I sat, thinking, as the men discussed landings and locations. It didn’t really matter which one we saw. I’d seen the pics both before and after the cops finished with them. And scavengers would have dealt with anything the cops left behind. We wouldn’t see much.
More quickly than I had expected, we were dropping altitude and I got queasy again. Not because of the flight. But because of the smells I’d expect to find on the ground. My Beast was used to the smells of rot and decay; she even ate things that were farther along in decomposition than were strictly smart, at least from a human perspective. But . . . there could be maggots hatching from blood-dried ground or from small bits of tissue missed by the cops. I hate maggots. I just do.
? ? ?
We made the Kid stay in the cockpit with Sarge and PP, which he pouted about, but we wanted to see as many sites as possible before sundown. And a two-person raft meant time spent ferrying back and forth over the water if he came. “I promise pizza suppers once a week for four weeks when we get home,” I said to cheer him up. His brother harrumphed softly, and Sarge chuckled, but Alex grumbled to silence at the promised treat.
The raft was easy to use but had a musty smell, as if PP had slept here one night. And as if Sarge fished from the raft from time to time. But it was functional, if a little black-moldy.
There wasn’t much left at the first crime scene site we visited, which had taken place on the second full moon after the wolves arrived. Even most of the smell of rot had been washed away by wind and rain and the movement of tides, and now there was little more than the stink of distant death, snakes, rats, nutria—humongous rats—and maybe armadillos, which would have been attracted to the insects feeding on the leftovers. And I caught the old wet-dog-that-rolled-in-something-dead smell of a werewolf, only one—a male, of course, since females went into permanent heat and went insane very quickly after being changed.
The second site was much the same, differing only by the smell of alligator. But the third site, which had taken place on the most recent full moon, only four weeks past, was very different. The paw prints and indentations in the mud were gone, thanks to the weather, and the body had been very carefully removed. But here I could still pick up not only the stink of rot but the gender of the victim. She had been young. And terrified.
I moved across the clearing made by death and wolves and many human law enforcement officers and crime scene people, using my nose, and sometimes my eyes, to tell me what had happened here. And by what I saw and scented, we had a bigger problem than I’d expected.
“Eli?” I said. “Those three wolves? Two were males and the other one was in heat.”
Eli grunted. He’d heard the stories about werewolves. He understood what I meant. We had a crazy female on our hands, and the bitches were always smart, wily, and inevitably in charge, thanks to the mating, rutting madness that drove a pack with a female in it.
And then I smelled something else. I bent and let my nose guide me into the edge of the rough land, the low trees and brush of the wet world. I found where a boat had come ashore, a scar on the mud, one that extended up into the brush as if it had been pulled high. And from the scents scattered all around, he had changed into his wolf, in the boat, before leaping into the brush.
I said, “The wolf—a wolf, maybe not one of the wolves—came to the site, maybe back to the site, recently, like maybe yesterday, which is odd. Why would he do that?” I moved to the edge of the killing ground and found his scent stronger there. He had marked his territory only once, against a short, broken tree, as if leaving a calling card. And it was definitely not one of the three wolves who had done this killing. “Eli, we have three wolves killing. And one, maybe, investigating. Or something. And this one was smart. Not a single good track left anywhere.”
I found one poor, dried-out paw print, mostly just leaves pushed into the soil, but there was enough to compare against the tracks of the crime scene photos. Not one of the killer wolves. It didn’t make sense. But yeah. “We have four wolves, three in a pack and one a lone wolf,” I repeated. Which, for reasons I didn’t examine, scared me more than anything else.