Ritual of the Broken (Haunted Hearts)

Chapter 4

Chapter

Four

A drian’s eyes snapped open to the jarring ring of his phone. His body tensed, still in the throes of sleep. He sat up in the bed. He was naked, and there was a man’s naked back in bed next to him.

Scrubbing his face with his hand, he tried to pinpoint where the ringing was coming from. Somewhere in the vicinity of the bedroom door, where his jeans were hastily tugged and pulled down as he and…

He studied the man sleeping next to him.

Todd. That was his name, right?

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and used the amber-orange light filtering in through the curtains from the street to find where his pants were. He fumbled for the front pocket until he pulled out his phone and glanced at the lock screen.

Dispatch.

He clicked the answer button. “Keller here,” he said .

The guy in bed sat up. “What is it?” he muttered. “What’s happening?”

Adrian turned his back to him and listened.

“Detective Keller, we need you to come in.” A woman’s voice he didn’t recognize. Chicago was a big department. It wasn’t out of the ordinary.

“Now? I got off shift at seven.”

“You’re the detective on call,” came the response.

“I’m not. McCarty’s on call.”

“Your name is on my list. Special order.”

Adrian sighed. Special order. He was just hoping for one night. “What is it?”

“You’re a homicide detective,” she said. “What do you think it is?”

“I thought maybe just once you’d give me a nice kitten stuck in a tree.”

“That’s the fire department,” she said. There was clicking over the phone. “I’m texting the details now to your phone.”

“Thanks.”

“Have a better one,” she said and hung up.

A bedside light turned on, and Adrian squinted.

“What’s going on?” Todd leaned heavily on one arm. At least he wasn’t half bad-looking. A little older, perhaps just touching forty, and nice abs that Adrian could see as the sheet fell away when the guy brushed a hand through his hair.

He’d been a quick choice in the bar Adrian went to after his shift for a drink, a gay bar in Boystown, even though they called it North Halsted now. A whiskey later, and Todd gave him a white-teeth smile followed by a hello. These days, that was about all it took. Most guys used the apps, but Adrian never liked them much. It was a lot of texting back and forth with too many flaky dudes, so he liked to meet guys the old-fashioned way. Besides, he was able to tell more about a man by the way he smelled than anything.

One of the perks of being a werewolf.

And this guy, Todd or whatever, smelled like simple sex when he saw him at the bar. No strings. Pump and dump and go to sleep before something like this happened.

“Sorry, Todd. I gotta go to work,” Adrian said. He reached down and grabbed his boxer briefs from where they landed next to a bedroom dresser and pulled them on, followed by his pants. At least the place was furnished nicely, minimalist with a decorator’s touch. Todd probably worked in finance.

“It’s Rand,” the guy said.

Adrian paused to give the guy a look. “Oh. Sorry.”

Rand shrugged. “What do you do that you’re getting calls at...” he picked up his phone from the nightstand, “1:12 in the morning? You a doctor or something?”

“Detective,” Adrian said as he buttoned his shirt.

Rand licked his bottom lip as he gave Adrian another assessing look. “Okay, that’s kind of hot. I figured I was bringing some sort of general contractor home tonight. What kind of detective? ”

“Homicide.” Adrian checked for his wallet. It was there. “General contractor? Really?”

Todd, er, Rand, gave another shrug. “You got those ropy arms and tight stomach. It fit the narrative.” He half-grinned. “And you growl during sex.”

Adrian’s brow pushed down. “Do general contractors growl during sex?”

“They’re primal types.”

Primal. He had to admit it fit, given what he was. But did he really growl during sex? “Anyway, it was fun,” Adrian said as he headed toward the door.

“Yeah. You ever feel the urge again, you know where I live. And now, at least, since you’re a cop, you’re probably not a creeper.”

“I’ll keep you in mind,” Adrian said with a wink.

“Lock the door on your way out,” Rand called from the bedroom.

No strings. Just how Adrian liked it. Once he found his shoes in the living room, he slipped out the door. And he locked it. He didn’t want Rand to fall victim to some intruder and wind up dead. Murder was too much paperwork.

The address given took Adrian to a house in Lincoln Park, but the cut of red and blue lights against the backdrop of brownstones and greystones told him the crime scene was in the alleyway behind the house. He parked and pulled his gun from the biometric lockbox in his car’s front console. As he made his way between the houses toward the back alleyway, he slid his badge over his head.

Fluttering crime scene tape made a border with uniformed officers standing guard to keep the small group of onlookers that had already gathered from contaminating anything. Chicago was no stranger to murder scenes, but in the upscale Lincoln Park neighborhood, death was stared at with a bit of shock.

Adrian moved past the people and flashed his badge to the uniform who lifted up the yellow tape to let him underneath. Walking the length of the alleyway toward where all the detectives gathered, he took in a breath, lifting his nose to pick up any scents. As a werewolf, his nose was far more sensitive. He could pick out a lot of things simply by smell that a lot of officers would otherwise miss.

Two of the guys at the edge of the scene looked up as he approached, Martindale and Howard. He was still about thirty yards away, but he could already tell from their expressions that they weren’t excited to see him.

“What the hell they call you down here for?” Martindale said with his chin raised like it was a challenge.

He held out his hands with a shrug. “I just go where they tell me,” Adrian said.

“You’re day crew,” Howard said. “We got this.”

Adrian turned on his heel to give them another shrug. “All I know is I got pulled out of a warm bed to come here.”

“Some of us need a bone, you know,” Howard said .

He didn’t tell them that’s exactly what he got pulled away from. Adrian kept walking as both Howard and Martindale turned and muttered.

“This fucking guy. I’m due for a promotion, and this guy gets all the fucking glory.” It was Howard talking. They weren’t being loud, but one of the curses of being a werewolf was enhanced hearing. It meant he could hear when people talked about him. And the general consensus was that Adrian wasn’t well-liked. Not because he was bad at his job. But because his clearance rate far exceeded anyone else in his district’s homicide division.

It was getting to the point that other detectives weren’t really hiding their jealousy anymore. He didn’t doubt they’d have his back if it came between him and fighting bad guys, but in the office, it meant he ate a lot of lunches alone. And it was why he went to random bars in the city to hook up with guys instead of slamming drinks with his fellow detectives at the local badge hangout near the district headquarters.

He did feel a little sorry for them. They had no idea what they were up against, and they just couldn’t compete with a werewolf. He’d been born a werewolf and raised in a family of werewolves before he left them behind in Elizabethtown, deep in southern Illinois on the border with Kentucky. Like most werewolves, the whole howling pack of them were a bunch of traditionalists. He never had a problem with the werewolf part. He could keep up with the best of his brothers and cousins, and any challenges thrown his way were rarely ones he had to show his throat in. The problem he had with them—or, well, the problem they had with him—was the same for a lot of kids growing up in deeply conservative parts of the country. He was gay.

A group of his cousins sniffed him out and discovered he’d been with one of the human guys in town. They turned his hometown life into a daily nightmare, and there were only so many scuffles he could get in before it became too much. He got out and joined the Army as soon as he graduated high school. And when he got out of the Army, he had an invitation waiting for him to join the Chicago PD. He never asked how he ended up on a CPD recruitment list, but he’d do anything to keep from having to go back to his old hometown.

But now, the whispers of his fellow homicide detectives sounded a lot like he was back in Elizabethtown. At least they didn’t give a shit that he liked dudes.

He shook his head and went about the real reason he was there, which was to figure out who killed the man lying dead in the middle of the dirty pavement in this alleyway. Sometimes mortals were too sensitive.

He could smell blood, but not too strong. It mixed with the stink of urine, rotting food in people’s garbage bins, and even the trails of city vermin. There was the pungent odor of rats that hid in the sewers and the musky raccoons that made their way into these alleys to pick through the trash. His nostrils flared as he moved down closer to the victim, trying to sort through each of the scents. There were things his nose could pick up from blood that even the medical examiner couldn’t, so he bent down closer like he was looking at the wounds on the body.

Usually there was a sense of a victim’s diet. He could pick up on what they ate a few hours before, sometimes just from the smell of it on their skin, but sometimes even mixed into their blood. Also, occasionally he could pick up on any disease in a victim. Not enough to tell him what was wrong, just that something was off.

And, of course, he could always smell fear on a murder victim. Usually it came to him as an acrid bite, which he figured was something like cortisol or adrenaline if he were a type to know what all that stuff really was. He just knew that when somebody felt that rush of fear from being attacked and murdered, the chemical changes caused by fear lingered in their smell.

But Adrian inhaled again. He tried to pick out that, by now, familiar scent.

What he really caught in the aroma caused his brow to furrow and for him to lean closer. There was something off.

First, the man’s blood had no smell. There were other scents, of course. Sweat heavy in the man’s clothes like he’d been running, the strong urine odor that was probably his, a slight tinge of old beer and whiskey in his clothes that told Adrian he’d probably come from a bar, though he didn’t drink or it would reek in the man’s piss. And there was the initial hit of decomposition typical of every body. He could guess that the man’s death only happened an hour ago, two at most .

And beneath all of that, just barely within reach of even his sense of smell, was an odor he’d never picked up at a crime scene before—a citrus-woodsy odor.

“The guy’s name was Zachary O’Brien.”

Adrian turned to find Lt. Vega standing behind him, holding what appeared to be a man’s wallet. He stood up to approach her. Lt. Vega was a trim, fit woman in her mid-thirties with a calm demeanor that inspired confidence. She was somebody in the homicide division Adrian liked. At least she treated him with respect.

She handed the wallet to him, and Adrian opened it to see Zachary O’Brien’s face on the ID, looking much better than the man lying on the ground.

“I guess I have you to thank for getting called in on this?” He snapped the wallet closed.

She shrugged, her half-grin showing her guilt more than the scent coming off her did. “We need another win. Mayor’s got a visit from some big brass in Washington in two weeks, and he plans to walk them through our division to discuss how we closed so many homicides last year. They want to figure out what we’re doing to see if they can copy it other places.”

They can. Hire a werewolf. “Good investigative skills and a dash of luck,” Adrian said with a shrug.

“Make some of that luck rub off on the rest of the district, and I won’t have to call you in in the middle of the night,” she said.

Adrian didn’t have anything to say to that other than to feel embarrassed, so he turned back to the body. “Any idea of a cause of death yet?” Adrian asked her.

She shook her head. “We’re still waiting on the medical examiner and the evidence techs to get here.” She eyed him and put her hands on her hips. “But I was hoping you might have some ideas. What’s the deal? You usually have something for me by now.” She gave him a sideways smile, and he smiled back.

It was true, though. But that was typically due to his werewolf nose. From all he could tell just by looking at the guy, he dropped dead in the middle of this alley. “Drugs, maybe?” Adrian didn’t believe that because an overdose left a distinct odor on a dead body. “Or he could’ve hit his head when he fell and broke something.” Adrian wasn’t sure about that one either. Broken bones caused blood to smell different, too, like the pain caused adrenaline, stress hormones, and lactic acid to flood into the bloodstream. The lactic acid was impossible to miss. A faintly sour odor in the way of kimchi. There was no hint of that in Zachary O’Brien’s scent profile. Adrian looked back at the lieutenant. “We sure this is even a homicide?”

“Witnesses heard screaming,” she said. “That’s how we got wind of it. Neighbors called 9-1-1. One of them said they saw him running like he was being chased.”

“Maybe he had some kind of psychotic break.” Adrian pressed his lips together. Psychosis didn’t cause any odd smells other than confusion, like a bunch of emotions got mixed together at once. But he didn’t like that theory either. There would still be some kind of smell—and not that weird woodsy-citrus odor. Was that maybe a hand lotion or bad cologne? “I’ll have to wait until the ME says we can take a closer look at the body.”

“He also had this.” The lieutenant handed Adrian what appeared to be a cocktail napkin with a phone number scribbled onto it, along with the name of a bar, the Second City Saloon.

Adrian read the napkin. “We figure out who Yolanda is yet?”

“We can send some guys over to talk to her,” Vega said. But she gave him a look he’d been expecting.

“I’ll do it. She may be the last person to see Mr. O’Brien alive.”

The expression on Lt. Vega’s face turned into a smile. “Case is yours then,” she said. “You got lead on this.”

Adrian glanced over toward Howard and Martindale. “What about them? They my backup?”

“I’ll handle them.” She turned. “Bring me another win, Keller.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

“Keep me updated,” Vega said. “You get me closure rates, but you’re not always the best at writing up reports.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m on it.” He hated writing reports.

She backed away. “Reports, Keller. Send me something after you talk to this Yolanda person.”

He held up his phone. “I’ll set myself a reminder.”

“See that you do.” Then she turned and headed toward Howard and Martindale .

He moved through the crime scene, taking in all the details as he searched for clues. There were subtle signs of a struggle—a trash can knocked over, debris spilled, and … Adrian moved closer to the brick wall. A smear of blood.

He leaned in and took a whiff. Definitely blood. This time, the fragrance came to him differently. He could pick out those things in the blood that weren’t present from the body. It was just a trace, but there was a sense of the person behind the blood, a personal scent that carried a stronger version than what he was able to pick up in the sweat. This was Zachary O’Brien’s blood. It only gave rise to more questions.

Back at the body, Adrian bent down to look at the dead man’s hands. The fingernails were chipped and frayed, broken and abraded. One of his hands even had a fingernail missing. From the looks of it, he clawed at the wall.

Adrian stood with his hands on his hips. He turned one way in the alley, then the other. Residential side streets were only a few hundred feet from the alley in either direction. Why would he try to climb the wall?

It called into question this victim’s mental state. At this point, he leaned again toward drugs or alcohol, or maybe a history of mental illness.

Another scent touched Adrian’s nose then, like a reminder of cold. It wasn’t unusual to smell cold in Chicago, but this was different. It was an otherworldly kind of scent, and that’s what made it stand out to him.

He turned and caught a shimmer in the air. He couldn’t make it out, and he blinked and squinted his eyes. When he looked again, the distortion was gone. He scanned the area, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was witnessing something out of the ordinary, almost like the afterimage of a bright light. Maybe it was nothing.

Shrugging it off, he turned and started in the direction of the brick wall where he found the blood, but the cold passed over him again. He stopped.

This time when he turned, he saw a woman. She stood close to him, inside the perimeter of the crime scene tape. Her dark hair was pulled back into a tight bun, and she wore some strange sort of necklace—a silver medallion of sorts with symbols that caused a low growl to come from his throat. It reminded him of something a mage would wear.

He started to tell her to get out of his crime scene, but her clothing threw him off, a dress from a different era. Was he seeing a ghost?

Her hands lifted as he watched, and she stared at him. When their eyes met, the chill Adrian felt deepened. This was definitely something otherworldly. It was as if seeing into the milky gaze of death. Her mouth worked as if she tried to speak, but no sound came from her.

Reluctant at first, he took a step in her direction. As he drew closer, he was able to make out more of her. What he thought of as pretty at first resolved into something more gaunt and sunken, her eyes losing any shine.

As he neared her, she peered over her shoulder toward the perimeter of the crime scene and the crowd of onlookers. He followed where she looked .

Beyond where she stood, among the group of onlookers was a brown-haired man wearing a blue shirt. Their eyes met, and Adrian thought for a moment that maybe this man had seen the ghost too. He felt a little jolt, a small rush of something. Excitement? The man wasn’t bad-looking.

But another scent touched his nose, one that made him ball his hands into fists. Adrian had been forced to recognize the odor of magic, a burnt ozone that made him huff. It came from the man’s direction.

Was the ghost his doing? When Adrian looked for her again, she was gone. Instead, he turned his attention to the man again.

Moving toward him, Adrian quickened his step. But the man saw him and turned to push through the gathered people. Adrian flagged down a uniform and pointed toward the guy.

“Get him,” he yelled across the scene.

The uniform, clearly a rookie, turned and looked over the crowd then back to Adrian with a frustrating shrug.

Adrian wanted to spring forward and use his real strength to catch up to the guy. But there were too many eyes, too many people with phone cameras pointed in his direction. Normal guys didn’t close fifty yards of distance in a matter of seconds. He wasn’t about to call that kind of attention to himself. Regular mortals didn’t react well to knowledge of the supernatural in their presence.

Adrian reached the crime scene tape. Onlookers moved aside to give him room when he slipped under, and he jogged in the direction he’d seen the guy go around a corner of a garage.

Here, the scent of magic was much stronger, bitter and sulfuric. Unmistakable.

But there was no sign of the guy.

He made his way back toward the crime scene and underneath the tape. A magic user.

A freaking mage. Of all the things to make his day worse… Adrian didn’t trust mages.

If there were mages involved, the possibility of this being murder was higher.

Much higher.