“There’s really another body?” Jesse asked as he joined me. I nodded. Jesse was silent for a long moment, and when I glanced over, he was visibly distressed. So much for trying to catch the guy before he could kill anyone else. We walked toward the house, with Jesse going extra slow and me working extra hard to keep up. It worked, sort of. It seemed to take forever for me to get out and make my way toward the door, even after Jesse took my duffel bag for me. Will was waiting outside when we made our way to the wooden walkway next to his house. The alpha werewolf paced back and forth, looking cornered and agitated. He had stuffed a towel in the crack underneath the front door, and I realized it was to keep the smell out. Or rather, to keep the smell in. That meant that the smell of the body had gotten to Will, whose control had always been so total. I shivered in my thick sherpa hoodie, spooked.
Will hurried to meet us on the walkway, possibly so we could talk, or possibly to get in my radius quicker. “I brought her inside, just like last night,” he said abruptly. “I figured that would cut down on the amount of flooring I have to replace.” Now inside my radius, he took a deep, relieved breath, as though he’d just popped out of the water after a deep dive.
“Was it a werewolf again?” I asked, and Will gave me a tight nod.
“Same one. I could smell him.”
I nodded back, glancing at Jesse. His jaw was clenched tight, and he looked as agitated as Will. “I should have been here,” he muttered. “I should have been watching the house.”
I winced. Will tilted his head quizzically, and I explained, “He thought we should stake out your place, but I told him the guy wouldn’t be able to change for a few more days.”
Will shook his head. “I would have said the same thing. He shouldn’t be able to change this quickly.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Will admitted. “Come inside. We’ll talk there.”
The new body was positioned almost exactly like the one from the night before, and I had the strange impression that it had grown through the floor in the same spot, like when a new snack rises to the front of a vending machine to replace the one you took. She was a small Asian woman in her early thirties, with chin-length black hair and the well-defined back and leg muscles of a serious swimmer. She was wearing only a pair of simple satin panties, and like Leah Rhodes, her face was untouched.
But she was different from Leah Rhodes in that no part of her appeared to be . . . missing. Instead, this woman had died the death of a thousand cuts—maybe literally. Wide, messy scratches in clumps of four covered her arms, legs, and torso. Each clump was deep enough to need stitches, but I doubted that any one of them—or hell, any three of them—would have killed her. There were so many, though. She looked like she was wearing a red-and-white Jackson Pollock painting underneath her underwear. There was a band of untouched skin on each of her wrists and ankles. Unlike Leah Rhodes, this girl’s fingernails were smooth and buffed to a shine. She hadn’t fought her attacker. I hoped that meant she’d been drugged and unconscious while he did this to her, but it might have just been because she was tied down.
“Same thing?” I asked Will. “She was on your doorstep?” He nodded.
“Were there any witnesses?” Jesse asked immediately. He dropped my bag inside the door, almost exactly where I had put it the night before, and began walking around me so he could see the body.
“I don’t think so,” Will said grimly. “My next-door neighbor has been on vacation in Aspen. I got lucky. Again.” He shook his head. “But for a lot of reasons, this can’t keep happening.”
Jesse didn’t respond. He had crouched down next to the corpse and was staring intently at her face.
“Jesse?” I asked.
“I know her,” he said softly. “I mean, I know her name.” He looked up at me. “When I went through missing persons reports at the station today,” he went on. “Her picture was attached to one of them. I saw that she was Asian and I clicked past it, but her name is . . . Kathryn. Kathryn Wong.”
“You’re sure?” I asked, and Jesse nodded.
He looked back at the dead girl, peering at the girl’s injuries. “See these?” he said, pointing to the wounds on her shoulders. He moved his hand until he was pointing at her shins. “And these? It’s a progression.”
“What do you mean, progression?” Will asked, frowning.
“He started at the top and worked his way down,” Jesse said absently. “See, the scratches up here stopped bleeding a while ago—they’re even starting to scab over. But the ones on her legs are raw.”
“Oh my God,” Will said, staring. “You’re right.” Will’s eyes unfocused suddenly, calculating.
“What does that mean to you?” Jesse asked, looking at Will’s expression. Will didn’t answer.
I tried not to imagine how the girl’s last moments must have gone, but it was impossible. She must have been in agonizing pain, trying to get away, bleeding. He must have attacked her upper body first, waited a little while, and gone after her torso. Then waited a little longer and come after her legs. It was eerily methodical, like he’d been waiting for something to happen in between each attack.
Playing a hunch, I added, “Will? Is he trying to change them?”
Will’s distant eyes flickered back to me. “It’s definitely a possibility,” he said at last. “I can’t tell if she bled out, or if the magic took her.”
Werewolf magic is contagious, but only through body fluids, and just a little bit won’t usually get the job done. So if somebody gets a single bite or scratch, they’ll most often recover and go about their lives. But the more magic-tinged blood or saliva that a person absorbs, the more the magic gets in. And if enough magic gets in, the body will try to make the transformation. Sometimes it works, and the person becomes a werewolf. Sometimes—more and more often in the last couple of decades—it doesn’t work, and the magic overwhelms the human body, killing the victim.
Jesse and Will were both staring down at the body, unmoving, so I broke in. “Guys?” I said, snapping my fingers. “Body now? Talk later?”