her more comfortable with ease. She yipped at me after a while, and inwardly, I found myself amused at her telling me that enough was enough.
Tongue lolling from my mouth, I scampered off, aware that if she could yip at me in irritation, she was well enough for me to leave.
Again, I felt the moon’s call, guiding me, urging me forward, and I answered it. Letting the Mother take me where I needed to be.
As she guided me to a clearing where a stag was gnawing at something on a bush, I accepted her offering with thanks, gave my appreciation to the animal for his sacrifice to nourish my mate, and pounced.
Ethan
“He was being weird. You can’t deny that,” I muttered, elbowing Austin, who was peering at the back of the candy stand as though it held all the answers.
Sure, it was the scene of the crime, but there were too many people here to discern one scent over another, and though we were enforcers, renowned throughout the Pacific Northwest for our tracking abilities, even we weren’t miracle workers.
“She’s a new she-wolf. Of course he was acting weird. Someone just committed a heinous crime on his territory,” Austin mumbled as he crouched. His boots squeaked as they scraped against the wet grass, and I sighed.
“You’re destroying the evidence,” I snapped at him when he didn’t move away from where he was trampling.
“There is no evidence. You and I know that.”
“Then why are you staring at that piece of grass as though it holds the answers to the known universe?”
Austin huffed before he turned to glower up at me. “Because I want to give him as much information as we can. You’re right, he was acting weird, and when Eli acts weird, it’s best to have all the facts at hand. You know that as well as I do.”
Because he wasn’t wrong, I just grunted and did as he had—squatted down. My jeans creaked with the motion, making me wish I hadn’t worn the new ones to impress Sally Anne tonight, especially since I hadn’t even had the chance to show her the damn pants before tearing new holes in them on our run through the woods.
Though we could shift with clothes on and return to our skin still dressed, the more powerful we were, the less likely the clothes were to stick around. Eli almost always reappeared butt naked, like he had back at the house. Whereas Austin and I tended to go through clothes like a six-year-old in the middle of a growth spurt, because shifting and reverting was a part of the job. Still, couldn’t be helped, so I shoved my irritation aside and focused on the crime scene.
“She didn’t work at the stand,” I mused out loud. “If she did, someone would have come looking for her. And there are no footsteps in the blood except for ours when we found her and picked her up.”
“She can tell us that herself,” Austin pointed out.
“Yeah, in a few days’ time. We need to act now. Before she wakes up.” Because I was right, he didn’t argue. Instead, I carried on, “Someone hasn’t reported all the blood, so that means they either haven’t left the stand since we took off, or they just can’t see it.” I peered around, and figured the low lighting around here would probably make it hard for a human to discern the mess of the attack. To be honest, that made more sense. After all, the reason we’d taken off at a run was because we’d heard movement in the stands that suggested someone was about to leave a stall. “But her outfit…she’s definitely a carny.”
“Without a doubt. Just not one who was popular enough for them to get concerned about once she went missing,” Austin reasoned, his nostrils flaring as he tried to differentiate between the scents.
It wasn’t as easy as just sniffing and picking up on something. Every scent was layered, filtered almost, condensing down until there was a pure essence that revealed itself above the others.
The only trouble was, blood was one of the worst things because it had a cloying scent that suffocated the sources of other smells in the vicinity. Our beasts reacted to it on a visceral level. I wasn’t sure if they considered it a threat or a warning, but it fucked with our senses, making it harder to figure out what and who the woman was.
“Maybe an attendant and not the main draw?” I stated as