“Rotten eggs,” Meg whispered. “Hands. Feet. Bones. Maggots.” A hesitation before she breathed out one final word. “Bullet.”

She sank to the floor. Vlad went down with her, still cradling her hand to keep her blood off the floor.

He felt Tess sweep into the room and out again. When she returned, she crouched beside Meg, lifted the bloody hand, and wrapped a towel around it, dropping a second towel under Vlad’s hand. He quickly wiped Meg’s blood off his skin.

“Put the towel in the sink. Run cold water over it while you rinse off your hands. The female pack says that works for removing blood from cloth so we don’t waste what we might need later,” Tess said.

<Can you take care of her?> Vlad asked as he hurried into the bathroom. <I need to talk to Lieutenant Montgomery and Captain Burke.>

<I hear sirens. I don’t think you’ll have to go looking for either of them.> Tess studied him when he returned. <Bad?>

<Let’s hope our Meg is wrong this time.>

<She hasn’t been wrong yet. Not really.>

At another time, the truth of that might have made Meg’s self-doubt amusing. But not now.

• • •

Monty retrieved the mail from his letter box and climbed the stairs to his apartment. He wasn’t sure he would spend the night there. He wasn’t sure a man alone, even a police officer, who was known to work with the terra indigene would be safe in this part of the city. Between the fires that burned down so many businesses on Market Street and the flash floods caused by the localized storm the same night of the fires, this part of Lakeside was in turmoil, and the police were breaking up several fights a day between members of the HFL, who blamed the terra indigene for all of the city’s troubles, and people who now blamed the HFL for the city’s troubles.

And then, today, the package that was delivered to the Courtyard. He believed the deliveryman when the fool claimed he didn’t know what was in the package. The hysteria after they had shown him what he’d delivered hadn’t been feigned.

Two hands with some of the bones showing through where the flesh had been eaten away. Two feet covered in maggots. And a bullet. Not a spent round. Nothing they could test.

After impounding the delivery truck, and ignoring the shrieks of the company’s owner about customers waiting for the items in the truck, Louis Gresh and his team checked every package, making a record of each item. They found three other packages from the Dead Cops Club—three other packages with the same items. Those were handed over to the forensics team after the bomb squad confirmed the packages weren’t booby-trapped.

They were searching for four bodies, or, at least, the identities of the deceased. Burke didn’t think they would be found since cremation was standard except for the wealthy, who could afford a family crypt and literally be buried with their ancestors. None of the hands and feet were fresh enough that the body would still be in the morgue or at a funeral home for the final viewing.

But the police would search for the bodies, and they would search for the people who were responsible for directing such ill will toward a member of Lawrence MacDonald’s family.

According to Burke’s grapevine, the delivery company’s owner and all its employees belonged to the Humans First and Last movement, and the workers at the crematorium, who were also HFL members, swore they hadn’t left any body unattended for “more than a minute” and hadn’t noticed any hands or feet missing on their return. And it seemed like, when fingerprints confirmed that the hands that had been sent to the Courtyard had belonged to Lawrence MacDonald, every police officer in Lakeside knew about it within an hour. And after hearing that news, every officer who had secretly, or openly, belonged to the movement removed his HFL pin and threw it away.

No matter what they thought about people who worked with the terra indigene, no police officer saw the Dead Cops Club as a harmless prank. This time, the HFL had crossed too many lines.

Because he was tired, Monty read the note from his mother twice before he understood what she was saying. Because he was tired, his temper, usually so slow to rise, ignited.

Tossing the letter aside, he picked up the phone and called his sister’s apartment.

“Sissy?” Monty said, struggling for control. “It’s CJ. I want to talk to Mama.”

“Mama wrote to you? When she heard about the phone call, she got a mad on and said she would write. It’s just that, Jimmy called to see how we were doing . . .”

“He called to squeeze some money out of you.” Monty sincerely hoped she hadn’t had a penny left to give.

He’d been twelve when his parents adopted Sierra. The toddler had needed a home; his parents could give her one. For him, there was nothing to discuss.

But for nine-year-old Cyrus James, known in the family as Jimmy, Sierra’s arrival meant a smaller piece of the pie. Money for clothes, for toys, for anything he coveted—and he coveted almost everything—had to be split among three children now instead of two. Jimmy never let Sissy forget that he never had enough because of her. If they each got a cookie, Jimmy ate his and half of hers because, he said, he would have gotten both if she hadn’t been there. Every time she saved up her spending money for something she wanted, he’d find something he wanted that cost more money than he had and she would make up the difference, and have to wait and save some more to buy something for herself.

Monty had stood as a buffer for as long as he’d lived at home—and he’d breathed a sigh of relief when Jimmy left home too, to make his own way.