Adam’s head tilted. “Thank you for that. Let’s say, I didn’t want to scare anyone any more than we had to, then. And she’s better for something like this anyway.”
“A coyote?” asked the manager.
“Mostly.” Adam considered me. “Let’s go directly to where the boy was murdered first. Then see if she can track the killer either backward or forward.”
The manager led us directly to the back area and stopped in front of a wide swinging door. “It’s just beyond here,” he said with a nervous smile. “I’ll leave you to it. If you need anything, I’ll be up in the offices doing paperwork. Otherwise, when you’re done, you can leave via any of the exit doors—they lock automatically.”
“Thank you,” George said. “We’ll be fine.”
The manager’s sigh of relief as he walked away would probably not have been audible to a normal human. We followed George through the door to the murder scene.
It was, I supposed, exactly what anyone would expect the loading bay of a grocery store to look like. A forklift was parked in one corner next to a stack of orange traffic cones and a bunch of tent-type signs leaning against the wall. The one I could see read Caution: Wet Floor.
A bay roll-up door large enough for a semi was flanked by two more doors. On the far side, between the big door and the wall, was a second roll-up door, this one sized for a forklift. The nearer door was a push-bar type with an Exit sign overhead. Next to that door, covered with warning signs, was a machine used to flatten cardboard boxes for recycling. I knew that because it was full of flattened cardboard boxes, now drenched in blood.
Fenced off by crime scene tape hung over plastic delineator posts, the forklift, the push-bar door, the nearest walls, and about a ten-foot square of concrete floor were also covered with dried blood. Some of it pooled on the floor, but a lot of it was scattered around in sprays of various heights on walls.
Looking at the blood-spattered area, I recalled Lady Macbeth’s line: Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? I was a predator and I killed—mostly mice and rabbits. Blood usually didn’t bother me. But there was something about the blood spray here that made me feel less like a predator and more like prey.
I’d been with packs of werewolves when they took down elk and once a moose. Both of those had a lot more blood volume than a human-sized body did. And yet...
“It’s as though whoever did this wanted to spread the mess as far as they possibly could,” said Adam. “A lot of this is blood cast from the weapon the killer used. I’ve seen something like this before, when I went into the jungle with Christiansen a few years ago—”
David Christiansen had been Changed at the same time as Adam. David ran a small group of mercenaries who specialized in rescuing ransom victims.
“We were after a drug lord over there who killed people in particularly gory ways in order to terrify people—his followers as much as his enemies.” Adam’s eyes drifted high up on the wall. “It worked.”
“We’ve been asked to stay outside of the taped area,” George said.
Zee dropped down to squat on his heels in a way that no one who looked as old as Zee did should be able to and examined the room. He tipped his head so he could see the high spatter on the walls.
“Four cuts, you said”—Zee stood up again—“as the body fell.” His arm made a different motion than George’s had when he’d been describing the killing blows. George had been graceful and quick. Zee’s were also quick, but they were jerks back toward himself rather than a fluid figure eight.
“That’s not how the body looked.” George frowned, watching him. “The cuts are in the front.”
“Then the victim was facing away from the killer,” said Zee. He frowned at the blood pattern, then nodded. “A sickle is sharp on the inside curve. You used it in a circular sweep, hooking back toward yourself. Assuming the murder weapon is a sickle. But this is not dissimilar from the single kill site I saw before our sickle wielder died.” He frowned at the patterns of blood spray. “If we are not looking at a repeat of history, this”—he waved a hand—“could be done with a long knife, I suppose. I could tell you if I saw the body.”
“I was planning on taking Adam to see the body,” George said.
“I will go also.” Zee dusted his hands off, though I had not seen him touch anything. “Mercy, have you found our killer’s scent?”
Ah yes, I had a job here, too. Part of the compromise I’d made with Adam was to wear my coyote shape. Thirty-five pounds divided over four feet was easier on my wounds than my human weight on two feet. It hurt for sure, but I wasn’t going to let anyone see it. The nice thing about four sore feet is that limping isn’t much of an issue.
I put my nose on the ground and tried to find individual trails. The victim’s scent was easy—his bodily fluids saturated the loading bay in iron-bound spatters. I didn’t know the dead boy’s name, but I knew his scent, a thing far more intimate than a spoken name could ever be. I knew what shampoo he used, and I could have picked his antiperspirant out of a lineup.
There was magic here, too.
When I shifted into my coyote form, largely I was still me. But the coyote me had senses that the human me did not. And the coyote processed that information just a little differently. Every once in a while, that caught me by surprise, especially if I was in a kind of place where I didn’t usually wear my coyote form.
That’s why I thought at first that the weirdness I was sensing was just the coyote in a grocery store for the first time. I’d caught something while we’d been walking back here, but with my nose to the ground—I could taste darkness.
Magic shimmered through the fur on my coat, and something altered about the dead boy’s scent. I knew who he was. Not his name. His name wasn’t important. I knew he’d been impulsive and cheerful. He cared deeply for those around him, but not so much about school or work. I got a fair sense of his fae half—the singed scent told me he was associated with some fire fae. The magical boost I was getting from it told me his mother had been able to fly—and that she was dead.
I was drowning in his scent, in the magic that bloomed in the wake of his death. Magic that sought to become...
I was dismally aware that I would remember who this boy was until the day I died. It was so overwhelming that it took me a while to be able to look beyond the victim.
I thought it was something about the way the young man had been killed that had created the magical soup that swamped me. I tried to shake it off and get something about the killer.