ONE
Jayden...
It had been raining in Bogotá for six days straight.
Jayden stood at the mouth of an alley off Carrera Séptima with his collar turned up and rain dripping off his chin, staring down at a dead man.
He had seen worse.
He had seen a woman pulled from the river with half her face missing. He had seen a boy in a bathtub who had been dead for three weeks. He had learned to breathe through his mouth and keep his face blank, because the first rule of being a good detective was never letting the dead see you flinch.
But this one bothered him.
The man lay on his back beside a row of overflowing bins, arms spread wide as if he had simply decided to lie down and look at the sky. Mid-thirties. Expensive shoes. A gold watch that had somehow survived the thieves who prowled this street.
Not a mark on him.
“Overdose” said a bored voice behind him.
Jayden didn’t turn around. “You always say that”
“I’m always right” Detective Hale said, coming up beside him with two paper cups. He pressed one into Jayden’s hand. “Tinto. Black. Don’t say I never take care of you”
Jayden took it, mostly for the warmth.
Hale was thirty-eight, broad through the shoulders, with a tired, friendly face and a dark moustache he’d been meaning to shave for years. He had been Jayden’s partner for eighteen months. He had stood by him at his first autopsy and covered for him when he’d missed a shift after a bad night.
He was the closest thing Jayden had to a friend in this city.
“Junkie?” Hale asked.
“With a gold watch?”
“Rich junkie” Hale shrugged. “They’re the worst. They get careless”
Jayden crouched beside the body.
The forensics tech, a thin young woman named Ruiz, was packing up her kit nearby. She gave him a look that said don’t touch anything, and he gave her one that said I’m not.
He leaned close and studied the dead man’s face.
The lips were slightly parted. Something glittered between them.
Silver.
A faint, powdery smear on the tongue, almost invisible under the glow of the streetlamp.
Jayden’s wolf lifted its head.
He went still.
It had been a long time since his wolf had stirred like that, a restless, prickling alertness that crept up the back of his neck.
He had learned to keep that part of himself quiet. It was the first lesson his mother had ever taught him.
You are going to live in the human world, Em had said, kneeling in front of him in a cheap motel room in a country he’d forgotten the name of. He had been seven. Which means no one can ever know what you are. Not teachers. Not friends. Not the people you love. Do you understand?
He hadn’t, then.
He did now.
“Ruiz” he said, without looking up. “Can I see behind his ear?”
“Detective, we’ve already bagged...”
“Just a look”
She sighed, then tilted the dead man’s head to the side with a gloved hand.
Jayden stopped breathing.
Behind the left ear, so small it was almost hidden beneath the hairline, a mark had been cut into the skin. Thin and precise, as if made with a surgical blade.
A crescent moon.
And beneath it, a single curved fang.
The world went quiet.
Rain drummed on the bins. A car horn sounded two streets away. Somewhere above them a window slammed.
Jayden heard none of it.
He knew that mark.
He had known it since he was seven years old. His mother had drawn it for him once on a napkin in a diner at three in the morning, her hand shaking so badly the pen had torn the paper.
If you ever see this, she had said, you run. You find your brothers and sisters and you run. And you never look back
“Jayden?”
Hale was watching him with a small frown.
“You okay?”
“Fine” Jayden said. His voice sounded far away. “It’s nothing. A scratch”
“Looks deliberate to me”
“It’s probably part of the drug thing. Some gang symbol”
“Maybe” Hale said slowly. “I’ll have it photographed. Mark it for the file”
Ruiz was already snapping pictures.
Jayden stood up.
His knees felt strange. His hands were steady, but under the skin something hummed, wild and uneasy, like a dog sensing a storm.
He forced himself to look at the body once more.
The man’s teeth were slightly parted.
Too many of them.
A row of small, sharp canines tucked behind the normal ones, pale and delicate as a shark’s.
Peltgra.
His mother had taught him that word too, in the same low, frightened voice.
He took a long swallow of cold tinto and let the bitterness burn his tongue.
It had been twenty-five years.
Twenty-five years since the night the pack died. Em had never told them everything, only enough to keep them alive. But she had made one thing very clear.
The man who had done it was still out there.
And the mark had come back.
“Hey” Hale said, nudging him. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost”
Jayden stared down at the dead man’s face.
“Maybe I have” he said quietly.
