Soul Taken

8

“Well now,” said Zee, cleaning his hands with the gritty orange soap we used to get tough grease and other substances off. “You stepped on a spider-like half-fae creature and got punctured. And the vampire told you to have me check your feet.” He paused. “In a dream.”

“It sounds really stupid when you say it like that,” I told him, in an irritated voice that was meant to cover up the butterflies in my stomach. I suddenly really, really didn’t want him to look at my feet.

He dried his hands off and then looked at me. “I can’t help how it sounds, Liebchen.”

The phone rang, and he gave a hiss of irritation and his eyes flashed with real temper. “I am going to pull that thing out of the wall,” he growled. He looked at Adam and lowered his lids in consideration—the expression made him look like a fiend contemplating the next child he was going to eat.

“You,” he said, “and you.” He looked at Adam and then George. “Go out and answer the phone. Keep the people who come to bother me—”

“Customers?” said Adam dryly.

Zee brushed that away with a flick of his fingers. “Customers. Pests. Nenn sie wie Du willst.”

“Let’s call them customers, please,” I said. “They pay me so I can pay you.”

Zee snorted dismissively and waved his hands at my mate and George. “Go and tell them we are closed for an hour at least.”

I waited . . . hoped . . . for Adam to take offense at Zee’s tone. Then maybe I could delay Zee examining my feet.

Adam gave me a shrewd look, jerked his head at George—who was the one who looked stung by Zee’s attitude. When Adam closed the door behind him, it did have a bit of a snap, but he left me alone with Zee anyway.

And that was good, right? Because I needed Zee to look at my feet. I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t want him to do it.

“I cannot do this,” Zee told me with a frown, “without a payment.”

Which was the beginning of negotiations. There were good reasons for the fae to bargain when you asked them for favors. Balance was very important for fae magic, and it ran in their blood and bones the way that the need for success ran in human culture. Despite the shard of hope I felt at his first words, it soon became apparent that Zee was feeling mellow. Or maybe he was worried about my feet, because he didn’t bargain very hard.

As payment for his doctoring, he demanded I tell him everything that had happened, starting with my bruised face and ending with me sitting on the cold concrete floor of the shop with my feet in Zee’s lap while he sat on the short mechanic’s stool.

I’d negotiated so I could leave out the bit about Sherwood because that was pack business and had nothing to do with the mess the vampires were in. I could probably have left out the part about the missing and dead witches—and the dead young man at the grocery store. But Zee was a useful source of information. The more I told him, the better the chances were that if he knew something, he could tell me about it.

“Spiders,” said Zee thoughtfully as he ran a grease-darkened finger over the bottom of my foot.

I had been getting more and more uncomfortable, almost jittery. My hands and butt were too cold from the chill concrete. The garage stank of burnt oil, diesel fuel, and rubber—which it always did, but now it made me feel as though I couldn’t breathe. The overhead lights were too bright. Mostly, I very much didn’t want the old iron-kissed fae to put his hands on my feet. Not at all.

Overcome by a desperate urgency, I pulled one of my feet away, but managed to keep from trying to free the one Zee was holding. Zee’s eyebrow went up—and he tightened his hand around the ankle of the foot he still held.

Adam opened the door and stuck his head in the garage bay. “What’s wrong?” he said sharply. He must have felt my sudden panic.

“Mercy has been infected by a particularly malicious bit of magic,” said Zee clinically. “Next time some fae spider shoves a bit of themselves into her, could you bring her to me right away? It would have been a lot easier to fix right after it happened.”

When I jerked my leg, he kept his hold on my ankle without visible effort.

“I think,” Zee said thoughtfully, “that you and your comrade should clear out the office, lock the door, and put up the ‘Closed’ sign. When you are done, both of you come in here. This will take a bit longer than I had assumed.”

He glanced toward the front of the garage, and the motors that powered the bay doors switched on. The big doors clanged and shivered and closed me in.

I didn’t actually see much while Zee was working on my feet because I spent most of the time facedown on the concrete. George held me down with a knee between my shoulders and both hands wrapped around my wrists, which he held in the small of my back.

It wasn’t comfortable at all, the kind of hold that would usually be used on someone Adam felt was really dangerous. But I’d broken free of the first two holds they’d tried. Adam had a leg over the back of my knees and held my feet so I couldn’t kick anyone while Zee worked.

“Certain kinds of fae can reproduce this way; several of those share some characteristics with spiders. Though they like to claim that spiders share characteristics with them,” Zee said as he worked. “Some of them have bodies covered with fine quills designed to break off inside their victim’s flesh.”

The foot he worked on burned, and flashes of electric pain shot up my leg and through my spine and wrapped around my forehead like one of those awful contraptions that black-and-white science fiction and horror movies so love. I screamed.

Unfazed, Zee continued talking. “The bits become the equivalent of fertilized eggs. Once that happens, they release a magical contaminate to turn their host into a guardian who will defend them in whatever way possible.”

There was a metallic clink. It sounded just like when Zee dropped a nut into a tin pan. I couldn’t see what he was doing because George didn’t allow me enough freedom to turn my head far enough. I grew convinced that he was breaking off pieces of my feet and what I’d heard was the sound of my discarded bones—now turned to gems by the dangerous old smith.

“If you had waited much longer,” Zee said, “we’d have had to find one of the healers to deal with it, and the cost for that would be a lot higher than a story.”

“Story?” Adam’s voice was rough with the wolf’s rage.

“Mercy paid me with the story of what happened last night—except for some pack business, which we both agreed could be private. She told me about the vampires and Stefan, the missing witches and the dead people. I might have a little to add to that.” There were several more clinks.

It took him about twenty-five minutes to do my feet. By the time he’d started on my second foot—which apparently had absorbed fewer bits of spider—my determination to stop him at all costs was mostly gone. That allowed me to quit screaming, though by then my throat was raw.

“Better?” Zee asked.

I nodded. “George can get off of me.”

“No.” Zee’s voice was firm. “I’m not done. Stay where you are, George.”

On my back George stiffened at Zee’s tone, but he didn’t say anything. I wondered what had put the old fae in such a foul mood. Now that I was thinking more clearly, it had been odd for Zee to be so abrasive earlier. I had hoped that Adam would take offense—but Zee usually didn’t go out of his way to push like that. He liked Adam and understood the role of an Alpha wolf.

The earlier rudeness I could attribute to worry over me. Maybe. But to act that way now was odd. I thought of Izzy’s story of Zee rescuing her and the way it had worried me. Most of the time Zee acted like—no. He was a grumpy old mechanic who showed his soft heart to very few people. But there was another truth, a Zee who was more. An ancient being who was brutal and dangerous, and that old fae was capable of serving a father wine in the bejeweled skull of his child.

When Zee finished with me, I was covered in sweat and dirt. My throat hurt and my shoulders were sore. I sported more bruises—though none that would be visible if I wore long sleeves. My wrists weren’t even sore, though George had had to hold me hard—the fine balance must be some skill he’d learned as a police officer. Or as a BDSM participant.

Both of my feet were sore—the right one was a lot worse than the left.

“I am glad my corpse isn’t going to be giving birth to six-legged spider-thingies,” I told Zee, my voice hoarse, which was as close to thanking him as I could get.

We’d agreed on a payment, but thanking him would place me in obligation to him. He wouldn’t do anything about it, but he’d worry and lecture.

“You fought the fae in your coyote form,” Zee said thoughtfully.

“Yes.”

“Let me see your hands,” he said.

If Adam hadn’t been standing between me and my best exit, if his reactions hadn’t been what they were, I might have escaped.

Adam held me wrapped in his arms, trapping my legs between his, while George held the hand Zee wasn’t working on.

My hands took longer than my feet had.

When Zee was done, Adam sat on another stool with my sweat-stained, dirt-covered self in his arms. I buried my face in his shoulder and breathed. Letting his scent—he’d broken a sweat, too—remind me that I was myself again. If I had needed a reminder that there were worse things than being linked to a vampire, one that I mostly trusted, this had been it.

“So,” said Zee, “I told you that I have an addition to the story Mercy told me. She said the grocer saw the Harvester, the villain in the horror movie, in his rearview mirror?”

That distracted me from my fit of post-terror shakes. Not that Zee had picked out that aspect of the story I’d told him, but that Zee knew the name of a character in a movie. Zee didn’t go to movies, and seldom—if ever—watched TV.

“Yes,” George said. From his tone of voice, he was still ruffled by Zee’s rudeness.

“In the movie, the main character acquired a sickle that turned him into the Harvester.”

“Zee?” I asked slowly. “Did you see the movie?”

He narrowed his eyes. “What of it?”

“It hasn’t actually opened yet,” I told him. “Did you see it last night?”

“Yes.” His face dared me to make something of it.

“Did you follow Tad?” I asked. Then I held up a hand. “Wait. Izzy said you fixed her car for her.” I stared at him. “Did you ensure that her tire would go flat at a time when she would naturally call here?” She hadn’t called, though, had she? “Or that Jesse, hearing how close Izzy’s car was, would call you to help her?”

He flattened his lips and didn’t reply.

I sat up straight on Adam’s lap, put my feet on the floor, and then pulled them up again because that had hurt. “Is Izzy in danger from you?”

“Everyone is in danger from me,” the old fae snarled.

“Is she in danger from you because she and Tad are dating?” Getting information out of the fae depended upon asking the right questions.

“If she is no threat to my son’s well-being,” Zee said carefully, “then she has nothing to worry about from me.”

We stared at each other.

“There are some things our friendship would not recover from,” I told him. “Harming Izzy is one of them.”

He angled his head, as if in thought. “I will agree,” he said slowly, “to accept your arbitration if she hurts my son.”

“You won’t do anything to her without talking to me about it,” I interpreted. “And if I tell you to leave her alone, you will do so.”

He nodded his head abruptly, and I relaxed.

“Unless he dated while he was back East in college, Tad hasn’t had a serious girlfriend before,” said Adam thoughtfully. “I get where you are coming from.”

There was so much sympathy in his voice that I craned my neck around so I could see him.

“You didn’t follow Jesse around,” I said.

Adam didn’t reply.

“I am disappointed in both of you,” said George solemnly. Then he ruined it by saying, “Zee, you have great magics at your beck and call and you followed Tad around like a mere mortal. Adam, you have all the spy-tech anyone could ask for, and a whole pack of werewolves to call upon.”

“Tech would have been a betrayal,” Adam said. “If Jesse’d caught me skulking around, she’d have had my hide. But if she found out I was watching her with cameras . . . she would never trust me again.”

I’d been watching Zee’s face.

“He caught you,” I said, amazed. Thoughtlessly, I put my feet on the ground so I could lean forward, but then pulled them back up again. “Tad caught you when you followed them to the theater.”

Zee’s face and his whole body stiffened for an instant, then he relaxed and a huge grin lit his face. “That boy is smart like his mama,” he said. “I am proud.”

And that’s why he’d given in when I confronted him about Izzy. Tad knew about the car thing, too. I relaxed further. Zee couldn’t do anything to Izzy without Tad finding out. And that made Izzy a whole lot safer.

“You were going to tell us about the Harvester?” I suggested.

“Of course,” said Zee, his smile fading. “This is a film about a man possessed by a sickle—which, for some reason I do not understand, they called a scythe.”

“We heard about that,” Adam commented.

“Ja, gut,” Zee said. “In the movie, this sickle drives the man to kill—and then to stalk and kill in more and more elaborate ways, ja?”

“Okay,” I said.

“There was such a sickle,” Zee said heavily. “I do not know how it came here, to this place. But about forty years ago, some damned fool boy found it—or was given it. This sickle is sentient—like your walking stick, Mercy. But it is more than that. It conscripts people to its purpose. This boy, he started killing people.”

“People?” George asked with a frown.

Zee nodded. “But the victims were carefully chosen. Magic in their blood, but not too much. No one tied with a larger group—no vampires, no black witches, no greater fae. A few lesser fae, goblins, white witches, a weak gray witch, half-bloods of any of the preternatural folk.”

“Are you saying that this sickle is sentient enough to make those kinds of calculations?” Adam asked.

“I am telling what happened,” said Zee curtly.

“We don’t have enough bodies to have a pattern,” George said. “A witch, yes. But the second victim is human.”

Zee didn’t address that directly. “There was a policeman. In those days we hid ourselves, but there are mortals whose eyes are open. They do not try to find mundane explanations for inexplicable things. This policeman was one of those. When he saw bodies slashed to pieces as if someone were harvesting wheat . . . he did not look at them and think a normal human had killed them. His involvement concerned someone who decided to do something about the situation. She had an inkling about what was happening, and so did I come to the Tri-Cities. The sickle was not of my making, but she didn’t know that.”

Zee shrugged and straightened a few tools on one of the rolling carts, his face casually turned away from the rest of us. I wondered if it was indignation at answering a summons, but I didn’t think that he’d have hidden that.

My phone rang.

I dug it out of my pocket, but I was watching Zee and caught a glimpse of his expression.

Avarice was one of the deadly sins, wasn’t it?

I glanced at my phone’s screen. The caller’s number was unavailable. Thinking about what I’d seen on Zee’s face, I hit the green button.

“Hello?” I’d called Samuel this morning, looking for information on Sherwood. He hadn’t picked up, so I’d left a message. Sometimes his calls registered as unavailable.

“Hello?” I said.

Silence. Telemarketing companies sometimes auto-dialed and ended up with more calls than their people could handle at once. They usually hung up after a few seconds. This one didn’t.

I couldn’t hear anyone breathing, but I could hear something. Faint whispers of the wind and traffic. Something set the hair on the back of my neck crawling. I knew it wasn’t Samuel on the other end. I don’t know how or why, but it didn’t feel like Samuel.

“Stefan?” I asked.

With a click the call disconnected.

“Mercy?” Adam asked.

I shook my head. Now that I’d disconnected, I couldn’t put my finger on why I’d gotten so freaked-out. I flexed my hands and they hurt. I shivered.

“Mercy? Was it Stefan?” Adam’s voice centered me.

“It’s nothing. Paranoia.” I waved my hand, taking in the daylight streaming through the skylights. “It’s daytime. Stefan would be asleep—and he’s not likely to call me and then not talk.” Some vampires could function during the day. Wulfe could. “It was a telemarketer.” By then I was able to make the last sentence a truthful one. “Anyone spiked by spider-fae-from-hell gets to be paranoid for a few hours.”

“I can find out who it was.” Adam took out his own phone and texted.

George grinned. “Are your people illegally hacking into the phone system?” he asked. “Again?”

“You are a cop,” Adam said. “How stupid do I look?”

“If you can’t find anything, you can give it to me,” George offered. “I have friends.”

I looked at Zee. “Do you see what I have to put up with? A telemarketer calls and all hell breaks loose.”

“I told you what would happen when you started dating an Alpha werewolf,” Zee said without sympathy.

The call over–dealt with, George’s face grew serious. “How many people died, Zee?” he asked. “When was this? I’ve served my time on cold cases and attended some serial killer seminars, a couple focusing specifically on the ones who operate or have operated in Washington, and I haven’t heard about people being killed with a sickle.”

“You would not have heard of this,” Zee said. “Most of the victims were never reported—like your disappearing witches. I think there were official reports on three—though those were destroyed. The situation was managed so that nothing was publicized, and the investigating officer was shut down.” Zee frowned. “I did not like that part. He was a good man doing a hard job, and the way he was quieted was crude. He quit his job soon after.”

“You caught the killer,” I said.

“It stopped,” Zee told me heavily. “It was not me. The sickle and the boy it had used were left for me. They were left where Uncle Mike could find them, but it was understood by both of us that they were left for me.”

“What happened to the sickle?” Adam asked.

“I destroyed it.” Zee’s lip curled. “It was crude old black craft. Witchcraft.” He paused as if reconsidering his opinion. “Effective,” he allowed. “But still crude.”

“Bodies slashed as if they were harvested wheat,” George said. “That’s how I’d describe the boy last night. But you destroyed the sickle.”

“I destroyed a sickle,” Zee said. “One that was presented to me as the murder weapon. It was not the sickle I’d come here to find.”

A thoughtful silence followed his words.

“I should have heard about them,” George said with certainty. “Paperwork or no paperwork, people saw the bodies. Whoever hushed it up did a good job.”

“And yet”—Adam’s voice was careful—“we have a movie.”

“Yes,” Zee said. “We have a movie. Based on whatever stories an old policeman told his grandson. Outside of the broad strokes—a killer controlled by a cursed sickle—the movie is completely fictional.”

“Huh,” I said. “I guess I’m going to have to go to the movies.” I looked at Adam. “Date night.”

He nodded but didn’t look happy about it. Slasher-type horror movies were not healthy fare for a werewolf. Sudden noises, too much tension, and a theater packed with fear-laden people was a recipe for disaster.

“You could take Tad instead,” suggested Zee. “When I told him this morning that the story of the Harvester was based on an actual occurrence, he sounded as though he planned on watching it a second time.”

“The kid at the grocery store could certainly have been killed with a sickle,” George said, not to be distracted by a movie. His phone chimed and he looked at it. “Tony says he’s ready to leave the Kennewick crime scene to the forensic people. If we go now, Tony will meet us at the grocery store in Pasco.”

I eyed Zee. “How would you like to come with us to look at a crime scene?”

Zee shook his head. “No.”

“You are staying here,” Adam told me firmly. “Your feet hurt.”

We all went, of course.

“Alpha werewolf meets coyote,” murmured George gleefully from the back of Adam’s SUV as I hopped in. “Fae—”

“Stop,” said Zee, climbing in beside him.

George didn’t lose his grin, but he quit talking. George was not stupid.

The grocery store was closed.

“We don’t want to hinder any investigation,” the manager said as he locked the front doors behind us.

He was a solidly built man in his late forties or early fifties, his hair the silvery-wheat color of a platinum blond going gray. He had a rounded, Santa Claus–type face, an impression that was enhanced by a short white beard. He’d given me a sharp look but hadn’t said anything.

“You need to find out what happened to that poor boy.” He sounded a little fierce.

“Was it you who saw something in your rearview mirror?” Adam asked.

He shook his head. “Nope. That was Andy. Andy Vargas.” He paused, keys halfway to his pocket. “Andy isn’t someone you’d think would make things up,” he said soberly. “He’s an honest man, and he was terrified last night.” He shrugged. “Today he’s mortified and regrets saying anything to anyone. He is convinced it was someone in a costume.”

I put my nose to the floor and did a quick sniff around the entrance. There were a lot of scents, nothing that stood out as unusual to me.

“Excuse me,” the manager said, a little diffidently, “is that a coyote?”

Adam nodded. “It is. She’ll give us a little more insight into what happened.”

“You didn’t bring one of your—” The manager fumbled to a stop as Adam looked at him. It’s uncomfortable for a man used to being in charge to meet someone like Adam.

My mate smiled, and the manager relaxed. “I didn’t think you needed any more monsters here,” he said.

“You aren’t monsters,” said the manager unexpectedly. “I live out in West Pasco. Your wolves took down that zombie cow not a hundred yards from my house, and my grandchildren were home visiting.”

Adam’s head tilted. “Thank you for that. Let’s say, I didn’t want to scare anyone any more than we had to, then. And she’s better for something like this anyway.”

“A coyote?” asked the manager.

“Mostly.” Adam considered me. “Let’s go directly to where the boy was murdered first. Then see if she can track the killer either backward or forward.”

The manager led us directly to the back area and stopped in front of a wide swinging door. “It’s just beyond here,” he said with a nervous smile. “I’ll leave you to it. If you need anything, I’ll be up in the offices doing paperwork. Otherwise, when you’re done, you can leave via any of the exit doors—they lock automatically.”

“Thank you,” George said. “We’ll be fine.”

The manager’s sigh of relief as he walked away would probably not have been audible to a normal human. We followed George through the door to the murder scene.

It was, I supposed, exactly what anyone would expect the loading bay of a grocery store to look like. A forklift was parked in one corner next to a stack of orange traffic cones and a bunch of tent-type signs leaning against the wall. The one I could see read Caution: Wet Floor.

A bay roll-up door large enough for a semi was flanked by two more doors. On the far side, between the big door and the wall, was a second roll-up door, this one sized for a forklift. The nearer door was a push-bar type with an Exit sign overhead. Next to that door, covered with warning signs, was a machine used to flatten cardboard boxes for recycling. I knew that because it was full of flattened cardboard boxes, now drenched in blood.

Fenced off by crime scene tape hung over plastic delineator posts, the forklift, the push-bar door, the nearest walls, and about a ten-foot square of concrete floor were also covered with dried blood. Some of it pooled on the floor, but a lot of it was scattered around in sprays of various heights on walls.

Looking at the blood-spattered area, I recalled Lady Macbeth’s line: Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? I was a predator and I killed—mostly mice and rabbits. Blood usually didn’t bother me. But there was something about the blood spray here that made me feel less like a predator and more like prey.

I’d been with packs of werewolves when they took down elk and once a moose. Both of those had a lot more blood volume than a human-sized body did. And yet . . .

“It’s as though whoever did this wanted to spread the mess as far as they possibly could,” said Adam. “A lot of this is blood cast from the weapon the killer used. I’ve seen something like this before, when I went into the jungle with Christiansen a few years ago—”

David Christiansen had been Changed at the same time as Adam. David ran a small group of mercenaries who specialized in rescuing ransom victims.

“We were after a drug lord over there who killed people in particularly gory ways in order to terrify people—his followers as much as his enemies.” Adam’s eyes drifted high up on the wall. “It worked.”

“We’ve been asked to stay outside of the taped area,” George said.

Zee dropped down to squat on his heels in a way that no one who looked as old as Zee did should be able to and examined the room. He tipped his head so he could see the high spatter on the walls.

“Four cuts, you said”—Zee stood up again—“as the body fell.” His arm made a different motion than George’s had when he’d been describing the killing blows. George had been graceful and quick. Zee’s were also quick, but they were jerks back toward himself rather than a fluid figure eight.

“That’s not how the body looked.” George frowned, watching him. “The cuts are in the front.”

“Then the victim was facing away from the killer,” said Zee. He frowned at the blood pattern, then nodded. “A sickle is sharp on the inside curve. You used it in a circular sweep, hooking back toward yourself. Assuming the murder weapon is a sickle. But this is not dissimilar from the single kill site I saw before our sickle wielder died.” He frowned at the patterns of blood spray. “If we are not looking at a repeat of history, this”—he waved a hand—“could be done with a long knife, I suppose. I could tell you if I saw the body.”

“I was planning on taking Adam to see the body,” George said.

“I will go also.” Zee dusted his hands off, though I had not seen him touch anything. “Mercy, have you found our killer’s scent?”

Ah yes, I had a job here, too. Part of the compromise I’d made with Adam was to wear my coyote shape. Thirty-five pounds divided over four feet was easier on my wounds than my human weight on two feet. It hurt for sure, but I wasn’t going to let anyone see it. The nice thing about four sore feet is that limping isn’t much of an issue.

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.

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.