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Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough. I took a bigger whiff through my nose and gagged. All I could smell was blood, dead flesh, bile, and excrement. Sorting through that? No. Not happening. Ian was crazy. If I wasn’t worried about looking tough in front of someone I didn’t know very well, I would’ve pulled my shirt over my nose.
Donovan hunkered down near a pile of mushy flesh and took a big inhale.
Oh, Christ. I almost gagged for him.
“It’s not one I know.” He looked up at Ian. “You’re sure you’ve not scented this one before?”
“No. Since the Americans made their little debut, we’d not seen nor heard from any of the courts, even the Lunar. They’ve kept their distance.”
Something about this didn’t sit right with me. There was no way a creature fey could come through the stronghold without notice, and kill the second strongest in the pack. The way here was so convoluted, I had no clue
how to get back to the front entrance. The creature would have to make it through the castle, not running into a soul, before finding John—the wolf whose death would destabilize the pack the most. And that didn’t take into account how hard it must’ve been to actually kill John.
Or maybe this thing was just that bad?
But I couldn’t get over how this fey monster—whatever it was—had found John without anyone in the pack seeing or hearing anything.
Even with Van’s handy-dandy teleportation powers, killing John like this—turning a second, and not just any second, but Donovan’s second to bits and mush—would’ve taken time and caused a whole lot of noise. So this thing had to have had inside help. That thought turned my blood to ice.
I didn’t want my theory to be true, and honestly my first thought went to Vivian, but I didn’t know the pack well enough to make that assessment. It was my own bias making me want to point the finger at her.
I ran my hands down my face as I tried to think of what we did know, which wasn’t much.
“The fey are in the process of closing their underhills,” Donovan said as he rose from the ground. “Maybe in the confusion of closing the Irish hill, something escaped?”
“Or maybe something was let out,” I said. I switched to using our bond, not wanting Ian to overhear the rest. But that would mean it was an act of war.
That’s what I’m afraid of. And I find it pretty interesting that Cosette manipulated a meeting with you just before my second was killed. It’s as if she knew this was going to happen.
Cosette had seemed like she knew something was coming, but Donovan was getting it all wrong. She’d been warning me about the pack. Not the fey. And I was the one who’d invited her to the mall, not the other way around.
Something that kills like this isn’t going to be satisfied with just one, I said.
Aye. We need to find out what happened before it kills again.
Which meant I needed to do some research to get info on our enemy. Most packs kept a library with records of all the monsters its hunters had run into over the years. The Irish pack had to have a huge database by now.
But first, we had to clean this room up. “Can we give John a proper burial now?”
“You’re right.” He looked back at what was left of the body. “Ian, get someone to gather up and prepare the remains. We’ll burn him tomorrow at nightfall and then go for a pack run to mourn our lost brother.”
“I’ll have it made known,” Ian said.
“Thank you.” Donovan stepped forward and linked our hands together. “This way, a ghrá. Let me show you to our room.”
As we slowly got farther away from John’s room, the scent of his death started to fade, but it lingered on my skin. I was going to need a shower—or ten—before it totally went away. I was daydreaming about all the lavender soap I was going to use to scrub the scent off of me when a redhead came barreling down the hallway. She shoved me to the side as she jumped into Donovan’s arms, pressing her lips hard against his before pulling back. “Welcome home.”
My blood turned to fire, and if I could’ve shot flames from my eyes, I would’ve. Only my father’s fierce training on protocol saved me from a historically epic throwdown.
Donovan tried to disentangle himself, but she held on. This had to be Vivian. I straightened my back, standing as tall as I could, and delicately cleared my throat.
Vivian held onto Donovan’s arm as she turned to me, giving Donovan a chance to shake free from her.
I hadn’t been able to take a good look at her in her rush to get to my mate, but now I wished I hadn’t seen her. Vivian was beautiful. Tessa liked to joke that all us Weres looked like supermodels, but the thing was, some Weres were just better looking than others. Vivian fell into that category, and worse yet, she knew it. From the way her eyes narrowed to the look of complete disdain she shot me, I knew she thought I was nothing to write home about. And from the way her gaze lingered on my hair… Well, it made me glad I hadn’t gone back to my natural blonde.
“What was that for?” Vivian pouted at Donovan as she tried to grab hold of him again, but Donovan stepped away from her. “Upset I knocked into your newest toy? Please, Don. Don’t be ridiculous. You know you’ll get bored of her and be back in my bed by the end of the week.”
By the end of the week? Yeah. That wasn’t happening.
