sat down on the step, centered between the wooden pillars that held up the porch, and planted his feet solidly two steps down. He couldn’t help but chuckle. “I can assure you that won’t happen. I was asked to secure the scene. Nobody gets past me until the person who gave the instruction arrives.” He pushed magic out in a bubble, blocking the door. He pressed it outward until it touched Dalvin’s rising power. He kept it there, just letting it hover, from earth to sky, letting Dalvin taste the immensity of what he could bring to bear but hadn’t.

  To his credit, Dalvin didn’t falter in the face of impossible odds. The man locked eyes with him, arms crossed across his chest, and raised his own power up a few notches. Nothing aggressive, just a reminder that he was chosen for the law enforcement branch for good reason.

  But the others couldn’t know what was happening, unspoken. They were lesser Sazi, and only felt the sting of magic that swept across their skin like biting ants … much like Tristan himself had felt in the presence of Lagash,
or his master, Sargon. But that had been long ago, and Tristan was very young. Over the decades, then centuries, his own power had grown, until he was a likely match of Lagash, if not Sargon himself.

  “Please, do not fight!” Anica stepped forward, slicing like a knife through both of their power, and planted her tiny bear body between them. “We need no more death today. Use your magic to help this poor woman find peace instead.”

  Dalvin, his scent as surprised as Tristan felt at Anica’s intervention, stepped forward and touched her ear. “Anica, don’t worry. We’re not going to fight. I’m sure Mr. Davies is going to be reasonable about this and let me investigate whatever happened inside the house.” He paused and then looked at the little bear. “Wait. How do you know a woman who died is inside?”

  The larger male bear shook his massive head and let out a noise that could only be derision. “Do owls have no nose at all? Even I can smell it is a woman, and a wolf, who died. Anica can probably name her brand of lip paint.”

  If a bear could blush, Anica was. She lowered her head shyly and scuffed the dirt with one paw. The wide claws seemed almost delicate, the way she moved them in a circle. “Bojan, please. I do not smell that well. But I do know she has not been dead long. We should be looking for who in town smells of blood before they can wash it off.”

  “Are you freaking kidding me?” Dalvin slapped his forehead with his palm. “Yes. Yes, we should be doing that.”