Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(5)
Author: Patricia Briggs

Actually he was wrong. I’ve never met two people who smell exactly alike – I’d thought that earthy scent that he and his son Tad shared was just part of their own individual essences. It wasn’t until a long time later that I learned to distinguish between fae and human. Unless you live within an hour’s drive of one of the four fae reservations in the U.S., the chances of running into one just weren’t that high. Until I’d moved to the Tri-Cities and started working for Zee, I’d never knowingly met a fae.

"So where is the swamp?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I hope that you will be able to see through whatever means our murderer has used to disguise himself. But for your own sake, Liebling, I would hope that you would leave the reservation its secrets if you can."

He turned down a street that looked just like the first four we’d passed – except that there was a young girl of about eight or nine playing with a yo-yo in one of the yards. She watched the spinning, swinging toy with solemn attention that didn’t change when Zee parked the car in front of her house. When Zee opened the gate, she caught the yo-yo in one hand and looked at us with adult eyes.

"No one has entered," she said.

Zee nodded. "This is the latest murder scene," he told me. "We found it this morning. There are six others. The rest have had a lot of people in and out, but except for this one"  –  he indicated the girl with a tip of his head – "who is a Council member, and Uncle Mike, there have been no other trespassers since his death."

I looked at the child who was one of the Council and she gave me a smile and popped her bubblegum.

I decided it was safest to ignore her. "You want me to see if I can smell someone who was in all the houses?"

"If you can."

"There’s not exactly a database where scents are stored like fingerprints. Even if I scent him out, I’ll have no idea who it is – unless it’s you, Uncle Mike, or your Council member here." I nodded my head toward Yo-yo Girl.

Zee smiled without humor. "If you can find one scent that is in every house, I will personally escort you around the reservation or the entire state of Washington until you find the murdering son of a bitch."

That’s when I knew this was personal. Zee didn’t swear much and never in English. Bitch, in particular, was a word he’d never used in my presence.

"It will be better if I do this alone then," I told him. "So the scents you’re carrying don’t contaminate what is already there. Do you mind if I use the truck to change?"

"Nein, nein," he said. "Go change."

I returned to the truck and felt the girl’s gaze on the back of my neck all the way. She looked too innocent and helpless to be anything but a serious nasty.

I got into the truck, on the passenger side to get as much room as possible, and stripped out of all my clothes. For werewolves, the change is very painful, especially if they wait too long to change at a full moon and the moon pulls the change from them.

Shifting doesn’t hurt me at all – actually it feels good, like a thorough stretch after a workout. I get hungry, though, and if I hop from one form to the other too often, it makes me tired.

I closed my eyes and slid from human into my coyote form. I scratched the last tingle out of one ear with my hind paw, then hopped out the window I’d left open.

My senses as a human are sharp. When I switch forms, they get a little better, but it’s more than that. Being in coyote form focuses the information that my ears and nose are telling me better than I can do as a human.

I started casting about on the sidewalk just inside the gate, trying to get a feel for the smells of the house. By the time I made it to the porch, I knew the scent of the male (he certainly wasn’t a man, though I couldn’t quite pinpoint what he was) who had made this his home. I could also pick out the scents of the people who visited most often, people like the girl, who had returned to her spinning, snapping yo-yo – though she watched me rather than her toy.

Except for her very first statement, she and Zee hadn’t exchanged a word that I had heard. It might have meant they didn’t like each other, but their body language wasn’t stiff or antagonistic. Perhaps they just didn’t have anything to say.

Zee opened the door when I stopped in front of it, and a wave of death billowed out.

I couldn’t help but take a step back. Even a fae, it seemed, was not immune to the indignities of death. There was no need for the caution that made me creep over the threshold into the entryway, but some things, especially in coyote form, are instinctive.

Chapter 2

It wasn’t hard to follow the scent of blood to the living room, where the fae had been killed. Blood was splattered generously over various pieces of furniture and the carpet, with a larger stain where the body had evidently come to rest at last. His remains had been removed, but no further effort had been made to clean it up.

To my inexpert eyes, it didn’t look like he’d struggled much because nothing was broken or overturned. It was more as if someone had enjoyed ripping him apart.

It had been a violent death, perfect for creating ghosts.

I wasn’t sure Zee or Uncle Mike knew about the ghosts. Though I’d never tried to hide it – for a long time, I hadn’t realized that it wasn’t something everyone could do.

That was how I’d killed the second vampire. Vampires can hide their daytime resting places, even from the nose of a werewolf – or coyote. Not even good magic users can break their protection spells.

But I can find them. Because the victims of traumatic deaths tend to linger as ghosts – and vampires have plenty of traumatized victims.

That’s why there aren’t many walkers (I’ve never met another) – the vampires killed them all.

If the fae whose blood painted the floors and walls had left a ghost, though, it had no desire to see me. Not yet.

I crouched down in the doorway between the entryway and the living room and closed my eyes, the better to concentrate on what I smelled. The murder victim’s scent, I put aside. Every house, like every person, has a scent. I’d start with that and work out to the scents that didn’t belong. I found the base scent of the room, in this case mostly pipe smoke, wood smoke, and wool. The wood smoke was odd.

I opened my eyes and looked around just in case, but there was no sign of a fireplace. If the scent had been fainter, I would have assumed someone had come in with it on their clothes – but the scent was prevalent. Maybe he’d found some incense or something that smelled like a fire.

Since discovering the mysterious cause of the burnt-wood smell was unlikely to be useful, I put my chin back on my front paws and shut my eyes again.

Once I knew what the house smelled like, I could better separate the surface scents that would be the living things that came and went. As promised, I found that Uncle Mike had been here. I also found the spicy scent of Yo-Yo Girl both recent and old. She had been here often.