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They were also filled with death.
I shivered and released the leaves. “Monty, tell Rocco we might need him to identify a victim.”
He gave me a thumbs-up from inside the car and kept talking. Belle joined me on the track, my pack slung over her shoulder. “Would a werewolf be silly enough to be caught by this thing? Aiden has put an alert out, hasn’t he?”
“For people to avoid the bush, yes. But werewolves aren’t likely to take much notice of it, especially when they’re on home ground.”
Belle made an exasperated sound. “You’d think that, after a year of being invaded by all sorts of nasties, they’d actually take an alert like that a little more seriously.”
“Except the general population—wolf or human—don’t really know about said invasions.”
She cast me a wry glance. “If the gossip brigade suspects there’s been an unusual number of supernatural incidents of late, surely the rest of the population would.”
I laughed. “I think you’ll find that for most people—gossip brigade aside, because they’d give Sherlock Holmes himself a run for his money—if it’s not in the local papers or on media sites, then it didn’t happen.”
“A sad fact that actually plays to our benefit.” Monty stopped just behind us. “The last thing we need is reservation-wide panic or even vigilantes. Rocco said he knows roughly where we are and will find us.”
“You’ve told him to ignore the scent of snake if he comes across it?”
He nodded. “Whether he heeds the advice is another matter entirely.”
“He will. He’s one of the more practical ones.”
Besides, he’d had firsthand experience with the violence that came with the influx of evil and wasn’t likely to go against advice. In this case, anyway.
“Technically,” Belle grumbled, “they’ve all had firsthand experience, given the banishment we did during their last council meeting.”
“I think you’ll find many consider that a one-off.”
“Then many of them are blinkered fools.”
“I think most people could be considered blinkered when it comes to this sort of stuff,” I replied. “Even witches.”
“Especially those witches living and plotting against each other in the cozy little capital that is Canberra.” Monty motioned toward the trail ahead. “Now, can we get moving? There is a possible dead person out there needing to be found.”
I immediately headed off. “And yet again he sounds entirelytoohappy about the prospect.”
“Hey, if my spirit was out here, confused and alone, I’d be wanting us to find me ASAP.”
“If you get dead, you can be damn sure I will be giving your spirit the sharp end of a tongue-lashing.” Though her voice was sharp, amusement ran through Belle’s thoughts, which I knew without even looking at her meant her eyes would be dancing with mirth. “Your spirit, my dear fiancé, is not allowed to move on until we’ve had a long and happy life together and we’re too feeble to do anything interesting.”
“I will never be too feeble to do anything interesting with you, that I promise.”
She laughed. “Oh, you can be sure I’ll remind you of that when youareold and feeble.”
“I look forward to it.”
She snorted. “I’ll remind you of that comment, too.”
I grinned and kept moving through the scrub. While the die-off made the basilisk’s trail easy to follow, heading up the steep and rocky mountainside was not. The air was thick and heavy with heat, and the sharp scent of eucalyptus hung in the air. I hoped the oncoming storm held off on the lightning. These forests were primed and ready to explode, and a strike could well have disastrous results.
The scent of sweat soon replaced the eucalyptus as the dominant force in the air, however. Even if Rocco couldn’t hear us—and really, he’d have to be deaf not to—he’d surely smell us. I wasn’t entirely surprised when he showed up a few minutes later, his expression bemused.
“With the racket you lot are making, your chances of catchinganysort of snake are next to zero.”
He was shorter and stockier than most werewolves, but a typical Marin otherwise—black hair that was currently cropped short, dark eyes, and brown skin.
“The basilisk has already left the area,” I said. “We just need to see what sort of damage it has left behind.”
