“I reckon it was a bear. Strange that it would come this far into town, but the Sutton boys have been at their old tricks again—probably led it straight to us.”
“Those Suttons are a menace. And that poor Johnson girl. First, her daddy kills her mama, and now this. Earl and Betsy must be taking it hard.”
I didn’t get to find out who Earl and Betsy were, because at that exact moment, I noticed a change in the pack-bond. Across the room, Chase stiffened, his nostrils flaring outward, his fingertips curling slightly inward, like claws.
“—just coming home from work, and now she’s gone. Funeral won’t be open casket, that’s for sure—”
Beside Chase, Lake paused, too. They smelled something.
Someone.
Making my way out to the front of the gas station, I scanned the streets for Maddy. Surely, she wouldn’t have come back here. Surely, she wouldn’t have stayed so close to a kill.
I smell … I smell …, Chase whispered the words straight into my mind.
What? What did he smell?
The answer came to me as nothing more than a vague sense that Chase was smelling something he’d smelled before—at the Wyoming murder site, at Wilson’s cabin in Alpine Creek.
It was faint. Different. It smelled like a werewolf, and it didn’t.
It smelled the way things did in dreams—a fraction off, a shade too, too … something.
For the first time, I really and truly let myself believe that Maddy might not be the one behind the murders. But that meant someone—or something—else was. Something that Lake and Chase couldn’t quite scent.
Something that was close.
Caroline and Jed must have noticed something was wrong, because they paid and followed us quickly out of the store.
Watching Caroline sparked a memory, and I sent a question silently to Chase and Lake. You guys can’t smell Caroline, I said. You can’t track her. It’s part of her knack. Do you think what you’re smelling—not smelling—now could be something similar?
Based on the crime scene, I’d been certain that our killer was a werewolf, but like Callum and the Resilient wolves in my pack, some werewolves had knacks, too.
In Wyoming, the killer hadn’t left any footprints in the victim’s blood.
What if this thing wasn’t a werewolf? What if it was something else? Something that made as much sense to me as psychics and werewolves would have to anyone else?
Without warning, Chase took off, as quick as a serpent’s strike. Lake followed, holding back on her speed enough to appear human. Jed, Caroline, and I slipped out of town, following them to the edge of the mountain and then into the forest.
We stopped at a densely wooded area where the smell of blood was so thick in the air that even with human senses, I wanted to gag.
Fresh blood this time—and it didn’t belong to an animal. It was human blood, and odds were good that it belonged to the girl whose remains had been found on Main Street.
This was where she was killed.
Through the pack-bond, I could hear Chase’s racing thoughts, and Lake’s, and I realized that beneath the pungent scent of iron and human flesh, they could smell something else.
The kind of something that smelled like a werewolf, but not. A dream smell, a memory, a scent they couldn’t quite make out.
I heard a noise then—a rustling in the brush to my left. Caroline whirled, her blonde hair fanning out around her baby-doll face. She had a crossbow in her left hand and a pistol in her right, and she was halfway to pulling the triggers before my eyes ever locked in on her prey.
It was a boy, about my age, standing only a few feet away—a pale and almost see-through boy, standing in a field of blood. He had golden hair, halfway between honey and a light, sun-kissed brown. There was a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose. His cheekbones were sharp, and his eyes were green, the exact same shade as Lake’s.
Caroline fired, and I watched as a bullet passed straight through the boy. A bolt came within a foot of his body, but he waved his hand, and it fell to the ground.
This was what Chase had smelled at the crime scene.
This was the kind of monster who could kill without leaving a trail.
This was a nightmare, dressed up like a boy.
It started walking toward us, and a sense of déjà vu washed over my body. There was something familiar about this thing, this boy. Something more than the way he smelled—or didn’t smell—and the serious expression on his face.
“Lake,” he said.
For a split second, there was silence all around us, and then Lake replied, her voice barely more than a whisper, but filled with a whole host of emotions, each as sharp as glass.
One word.
She just said one word.