Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(10)

I’d been almost certain that Dennis was dead when I’d heard the gunshot. Closer to certain at Anna’s last words. I hadn’t realized how much I’d hoped I was wrong until I opened their door and found the body.

Faced with the reality that both Dennis and Anna were dead, I found that I was not very concerned with fingerprints and pristine crime scenes anymore. I slid through the narrow opening between the door and the frame, stepping over Dennis’s leg and into the Cathers’ living room.

Dennis’s body lay crumpled midaction, as if he’d been walking toward the door when he’d shot himself. He had shot himself. The trigger finger of his right hand was still caught in the trigger guard. He’d done it right—put the gun in his mouth and blown out the back of his head.

My ears and nose told me that there was no one alive in this house—and no one dead except for Dennis and Anna. She wasn’t in the living room, but she wasn’t too far. The danger, whatever the danger had been, had passed.

I knelt beside Dennis, staying clear of the blood spatter and resisting the urge to close his death-clouded eyes. I could justify, if only to myself, my need to figure out what had happened. But altering the scene, even by a little, would be wrong.

Without touching him, then, I examined his body with all of my senses.

As far as I knew, this had been the first time Dennis had ever had a gun in his hand. It was an STI Trojan, a 1911 model chambered in 9mm. Anna’s gun. She and I had gone target shooting a few times over the years—the Trojan was her favorite. Dennis had refused to go with us, his dislike of guns unyielding. Anna had told me that her father had been a Marine and had taught all of his daughters how to shoot. She was a better shot than I was, and I wasn’t terrible.

What had happened to Dennis that he’d decided to change a lifetime of habit and conviction this afternoon? Drugs or alcohol would be my first choice. As weird as it was to contemplate that Dennis had gotten drunk (he did not drink to my knowledge) or tried drugs, that wasn’t as weird as Anna having an affair or doing something that had made Dennis feel that a gun was his only recourse.

I couldn’t smell any alcohol near his face or on his clothing, but if he’d ingested it more than an hour ago or if he’d been drinking somewhere else, I wouldn’t be able to scent it from a distance. If he’d been drinking enough to go on a shooting spree, I should be able to smell it on his skin, but it might be subtle and I’d need to get close.

The wound was a host to strong smells—blood, gunpowder. If I was going to smell for drugs as well as alcohol, for something, anything wrong, I needed to find skin as far from the gore as I could. He’d been wearing a short-sleeved shirt and his left arm was outstretched from his body.

As I put my face near his arm, I noticed that he’d been bitten by something recently. I hesitated. There were two distinct marks, recently made, with small bloody smears on the surrounding skin. They looked as though he’d been bitten by a tiny vampire. Maybe that was why the hair on the back of my neck was crawling.

It could be from a snake, I thought, remembering the abandoned repairs in the yard. Rattlesnakes were scarce around here, in my experience. Bull snakes would bite, but they had no venom. Not that it mattered; no snake venom I knew about would turn a person into a murderer. I was no expert—maybe there existed a snake whose bite was hallucinogenic, but not any snake anyone would encounter around here.

It didn’t look that much like a snakebite, anyway. What it really looked like was a rabbit bite. I have had my fair share of rabbit bites—when I am a coyote, rabbits are fair game. But Dennis wasn’t a coyote shapeshifter, and they didn’t have rabbits.

For some reason I thought of the jackrabbit I’d seen, the one my coyote had taken notice of because there was something wrong about it. Had it been headed in this direction? Maybe.

Could it have been infected with rabies? Rabies was a disease that rabbits could carry, I knew. Other than being traumatized by Old Yeller when I was a child, I didn’t have any experience with it. Dogs, I thought, at least in Old Yeller’s case, foamed at the mouth and bit people. It seemed like a long way from that to causing someone to kill his wife and then shoot himself.

Deciding it was unlikely that venom or rabies was the culprit, I resumed my examination for some chemical cause. I closed my eyes and inhaled, looking for the scent of alcohol, drugs of some sort—or illness. Despite my care, my nose touched Dennis’s skin as I inhaled.

Magic filled my nose, burned into my sinuses, and brought tears to my eyes as I jerked back from the burn. I opened my eyes as I lost my balance, narrowly avoiding falling onto Dennis’s body—which glowed with the magic that still bit at my nose like menthol oil.

Adam was of the opinion that it wasn’t really my nose that allowed me to detect magic—otherwise he and the other werewolves would be able to smell it, too. He thought that my perception of magic felt like a scent to me because I had no other way of processing it, a sort of synesthesia. He may have been right, but that didn’t change that it was mostly my nose that told me when there was magic around.

Usually, though, with magic that affected me this much, I’d have been able to smell it from the front door—maybe from the road. My fingers buzzed with it, my nose burned—and to my eyes, Dennis’s whole body glowed. I didn’t understand why I hadn’t noticed it until I smelled Dennis’s skin. No. Until I touched his skin. A lot of magic reacted to skin on skin.