help from a certain dead asshole we’ve both heard about.”
“Lancroft?”
Jessup nodded. “That’s one of ’em, but not the one I meant. I helped myself to plenty while we were all sifting through that house in Philadelphia, but I was more interested in the things that nobody else knew quite what to do with. I’ve always been a tracker. I love getting my boots dirty while everyone else taps away at their keyboards and checks phone records.”
“Who do you know that could check phone records for us?” Cole asked. “That would be great!”
“Nobody. That’s the point. When the power goes out or if you’re too far away to get a damn signal, all of you techie dickheads are helpless. But that ain’t the case for someone who knows their craft all the way down to the bone. That mask you’re holding there is the best thing I ever done. The main ingredient comes from the other dead asshole with whom you’re very well acquainted.”
“Don’t make me guess,” Cole said.
“In case you don’t remember Henry, he’s the Full Blood that happened to disappear on your watch, and don’t tell me you don’t know where that body’s buried.”
“Let’s not get into that right now.”
After taking a moment to steer around a pothole resembling a crack in the earth’s crust, Jessup let the matter drop. “So I found a box Lancroft had in cold storage, locked away in that secret lab of his where he did all his cuttin’.”
Just mentioning that room flooded Cole’s mind with memories of stark white lighting, dissection tables, and a carcass that was pulled apart and held open by metal studs screwed into a chrome tabletop.
“Everyone already helped themselves to all the Full Blood spit, blood, fur, and what-have-you,” Jessup continued, “but left some of the more interesting bits for me. At first I thought I’d found some kind of paste smeared onto a plastic sheet. Then I saw it was a membrane Lancroft had removed and preserved. Removed,” he added with a wink, “from Henry’s nasal cavity.”
Cole held up the mask. “This is the inside of a werewolf’s nose?”
“I don’t know if that’s exactly where it’s from or if it’s from deeper inside his misshapen dome, but yeah. Lancroft didn’t know what to do with it, but I did. It took some tricky work with preservatives and a lot of playing around with the mixture that we use to bond our weapons to us, but I got the damn thing to do something besides make my nose burn when I breathed through it. Long story short, I dumbed down our bonding agent to bridge the gap between humans and Full Bloods, sewed what was left of the membrane into that mask, and voilà! Portable Wolf Nose! Patent pending.”
Turning the mask over a few times, Cole said, “This could be huge! You bridged the gap between humans and Full Bloods? Do you know what that could mean for the ink Paige came up with?”
“You mean the stuff that screwed up her arm?” Wincing almost in time with Cole, he quickly added, “No, this was just a real simple tweak that barely worked. I wouldn’t trust it on anything that actually goes inside of you or mingles with blood. What I need you to do is see if you can pick up our young one’s scent.”
“We’ve already gone a few miles,” Cole pointed out. “Are you sure it was in the right direction?”
A sly grin eased onto Jessup’s face. “This ain’t the first time she tried to bolt. She’s new to this, so she sticks to the roads. Just see if you can narrow it down for me.”
Cole raised the mask to his face again but was cautious about drawing another breath. When he did, he was once more besieged by smells from every end of the spectrum, ranging from the candy bars piled on the dashboard to a mound of animal scat somewhere in the field outside. “How the hell did you use this to find anything specific? Do you mix in something to help weed everything else out?”
“Nope. Just good old-fashioned discipline. Concentrate on what you’re after and focus. Helps to have a sample, but most of the stuff we’re after is pretty distinctive. Turn your head that way and see for yourself.”
Jessup pointed toward the road, and when Cole did as he’d been told, he was introduced to a new scent that easily superseded the others. It was a mixture of animal musk, something that might have