Taken by Storm (Raised by Wolves #3)(23)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I took the proffered glove. Cold and detached, Caroline strode past me into the house. I followed, and in the dim light Jed had turned on, I could see dark blotches on the tan stone floor.

Drops of blood.

Someone had made an attempt at cleaning up since the crime scene photos were taken, but the aftereffects of slaughter were still visible, tangible proof that what had happened here couldn’t be exorcised with cleaner and bleach.

Drawn like a moth to the flame, I followed the trail of blood and watched as the dark spots got bigger and thicker the farther into the labyrinthine hallway we got.

“It started with a puncture wound.” Caroline walked the path of blood, as light on her feet as a dancer, her head tilted slightly to one side. “A small one. A warning.”

Caroline met Jed’s eyes, but not mine. “Killer gave his target time to run.”

The hallway dead-ended into a large, open living room. The stone fireplace on the far end was discolored, and Caroline stopped in front of it.

“Second and third puncture wounds. Then a long, deep cut.” She gestured to the dark spots on the floor. Her words could have just as easily been describing a knife attack, but somehow, I doubted a rabid werewolf would have bothered with a blade.

No, our killer would have Shifted—in full or in part—and gouged the victim. Once. Twice. Three times.

“The target scrambled backward,” Caroline said—and I realized for the first time exactly how different our mental vocabulary was. My victim was her target.

“Target was already bleeding. Here”—she touched her still-gloved hand to the ghostly remains of what had once been a pool of red on the ground—“he slipped and hit his head.”

Caroline dragged her fingertips over the discolored area on the fireplace. Her face darkened. “And then it happened all at once.”

I took those words to mean that her discomfiting expertise started and ended with the aspects of this kill that seemed almost human. What had happened after the victim had fallen on the fireplace wasn’t human at all.

“The attacker Shifted,” I said, carefully avoiding all use of the pronoun she—or anything else that might bring Maddy’s face to my mind. “After a minute, maybe two, the smell of blood would have been too much for the wolf.”

Based on the way the corpse had been positioned in the photos I’d seen, our Rabid must have dragged the victim—or possibly the body by that point—across the room. I followed the path, overcome with images that felt like memories, as my mind took what I knew and filled in the horrifying gaps.

Memorize the way it feels, I told myself. Keep it under lock and key.

In wolf form, a rabid werewolf would have been unable to keep from going for the throat, and that was probably responsible for most of the splatter on the baseboards and the walls.

I could smell it. I could hear the sound it made, that awful, ungodly sound of shredding flesh, interspersed with raindrops on a windshield.

“There should be footprints,” Caroline said. Still caught up in a trance of my own making, I slipped on my borrowed glove and ran my right hand over the surface of the wall.

“With this much blood, the target shouldn’t have been the only one slipping. If the killer didn’t clean up afterward—

and if this is what it looks like a week later, I doubt they did—then he or she should have left footprints. Paw prints. Whatever.”

I thought back to the crime scene photos. There’d been evidence that someone had dipped human hands into the blood and smeared it along the walls, but Caroline was right—there’d only been one set of footprints.

The victim’s.

There hadn’t been any paw prints at all. How was that possible?

One of these days, I thought, I’m going to excise that word from my vocabulary.

Werewolves and psychics weren’t exactly the height of possibility, either.

Beside me, Caroline snapped to attention, pulling her body back into the shadows, her eyes narrowed and her pupils wide. The sound of creaking wood on the front porch alerted me to the reason for her behavior. I reached out to keep her from flying into action.

“It’s Chase,” I told her. “Not the police.”

Hearing his name, Chase ducked into the room, quiet and unobtrusive. “There’s no evidence that Maddy ever Shifted in the woods,” he said, by way of greeting. “If she was living there, she was living there as a human.”

He paused and took in the sights and smells in this room. To his nose, the astringent smell of bleach would have washed away some of the blood scent, but not all of it.

Fresh off his own Shift, Chase was able to press down against his inner wolf, but I could feel the animal response bubbling beneath the surface of his mind. “Do you think she Shifted in here?” he asked, his voice throaty and low.

I turned the question right back around at him. “Do you think she did?”

Chase was silent, and for several seconds, none of us said a word. He breathed in and out. I watched the way his chest rose and fell, waiting for my answer.

The answer I didn’t want to hear.

“Maddy was here,” he said finally. “She Shifted—and I don’t think she was alone.”

Not alone?

“Was she with another werewolf?” I asked, my mind racing with the implications. If Maddy was with another Were, she might not have been the one to do the actual killing. Maybe she just stood there and watched.

Not that that’s much better.

“I don’t know.” Chase’s voice was intense with concentration. He took another deep breath, pushing his way past the overwhelming scent of blood. “The scent is different. It’s faint. One second it’s there and the next it’s not, but I smell someone … something …”

A growl broke free from his throat as he tried to put what he was smelling into words. Even in the dim light, I could see the way Caroline responded to the sound. Her hands went automatically for the weapon strapped to her side. She turned her back to the wall.

Casually, I stepped in between Caroline and Chase, removing the glove I’d borrowed and handing it back to her, while he got control of his wolf.

“We should go.” Jed had been so quiet while Caroline and I were walking through the killer’s motions that I’d almost forgotten he was here. “We’ve seen what we came to see. No use pushing our luck.”

I hesitated, not wanting to stay here any longer than I had to, but unable to banish the feeling that I was missing something. Maddy was here. Someone was with her. And Chase couldn’t quite tell who—or what—that someone was. I’d assumed when Maddy left the pack that she wanted to be alone. But what if she’d met someone somewhere along the way?