“I could have killed her,” he moaned.
I opened my eyes, meeting the deep brown of Maximus’. His anguish was visible.
“Stop,” I said. “It was my own stupid fault. I know better than to jump in between you all fighting.”
“Yes, you’re in big fucking trouble, Jessa.” Braxton’s voice had that edge; he was close to losing control again. “And you are going to tell us what happened with your parents. Clearly, it was something bad enough to make you suicidal.”
Maximus still hadn’t put me down; he seemed unable to let go.
Jacob burst into the room then. All of our heads swiveled in his direction.
“There’s been another death,” he said. “Someone killed a vamp.”
I exhaled. The quads might let me get away with my hedging on what had happened with my family in the forest. Murder was a pretty big distraction.
As the five of us ran toward the gathering in the forest, Braxton quizzed his brothers hard, trying to determine the reason they’d decided to use each other’s faces as a punching bag. The most we got out of them was that Maximus was defending Mischa’s honor and Tyson was feeling a little distrustful toward the new arrivals. Our stilted conversation halted as the stench of death reached us. We were still a hundred yards from the scene. As we moved closer, the crowds came into view; already there was a crowd of onlookers.
I found it a little odd that there were so many people around the corpse. Generally the council would have cleared the evidence by now. I pushed through the masses of supernaturals who were gathered in a circle around the kill zone. I cursed as the scene came into focus. What the hell was going on? Vampires were notoriously hard to kill. The constant influx of new blood gave them amazing healing and regeneration abilities, but someone had cut off the victim’s head. The body was slumped against the large roots of the redwood, and a long machete had been speared through the skull, pinning it to the trunk.
“Is that Markus?” Jacob cursed. “Shit, he was like a hundred years old.”
Which meant whoever killed him had been strong and powerful, able to resist his vampire compulsion. Not to mention crazy-as-hell, judging by the scene we were seeing. Which was a scary concept.
“No blood and no bite marks.” Braxton was sidling closer for a better look. “This is not the kill scene. He was moved.” He lowered his head close to my ear. “Do you scent anything strange?”
I closed my eyes and tried to focus my nose on the scene, filtering out all of the scents which had nothing to do with the murder. The most demanding smell was still that of death. It was a recent kill so there wasn’t an overpowering smell of decay and excrement, but it was still there. I wrinkled my nose, moving past that to anything else strange. Forest smells and … coconut.
“I smell coconut oil and something flowery,” I murmured as I opened my eyes.
Braxton nodded, “Yes, coconut and lavender.”
He was right, they were was the underlying scents.
Why was that ringing with some familiarity in my head? That combination was something I’d smelled before. I turned and saw Tyson. “Didn’t one of the spells you used – to find the prison – use those two ingredients?”
“Yes,” Tyson bit out. “And it’s a spell I created. The scented oil was designed as a trail marker to take us to the prison.”
I twisted my head back to the morbid scene. “Does that mean someone has left us a trail to lead to the killer? Or are they trying to implicate Ty as the killer?”
“Fuck!” Braxton clenched his fists. “Those marks on the tree, do they look like claw marks from a rather large animal?”
I’d been so focused on the head speared to the tree I hadn’t noticed there were two large gashes out of the bark. I examined them, and they were definitely a familiar shape and size. I didn’t need to be an evidence magic user to know those claw marks would probably line up perfectly to Braxton’s dragon. There was no reason for the Compasses to have killed Markus. Note I did not say they weren’t capable, they were more than capable, but they would need a reason. Someone was staging this scene to implicate them.
At the moment of that realization, arms grabbed around me, tightening across my chest and yanking me backwards. I was dragged ten feet away before the boys realized I was gone. They spun as one, coming at me, but in unison stopped when they saw who held me. I hadn’t scented him at all, he’d cloaked himself so he could take me unawares. But the large ring on his middle finger was familiar enough that already my skin was starting to crawl. Kristoff.
The sorcerer had one hand wrapped around my throat. “We left this scene here to draw you Compasses into public. The four of you need to come quietly.” He almost sounded gleeful. “I will keep a hold of Jessa until you allow the council guards to cuff you.”