Patricia Briggs: Bone Crossed

He flashed his pearly whites at me. "Good for you. Do you think Bright Future did this?"

If our minds kept working this much in sync, I'd pity poor Tony.

"Sort of. I think this is Tim's cousin's work," I told him. "She's a member of Bright Future, but she didn't do this under their banner. Everything was directed at me—not the fae."

"You want to press charges?"

I sighed. "I'll call my insurance company. I'm afraid they might force me to press charges in order to be reimbursed. I can't afford to hire someone to repaint it unless I use my insurance, and I can't take the time off work to repaint it myself." I still had other things to pay for—the damage a fae who wanted to eat me had done to Adam's house and car, for instance. And Zee had told me he was collecting the rest of what I owed him on the business. Fae cannot lie, and we hadn't had time to work that out.

"How about Gabriel's family," Tony suggested. "There are enough of them, and they could work after school. It would be cheaper than hiring professionals and… I think they need the money."

Gabriel Sandoval was my man Friday, a high school student who came in weekends and late afternoons to do paperwork, answer phones, and do whatever else needed doing.

I had a sudden vision of the shop being overrun with little Sandovals hanging from ladders and ropes. I'd let them loose in the office for cleaning, and it was almost hard to recognize the place—for a bunch of kids they were amazingly industrious. "That's a good idea. I'll have Gabriel call his mom as soon as he gets here."

"Here," said Zee. He turned on the little security monitor and flipped a switch. The system that Adam had installed was slick and expensive. It ran on motion sensors, so we only had to watch it when there was something moving. Something first moved at 10:15; we watched a half-grown rabbit bop unhurriedly across the pavement out of sight. At midnight someone appeared at the door of the garage. It wasn't two people with spray paint, so I was pretty sure it was whoever painted a pair of crossed bones on my door.

His image was oddly shadowed, unrecognizable. The miscreant kept his face out of camera range—impressive since there was a camera placed just in front of the door to catch the face of anyone breaking in.

The only thing the camera got a clear shot of was the gloves he wore—the old-fashioned kind: white with little buttons on the wrist. There were odd glitches in the pictures, jumps where the camera turned off because there was no movement for it to follow. By the timers, it took him forty-five minutes to paint the bones on my door—of which the cameras caught about ten minutes. Part of the missing time covered how the painter got there and how he left.

I didn't think he knew the cameras were there, and he still avoided them. Some supernatural creatures just don't film well: by tradition, vampires are among them. The height was right for Wulfe, who would be my first choice in any vampire magicking. Since Wulfe was the vampire who knew for certain that I'd killed Andre, he was also my top suspect for the informer who had told Marsilia about my crimes.

The camera caught movement again.

"Stop it," Tony said.

Two figures, still indistinct, froze on the edge of the lights of my parking lot, and the little numbers on the lower right of the screen read 2:08 A.M. Time had jumped almost a half hour from when the bone painter had last been there.

"What was that all about?" he asked. "The person at your door?"

"I don't know," I told him. I almost said that his guess was as good as mine, but it wasn't. "Maybe someone was trying to break in, but didn't make it." Impossible to tell what he'd been doing from the camera shot. "It doesn't matter, though, because he obviously wasn't the one who graffitied all over."

Tony stared at me. Cops were almost as good as werewolves at sensing lies. He turned abruptly and opened the door to examine it. Like Zee, he traced the crossed bones with a light finger.

"Who have you been ticking off besides Bright Future? This looks almost like something the old Mob might do—classy, but designed to frighten the hell out of whoever received it."

I sighed, shrugged. "No one wanted me to get Zee out of the murder rap. But it's not the kind of thing a fae would do—too visible. And a werewolf who was ticked off that badly would just attack. I've got some people who'll look into it for me better than the police can."

Frowning, Tony made an irritated noise. "Is this another one of your 'It's too dangerous for you mere human cops? "

I rubbed my arms, but I wasn't cold, just chilled. I was under no illusions. Marsilia could have just killed me, but she was playing. But no matter how playful the cat is, the mouse is just as dead in the end. And the end would be whenever she decided. The only question was how many people—how many of my friends—she decided to take down with me.

Maybe I was panicking prematurely. Maybe she would settle for a punishment. Stefan was hers, there was no reason for the gut-deep feeling that he wouldn't be the last to suffer for my sins. I didn't know Marsilia well enough to make that kind of prediction.

"Mercy?"

"I don't know what the crossed bones mean." Other than bad news. "Zee tells me it is magical but probably not fae magic." Zee was out, anyone who cared to would know that he was fae, which was the reason that the garage was mine now, instead of his. There was a lot of prejudice against the fae. "He has a few contacts who'll take a look at it for me. I know a few other people I can ask, too." Adam had a witch on the pack's payroll for cleanup. She was good, but it would cost me a lot to hire her if Uncle Mike and Stefan didn't know what it was. This was shaping up into a real macaroni-and-cheese month.

"However, none of them will come within a hundred miles of a police investigation. Do you have anyone on the KPD who is an expert in magic?"

Tony held my gaze for a minute before giving up with a sigh. "Hell no, Mercy. You should have seen the brass's faces when they watched that video—" He stopped and gave me a guilty look. It was a video of me killing Tim… and all the stuff before that. He shrugged nervously and looked away. "There are a few who know something about fae or werewolves, but… if they know anything more, they keep it quiet for fear of losing their jobs."

He sighed and came back into the shop. "Go ahead," he told Zee. "Let's watch Tim's cousin paint the shop."

Once the two shadowy people moved fully onto the parking lot, Courtney was unmistakable. Instead of watching the whole process, Zee fast-forwarded it until the pair walked off with bags of empty spray-paint cans almost two hours later. He stopped the images when Courtney was close to the camera and impossible to mistake, her pretty, rounded face hard and angry. Zee flipped back and forth a little until we got a clear view of her companion's face, too.

The security system hadn't been in place long, but Zee loved gadgets. He must have spent some time playing with this one.

"It's Courtney all right… I don't remember her last name," I told Tony. "I don't recognize the man at all.

If it were Bright Future, there'd have been more people."

"It's personal," Tony agreed grimly. "You are going to want to give me those disks and file charges so we can give her some time to cool off. She's not going to stop harassing you anytime soon unless someone heads her off at the pass. It's safer for everyone if it's the police and not the werewolves or the fae."

Zee ejected the disk and handed it to Tony.

Tony frowned at it a moment. "I'm not worried about the kids, Mercy. But there's something about those bones and that guy that is sending my old radar into fits. If that's not a death threat, I'll be a monkey's uncle. You stick close to that werewolf boyfriend of yours for a while."