Night Broken (Mercy Thompson, #8)(37)

“How did she know it was here?” asked the angry man who knew who I was.

“I could smell them,” I told him simply. “I’ve got a good nose—being the mate of a werewolf can bring unexpected benefits.” Both were true, just not the way I implied.

“Clay Willis, this is Mercy Hauptman. Mercy, Clay Willis,” said Tony. “Clay’s the investigator in charge. We had one body I wanted you to take a look at because it looked like it’s been eaten by something. Our guy said maybe werewolves. That kill is older than this one”—he paused and took a breath—“than these are by more than a day.”

“Could have been a werewolf,” I acknowledged reluctantly. If a werewolf had done this, he needed to be stopped yesterday. But, I thought with some relief, if it had been one of our werewolves who had taken this much prey, he’d been in the grips of some kind of frenzy, and that would have translated itself to the pack bonds. We all knew, on moon hunts, when one of us took down prey. It wasn’t one of our pack.

“I can’t tell for sure if it was werewolves from here. Maybe if I got closer.” If a werewolf had been around here, he’d taken a different route to the killing field because I couldn’t smell werewolf.

“Just tell us what you see,” Tony suggested, and raised a peremptory hand to keep the other people spread out behind us quiet.

I looked at the pile of bodies, trying to analyze what I saw rather than worry about it.

“Someone,” I began slowly, “maybe several someones—” I stopped and changed my mind. “No, it was just one killer. He had dinner, then … a play day, maybe? Opportunistic kills? Some predators, like leopards, will bring all of their prey to one place, where they can feed later.” But it didn’t really feel like that.

“Why not several someones?” Tony asked.

I tried to work that out, but my instincts said one killer, and I couldn’t tell them that. When I made a frustrated sound, Tony said, “Just from the top of your head, Mercy.”

“No sign of competition,” I said, finally, distilling what my instincts had told me. “When a pack hunts—” Someone behind me sucked in a breath.

“Werewolf packs hunt at least once a month on the full moon,” I told them firmly. “Around here, we mostly hunt rabbits or ground squirrels. Other places, they hunt deer, elk, or even moose. Just like timber wolves do, though werewolves avoid domestic animals like cattle as a matter of course.”

“Point taken,” said Willis, not sounding angry anymore, just tired.

“When wolves hunt, there is a hierarchy. Someone directs, others follow. I don’t see any signs of that. No signs that someone got the good parts—” My voice wobbled because for all my experience with killing rabbits, they were rabbits. One of the women was wearing tennis shoes that looked like a pair Jesse had in her closet. I shut up for a second to recover.

“Maybe another kind of predator would hunt differently.” I shrugged uneasily. “But I think this is the work of just one.”

Only the horse and the other big animal—which had probably been a horse, too, because I thought I could pick out the start of a mane—had been disemboweled. Predators go for organ meats first. So why had he mutilated the other bodies beyond what he’d eaten? It had been deliberate and had nothing to do with eating because there was an intact dog leg about ten feet from me, and the dog was on the far side of the pile. I breathed in, but that didn’t help. The scent of blood held no trauma for me, but the stink of terror and … more faintly, pain.

“I think you’ll find that at least some of them were mutilated while they were still alive,” I said in a low voice because I didn’t want it to be true. But my stomach cramped with knowledge that the smell of pain meant someone had hurt. It was faint because pain stops when someone dies.

“A werewolf could do this?” asked Willis.

“I told—” The wind shifted just a little, and I caught another scent. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to get below the smell of the dead.

“Magic,” I said, with my eyes still closed. It was subtle, like a good perfume, but now that I knew its flavor, it was strong. Problem was, I had no idea what kind of magic I was scenting.

“Fae?” asked someone who wasn’t Tony or Willis.

I opened my eyes and shook my head. “Fae magic smells different than this. This isn’t witchcraft, either, though it’s closer to that than to fae magic.”

“Witchcraft,” said Willis neutrally.

I nodded. It wasn’t a secret; the witches had been hiding in plain sight for a hundred years or more. In places like New Orleans or Salem (Massachusetts, not Oregon), they were virtually a tourist attraction. That human culture dismissed the validity of their claims was something the witches I know thought was a delicious irony: when they had tried to hide, they had been hunted and nearly destroyed. In the open, they were viewed as fakes—and, even more usefully, a lot of the people claiming to be witches really were fakes.

“But this wasn’t witchcraft,” I said again, in case he’d only been paying attention to part of what I’d told him. “Not any witchcraft I’ve smelled before, anyway. If you ask, Adam has someone he can send to check it out.” Elizaveta Arkadyevna was our pack witch on retainer. “She won’t agree to talk to you, but we can get the information for you if you would like.”