Night Broken (Mercy Thompson #8)(63)

“Okay,” I said. “We’re going in. Adam will take the lead, then me, Lucia, and Gary will be rear guard.”

“You did hear me the first time, right?” Gary said.

“That’s why you are in the rear,” I told him. “To give us warning when the bad guys eat the rear guard.”

He laughed, then took a good look at the door and stopped. “Someone’s been inside,” he said.

Lucia had locked the door when we left for the restaurant, but that hadn’t stopped the interloper. The door had been forced, breaking the frame. Most of the damage was on the inside—apply enough inward force, and that happens.

Adam shouldered the door open and paused, then he kept going. I followed him, wishing for a gun, but I’d left my Sig Sauer in the safe at work and my .44 S&W at home. I hadn’t wanted to retrieve the Sig with all the police and Cantrip agents running around. Maybe I was going to start leaving a gun in each car, too.

Just inside the door, I understood exactly what had made Adam pause. Something had marked territory in the house. I wrinkled my nose. It wasn’t a dog. Or—and I thought about Zack’s complaint about his hotel room—a human peeing in the corner.

“If that is Guayota, I’m going to completely revise my opinion on the manners of primitive gods,” Gary whispered.

“You have heard some of the stories about Coyote, haven’t you?” I asked. True, I hadn’t heard any about him marking territory, but a lot of Coyote stories sound like something thought up in locker rooms by a bunch of horny teenage boys. I was pretty sure Coyote enjoyed those the most. Maybe they were all true.

Adam glanced back at us, and I caught the reproach. He didn’t chatter when he was scared. Adam was the man in charge. Wolf in charge. So if he wanted quiet, we’d better give it to him.

The blood smell had faded once we were in the house—so nothing had died here. I didn’t think. But the urine made it so rank—Lucia was coughing—that I couldn’t be sure.

Nothing alive in here. Tell her to get her things, and we’ll go back to the kennels. Adam’s voice slid into my head like warm honey.

I’d never told him how much I liked it, because, like telling him how sexy it was when he did sit-ups when I could see his bare stomach, it could never be unsaid. He had enough power over me already. He didn’t need to know how weak I was.

I love it when you talk this way to me, too, Adam told me.

“Adam says that whoever broke in is gone now,” I said, trying not to smile because it would be inappropriate. “We’ll have you pack something, then check on the dogs.” I didn’t tell her what I was afraid we’d find in the kennels. Free to run, they might have stood a chance against what I’d faced in my garage. But they hadn’t been free to run. “Where is your bedroom?”

“Second door on the left,” she said.

The door was closed, and I opened it because it was less likely to take damage if it was me than if it was Adam. Werewolves break things like doorknobs. As soon as I opened it, the smell of urine and musk quadrupled. I glanced inside. It looked as though a giant dog had torn the room to bits, piled everything up in the middle of the bed, and peed all over it. Which might have been exactly what happened.

I shut the door quickly. “Belay that plan,” I said. “We’ll find you some clothes at Honey’s.”

It’s not fun watching someone’s life get ripped to bits. Lucia didn’t ask what I’d seen in the room—her nose, human as it was, could smell it, too. She just raised her chin and turned around.

Gary kept his eyes down, careful not to make eye contact with me or Adam, and led the way back through the house. I wondered what I would have seen in his eyes if he’d let me look. Because he wouldn’t have hidden his eyes just to avoid offending someone; coyotes don’t run that way.

As soon as we were all outside, Adam surged to the front of our little parade. He rounded the end of the house, where the gate to the back had been ripped off and thrown to the side. The rest of the fence was a thick hedge, so it was impossible to see what was in the backyard until we were right on top of it.

Gary made a noise, but Lucia just walked into the middle of the bloody mess in her backyard and knelt beside her big white Amstaff and closed the dead dog’s eyes.

There were ten chain-link kennels in the yard, taking up exactly half the space. Each had a doghouse with an extended roof that gave the dogs outdoor space and still had some protection from the weather. The other half of the yard was lawn, mowed to golf-course neatness.

It must have been neat and tidy, even pretty, before someone had killed all the dogs and left. The gates of eight of the kennels had been ripped off their hinges and thrown willy-nilly. Some of them could have been rehung with new hinges, but some of them were badly damaged. One had been crumpled into a ball.

In front of the kennels, eight dogs lay on their sides, each with a single deep wound that had laid open their necks. I recognized the dog that had put his head on my knee and blinked back tears.

“I hate it when the dog dies at the end,” said Gary, his voice tight. He slapped the chain-link wall of a kennel. “I tore up my copy of Old Yeller and threw it away.”

Lucia didn’t flinch at the noise, just rubbed her dead dog’s uncropped ears.

Adam gave me a sharp look, like there was something I wasn’t seeing. I looked again and drew in a breath. The dogs were laid out, staged just like the women Guayota had killed. But this staging wasn’t for us, there was a formality here, each dog in front of its kennel.