Night Broken (Mercy Thompson 8)

The kneeling woman was petting the severed head of the German shepherd. She looked up, and her eyes met mine, just as Gary Laughingdog’s had. And then I realized what I was looking at and why no one else seemed to notice her. I see ghosts.

“Find the one who did this,” she told me sternly.

I gave her a little nod, and Willis caught my shoulder.

“What do you see?” he asked. “What made you turn back?”

“Only the dead,” I answered. “And I intend to help them as best I can.”

He wasn’t satisfied, but I thought he knew I was telling the truth.

6

The original crime scene had only one body, another woman. She lay in the middle of the hayfield in a section, roughly square, that had nothing at all growing in it. The soil was black, and it stained the bottom of my tennis shoes with soot. Someone had burned a chunk of field and put the dead woman in it like the bull’s-eye of a target.

“Staged,” I said.

“Yes,” agreed Tony. “And we’ll let the scene experts have their way, but, like Willis, I’m reading the other bodies the same way. Arranged for maximum effect.”

Unlike the other women, this one had been partially eaten. The soft flesh of her abdomen was completely gone and most of the thigh muscles. Something with big, sharp teeth had gnawed on the bones exposed by the missing flesh.

I stopped about five feet from the body and smelled. A lot of people had been roaming around the area, and if I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have scented the same magic I’d detected at the other site. Magic, death—the bare remnants of the pain and fear that had also been present with the other bodies. Over it all hung a pall of burnt grass and earth. I didn’t smell any kind of volatile compound, though maybe the circle had been burned a few days earlier. Some things—like alcohol—evaporate pretty fast.

“I think it’s the same killer,” I said.

“We don’t get so many murders around here—especially where the victims are partially eaten—that anyone is going to argue with you,” said Willis. “But what are you basing that on?”

“The smell of magic is the same—and he killed her the same way he took out one of the horses,” I told him. You see enough hunts, you pay attention to how prey is killed. “He tore out the throat and ate it before disemboweling her, just like he did the horse. A lot of predators develop a favorite style of kill.”

I took a step closer, and the slight change in angle highlighted the ground. Paw prints, canid and huge, dug into the barren earth. They were bigger than my hand when I set it beside them. A timber wolf’s paw prints would have been bigger, too—but these were a lot bigger than any timber wolf’s.

“Not werewolf,” I said with a relieved sigh. “Werewolves have retractable claws that don’t dig into the dirt unless they are running—almost like a cougar’s. These have claw marks like any other canid.”

“Werewolves have retractable claws?” asked the officer who’d been still at the scene when we came here. “I’m forensics; why didn’t anyone ever tell me that? I can’t look for werewolves if I know squat about them. Do you have a werewolf who will let me examine him for a while?” The last question was directed at me.

“You’ll have to ask Adam,” I told her. Who would have to ask Bran, which I didn’t tell her.

“So what was it?” Most of the cops had stayed at the other site, but a couple of others had followed Willis, Tony, and me. It was one of those who asked.

“I don’t know,” I told him.

I knelt beside the body and put my nose down as close to the dead woman as I could get. She had been here longer and was beginning to rot. I sorted through odors as quickly as I could.

Between the rot and the burnt smell, it was difficult.

I sat up. “I definitely smell a canid, though not coyote, wolf, werewolf, or any dog I’ve smelled.” I looked at Tony. “I’d like to be more help. I’ll recognize the way our killer smells if I run into it again. If you want, we can have some of the werewolves take a shot at identifying it.”

“We are taking her word that it isn’t a werewolf?” asked Willis, disbelief in his voice. “The wife of the Alpha?”

“Yes,” said Tony. “We’re taking her word—but we’ll let forensics double-check. Would a werewolf have a better chance of identifying it than you, Mercy?”

My nose was as good as most werewolves’, better than some. But Samuel was very old, and he’d run into a lot of things over the centuries. He was not a member of the pack, but he’d come look if they’d let him.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” said Willis before I could express an opinion. “If this isn’t a werewolf, then we don’t want to bring any in to confuse the issue. Having Ms. Hauptman here is pushing it as it is.”

Willis dusted off his hands and looked at me thoughtfully. “This was not a werewolf?”

“No,” I said.

He pursed his mouth. “Damned if I don’t believe you. Whatever did this isn’t human.”

“Something supernatural,” Tony said.

I nodded. “I don’t know how to prove it, without anyone being able to smell this magic.”

“Fae, then,” said one of the other cops. “I’ve read all the fairy tales. The black dog is the most common of the shapes they take. Meet a black dog at the crossing of two roads or hear the call of the Gabriel Hounds, and you are sure to die.”

I shook my head. “Doesn’t smell like fae—and they have all retreated to the reservation, anyway.”

“There are other things out there besides werewolves and fae?” asked Willis.

I got to my feet and dusted the dirt off my jeans before I answered him. “What do you think?” I asked.

He frowned unhappily.

I nodded. “That’s what I think, too. I’ve never come across whatever did this. But judging from the tracks and the amount of meat he ate in a very short time—whatever this is, it is bigger than any werewolf I’ve been around. That means more than three hundred pounds.”

“On the way over, you just explained to me that you didn’t think it was a good thing to tell people that there were other things out there besides werewolves and fae,” Tony commented.

I waved my hand toward the crowd of police officers by the copse of trees. “If something is out there doing this, then I think that it’s too late to worry about what is safe for the public to believe in. This … I don’t know what this is. Finding out and stopping it is more important to public safety than trying to not make them paranoid.”