Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(8)

He hadn't said when she died, but I could guess that there hadn't been anyone here for a month or more.

About a month ago, the demon had been causing all sorts of violence by its very presence. I was pretty sure that the fae had considered that, and was reasonably certain the reservation was far enough away to have escaped that influence. Even so, when I regained my human form, I thought I might ask Zee about it.

Connora's bedroom was soft and feminine in an English cottage way. The floor was pine or some other softwood covered with scattered handwoven rugs. Her bedspread was that thin white stuff with knots that I always have associated with bed-and-breakfasts or grandmothers. Which is odd, since I've never met any of my grandparents - or slept in a bed-and-breakfast.

A dead rose in a bud vase was on a small table next to the bed - and there wasn't a book to be found.

The second bedroom was her office. When Zee said she was collecting stories, I'd somehow expected notebooks and paper, but there was only a small bookcase with an unopened package of burnable discs. The rest of the shelves were empty. Someone had taken her computer - though they'd left her printer and monitor; maybe they'd taken whatever had been on the shelves as well.

I left the office and continued exploring.

The kitchen had been recently scrubbed with ammonia, though there was still something rotting in the fridge. Maybe that was why there was one of those obnoxious air fresheners on the counter. I sneezed and backed out. I wasn't going to get any scents from that room - all that trying would do was deaden my nose with the air freshener.

I toured the rest of the house, and by process of elimination deduced that she'd died in the kitchen. Since the kitchen had a door and a pair of windows, the killer could certainly have entered and left without leaving scent anywhere else. I made a mental note of that, but made a second round of the house anyway. I caught Zee's scent, and more faintly Tad's as well. There were three or four people who had visited here often, and a few who were less frequent visitors.

If this house held secrets like the last one, I wasn't able to trigger them.

When I came out of the front door, the last of the daylight was nearly gone. Zee waited on the porch with his eyes closed, his face turned slightly to the last, fading light. I had to yip to get his attention.

"Finished?" he asked in a voice that was a little darker, a little more other than usual. "Since Connora's was the first murder, why don't we hit the murder scenes in order from here on out?" he suggested.

The scene of the second murder didn't smell of death at all. If someone had died here, it had been so well cleaned that I couldn't smell it - or the fae who had lived here was so far from humanity that his death didn't leave any of the familiar scent markers.

There were, however, a number of visitors shared between this house and the first two and a few I'd found only in the first and third house. I kept them on the suspect list because I hadn't been able to get a good scent in Connora the librarian's kitchen. Also, since this house was so clean, I couldn't entirely eliminate anyone who had been only in the first house. It would be handy to be able to keep track of where I'd scented whom, but I'd never figured out any way to record a scent with pen and paper. I'd just have to do the best I could.

The fourth house Zee took me to looked no more remarkable than any of the others had appeared. A beige house trimmed unimaginatively in white with nothing but dead and dying grass in the yard.

"This one hasn't been cleaned," he said sourly as he opened the door. "Once we had a third victim, the focus of effort changed from concealing the crime from the humans to figuring out who the murderer is."

He wasn't kidding when he said it hadn't been cleaned. I hopped over old newspapers and scattered clothing that had been left lying in the entryway.

This fae had not been killed in the living room or kitchen. Or in the master bedroom where a family of mice had taken up residence. They scurried away as I stepped inside.

The master bathroom, for no reason I could see, smelled like the ocean rather than mouse like the rest of this corner of the house. Impulsively, I closed my eyes, as I had in the first house, and concentrated on what my other senses had to tell me.

I heard it first, the sound of surf and wind. Then a chill breeze stirred my fur. I took two steps forward and the cool tile softened into sand. When I opened my eyes, I stood at the top of a sandy dune at the edge of a sea.

Sand blew in the wind, stinging my nose and eyes and catching in my fur as I stared dumbfounded at the water while my skin hummed with the magic of the place. It was sunset here, too, and the light turned the sea a thousand shades of orange, red, and pink.

I slipped down through the sharp-edged salt grass until I stood on the hard-packed beach. Still I could see no end of the water whose waves swelled and gentled to wash up on shore. I watched the waves for long enough to allow the tide to come in and touch my toes.

The icy water reminded me that I was here to work, and as beautiful and impossible as this was, I was unlikely to find the murderer here. I could smell nothing but sea and sand. I turned to leave the way I'd come before true night fell, but behind me all I could see were endless sand dunes with gentle hills rising behind them.

Either the wind in the sand had erased my paw prints while I'd been watching - or else they had never been there at all. I couldn't even be sure which hill I'd come down.