“Her name’s probably Jennifer Ying,” I said. “The hair has Mongoloid texture. She’s one of the missing women whose names I found in Feldman’s file. The head wasn’t here when I came in, which was around four thirty this morning.”

Jim sniffed at the head. “Fresh kill. A day, maybe a day and a half at most,” he said. “You need to call Curran.”

“He won’t listen to me. He thinks I’m a glory hound.”

Jim shrugged. We’ve worked together long enough to know that neither of us was interested in fame.

“You aggravate the hell out of him.”

“There is more.” I led him to the porch. A gathering of human bones lay arranged on canvas, spanning the entire porch.

“You rob a graveyard?”

“I wondered how he came so close to the house without setting my wards off, so I went looking and found these. He arranged them in a circle around the property in the tree line. It’s a form of a ward. Very old.”

“How old?”

“Neolithic. Primitive hunters would lay out the bones of their prey around their settlements. The idea is to form a chain of Rock, Bone, and Wood. You use Rock and Wood to obtain the Bone, binding all three, so if you return the Bone to the Rock and Wood after you’re done with it, it will afford you protection. He created himself a safe passage so he could wander around my yard whenever he wanted. It’s an easy spell to break. All you have to do is to remove the bones, and that’s why nobody uses it anymore. Unfortunately, you can’t detect it unless you stumble over it.”

I picked up a skull and handed it to him. Jim took it and recoiled, hissing. His eyes flooded with green.

Folklore correctly stated that in death a shapechanger’s body would revert to the form it had at birth, be it human or animal, but Lyc-V did some permanent things to bone structure, which remained in life or in death. Several long glossy strips of Lyc-V-created bone marked the skull in telltale places above the jaw and along the cheekbones.

“A wererat,” Jim said, handing me the skull as if it was hot.

“Guess how many I found?”

“Seven.”

“And at least three vampires. The skeletons are not complete. Some bones are missing, but there are eight pelvises and nine skulls, three of which have bloodsucker fangs.”

Jim glared at the bones. “You have to put the vamps separate.”

“What?”

“Put the bloodsucker bones separate,” he repeated. He was agitated and low snarls crept into his voice.

“Why don’t you get off your ass and help me?”

“I’m not touching them.”

I sighed. “Jim, I’m not a criminalist. Without a bloody loup and an m-scanner, I don’t know which bones are vamp. You, on the other hand, can tell by the scent.”