Night Broken (Mercy Thompson #8)(36)
“We need her,” Tony told him. “If what you told me was right and this was something other than human. She can tell us what it was.”
I caught a scent that bothered me, but it wasn’t coming from the direction of the group of police officers. Frowning, I turned in a slow circle to pinpoint it. I glanced at Tony, but he was busy arguing with the other man, so I wandered off in the direction my nose told me to, away from the cluster of officials.
The ground was more uneven than I would have thought a hayfield would be, maybe because it was alfalfa and not grass hay. I had to watch my step as I walked along the edge of where grass had been cut. The growing crop of hay was only about five inches high—the length of a lawn that had been left a week too long. Off the cultivated field, I’d have been wading through the weeds that ruled where the ground was too rocky to be farmed.
A short distance ahead in that too-rough-to-harvest rocky area, a copse of cottonwoods grew where the ground dropped down in a natural drainage. They’d probably been planted as a windbreak because we weren’t near enough to the Columbia River for the growth to be natural. By my reckoning, the source of the things I smelled seemed to be coming from the same general area.
Tony and the man had quit arguing to follow me.
“Where are you going, Mercy?” Tony called.
“Something smells bad over here,” I told him. Blood and feces is bad, right?
I left the tilled ground and broke through the edging ring of opportunistic alfalfa into cheatgrass that released spiky-painful seedpods into my tennis shoes and socks as soon as I’d traveled about two steps. I followed the too-sweet, unmistakable scent of freshly opened organs and blood to a small clearing under the trees—and stopped, appalled.
“Holy shit,” the stranger who knew me said in reverent tones. Then he shouted one of those words that don’t mean anything except “pay attention” and “come” and are designed to carry over battlefields.
This was not a battlefield, or even the remains of a battlefield. It was the remains of a slaughter.
Bodies, blood, and pieces were scattered here and there and mixed, so it took me a moment to parse exactly what I saw. I finally decided to go with heads, because heads are difficult to eat, and the charnel-house mess was definitely missing parts and maybe whole bodies. Five … no, six people, all women, two dogs—a German shepherd and something small and mixed-breed—a horse, and some other big animal whose head was either missing or might have been under something.
I have a strong stomach—I hunt rabbits, mice, and small birds while wearing my coyote skin, and I eat them raw. Before this, I would have said that lots of things make me squeamish, but fresh bodies not so much. This was so far beyond anything I’d ever seen that I flinched, looked away, then turned back to stare because part of me was sure that it couldn’t have been as bad as I first thought. It was worse.
Had someone in the pack done this? Or rather, given the volume of meat eaten, had several someones in the pack done this?
“These haven’t been here long,” I said into the silence behind me because I had to say something, do something. “Probably only since yesterday. It’s only spring, but even so, something would have started rotting in a day or so, and I don’t smell much putrefaction.”
I took a step forward to see better, and Tony grabbed my arm.
“Crime site,” he said. “We haven’t processed this. We didn’t know about this one.” He looked around. “This isn’t a make-out site, and there’s no reason for people to be walking around here. Probably wouldn’t have seen it until the guy who called us about the first body in his field came upon this by accident, too.”
“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.