Taken by storm(32)

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?

With more questions than answers, the four of us left the way we came—softly, silently, disappearing back into the night.

“I lost Maddy’s scent at the river.” Lake, half-naked and utterly unapologetic about it, picked her discarded shirt up off the ground, skin glistening with sweat and hair streaming free down her back. “When she left, she left fast.”

As Lake finished getting dressed, I took stock of what we knew. Maddy had lived in these woods as a human. She’d left quickly. The killer had somehow managed to avoid stepping in the rivulets of blood. The victim—whoever he was—had died bloody.

“Pain,” Chase said. He brought the side of his face to rest on the top of my head. “Sora said that to track a Rabid, we needed to figure out what he was hungry for.”