“Where are you going, Mercy?” Tony called.
“Something smells bad over here,” I told him. Blood and feces is bad, right?
I left the tilled ground and broke through the edging ring of opportunistic alfalfa into cheatgrass that released spiky-painful seedpods into my tennis shoes and socks as soon as I’d traveled about two steps. I followed the too-sweet, unmistakable scent of freshly opened organs and blood to a small clearing under the trees—and stopped, appalled.
“Holy shit,” the stranger who knew me said in reverent tones. Then he shouted one of those words that don’t mean anything except “pay attention” and “come” and are designed to carry over battlefields.
This was not a battlefield, or even the remains of a battlefield. It was the remains of a slaughter.
Bodies, blood, and pieces were scattered here and there and mixed, so it took me a moment to parse exactly what I saw. I finally decided to go with heads, because heads are difficult to eat, and the charnel-house mess was definitely missing parts and maybe whole bodies. Five … no, six people, all women, two dogs—a German shepherd and something small and mixed-breed—a horse, and some other big animal whose head was either missing or might have been under something.
I have a strong stomach—I hunt rabbits, mice, and small birds while wearing my coyote skin, and I eat them raw. Before this, I would have said that lots of things make me squeamish, but fresh bodies not so much. This was so far beyond anything I’d ever seen that I flinched, looked away, then turned back to stare because part of me was sure that it couldn’t have been as bad as I first thought. It was worse.
Had someone in the pack done this? Or rather, given the volume of meat eaten, had several someones in the pack done this?
“These haven’t been here long,” I said into the silence behind me because I had to say something, do something. “Probably only since yesterday. It’s only spring, but even so, something would have started rotting in a day or so, and I don’t smell much putrefaction.”
I took a step forward to see better, and Tony grabbed my arm.
“Crime site,” he said. “We haven’t processed this. We didn’t know about this one.” He looked around. “This isn’t a make-out site, and there’s no reason for people to be walking around here. Probably wouldn’t have seen it until the guy who called us about the first body in his field came upon this by accident, too.”
“How did she know it was here?” asked the angry man who knew who I was.
“I could smell them,” I told him simply. “I’ve got a good nose—being the mate of a werewolf can bring unexpected benefits.” Both were true, just not the way I implied.
“Clay Willis, this is Mercy Hauptman. Mercy, Clay Willis,” said Tony. “Clay’s the investigator in charge. We had one body I wanted you to take a look at because it looked like it’s been eaten by something. Our guy said maybe werewolves. That kill is older than this one”—he paused and took a breath—“than these are by more than a day.”
“Could have been a werewolf,” I acknowledged reluctantly. If a werewolf had done this, he needed to be stopped yesterday. But, I thought with some relief, if it had been one of our werewolves who had taken this much prey, he’d been in the grips of some kind of frenzy, and that would have translated itself to the pack bonds. We all knew, on moon hunts, when one of us took down prey. It wasn’t one of our pack.
“I can’t tell for sure if it was werewolves from here. Maybe if I got closer.” If a werewolf had been around here, he’d taken a different route to the killing field because I couldn’t smell werewolf.
“Just tell us what you see,” Tony suggested, and raised a peremptory hand to keep the other people spread out behind us quiet.
I looked at the pile of bodies, trying to analyze what I saw rather than worry about it.
“Someone,” I began slowly, “maybe several someones—” I stopped and changed my mind. “No, it was just one killer. He had dinner, then … a play day, maybe? Opportunistic kills? Some predators, like leopards, will bring all of their prey to one place, where they can feed later.” But it didn’t really feel like that.
“Why not several someones?” Tony asked.
I tried to work that out, but my instincts said one killer, and I couldn’t tell them that. When I made a frustrated sound, Tony said, “Just from the top of your head, Mercy.”
“No sign of competition,” I said, finally, distilling what my instincts had told me. “When a pack hunts—” Someone behind me sucked in a breath.
“Werewolf packs hunt at least once a month on the full moon,” I told them firmly. “Around here, we mostly hunt rabbits or ground squirrels. Other places, they hunt deer, elk, or even moose. Just like timber wolves do, though werewolves avoid domestic animals like cattle as a matter of course.”
“Point taken,” said Willis, not sounding angry anymore, just tired.
“When wolves hunt, there is a hierarchy. Someone directs, others follow. I don’t see any signs of that. No signs that someone got the good parts—” My voice wobbled because for all my experience with killing rabbits, they were rabbits. One of the women was wearing tennis shoes that looked like a pair Jesse had in her closet. I shut up for a second to recover.
“Maybe another kind of predator would hunt differently.” I shrugged uneasily. “But I think this is the work of just one.”
Only the horse and the other big animal—which had probably been a horse, too, because I thought I could pick out the start of a mane—had been disemboweled. Predators go for organ meats first. So why had he mutilated the other bodies beyond what he’d eaten? It had been deliberate and had nothing to do with eating because there was an intact dog leg about ten feet from me, and the dog was on the far side of the pile. I breathed in, but that didn’t help. The scent of blood held no trauma for me, but the stink of terror and … more faintly, pain.
“I think you’ll find that at least some of them were mutilated while they were still alive,” I said in a low voice because I didn’t want it to be true. But my stomach cramped with knowledge that the smell of pain meant someone had hurt. It was faint because pain stops when someone dies.
“A werewolf could do this?” asked Willis.
“I told—” The wind shifted just a little, and I caught another scent. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to get below the smell of the dead.
“Magic,” I said, with my eyes still closed. It was subtle, like a good perfume, but now that I knew its flavor, it was strong. Problem was, I had no idea what kind of magic I was scenting.
“Fae?” asked someone who wasn’t Tony or Willis.
I opened my eyes and shook my head. “Fae magic smells different than this. This isn’t witchcraft, either, though it’s closer to that than to fae magic.”
“Witchcraft,” said Willis neutrally.
I nodded. It wasn’t a secret; the witches had been hiding in plain sight for a hundred years or more. In places like New Orleans or Salem (Massachusetts, not Oregon), they were virtually a tourist attraction. That human culture dismissed the validity of their claims was something the witches I know thought was a delicious irony: when they had tried to hide, they had been hunted and nearly destroyed. In the open, they were viewed as fakes—and, even more usefully, a lot of the people claiming to be witches really were fakes.
“But this wasn’t witchcraft,” I said again, in case he’d only been paying attention to part of what I’d told him. “Not any witchcraft I’ve smelled before, anyway. If you ask, Adam has someone he can send to check it out.” Elizaveta Arkadyevna was our pack witch on retainer. “She won’t agree to talk to you, but we can get the information for you if you would like.”
“Not admissible,” grunted Willis.
“Neither, probably, will Mercy’s testimony be,” agreed Tony. “But at least we won’t be running around in the dark with blindfolds on.”
Sister …
The whisper came out of nowhere. I glanced around, but no one else seemed to have heard it. A movement caught my eye—and there was a coyote crouched in the brush about fifty feet from where we all stood.
It could have been a real coyote—there are a lot of them around Finley. But I knew that the coyote was Gary Laughingdog, not because I had some sort of special way of telling walkers from coyotes—his body language said he was looking for me, and I wasn’t on speaking terms with the local coyotes. He met my eyes for a full second, then slipped away: message received and understood. He wanted to talk to me; otherwise, he would never have shown himself. Maybe he knew something about what had happened here.
I blinked at the dead a moment. Could Coyote have done this? It was a useless question because I had no idea what he was capable of. There were no stories that I knew about Coyote killing like this, but I didn’t know all the Coyote stories.
“All the women are wearing clothing,” said one of the police officers.
“Could still have been sexual assault,” said another one.
“Cougars hide their prey, so that they can eat it over a few days,” the first officer offered tentatively, and someone made a gagging noise.
I don’t think they realized I could hear them because they kept their voices down.
“Just for the record, you think this was done by something supernatural?” Tony asked me in a low voice.
“Yes. I told you, I smell magic.”
“A werewolf did this,” said Willis with authority.
I hunched my shoulders and shook my head. “The magic isn’t werewolf or fae. I might be able to do more if I can get closer.”
“You smell magic, and that means it wasn’t a werewolf?” asked Willis, sounding like he didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame him.
“I am not going to make things up just to make both of us feel better,” I said. “Werewolves smell like musk and mint. This smells like magic and scorched earth—and that is bad. Adam wouldn’t have a lot of trouble hunting down a rogue werewolf. It would be hard for one to hide from the pack more than a day or two. We can stop a werewolf—and I’ll tell Adam to keep an ear to the ground—but I don’t think this is a werewolf kill.”