Shadow Rites

It didn’t take nearly as long as it used to, to find the coiled snake of bloodhound genetic code. Suddenly I was wrapped in the Gray Between, my bones sliding and snapping and painpainpain like being flayed alive.

* * *

I stepped from the boat, putting my front paws on land, my nose so full of wonderful smells that I nearly fell into the water when the johnboat slid away from shore while my back paws were still on the boat seat. Stupid. I leaped the rest of the way and Bruiser slipped a leash around my neck, presumably so that he would have a way to pull me back if I accidentally went swamp-swimming.

He led me over mud-crusted, muddy, and some semidry ground, my big paws tripping over ruts and a two-liter cola bottle full of human urine. Fortunately it was sealed with the screw-on cap. Unfortunately other humans hadn’t been so kind and had relieved themselves behind trees, on bracken, and in the swamp water itself. The stink of human pee was everywhere.

I stopped and let the scents filter through my brain. There had been eight humans here, working up the crime scene. Seven were male, one was female. Each had his and her own particular scent pattern, and I was far better than I had been at differentiating them. I discovered that I could tell age range, race, health conditions, and that one of the men was sleeping with the woman. Dog noses were amazing.

Beneath the fresh scents were older ones, of Onorios and the humans who had helped to rescue Ming, all familiar from my Beast form. Some known intimately from my hound nose.

I opened my eyes and looked for Eli. I whined. As if able to read my mind even with me in dog shape, he reached into a thigh pocket of his cargo pants and removed a leather drawstring bag. He nursed the object inside to the lip of the bag without touching it, and dropped to his knees. I put my nose on the thing.

It smelled of iron, nitrocellulose, lead, lawn chemicals, magic and . . . the girl. I snuffled all over it, getting drool on it, but making sure I had the scent. I put my nose to the ground and began sniffing the patch of land in a grid pattern. My nose caught the scent instantly. She had been here. She been all over the site. But it had been a while.

I sniffed and learned and sniffed and . . . I understood. I froze, going as still as a vamp. Knowing. Knowing. I held the understanding inside me, my dog body still as a pointer, unmoving as the bits and pieces fell together. The scents filled my head, filled me. Filled everything and . . .

“Jane? It’s nearly dawn. You need to shift.”

I shook myself and whined. Looked up at man. At other man. Shook again, uncertain. Man held new scent pattern to my nose. I sniffed. Female, not Caucasian. Dog. Big-cat.

The part of me that was still Jane ripped aside the nose-suck and shoved the bloodhound away. I leaped to the side, ripping the leash out of Bruiser’s hand, and raced to the boat. I jumped into the johnboat, sending it waffling on the water. Bracing my paws out, keeping my balance, I realized that I was trembling with cold. Even with my dog coat.

I reached into the Gray Between.

* * *

I pulled the oversized sweats on me just as it started to rain. I was colder than I should have been, shivering, but I could worry about that later. “Y’all! I got it. And it’s bad!”

They scrambled into the boat and Bruiser started the engine with a single ripping jerk. Eli took one look at me and opened his gobag. He popped three hand warmers, tucked them under my arms and into my waistband, shook out a rain-shedding blanket, which he wrapped around me. “Thanks,” I said over the boat roar.

The warmth hit me fast and I huddled into the blanket, holding in the heat from the chemical packs. He also opened two Snickers bars and four energy bars, and I ate, not talking, thinking. I had to address the being-too-cold thing, but there were more important things to discuss, the moment we were airborne. This time, Bruiser gave me some excellent ear protectors attached to a headset and I realized that he and Eli had been chatting privately on the trip to the wildlife refuge, chatting and leaving me out. I could worry about that later, adding to the rather long list of things to deal with when my life became normal. Whatever normal was.

I swallowed the last of the Snickers without tasting the chocolate and nuts, and felt more stable as I started in on the energy bars. “I got the scent of the girl witch,” I said over the muted helo roar. “It was a mutating scent, fluctuating, morphing into something else.”

“You saying she was a skinwalker, babe?”

I wish. “No.” I looked at Bruiser. “She’s a lot more like an Onorio.”

Bruiser’s eyes met mine for a shocked heartbeat and jerked away, thoughts racing behind his eyes, the vision reminiscent of Ming’s eyes in her cage, too fast to follow. Even his scent was too fast to follow, and my nose was now spectacular by human norm.

“Bruiser?”

“Humans have attempted to become Onorio without a Mithran’s approval, holding the Mithran captive. It has never been successful. Mithrans eventually compel the human to free them and then the humans die. A witch, damping a Mithran’s ability to compel, attempting the same thing . . . If she had the formula . . . It might work. And she would be dangerous. Beyond dangerous.”

I said, “Add it to her being a homogeneous witch, one with two witch genes, one from her father and one from her mother, then things get kinda freaky. And this witch chick is freaky. Bad, sick, nutso, got her panties in a wad, wants to blow up the world, mad über-supervillain freaky.

“Worse,” I said. “Or maybe not worse but adding to the problem in ways I can’t describe, there are other scents. Ming. Iron and salt. Other humans. Two in particular, male, who might be distantly related to her. Cousins. Maybe. Something like that.”