Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(31)

The cutlass in the hands of a werewolf who knew what he was doing would be quiet and nearly as deadly as a gun. Possibly, depending on what kind of fae we faced, more deadly. I hadn’t seen him fight with my blade, though I’d seen him fight with other swords and swordlike things. The cutlass was unlikely to give him any trouble.

I’d had time to think about the fae magic I’d been smelling. Fae had very distinctive odors, depending upon the magic they used. Some of them smelled earthy or like water. Others smelled of fire or woodlands. I used to think there were only earth, air, fire, and water, until I encountered more fae. Some of the Gray Lords smelled like hunting cats or lightning. Some of them just smelled like themselves.

This fae smelled . . . like nothing I’d ever scented before. Not so much a different scent, but less of a scent. It had to be magic if Adam couldn’t smell it. But it didn’t smell right even for that. I had no idea what we were facing.

Adam shut the front door behind us. Any close examination would reveal the damage to the latch, but people driving along the nearby road shouldn’t notice it—not the way they’d notice a door hanging open with light spilling out onto the porch steps.

I’d been inside Stefan’s house a couple of times before, enough to know the general layout. The entry and living room could have belonged to a 1920s craftsman, contrasting starkly with the soulless exterior that had been built to match the other houses in the area. The flagstone entry gave way to dark oak floors covered with scattered Persian rugs, Shaker-style couches, and chairs built with more dark wood and woven earth-tone fabrics.

The living room opened to a larger, more airy space that was the dining room and kitchen. The look here was modern and sleek, with lots of shiny chrome softened by earthy tiles. The two parts of the house should not have blended as well as they did, not without walls to soften the change. But the overall effect was, usually was, homey. But that wasn’t how Stefan’s home felt now.

The atmosphere reminded me of childhood expeditions to the haunted mansion at a traveling carnival, nerve-tingling but also sordid. I could not tell exactly what was causing it: the fae whose magic I could still sense, or the ghost who sat watching me from the big couch that took up the long wall of the living room.

I’d met Daniel before he became a ghost. Now the fledgling vampire sat on the middle section of the Shaker couch, absolutely motionless, as vampires often did. He sat near a big Tiffany floor lamp that was the source of the light reflected in the outside windows. That he did not cast a shadow in the light was the only real sign he was a ghost.

That’s not to say that he wasn’t creepy. His eyes were on me, white and pupilless, as they had been the only time I’d seen him alive. Or as alive as vampires got, anyway. He was, as he had been then, half-starved and frail, his hair only a stubble on the pale globe of his shaved scalp. Tears dripped slowly down his emotionless face.

Daniel was not a ghost I would have been comfortable living with—but Stefan didn’t know Daniel was still in his house. Or if Stefan did, it wasn’t because I’d told him about it.

I tried to ignore Daniel because too much attention from me strengthens ghosts. He was not what we were hunting here, and Stefan would not thank me for making his dead roommate more powerful.

Adam stopped in the center of the living room. He turned very slowly, taking his time peering into the shadowed hallway that led to the bedrooms, then at the open basement door. He didn’t see Daniel, but I hadn’t expected him to.

Adam moved without a sound, but not because he needed to. The splintering of the front door had been loud enough to alert anyone in the house who hadn’t heard our car drive up of our presence. It was an involuntary reflex he reverted to whenever there was danger about. I thought that he might have learned to do that before he’d ever become a werewolf, when he’d hunted and been hunted in Southeast Asia.

I felt like we were being hunted now. My impression that this was a trap had settled into an instinctive certainty. I just couldn’t tell if Adam and I were its intended prey—or if it had been set for Stefan.

I was going to feel really stupid if I was overreacting and Stefan and his people were at the seethe, or out on a team-building exercise. I made a mental note to ask Stefan if he did team-building exercises, then thought about what kind of team-building exercises a vampire might do and decided it might be better not to ask.

I told myself that the fact that Daniel was the only ghost I could see was good news—since I could not hear anyone in this house, which should have at least eight normal humans and a couple of fledgling vampires in it at this time of night. If they had been violently killed recently, there would be more than one ghost here. I put my nose to the floor and tried to pick up any hint of the thing we were hunting.

I made a full circle of the living room, a quick-time perimeter slink, with my nose on the floor, finishing back at Adam’s side. There were no sounds or scents to direct our hunt, so I paused to see where he wanted to go next.

I didn’t much want to move on to the bedrooms, where tighter spaces would make fighting anything nasty more difficult. As for the basement . . . spending some time in the basement of a black witch might have left me with just a bit of basement-itis, because I didn’t want to go through that dark doorway.

Adam took two steps forward so he could get a better look at the kitchen and dining area. I would have started heading into the kitchen, but Daniel’s whitewashed eyes caught mine. He wasn’t, had not been, one of the ghosts who interacted with the real world, so it caught me by surprise when he looked from me up to the vaulted ceiling.