Trail of Dead (Scarlett Bernard #2)(9)

“What are you doing here?” I said. The different Old World groups don’t mix much—they have a few hundred years of tension that tends to get in the way of a good time—and of pretty much everyone I know, Kirsten has the most normal life. She has a day job and everything, which made her presence here more than a little out of the norm.

“Erin” was all she said, but it was enough for pieces to fall into place. The one thing that Dashiell, Will, and Kirsten all have in common is concern for their people’s safety.

“She was one of yours?” I asked, crossing the room to drop onto the stool next to her.

Kirsten nodded, keeping her red eyes focused on the coaster, which she’d folded over and over until it looked like a sliced pizza. She started pulling the slices apart. I was opening my mouth to start another question, but Eli raised his eyebrows meaningfully, telling me not to push it. Despite their inherent differences, he and Kirsten had developed sort of a mutual respect when they’d teamed up to save my life. “You want a drink?” he asked me, walking back behind the bar. I dropped onto a stool, hesitating, but finally shook my head. I needed to be clear.

“Not just now,” I said.

We sat there for a few minutes without talking. When the last coaster slice had been torn off and ripped in half again, Kirsten spoke. “Erin called me tonight from campus begging for help. We made plans to meet up at a coffee shop halfway between her school and my home, but Erin never came. After last fall I collected a few hairs from each of my witches in case someone targeted the Old World again. I did a locator spell, and another, and another. Erin…wasn’t anywhere.” She abandoned the coaster and leaned forward, burying her head in her arms.

Before I could ask, Eli explained. “Meaning she was dead. Or inside your radius, but you were out of town.”

I looked from one to the other. I’ve always suspected that Kirsten’s power comes from her inherent serenity—even when she was using combat magic against a serial killer last fall, her composure had never wavered. This was scary. I raised my eyebrows at Eli, who picked up the story.

“Kirsten went to the campus, and called me to go to her apartment,” he said quietly. “She thought…there was probably a crime scene to clean up somewhere.”

“Was there a body?”

He nodded. “I could smell it before I got off the elevator.”

I winced. Meat and blood smells can drive the werewolves kind of crazy, sometimes even forcing them to change. Eli’s tolerance is better than most (for some reason the inner wolf bothers him, but blood doesn’t bother his inner wolf, which just goes to show how much sense magic makes), which is why he’s able to do this job at all, but it must have been rough to be in that room. “Go on.”

Eli’s eyes became distant as he remembered. His hands, which had been doing little closing-up tasks as he spoke, went still on the bar. “There had been some kind of fight. That girl…I could hardly tell she’d been a person. It looked like she’d been liquefied.”

“Crushed?” I said.

He pointed a finger at me, nodding.

“What did you smell?” I asked. Eli’s werewolf senses have been helpful on more than one occasion.

“Mostly just the blood, and the other…body stuff. But there was a little bit of dirt there too. Odd smell.” He shrugged.

Jesse had said the forensics team had found dirt. “What made it odd?”

“It smelled…I don’t know, processed? I can’t really explain why, but it made me think of industrial buildings.”

“And it didn’t rain last night?”

“Nope.”

Hmm. No reason for Erin’s shoes to be muddy. “So you took the body,” I prompted. I would have too. If a person has clearly died of something explainable—gunshots or a heart attack or a car accident—I leave the body alone, even if someone from the Old World might have been involved. Basically, if there was a reasonable human explanation, I stay out of it. But a crushed body in a tiny third-floor bedroom would bring up too many questions.

“Yeah, and I cleaned up as fast as I could, but I heard the roommate coming. I grabbed the bag with the body, waited until she went into her own bedroom, and made a run for it. You said always deal with the body first, right?” He looked directly at me, and I realized what he was asking. In his quiet, pragmatic way, Eli wanted to know if he’d handled it right.

“Yes,” I replied, but a second too late.

“What? What else should I have done?”

This is what I liked about Eli—his tone wasn’t defensive or angry. He simply wanted to know. I felt awkward about correcting him in front of someone who was essentially our boss, but what the hell, Kirsten knew he was still training. “Taken the carpet,” I replied. “There’s a carpet knife in the bag, just for that kind of thing. With a bloodstain that big and that wet, they know they’re looking for a dead body. If you take the carpet, all they have is a missing girl who’s maybe in trouble, or maybe just ran away with her rug. It changes the story.”

“So I should have picked taking the carpet over straightening the room,” he said thoughtfully.

“Yes.” I shrugged to say not that it matters now.

Looking troubled, Eli excused himself to the back office to count the till and lock up. Kirsten finally looked at me. “If Erin’s roommate came home, I’m assuming the police have gotten involved by now?”