I nodded and sniffed the air for myself. The only strong scents in the cabin belonged to Hargrove and another human man, whom we were assuming to be Darren.
At my right, Abby exhaled deeply. “I smell a few unfamiliar strays, but those scents are older and pretty weak. Other than a faint trace of the same chemicals we found in Hargrove’s basement, I don’t smell anything unexpected.” Tension melted from her frame with the discovery—until her gaze found what hadn’t been visible from outside. The top of the living room wall was lined with the stuffed, mounted heads of dead shifters. And not just cats. There were also a bruin and the bizarrely posed heads and long slender necks of two thunderbirds.
“Please tell me that’s not Elias Keller,” she whispered, nodding toward the mounted bear’s head.
“It’s not. But he’ll need to know about it.” Bruins were largely solitary creatures, but if anyone knew how to warn the other bear shifters about the hunters, it would be Keller.
I studied the kitchen, looking for anything out of the ordinary, but other than a vertical gun rack on the floor next to the refrigerator, the kitchen looked normal. If dim and dirty.
A hallway to the left led to three more rooms that I could see, and a single door on the other side of the kitchen was open to show a small pantry.
At my signal, the guys headed for the hallway, but Warner stopped on the way to pull a ratty blanket from the back of the couch and drape it over our fallen, gruesomely stuffed brother.
While they searched the back rooms, I kept Abby in the front of the house with me, and I could practically feel her revving up for another argument about her own usefulness as an enforcer. But then her focus snagged on a framed photo sitting on an end table next to what at first appeared to be a bronze sculpture of a giant talon, but was, in fact, an actual thunderbird talon dipped in bronze.
She picked up the frame while I was rifling through kitchen drawers. “Hey, Jace, come look at this.”
I joined her in the living room, where she held the photo up for me to see. Two other men were in the picture with Hargrove, and it took all three of them to hold up the body of a well-muscled black cat, at least six feet in length, not including his tail.
I took the picture from her and my hand clenched around the frame. “That’s Leo.”
Leo had been Mateo’s roommate in the east cabin until he’d gone missing several months before. We’d found no sign of him until Abby’d discovered his head hanging on the wall of the hunter’s cabin she’d been lured to back in October.
“And that’s Steve.” She pointed to the hunter on Hargrove’s left in the photo, as if I could possibly have forgotten the man who’d tried to kill her. The man whose throat she’d ripped out, putting her on my radar as an adult for the first time. “This other guy has to be Darren, don’t you think?” She tapped the third man in the photo.
“I don’t want to rule anything out this early, but that’s a good possibility.”
“Check this out.” Abby turned to a set of built-in shelves to the left of the fireplace, where a dozen more photos had been lined up and pushed to the back of the shelf, not like a woman would display them, with artful angles and pretty frames, but like I would. That was a bachelor’s work if I’d ever seen it.
“Hargrove’s only in a few of these,” she pointed out. “But every single one of them shows this guy.” She tapped on the face of the unidentified man holding Leo’s front half in that first picture. “This has to be his cabin, right?” I nodded, but she was already pulling another frame from the shelf. “Look. In nearly half of these, he’s wearing a police jacket.”
Sure enough, the picture she shoved at me showed the unidentified man in a navy nylon jacket with the word police written on one side.
“Well, that would explain how he knew to remove those photos of you before the rest of the cops showed up. Especially if he was the one who took them.” The implications were startling. A human cop knew about us, but rather than alert the government—or even the internet—he’d decided to hunt us into extinction for his own psychotic pleasure. Which confirmed my longstanding suspicion that most of the world’s true monsters were human.
“Okay, we’re clear.” Mateo stepped into the living room. “No one’s here, and there’s nothing incriminating in either of the bedrooms or in the bathroom. Nothing at all that I can see, except that.” He pointed to the blanket-covered taxidermied stray.
“And this.” Abby showed him the picture of the hunters posing with his roommate’s body.
Teo’s hands curled into fists. “I’m going to rip them into tiny pieces.”