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“Yup.” To be honest, I was really looking forward to seeing the inside of the stronghold, and I wasn’t disappointed. A portrait of Donovan in a kilt with a broadsword hung over a massive fireplace off to the right of the entryway.
“Sexy,” I muttered softly as we walked past it and through a corridor. Donovan shot me a wink and a grin.
Tapestries lined the hallways, depicting scenes throughout history. Some were faded in color, but other than that, they were beautiful. The floors were bare stone, which was best for Weres. When a bunch of us lived together, a fight was never too far away. Blood was much easier to clean off stone than carpet. And judging from the faded scents of fights, they’d done just that time and again. As I was picking out scents, one note kept coming back to me, drawing my attention away from everything else. It was really floral. I took a deeper whiff and caught even more threads of floral notes. “The fey come here often?”
“The Lunar court is very close to this pack,” Ian said. “We’ve had children between us. Some have been more Were and joined the pack. They tend to scent a little floral. But yes, there are fey who wander our halls regularly.”
“Vivian said that it was probably a fey that killed John. Anyone—”
“You’ll not start a witch hunt.” Ian spat the words out.
I held up my hands. “I wasn’t trying to offend anyone. I was just going to say that maybe the fey responsible might have been here before. Maybe someone might recognize their scent?”
“No one will recognize this smell. It’s new to me, and I know everyone that comes in and out of our doors.”
“Okay.” I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but his tone was a little feisty. After that standoff on the tarmac, I wasn’t sure what to think of him. He’s a little defensive.
It might be the grief. I’ll have a word with him.
Don’t. If anyone has an issue with me, it’s best if I handle it. At least for now. But still, I decided to keep my mouth shut for a little bit. I was too tired and didn’t want to make a wrong move.
Our footsteps echoed down the long hallways. The longer we walked, the less I paid attention to my surroundings and the more I tried to count how many turns we were taking. This place was more expansive than any stronghold I’d been to. Some sections of the castle were newer than others, but the materials blended together seamlessly. It was only the changing smell—some parts had more of a dust and dirt smell to them even if they were clean—that tipped me off to the age difference.
And then the smell changed again. The scent of dried blood and decaying flesh hit me, growing stronger with every step we took. I fought hard against the instinct to plug my nose. After what felt like forever and an endless maze of stairwells and hallways, Ian stopped at a large wooden door. The black iron handle hung limply, barely able to do its job.
“It’s bad in here,” Ian said. “You should prepare yourself.”
Donovan waved Ian aside. “It would have to be. John wouldn’t go down without a hell of a fight.”
I couldn’t help but gag as he opened the door. “Good Lord. Can we open a window?”
“It would contaminate the scene,” Ian said. “We’ve left everything closed off.”
“Right.” But who could think about the scene when it smelled this bad? I breathed through my mouth, but that only made me taste the scent, which was worse. So much worse.
I switched to small shallow breaths through my nose as I stepped into the room.
It was more horrible than anything I’d seen. After the chapel in Santa Fe, I would’ve thought that was impossible.
Apparently not.
Gore was splattered across the room. I tried to find John’s body until I realized there wasn’t one. It was like Donovan’s second had been put through a blender just enough to liquefy bits and pieces of him, leaving chunks lying about. The biggest piece was his left foot, which was thrown in the middle of the bed. Its toes were missing, but part of the leg was still attached.
I swallowed down bile, trying to focus on the overall look of the room instead of the gore. It was furnished with dark wood antiques and rich colors like the rest of the castle. The four-poster bed took up most of the room, with a small nightstand on either side. Heavy embroidered curtains hung open on either side of the window opposite the bed. A small writing desk and chair stood in one corner of in the room, with a landline and papers that might’ve once been orderly, but were now scattered over the desk and floor. The armoire had been knocked over and broken against the wall, vomiting clothes all over the floor.
As soon as I thought the word vomit, the queasiness came back. I tried to refocus. The room was a mess, but the windows were closed and locked from the inside, and the destruction seemed confined to just this space.
What could do this to a Were? I’d never heard of anything that could turn a werewolf into hamburger…
Maybe a demon could, but if it were a demon, I would’ve smelled the sulfur. That smell was definitely strong enough to stick out, even among all of the gore.
Vivian had said she thought it was fey, and they usually scented floral. I wasn’t smelling anything floral here, but just because I couldn’t smell it, didn’t mean it wasn’t there. The gore in the room could overpower floral for sure.
And if it really were a fey, then it had to be one of the creature types. A lot of supernaturals liked to forget that not all the fey looked as pretty as Cosette and Van. The truth was that there were all kinds of fey. Beautiful little pixies with sharp teeth, ugly goblins with green skin, and others that were purely the stuff of nightmares. The last were only whispered about because no one wanted to chance naming them. They might show up when called.
“Can you smell the fey through all of this?” I asked Ian and Donovan.
“Yes. You can smell the scent if you sort out all the rest,” Ian said.
