Back For a Few Demons More
Chapters (48)
  1. Title Page
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. ONE
  5. TWO
  6. THREE
  7. FOUR
  8. FIVE
  9. SIX
  10. SEVEN
  11. EIGHT
  12. NINE
  13. TEN
  14. ELEVEN
  15. TWELVE
  16. THIRTEEN
  17. FOURTEEN
  18. FIFTEEN
  19. SIXTEEN
  20. SEVENTEEN
  21. EIGHTEEN
  22. NINETEEN
  23. TWENTY
  24. TWENTY-ONE
  25. TWENTY-TWO
  26. TWENTY-THREE
  27. TWENTY-FOUR
  28. TWENTY-FIVE
  29. TWENTY-SIX
  30. TWENTY-SEVEN
  31. TWENTY-EIGHT
  32. TWENTY-NINE
  33. THIRTY
  34. THIRTY-ONE
  35. THIRTY-TWO
  36. THIRTY-THREE
  37. THIRTY-FOUR
  38. THIRTY-FIVE
  39. THIRTY-SIX
  40. THIRTY-SEVEN
  41. THIRTY-EIGHT
  42. THIRTY-NINE
  43. The Undead Pool: An Excerpt
  44. Chapter 2
  45. About the Author
  46. Also by Kim Harrison
  47. Credits
  48. About the Publisher

Irritation flickered through me. “I thought I was rescuing it. And it wasn’t his fish. David said Mr. Ray stole it first.”

Eyebrows bunched, Glenn seemed to think it made no difference. “She came in as a wolf,” he was saying, his manner professional as his eyes lit on only the bruised and torn parts of her naked body. A small but gorgeous koi tattoo swam in orange and black across a high patch of her upper chest, a permanent sign of her inclusion into the Ray pack. “Standard procedure is to turn them back after the first look. It’s easier to find the cause of death on a person than on a wolf.”

The smell of dead things in a pine forest was getting to me. It didn’t help that I was running on empty. The coffee wasn’t setting well anymore. And I’d known the SOP, having briefly dated a guy who made the charms to force a shift back to human. He was a geek, but he had lots of money—it wasn’t an easy job, and no one wanted it.

Jenks was making a cold spot on my neck, and not seeing anything out of the ordinary—other than her being dead and her arm torn to the bone—I murmured, “What am I looking at?”

Nodding, Glenn went to a low drawer at the end of the room and, after checking the tag, pulled it open. “This is a Were suicide that came in last month,” he said. “You can see the differences. She would have been cremated by now, but we don’t know who she is. Two additional Jane Wolfs came in on the same night, and they’re giving them a little extra time.”

“They all came in together?” I asked, going over to look.

“No,” he said softly, gazing down at her in pity. “There’s no connection other than the timing and that none of them can be found in the computer. No one’s claimed them, and they don’t match any missing-persons report—U.S.-wide.”

From my shoulder came Jenks’s muffled voice saying, “She don’t smell like a Were. She smells like perfume.”

I winced when Glenn unzipped the bag to show that the woman’s entire side had been ravaged. “Self-inflicted,” he said. “They found tissue between her teeth. It’s not uncommon, though they’re usually a lot less brutal than this and simply open a vein and bleed out. A jogger found her in an alley in Cincinnati. He called the pound.” The faint wrinkles around Glenn’s eyes deepened with anger. He didn’t have to say that the jogger had been human.