“Not admissible,” grunted Willis.
“Neither, probably, will Mercy’s testimony be,” agreed Tony. “But at least we won’t be running around in the dark with blindfolds on.”
Sister …
The whisper came out of nowhere. I glanced around, but no one else seemed to have heard it. A movement caught my eye—and there was a coyote crouched in the brush about fifty feet from where we all stood.
It could have been a real coyote—there are a lot of them around Finley. But I knew that the coyote was Gary Laughingdog, not because I had some sort of special way of telling walkers from coyotes—his body language said he was looking for me, and I wasn’t on speaking terms with the local coyotes. He met my eyes for a full second, then slipped away: message received and understood. He wanted to talk to me; otherwise, he would never have shown himself. Maybe he knew something about what had happened here.
I blinked at the dead a moment. Could Coyote have done this? It was a useless question because I had no idea what he was capable of. There were no stories that I knew about Coyote killing like this, but I didn’t know all the Coyote stories.
“All the women are wearing clothing,” said one of the police officers.
“Could still have been sexual assault,” said another one.
“Cougars hide their prey, so that they can eat it over a few days,” the first officer offered tentatively, and someone made a gagging noise.
I don’t think they realized I could hear them because they kept their voices down.
“Just for the record, you think this was done by something supernatural?” Tony asked me in a low voice.
“Yes. I told you, I smell magic.”
“A werewolf did this,” said Willis with authority.
I hunched my shoulders and shook my head. “The magic isn’t werewolf or fae. I might be able to do more if I can get closer.”
“You smell magic, and that means it wasn’t a werewolf?” asked Willis, sounding like he didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame him.
“I am not going to make things up just to make both of us feel better,” I said. “Werewolves smell like musk and mint. This smells like magic and scorched earth—and that is bad. Adam wouldn’t have a lot of trouble hunting down a rogue werewolf. It would be hard for one to hide from the pack more than a day or two. We can stop a werewolf—and I’ll tell Adam to keep an ear to the ground—but I don’t think this is a werewolf kill.”
“What if it was one of your pack?” Tony asked, almost gently. “They would know that we’d bring you in because we have before. They could hide their scent from you.”
I shook my head. “Trust me. This kind of mass killing? Werewolves can smell emotion, can smell when something is off. A pack member who did this could not hide it from the rest.”
“This wasn’t done with a lot of emotion,” said Willis.
I looked at him.
“Look at them,” he told me. “The bodies are arranged for maximum effect. The animals are on the bottom, the women on top, heads together like a macabre pinwheel.” I hadn’t looked that hard, but once he said it, I saw it, too. A pinwheel of dead women—and now that image was going to haunt me for a long time. “The killer felt nothing for the dead—unless you’re right, and they were tortured before they died. But when he left this, he was in control. No strong emotions for your pack to smell.”
He couldn’t smell the fear and agony that I did. Nor could I tell him that no wolf could have hidden from the pack bonds while he killed so many.
“Maybe someone is trying to make trouble for the werewolves,” Tony said.
“I think it is the werewolves making trouble for themselves,” said Willis.
“You brought me out because you wanted my opinion,” I told them. “It could be a werewolf, but if it is, isn’t one of our pack. I don’t think it’s a werewolf. I don’t smell one, but I can’t get close enough to check.”
“Why don’t you come over to the other scene,” Tony said. “They’ve got what they need from it?” He addressed that question to a woman in muddy overalls, and she nodded at him with a sort of studied weariness. “Maybe you can see something we don’t.”
I started to turn away and caught some movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked back over my shoulder and saw a woman kneeling right smack in the middle of the crime scene. Her blond hair was in a professional bun that contrasted with the jeans and tank top she wore. For a surreal moment, I thought it was Christy, and almost asked her what she thought she was doing. Then she moved and broke the illusion. It was just her hair and something in the sweep of her jawline that reminded me of Adam’s ex-wife.
The kneeling woman was petting the severed head of the German shepherd. She looked up, and her eyes met mine, just as Gary Laughingdog’s had. And then I realized what I was looking at and why no one else seemed to notice her. I see ghosts.
“Find the one who did this,” she told me sternly.
I gave her a little nod, and Willis caught my shoulder.
“What do you see?” he asked. “What made you turn back?”
“Only the dead,” I answered. “And I intend to help them as best I can.”
He wasn’t satisfied, but I thought he knew I was telling the truth.
6
The original crime scene had only one body, another woman. She lay in the middle of the hayfield in a section, roughly square, that had nothing at all growing in it. The soil was black, and it stained the bottom of my tennis shoes with soot. Someone had burned a chunk of field and put the dead woman in it like the bull’s-eye of a target.
“Staged,” I said.
“Yes,” agreed Tony. “And we’ll let the scene experts have their way, but, like Willis, I’m reading the other bodies the same way. Arranged for maximum effect.”
Unlike the other women, this one had been partially eaten. The soft flesh of her abdomen was completely gone and most of the thigh muscles. Something with big, sharp teeth had gnawed on the bones exposed by the missing flesh.
I stopped about five feet from the body and smelled. A lot of people had been roaming around the area, and if I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have scented the same magic I’d detected at the other site. Magic, death—the bare remnants of the pain and fear that had also been present with the other bodies. Over it all hung a pall of burnt grass and earth. I didn’t smell any kind of volatile compound, though maybe the circle had been burned a few days earlier. Some things—like alcohol—evaporate pretty fast.
“I think it’s the same killer,” I said.
“We don’t get so many murders around here—especially where the victims are partially eaten—that anyone is going to argue with you,” said Willis. “But what are you basing that on?”
“The smell of magic is the same—and he killed her the same way he took out one of the horses,” I told him. You see enough hunts, you pay attention to how prey is killed. “He tore out the throat and ate it before disemboweling her, just like he did the horse. A lot of predators develop a favorite style of kill.”
I took a step closer, and the slight change in angle highlighted the ground. Paw prints, canid and huge, dug into the barren earth. They were bigger than my hand when I set it beside them. A timber wolf’s paw prints would have been bigger, too—but these were a lot bigger than any timber wolf’s.
“Not werewolf,” I said with a relieved sigh. “Werewolves have retractable claws that don’t dig into the dirt unless they are running—almost like a cougar’s. These have claw marks like any other canid.”
“Werewolves have retractable claws?” asked the officer who’d been still at the scene when we came here. “I’m forensics; why didn’t anyone ever tell me that? I can’t look for werewolves if I know squat about them. Do you have a werewolf who will let me examine him for a while?” The last question was directed at me.
“You’ll have to ask Adam,” I told her. Who would have to ask Bran, which I didn’t tell her.
“So what was it
?” Most of the cops had stayed at the other site, but a couple of others had followed Willis, Tony, and me. It was one of those who asked.
“I don’t know,” I told him.
I knelt beside the body and put my nose down as close to the dead woman as I could get. She had been here longer and was beginning to rot. I sorted through odors as quickly as I could.
Between the rot and the burnt smell, it was difficult.
I sat up. “I definitely smell a canid, though not coyote, wolf, werewolf, or any dog I’ve smelled.” I looked at Tony. “I’d like to be more help. I’ll recognize the way our killer smells if I run into it again. If you want, we can have some of the werewolves take a shot at identifying it.”
“We are taking her word that it isn’t a werewolf?” asked Willis, disbelief in his voice. “The wife of the Alpha?”
“Yes,” said Tony. “We’re taking her word—but we’ll let forensics double-check. Would a werewolf have a better chance of identifying it than you, Mercy?”
My nose was as good as most werewolves’, better than some. But Samuel was very old, and he’d run into a lot of things over the centuries. He was not a member of the pack, but he’d come look if they’d let him.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” said Willis before I could express an opinion. “If this isn’t a werewolf, then we don’t want to bring any in to confuse the issue. Having Ms. Hauptman here is pushing it as it is.”
Willis dusted off his hands and looked at me thoughtfully. “This was not a werewolf?”
“No,” I said.
He pursed his mouth. “Damned if I don’t believe you. Whatever did this isn’t human.”
“Something supernatural,” Tony said.
I nodded. “I don’t know how to prove it, without anyone being able to smell this magic.”
“Fae, then,” said one of the other cops. “I’ve read all the fairy tales. The black dog is the most common of the shapes they take. Meet a black dog at the crossing of two roads or hear the call of the Gabriel Hounds, and you are sure to die.”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t smell like fae—and they have all retreated to the reservation, anyway.”
“There are other things out there besides werewolves and fae?” asked Willis.
I got to my feet and dusted the dirt off my jeans before I answered him. “What do you think?” I asked.
He frowned unhappily.
I nodded. “That’s what I think, too. I’ve never come across whatever did this. But judging from the tracks and the amount of meat he ate in a very short time—whatever this is, it is bigger than any werewolf I’ve been around. That means more than three hundred pounds.”
“On the way over, you just explained to me that you didn’t think it was a good thing to tell people that there were other things out there besides werewolves and fae,” Tony commented.
I waved my hand toward the crowd of police officers by the copse of trees. “If something is out there doing this, then I think that it’s too late to worry about what is safe for the public to believe in. This … I don’t know what this is. Finding out and stopping it is more important to public safety than trying to not make them paranoid.”
Willis shook his head and looked at Tony. “The brass is going to want this to be werewolves.” He turned to me. “Fair warning. They are going to want to talk to your husband. Probably not for a few days, until the initial lab reports get back to us, but soon.”
“Is this really a conversation for dinner?”
Christy interrupted me in the middle of explaining what I’d been doing this afternoon. There was an odd pause because by interrupting me, she’d made it clear that she felt comfortable correcting me. If we’d both been werewolves, I’d have been forced to make her back down—and then her supporters would have stepped in to defend her.
That I wasn’t a werewolf gave me some leeway of behavior, but not much.
We were eating formally again, as we had been since Christy had moved in. Four werewolves, Adam, Jesse, Christy, and I meant eight people, which was, to give her credit, too many people for the kitchen table. Eating in the dining room with Christy cooking meant bouquets cut and arranged from the garden, good china, and cloth napkins folded into cute hatlike things or flowers.
The tablecloth tonight had been hurriedly purchased (Jesse had been sent out to the store earlier) because Christy’s favorite tablecloth, unearthed from the linen closet, had a stain on it—discovered just as I came in from work. She hadn’t looked at me, but the sad note in her voice had Auriele glaring at me and a few reproachful looks from everyone else, including Jesse. The other tablecloths were dirty, and there was no way we could eat at a table without a tablecloth.
I had not said a number of things—one of which was, if it was such a favorite of hers, then why hadn’t she taken it with her? Another unsaid comment was that if I’d known her grandmother had given it to her on her wedding day, I would have ripped it into shreds and used a paper tablecloth before I’d put it on the table for last Thanksgiving. Instead of saying anything, I’d ignored the whole dramatic show and gone upstairs to change my clothes from work, leaving Adam to listen to Christy try to decide if there was any way to salvage her grandmother’s tablecloth.
It had taken a pep talk with the mirror to get myself out of the bedroom and downstairs to eat with everyone else. Dinner had been served, the pack gossiped over, then Darryl asked me about the kill site the police had taken me to. I’d briefed Adam over the phone, but there hadn’t been time to really hash the matter out.
“I mean, Mercy,” Christy said, as if she hadn’t noticed the rise in tension when she interrupted me, “why don’t we hold off talk of dead bodies until after people are done with the food? I spent too long making this for it to go to waste.”
For tonight’s dinner, Christy had made lasagna (from scratch, including the noodles), and I’d been shuffling it around on my plate because knowing that she’d made the food made me not want to eat it. That it was pretty and smelled good wasn’t as much of an incentive to consuming it as I’d have thought it would be.
“It’s okay, Mom,” said Jesse with forced cheer, trying to defuse the situation. “Dinner is kind of when everything gets ironed out. Sometimes it’s hard to get everyone in the same room afterward.”
Ben, one of the four werewolf guards for the night, ate a big bite, swallowed, and said in a prissier-than-usual version of his British accent, “Mercy, when you say it gnawed on the bones, was it trying to get at the marrow or just cleaning its teeth?”
“Ben,” snarled Auriele. “Didn’t you hear Christy?”
Six months ago, Ben would have backed down. Auriele outranked him, both as Darryl’s mate and as herself. But he’d changed, grown stronger, so he just ate another bite and raised an eyebrow at me. Silent—but not very subservient.
“Playing, I think,” I said to attract Auriele’s ire. She wouldn’t attack me—and in her usual mode of Christy’s protector, she might do something to Ben. I’d decided the best way to deal with Christy’s interruption was to ignore her. “The bones weren’t cracked, just chewed on. At least on the body I got close to. No cracking means no marrow. And if it was just trying to clean its teeth, it would have chewed harder.”
I ate a bite of salad. It smelled like Christy because she’d washed the romaine herself. Swallowing it was an effort. Trying not to look like I was choking was an even bigger effort.
Auriele opened her mouth, but Darryl put his hand on top of hers, and she closed her lips without speaking, but not without giving him a hurt look.
Adam’s hand touched my shoulder and suddenly I could swallow again. I had allies here, and Adam had my back.
“The important thing,” he said, “is that we are careful. I don’t want any wolf to go out running alone until we know what made those kills.”
Darryl nodded. “I’ll see that word gets around.”
“Good,” Adam said. “I’ve got people out looking for Gary Laughingdog.
Hopefully, we’ll find him before the police do—or he’ll find you, Mercy.”
“I’m pretty sure he wanted to talk to me,” I told him. “If so, he’ll find me before anyone finds him. I wouldn’t worry too much about the police finding him since he’s running around as a coyote.”
“Did you check if Bran had any insights into what it was that killed all those people?” Darryl asked.
Adam ate another bite of lasagna, paused to enjoy it, then gave me a slightly guilty look. I decided not to tell him it was okay if he liked Christy’s food. It was entirely understandable, but it was not okay, and I wouldn’t lie to him. I looked away.
To Darryl, Adam said, “I called Bran. Without checking out the site himself, Bran wasn’t able to pinpoint what could have done it. Taking the fae out of the picture leaves us with not much. Might even be a native creature. Bran said he once encountered a wendigo, and he believes that it was physically capable of killing this way. They smell oddly of magic, the way Mercy described them. But he didn’t think that it would have left canid paw prints—or left anything except bare bones. Their curse is that they hunger in a way that cannot ever be satisfied. Also, they tend to haunt the mountain passes, not the open shrub steppe. He’s having Charles do a little more research for us.”
“Charles who?” asked Christy.
“Bran’s son,” I told her, trying very hard not to be condescending and not succeeding. Maybe because I didn’t try that hard. She’d been Adam’s wife for over a decade, and she hadn’t bothered to learn anything if she didn’t know about the Marrok and his sons. “He’s half-Indian—Salish—and he has some people who will talk to him about things that are culturally sensitive—sacred things or stories they don’t want prettied up with all the original flavor lost so that it can be more effectively marketed as a genuine Native American story.”
“Have you asked Ariana?” Darryl was getting good at ignoring the almost battle between Christy and me and, at the same time, reducing the tension by changing the subject. I would never have thought Darryl would be such an adroit politician.