Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(58)

I trotted back into the store and followed the victim’s scent, because it was easier to track than the abyss. I tracked the young man to the place he’d been taken—in the middle of the flour and spice aisle. I wondered if that had been on purpose, because the overwhelming scent of spice made it very difficult to smell anything else.

Sneezing, I tried to catch the slippery feeling that the abyss had left behind. It was like those optical illusion pictures that became three dimensional when you unfocused your eyes. That wasn’t an exact analogy, but it was close.

I followed it. I was so focused that only when I reached the wide door to the back area did I realize I’d caught the trace of the killer taking the victim to where he’d been killed. I broke off, went back to where the victim’s scent encountered the abyss, and cast around a bit. Nothing. It was as if the darkness coalesced right there, right where his victim had been taken.

I might believe that whatever had killed here was able to teleport like Stefan and Marsilia. Maybe just like, though the thought made my stomach hurt. But common sense told me that the killer had to have located his prey somehow. Found the right victim and waited until he was alone.

I looked up.

This store wasn’t like Costco or some of the other warehouse stores that put in overhead shelving to store merchandise. But the top of the shelf was still pretty high, a couple of feet over head height. Not really out of sight, but there were a lot of magical creatures who could remain unseen if they were still enough. Werewolves could. I was pretty sure vampires could as well.

I hopped onto the top shelf, landing on bags of flour. I trotted along the ridge where the two opposite-facing shelving units met. Nothing.

I leaped to the other side of the aisle—and found the abyss. The killer had waited on the shelving for a while. I could tell because of the depth of the darkness. I backtracked it from that perch and along the top of the shelving—it was dexterous enough to run along a path no more than an inch and a half wide. I had no trouble with it, but I was pretty sure that I couldn’t have run it wearing my human form. At the end of the aisle, I dropped to the ground, but the darkness disappeared.

After a moment’s consideration, I jumped on top of the next aisle and found it again. It wandered from one unit to the next and finally dropped to the ground near the front entrance. I trailed it almost to the doors before it disappeared again. I looked out the window and thought that something that could teleport might be able to look through the window and show up inside the store.

I didn’t know why they hadn’t just come through the open door.

. . . a game . . .

Or maybe I did.





9





adam



Adam led Zee, George, and Tony to the Benton County Coroner’s Office, a small building set in the corner of the massive criminal justice center. Technically the grocery store murder victim’s body should have gone to the Franklin County Coroner’s Office, but Benton County had a specialist for supernatural crimes, so both the boy’s body and the witch’s body had been taken there.

“You okay?” George asked.

Adam nodded. It was as close to lying as he allowed himself. His wolf was very unhappy leaving Mercy behind in the SUV.

After she’d returned to her human shape, his mate had been unusually quiet and wracked with shivers. Normally he’d have said she was in shock—but normal went out the window when dealing with Mercy. She’d refused his offer to get food for her, and with the others in the car, he hadn’t pressed. When she’d proposed that she stay in the car because her feet hurt, he’d trusted her to know best how to take care of herself.

That had been a hard-fought battle. It was his nature, man and beast, to take care of the people around him. When he was courting Mercy, he’d come to the reluctant understanding that taking control of her life—even and maybe especially for her own good—was the opposite of care. Experimentally, he’d applied that understanding to his pack, and he’d seen it become healthier, stronger. Larry the goblin king had not been wrong when he said that Mercy was changing Adam and the pack.

Still, knowing that leaving Mercy when she asked him to was the right thing to do didn’t make it any easier.

Before abandoning her in the car, he’d wrapped Mercy in his coat because she was still shivering as if the SUV heater wasn’t blowing hot enough to boil water. He’d given her a look to let her know that he expected her to tell him what was going on as soon as she could. She’d nodded. And that unspoken promise had allowed him to shut her door and leave her behind.

Shivering.

There were a lot of reasons that she could be shivering like that. All the easy ones would have been something she could talk about in front of everyone. He frowned darkly.

Neither he nor his wolf was happy with her alone in the SUV. Something more bestial than his wolf stirred to life and brought a growl rising to his lips. He stopped that before it became audible.

Mercy still believed that Elizaveta the witch had called the malformed beast into being. Mercy had thought that when she broke the witch’s curse, the evil creature—who only resembled his wolf as a tank resembled Mercy’s beloved and deceased Rabbit—should have gone away. When it lingered, she had decided it would just need time to fade.

Adam knew better.

Elizaveta might have given it form, but that beast had been his for longer than Mercy had been alive, born when a God-fearing boy, who’d thought the world was mostly a good place peopled with mostly good folk, met a war in Southeast Asia. Adam had grown that beast to protect himself and used it to wade through scenes of such horror that, even though he’d lived as a werewolf for half a century, the memories still appeared in his worst nightmares. Adam had used the beast to follow orders that no moral being would have been able to carry out, because he knew that those orders were the right ones, no matter how horrific.