Tara took Andrew’s truck to get Sigyn packed and off campus, and Andrew and I waited on the edge of campus for Samuel to arrive. It was a long wait, and we sat on a bench side by side in silence while I occasionally got check-ins with Samuel. I went to smoke a cigarette and found I’d fucking forgotten my dad’s jacket at Barbie’s house, while Andrew gave me a side-eye as I asked him if he smoked.
When Samuel did eventually arrive he pulled up in an old muscle car with a phoenix painted on the hood, and I sat in the passenger seat while Andrew crawled in the back. The interior smelling vaguely of blood, mud, and body odor, which probably shouldn’t have surprised me. Once settled, the man pulled out and I sat back in my seat as I asked, “they dismantle the car yet?”
“Fully, had an investigator look over it as well as the bullets that’d melted in you,” Samuel said, rolling down his window as he let his arm hang out in the wind, helping the smell a good bit, “bullets in you were all silver, but we knew that, probably about .41 magnum if we had to guess. Hard to tell with the breakage and melting.”
“Not surprising, pretty common among well-prepared hunters,” I said, looking back to Andrew as I explained, “holds six bullets, so you can’t exactly unload a full magazine, but they’re big bullets and revolvers handle silver and iron better than a pistol. My guess is he either alternated between hollow point and round nosed or all round nosed.”
“Looked like all round nosed, none of them got stuck in the car door,” Samuel admitted, furrowing his brow before he added on, “looks like it did alternate though on composition. They were all silver, but some had iron mixed in for some reason.”
“Fey, it’s a European hunter tradition from the sixties to add iron tips to every other bullet just in case,” I said, frowning as I recognized the technique, “some hunters replicate it if they learn about it, popular among the older crowds. Little more penetration than the straight silver ones and a bit more inaccurate, but it provides more coverage of weakness. Was there any sign of rune covered steel jackets.”
“Not that I fucking saw,” Samuel snorted, pausing a moment before he looked at me in confusion, “is that a fucking thing hunters do?”
“I’ve seen it three times,” I said, shrugging as I rolled my own window down, “more common with hunters on the other side of the Mississippi though, something gunsmiths learned and passed down. Usually when you see it out here though it means someone wants someone fucking dead and was willing to pay a few thousand for the bullets. If there was something like that, it’d make it more likely to be an extremely targeted hit.”
“No offense, but I don’t think you’re that important,” Samuel said, frowning over toward me as he finally asked, “please don’t tap your leg like that you’re shaking the car.”
I hadn’t even realized I had been, and I nodded as I tried to will my entire body to stop. Finally breaking down with a low sigh, I asked him, “do you have anything to smoke? I’ve spent all day around half-ones, and skipped lunch, I could really do something to distract me.”
“Danny keeps some in the glovebox,” the man said, and I nodded as I opened it to reveal a spare box of cigarettes I took. I was trying to work out who Danny was, figuring she must have been another one of the Covenant members, when the man reached down and pressed something on his console. “Give the lighter a few seconds to heat up.”
Andrew finally spoke up from the back, taking this as his opportunity to speak as he told me, “you shouldn’t be smoking, it’s bad for you.”
“Under advisement,” I answered, holding one of the cigarettes between my lips as I offered Samuel the box. He gestured it away, and I tossed the rest back in the glove box even as the cigarette lighter popped back up, and I lit myself with the unfamiliar tool, almost dropping it trying to get the angle right at Samuel’s nerves’ expense. Andrew leaned forward a bit more to get the fresh air from the open driver window, and I rolled my eyes as I told him, “not like werewolves can get cancer. Besides, it helps keeps me from wanting to take fucking bites out of everyone, so smoking saves lives in this case.”
“Mary I’m pretty sure that’s wrong,” Andrew said as he shook his head in disappointment, even as I blew the smoke out my window and mostly held the cigarette outside. “I mean, werewolves are supernatural, but we’re not exactly magical? Is there any reason we wouldn’t be able to get cancer?”
Samuel interjected, sounding thoughtful as he admitted, “well, I’ve never seen a werewolf die of cancer, and we do all sorts of bullshit. I mean, I’m almost fifty and me and my first pack used to live in a building full of asbestos we just tore up all the time for shits and giggles. If we could get cancer I think I’d know.”
“Okay but not everyone around asbestos dies from it,” Andrew said, frowning as he then added on, “also I don’t think that causes cancer, I think it’s a different thing. Maybe? I don’t know, either way the point is I don’t see why we can’t.”
The car fell into silence for a moment, and I focused on my cigarette as I tried to let the smell and taste coat my nose and throat. Eventually the silence was broken though as a thought crossed my mind.
I turned back toward the other passengers and asked, “isn’t cancer where you're like, body splits cells too much and stuff happens? Like, with how werewolves heal, I feel like if we could get cancer we’d just be dropping dead from it all the time.”
“No, see, that’s a good point,” Samuel said, nodding rather sagely at the thought, “I mean, you still shouldn’t smoke, it’s a terrible habit.”
“You also have a kid, Mary,” Andrew said, making me want to punch him more than a little.
“Wait, you have a kid?” Samuel asked with his eyes narrowing at the though, his glance darting too me as I went to take another drag. I didn’t get a chance to answer, and he reached over and grabbed the cigarette from my hands, tossing it out the window as he scolded me, “you need to set a good example. Besides, it’s bad for their health too if you’re visiting them or whatever.”
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“By the fucking Wolf Gods,” I muttered, rubbing my eyes in annoyance, “who said you two can act like my dad?”
“Oh, don’t fucking pull that card on me,” Samuel scolded me, slapping my hand away as I went for the glove box again, “The Lady put me in charge of your health, consider it my advisement.”
“That was for gunshot wounds! They’re healed!”
“Yes, well, you still shouldn’t smoke,” the man older muttered, muttering a long line of curses as he focused on driving before speaking up, “bad habit. Trust me, it took me years to quit after your mom got me into the habit.”
“Oh, going on about my mom again,” I muttered, leaning against the window in annoyance, “let me guess you're still not going to tell me anything about her?”
“You don’t need to know about her,” Samuel scolded, even as Andrew looked between us in confusion and asked, “how the fuck do you know her mom? Is she a hunter too?”
“Stay out of this,” we both snapped, pointing back at the man even as we pulled into a junkyard of abandoned cars. Andrew raised his hands defensively, and I let out a sigh as I apologized, “look let’s not talk about this right now. What the fuck is going on with this car anyway?”
“You’ll see,” Samuel sighed, stopping the car and already climbing out with a low grunt, “this is its third location I should have you know.”
“That sounds like a good thing,” I said, shaking my head as Andrew climbed out with us. He looked at me for a brief moment, and I told him, “Wait here, I don’t want to deal with The Lady interrogating you too. I think you can assume I’m not getting in trouble if I’m here.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Andrew muttered, shaking his head as we left him behind and started down a dirt path between vehicles.
Samuel led the way, seeming on edge as he kept a hand on his jacket pocket where I assumed a gun lay. The metal cars stacked on top of each other forming hidden paths, and giving the area an isolated foreboding like a forest of metal. We walked silently, only some distant metallic grinding and the smell of rust and oil to accompany us, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up as I worried what his paranoia meant.
If a fight broke out I was going to end up ruining my dress, as long as it’d take to slip out, I’d need to transform in it. I’d both spent a fucking month making this, and already had Barbie starting her portrait of me in it. I did not want to have to speed fix my clothes between dealing with cases until Friday.
We turned a corner, and a piece of shifting metal nearly made both of us leap for cover, even if I wasn’t sure what Samuel was scared of. Eventually though we walked into a clearing of the metal, where knives’ car sat in pieces, seeming to have every bolt taken off and the pieces set aside in organized lines. A long wooden table laid out on one end of the clearing, and on it various pieces were dissected in further detail with a man in coveralls carefully sawing a pipe in half.
The Lady stood nearby, wearing a multi-colored dress and brown tassel jacket, with opaque red sunglasses and a parasol matching her dress held over her shoulder to block out the sun. A pretty looking woman in a sundress I didn’t recognize stood nearby carrying a large woolen trench coat over one arm, who whispered something as we came into view and stepped away.
“I will not ask for…tribute this time, my favorite morsel” The Lady said as we walked up to her, surprising me slightly that she’d made the first move. Usually so calm and patient, not even feeling like she fully understood what she said, she merely looked over me for a moment before declaring, “we found…evidence of tampering. A Global Positioning System within the…wheel well. Additionally, my mechanic found something of interest attached to the ignition.”
“I can take a look at it, you want me to see if I can tell you anything about it?” I asked, figuring that would make some sense. My dad had been a monster hunter, and trained me in a lot of what he knew about that sort of thing. If anything seemed strange or in need of observation it was likely I could figure it out.
“You can tell me anything about it,” The Lady confirmed slowly, gesturing towards the mechanic nearby, “ask him for more…information.”
“Alright, I can do that,” I said, rubbing my eyes for a brief moment, “before I do though, I…I’m taking on the disappearances as a case to look into. Personal favor. Something’s killing a lot of people and then making the living forget about them.”
“Personal favor,” The Lady said, her dull red eyes boring into me with a strange intensity, “hm…fine, but do not let this get in the way of the other matters placed upon you.”
“I won’t,” I agreed, able to say nothing more before Samuel gripped my arm and pulled me toward the bench.
I rolled my eyes, wanting to snap at him when he turned to me and whispered, “she is not in the mood for you pushing your luck currently. She knows you were fighting humans, and she knows it nearly got you revealed. Keep as much as you can close to your chest, and let’s get this solved as fast as we can.”
There wasn’t much of a chance for me to respond before we reached the mechanic, an old bald man missing a large chunk of one ear. Once we were within a few feet of him he spoke up, not even turning back to us as he said, “you’re lucky we towed the car.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, frowning as I walked beside him and was almost immediately granted the answer to my question.
There on the table was a metal pipe, with various cables and wires coming from one end of it. A frown crossed my lips and, gingerly picking up the pipe, and I turned it to read the bottom cap, greeted by the roughly carved letters SNI. Silver and Iron.
“I ain’t attempting to disarm that,” the mechanic told me, and I nodded as I turned it around in my hand.
“Get a wrench,” I answered, holding the pipe so it hung with the wires facing straight up, “this will have an electronic triggered fuse, with a fail safe for if the pipe is pulled apart. Unscrew the bottom while hanging it like this though, and let it drop all the way, and it breaks the connection before it can trigger.”
The man looked ready to argue, before he sighed and picked up the tool without complaint. Merely doing as I said while muttering, “maybe this’ll get me out of Wednesday service.”
He turned the wrench, and I held tight onto the pipe as I tried to keep it perpendicular to the ground as possible. Eventually the lid popped loose, and the man held the cap close to the pipe for a few seconds before letting it drop to the table. Something popped, a string of chords and ball bearings poured out, and then the blasting cap, and I sighed as I sat everything back down.
“How did you know how to do that, Mary?” Samuel asked, the werewolf coming up beside me with a furrowed brow. “Is that like, common hunter design?”
“It’s specialized,” I admitted, sighing as I rubbed my eyes a moment and leaned onto the table, “invented by an IRA Volunteer in the early seventies, refined for supernaturals. He turned monster hunter in the mid nineties, came over to America to help his daughter raise her son after her husband died.”
“So, what, you got the drop on you by a geriatric irishman?” the mechanic asked, sounding like he was going to laugh at the thought and with no attempt to hide his smile.
“No, he died when I was a kid,” I said, frowning as I futilely tried to come up with any explanation beyond the obvious, “he met my grandfather when he came here though, and they taught each other everything they knew. My dad made this.”
