Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(57)

I put my nose on the ground and tried to find individual trails. The victim’s scent was easy—his bodily fluids saturated the loading bay in iron-bound spatters. I didn’t know the dead boy’s name, but I knew his scent, a thing far more intimate than a spoken name could ever be. I knew what shampoo he used, and I could have picked his antiperspirant out of a lineup.

There was magic here, too.

When I shifted into my coyote form, largely I was still me. But the coyote me had senses that the human me did not. And the coyote processed that information just a little differently. Every once in a while, that caught me by surprise, especially if I was in a kind of place where I didn’t usually wear my coyote form.

That’s why I thought at first that the weirdness I was sensing was just the coyote in a grocery store for the first time. I’d caught something while we’d been walking back here, but with my nose to the ground—I could taste darkness.

Magic shimmered through the fur on my coat, and something altered about the dead boy’s scent. I knew who he was. Not his name. His name wasn’t important. I knew he’d been impulsive and cheerful. He cared deeply for those around him, but not so much about school or work. I got a fair sense of his fae half—the singed scent told me he was associated with some fire fae. The magical boost I was getting from it told me his mother had been able to fly—and that she was dead.

I was drowning in his scent, in the magic that bloomed in the wake of his death. Magic that sought to become . . .

I was dismally aware that I would remember who this boy was until the day I died. It was so overwhelming that it took me a while to be able to look beyond the victim.

I thought it was something about the way the young man had been killed that had created the magical soup that swamped me. I tried to shake it off and get something about the killer.

Intent on that, I heard a new voice speak quietly. Tony had made it here from the Kennewick crime scene.

I ignored him for the moment, worried that if I took my attention off my job, I’d drown in the swamp of knowing and not be able to pull myself out. It took some effort, but I forced the tide of magic back so I could detect something other than the dead boy and his murder.

I found people who worked at the store. I knew that was who they were because their scents were layered over days and weeks. I found the police officers who carried with them the metallic smell of weapons—gunpowder, gun oil. I found forensic people who smelled of chemicals and their nitrile gloves. Despite the darkness that filled my mouth, those scents came to me as scents usually did.

There were bloody footprints that led to the push-bar door, and I tried to scent the killer around them. Police tape meant I couldn’t get right on top of them, but that shouldn’t have mattered.

The footprints smelled of the blood of the victim. I was going to smell him in my dreams. I almost gave up. Had lifted my head to look at Adam—when I figured it out.

“Mercy?” Adam said.

I ignored him. I closed my eyes because this was ephemeral, this was something that I shouldn’t be able to detect. Along the edge of the bloody footprints and the understanding of who the victim was—right on that edge, I felt the abyss.

I had felt it in that vision I’d shared with Stefan and in the one in Stefan’s house when I broke through the spiderwebbed spell. I’d forgotten the endless, unfathomable depth of it. It didn’t smell of anything and it smelled of everything at the same time. Magic. Madness. As I became aware of it, I could feel it feeding upon the death here, feeding but not consuming.

And I had been able to taste it since I fell through the spiderweb of magic and attracted its attention. I should have panicked, but in my coyote form, I was focused on following the not-scent the killer had left.

Adam caught me with a hand over my chest before I blundered past the yellow tape. I floundered a moment with the scent of the abyss in my head—how could I follow it if I couldn’t go past the tape? I was aware that my mouth was open and I was panting as if I was in pain as I struggled with Adam.

“Open it,” Adam said.

George opened the smaller of the roll-up doors, on the far side of the big bay door, well away from the police tape. Adam set me down and I ran out, hopped down the concrete steps, and bolted to the outside of the door the killer had left by. It, too, was sealed with crime scene tape, but I didn’t need to go in through the door.

I caught the scent that wasn’t a scent; I caught the feeling of the abyss and followed it to the small lot marked Employee parking, where it disappeared.

I tried again. Ended up back in the parking lot, where the scent stopped. Not like the killer got into a car or something. But like he vanished.

Like Stefan could vanish.

It didn’t smell like Stefan. I put my nose on the ground again to make sure.

I had been raised by werewolves, by monsters. I’d seen monstrous things. I knew what vampires were capable of. Stefan was capable of this. He could kill a young man who’d gone to the store to buy groceries. He was very old, and the ties between us meant he could order me not to recognize his scent—that could be why I couldn’t smell the killer except for the taste of the abyss it carried with it.

I thought of the self-loathing in Stefan’s voice.

“I’ll survive. That’s what I do,” he’d said. And, “Marsilia and I have given you a game to play.”

Stefan could have done this.