“Then he is no longer a threat to any of you,” Tolya said quietly.

“What about the men who were with him?” Judith Dixon asked.

“We’ll find out who he is—and we’ll find the other men.” He smiled, showing a hint of fang. “That’s a promise.”

He escorted the women out of the building and watched them walk back to the hotel.

<Virgil?> he called.

<Jana and I are sniffing around a body. I’ll talk to you later.>

Another body? It was tempting to demand details, but Virgil was the sheriff, and he was doing his job. Besides, what Tolya had learned from his brief observations of Vlad working with Simon Wolfgard was that you got along better with a dominant Wolf by asking rather than demanding.

Tolya strolled down the street. Time to do another part of his job and listen to the reports from the rest of the Sanguinati.

* * *

* * *

Virgil studied the meat with considerable regret. The body. There were humans around, so he had to remember to call it a body instead of almost-fresh meat. Good thing Tolya hadn’t come with them. The Sanguinati would have regretted the waste of blood even more than he regretted not being able to have a quick snack. After all, this human didn’t need his liver anymore, did he? Or any of the meat on the legs?

“Is this how humans usually kill each other?” he asked as Jana gingerly moved closer to the … body … while trying to avoid stepping in the blood. Sensible, that. Lots of terra indigene would follow a blood trail, even a small one, thinking they were following injured prey.

And that’s what this reminded him of: injured prey. Run it down and hamstring it, then follow it as it bled and became weak enough to kill.

“Looks like he was already shot.” She raised her camera and began taking pictures. “But all that blood … It’s not from the gunshot wound.” She looked toward the doorway at the human male who had reported finding the body. “Zeke, your crew and Fagen’s will have to work another house for the next few days. Wait. You walked through the house already, right?”

“Most of it,” Zeke said. “Fagen was checking the kitchen and cupboards, and I was taking a look in the other rooms. We stopped as soon as I found …” He nodded toward the body. “I didn’t look in the other bedrooms.”

“Okay.”

“We’ll work next door for a while, stay nearby.”

“Thanks.” Jana waited until Zeke left. Then she raised the camera again and took pictures of the lower half of the body. “To answer your question, no, this isn’t how humans usually kill each other. They shoot each other, or stab each other, or they strangle with their bare hands or with some kind of ligature, or they hang each other, or poison each other. What they don’t usually do is …”

“Hamstring them?” When Jana looked at him, he shrugged. “If his legs still worked, wouldn’t he have tried to escape, even if he was weak?”

“I guess one of our town doctors is also going to be our medical examiner, so he’ll have to give us the full list of injuries, but …” Jana pulled back the man’s shirt, revealing one shoulder. “I think more than his legs were cut. I don’t think he could move his arms to fight off his attacker. Once he was helpless, whoever did this cut the arteries. But the throat wasn’t cut. That would have been a swift death compared to bleeding out.”

“Two-legged predator. Maybe brain sick.”

“Why do you say that? Don’t Wolves go for the legs?”

Virgil nodded. “But we don’t do it to make the prey suffer. And we don’t stand back and watch it bleed unless the prey is too strong and we have to wait until it weakens before we can move in. This human doesn’t look strong.” He walked to the door. “I’m going to sniff around.”

Returning to their vehicle, he stripped off his clothes, tossed them on the passenger seat, and shifted to Wolf.

“Yes,” Jana said to whoever was on the phone, “we need the ambulance to pick up a body at this address. No sirens. No need to alarm everyone.” She tucked the mobile phone back in her duty belt.

He caught a scent. Caught another. Not Zeke, not Fagen. But one of those scents …

Virgil leaped in front of Jana and snarled.

“What?” Jana snapped. “I’m just going to check out the rest of the house.”

Me first.

He roamed through the house, keeping ahead of her. Old scents in these bedrooms. One fresher scent in this room. Not on the bed but under it.

He tried to squeeze under the bed to reach what he could smell, but he was too big.

Jana nudged his hip. “Get out of there before you get stuck. I’m smaller. Let me try.”

He worked his way out from under the bed, yelping when he ripped out a bit of fur that got caught in the bedsprings.

Jana took the flashlight out of her belt and went down on her belly. “That backpack? That’s what you want?”

“Roo.”

She squirmed and wiggled her way under the bed. “Got it.”

When the squirming and wiggling didn’t seem to work to get her back out, Virgil closed his teeth over her boot and pulled.

She let out a startled yip. As soon as he saw all of her, he let go of her boot and grabbed for one of the straps on the backpack, pulling it into the center of the room.

Yes. It had been covered by death smells and the scents of Elders marking territory by the time he’d returned with John Wolfgard to take pictures of what little meat was left, but he recognized the scent of the male who had hurt Barbara Ellen’s hand.

So easy to shift paws into hands and open the zippers, but he scratched at the backpack and waited for Jana to finish brushing herself off.

“Darn dusty under there,” she muttered. Then she looked at the backpack. “But that’s not dusty.”

She opened each compartment. One held very stinky clothes. Another held money. Since Jana whistled when she saw it, Virgil assumed that meant it was a lot of money. Finally …

“This would be easier if you didn’t keep sticking your head inside the pack.”

It would be easier if she just pulled everything out so they could look at it instead of doing this dainty kind of pawing. The human was dead. And not just dead. He was already part of somebody’s poop. He wasn’t going to howl about her touching his stinky clothes.

“Identity card,” Jana said as she pulled several items out of an inside pocket. “Several of them. And … a driver’s license. I don’t recognize the name of the town listed as his address, but I bet it’s not in the Midwest. Sweeney Cooke.” She sat back on her heels. “You think he was trying to get back here after the incident in the Bird Cage Saloon?”

Wounded animal going to ground. Made sense.

“Do you think he killed that other man?”

No. There was that other scent in the meat’s room. He returned to that room, sniffing under the bed and in the closet. He sniffed around the rest of the house, following the scent out the door to a big stink that stung his nose and made him sneeze.

Gone. Lost.

He shifted back to human form and got dressed. A minute later the ambulance pulled up. Letting Jana deal with packing up the meat, he walked over to the next house and found Zeke and Fagen.

He stared at the Intuits. “The human who killed that man is still out there. He could be hiding in any of these houses. Or he could have moved on to another territory.”

Zeke and Fagen exchanged a look. “When we saw that body, we had a feeling that the killing was personal, that the killer had followed that man here,” Zeke said.

“Not a lot of places to go, so this would have been a good choice,” Fagen added. “We’ve seen signs of squatters in other houses. Some places were searched and valuables were taken. Money, jewelry. And food.”

“No one should be living out here,” Virgil said. “Anyone who is might be dangerous. Might even be the two-legged predator who kills his own kind. If you see any sign of humans out here who aren’t part of your pack, you run away and call us.”

“Will do.”

He returned to the sheriff’s vehicle. Jana was still inside the house doing … something. He didn’t need to see anything more.

He looked up and watched the Eagles riding the thermals while searching for prey.

No, he didn’t need to see anything more. From now on, all the terra indigene around Bennett would be watching for signs of unwanted humans.

* * *

* * *

“Thanks for helping out today,” Barb said.

“It’s a change from mopping floors.” Abigail worked up a smile she didn’t feel. She rinsed out Rusty’s water bowl and filled it with fresh water from the kitchen faucet.

She didn’t want a dog. She didn’t want something that would depend on her so much. But sweet Abigail might adopt one of the kittens in order to have a little fuzzy company now that Kelley had moved out.

Barb looked uncomfortable. “I saw Kelley this morning.”

“A lot of people saw Kelley this morning.” Saw him walking out of the hotel with that bitch Dina. Saw them talking and holding hands.

“I’m sorry, Abby.”

“Me too.” She put on a brave face but made sure her lip trembled. Had Kelley taken a room there, or had he and Dina met at the hotel for a meal? It didn’t matter now that she had a plan.

While Barb and Jana had been busy feeding the cats that morning, Abigail had followed the susurrus to a closed room that held a desk and a wall of books. A study or office? Didn’t matter what it was. Didn’t matter who had lived there. What mattered was the small wide bowl that held the stones.

Obsidian. Onyx. Hematite. Jet. Black stones. Protection stones.

Abigail had held one hand over the bowl.

They hadn’t protected the person who had used this room from anything. And they wouldn’t protect anyone else. Even properly cleansed, these black stones had absorbed too much anger. They would remain dissonant and draw the dark things instead of repelling them.

She’d read her cards that morning, and she knew the black stones were coming. Her father, her uncle, her brother, Judd McCall. She’d run from them, but there was no place to run anymore. There was, however, a way to sour things for them once they arrived.

Obsidian. Onyx. Hematite. Jet.

She would offer to help the girls who cleaned the hotel rooms, and she would hide these stones in the rooms that were reserved for guests who were passing through.

Let her father and the rest of the Blackstone Clan experience a run of ill fortune and see how they liked it.

* * *

* * *

“Why do you think she’ll know?” Virgil asked when Jana finished the call asking Candice Caravelli to meet her at the sheriff’s office.

“I don’t know if she’ll recognize our victim,” Jana replied. “But we didn’t find anything in the house or the other backpack we found that would identify him. Everyone carries an identity card, even if it’s a fake. Everyone carries a ration card, even when they’re traveling.”