Night Broken (Mercy Thompson #8)(38)

“A werewolf did this,” said Willis with authority.

I hunched my shoulders and shook my head. “The magic isn’t werewolf or fae. I might be able to do more if I can get closer.”

“You smell magic, and that means it wasn’t a werewolf?” asked Willis, sounding like he didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame him.

“I am not going to make things up just to make both of us feel better,” I said. “Werewolves smell like musk and mint. This smells like magic and scorched earth—and that is bad. Adam wouldn’t have a lot of trouble hunting down a rogue werewolf. It would be hard for one to hide from the pack more than a day or two. We can stop a werewolf—and I’ll tell Adam to keep an ear to the ground—but I don’t think this is a werewolf kill.”

“What if it was one of your pack?” Tony asked, almost gently. “They would know that we’d bring you in because we have before. They could hide their scent from you.”

I shook my head. “Trust me. This kind of mass killing? Werewolves can smell emotion, can smell when something is off. A pack member who did this could not hide it from the rest.”

“This wasn’t done with a lot of emotion,” said Willis.

I looked at him.

“Look at them,” he told me. “The bodies are arranged for maximum effect. The animals are on the bottom, the women on top, heads together like a macabre pinwheel.” I hadn’t looked that hard, but once he said it, I saw it, too. A pinwheel of dead women—and now that image was going to haunt me for a long time. “The killer felt nothing for the dead—unless you’re right, and they were tortured before they died. But when he left this, he was in control. No strong emotions for your pack to smell.”

He couldn’t smell the fear and agony that I did. Nor could I tell him that no wolf could have hidden from the pack bonds while he killed so many.

“Maybe someone is trying to make trouble for the werewolves,” Tony said.

“I think it is the werewolves making trouble for themselves,” said Willis.

“You brought me out because you wanted my opinion,” I told them. “It could be a werewolf, but if it is, isn’t one of our pack. I don’t think it’s a werewolf. I don’t smell one, but I can’t get close enough to check.”

“Why don’t you come over to the other scene,” Tony said. “They’ve got what they need from it?” He addressed that question to a woman in muddy overalls, and she nodded at him with a sort of studied weariness. “Maybe you can see something we don’t.”

I started to turn away and caught some movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked back over my shoulder and saw a woman kneeling right smack in the middle of the crime scene. Her blond hair was in a professional bun that contrasted with the jeans and tank top she wore. For a surreal moment, I thought it was Christy, and almost asked her what she thought she was doing. Then she moved and broke the illusion. It was just her hair and something in the sweep of her jawline that reminded me of Adam’s ex-wife.

The kneeling woman was petting the severed head of the German shepherd. She looked up, and her eyes met mine, just as Gary Laughingdog’s had. And then I realized what I was looking at and why no one else seemed to notice her. I see ghosts.

“Find the one who did this,” she told me sternly.

I gave her a little nod, and Willis caught my shoulder.

“What do you see?” he asked. “What made you turn back?”

“Only the dead,” I answered. “And I intend to help them as best I can.”

He wasn’t satisfied, but I thought he knew I was telling the truth.

6

The original crime scene had only one body, another woman. She lay in the middle of the hayfield in a section, roughly square, that had nothing at all growing in it. The soil was black, and it stained the bottom of my tennis shoes with soot. Someone had burned a chunk of field and put the dead woman in it like the bull’s-eye of a target.

“Staged,” I said.

“Yes,” agreed Tony. “And we’ll let the scene experts have their way, but, like Willis, I’m reading the other bodies the same way. Arranged for maximum effect.”

Unlike the other women, this one had been partially eaten. The soft flesh of her abdomen was completely gone and most of the thigh muscles. Something with big, sharp teeth had gnawed on the bones exposed by the missing flesh.

I stopped about five feet from the body and smelled. A lot of people had been roaming around the area, and if I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have scented the same magic I’d detected at the other site. Magic, death—the bare remnants of the pain and fear that had also been present with the other bodies. Over it all hung a pall of burnt grass and earth. I didn’t smell any kind of volatile compound, though maybe the circle had been burned a few days earlier. Some things—like alcohol—evaporate pretty fast.

“I think it’s the same killer,” I said.

“We don’t get so many murders around here—especially where the victims are partially eaten—that anyone is going to argue with you,” said Willis. “But what are you basing that on?”

“The smell of magic is the same—and he killed her the same way he took out one of the horses,” I told him. You see enough hunts, you pay attention to how prey is killed. “He tore out the throat and ate it before disemboweling her, just like he did the horse. A lot of predators develop a favorite style of kill.”