License to Ensorcell by Katharine Kerr Page A

the Pacific Ocean puddling at the foot of the cliffs. We’d gone about halfway up when Nathan asked me to stop.
    “We need to discuss something,” he said.
    I pulled over and parked in a shady spot on the gravel shoulder. Down below the ocean stretched out, shrouded in the gray of approaching fog. Nathan turned toward me, but in the bucket seats he could get no closer, particularly with the gear shift threatening to make seducing me a moot point. I figured he wanted to ask more about the Chaos lights, but instead he brought up the most recent murder.
    “The Romero girl’s body is going back to her family tomorrow,” Nathan said. “Serial killers have been known to attend the funerals of their victims. They keep a good distance away, of course, at the cemetery, but the bastards like to watch the families mourn. I don’t know when they’ll schedule the funeral, but I thought we should go and keep an eye out.”
    “Good idea. I might be able to make contact with the Hounds that way.”
    “With what?”
    “The Hounds of Heaven. The pack my brother belonged to, good Catholic werewolves all.”
    Nathan muttered something under his breath. “Just when I think I’m used to all of this,” he said eventually, “you come up with some sodding tidbit like that.”
    “I didn’t come up with it. That’s what they’re called in Pat’s journals.”
    Nathan opened the car door and slid out. I had a brief moment of wondering if he was going to throw himself off the cliff in despair, but instead he merely opened the back door and got out his suit jacket. With the fog racing in, the wind had turned cold. He took his holstered handgun out of the glove compartment and strapped it on before he put on the jacket, then got back in the car.
    “I’ve got Agency business to tend to tonight,” I said. “I’ll drop myself off at my place.”
    “Nola, aren’t you forgetting something?”
    “What?”
    “That someone wants to kill you. You’re living in an apartment overlooking a busy street, with big windows where you insist on sitting, a perfect target. Now you’re planning on going back there alone.” He paused for effect. “At night.”
    The wind seemed to have gotten into my blood and chilled my bones. I thought of the creature I’d caught spying in the lobby of the office building and shivered.
    “Actually, it’s even worse than that,” I said. “I was planning on going out alone to talk to a couple of Agency stringers. One of them works in the Tenderloin. Know what that is?”
    “Oh, yes. Your police made a point of telling me.” He crossed his arms over his chest like an angry schoolteacher.
    Which may be why Sister Peter Mary appeared on the hood of the car, about half life-size. When I went to high school, most of the teachers were laypeople, thanks to the emptying of the convents in the ’70s and ’80s, but for religion class we had a nun, black habit, bobbing white wimple, and all. I’d heard that some years previously she’d gone to her reward in heaven. Now she dropped back down to point her ruler at me like the weapon it had always been in her hands.
    “Lust,” she said, “can kill. Remember Bathsheba.”
    As visitations went, this one lacked all justice. Wasn’t I trying to avoid emulating Bathsheba despite Nathan’s obvious qualifications to be one hell of a David? Sister Peter Mary slowly dematerialized, ascending back into heaven, I assumed.
    “Thanks for the warning,” I said.
    “You’re welcome,” Nathan said, “though I have the distinct feeling you weren’t talking to me.”
    “I wasn’t, actually. Sorry.” I managed a smile. “Just one of my—uh—visions, I guess you’d have to call them.”
    He sighed and uncrossed his arms, then turned in his seat to look straight ahead.
    “What gets me,” I went on, “is this crop all seem to have religious content. That’s probably because of the Hounds.”
    Nathan continued staring out the windshield. I remembered St. Joseph di