Feel? That was an odd word to use. "Will you be all right here?"
A ghostly smile touched her lips, though it failed to lift the fear from her eyes. "Fine. Just don't be long, because I'll have to call your people in."
He nodded and went back. It was no better the second time around. He breathed though his mouth, but the smell still coated the back of his throat, so that he swallowed death with every intake of air. He fought nausea and mounting horror as he carefully studied each of the remaining body parts. He hadn't been mistaken before. Something big had chewed through the bones. Something like a dog.
Or a wolf.
He rose and went back to Kat. She looked no better than she had twenty minutes before. "You calling the department?"
"Just did."
"Then I'll have to go. I'm supposed to be on leave."
She didn't seem surprised. "Take my car." She handed him the keys. "I need to go to the beach after I finish here, so you can meet me down in Florence, if you like."
"What do you hope to find at the beach?"
"Cleansing." She looked past him. "You'd better go. I can hear their sirens."
So could he, and they were a distance away. Her hearing was as good as his — and his was moon enhanced. "Florence is a reasonably big place, with lots of ocean frontage. How are you going to find me?"
"I'll find you, believe me."
Oddly enough, he did. "Will you be all right?"
She looked at him. Deep in the green depths of her eyes he saw a suffering so deep he had to fight the urge to reach out and comfort her.
"We both have curses we have to live with," she said softly. "And in many ways, mine is much worse than yours."
Nothing could be worse than losing your soul to an animal every full moon. "What do you mean?"
She rubbed a hand across still-damp eyes. "I'll explain later. You need to go. Right now."
What he needed was an explanation. But the sirens were drawing closer and Benton's blood pressure would go haywire if he found Ethan here.
"I'll see you at the beach," he said, and walked away.
* * * *
Kat waited until the rumble of the Mustang's engine had faded, then dialed the hotel. Gwen answered on the third ring.
"I'm sorry, Kat," she said. "I wish I could have warned you."
No amount of warning could have helped ease the horror of what she'd felt in that room. Bile rose and she closed her eyes, fighting the need to vomit, fighting the tears pressing past closed eyelids. "I needed to go in without any preconceptions. We both know that."
Gwen sighed. "So what did you feel?"
What didn't she feel? God, the room was a menagerie of the dead's emotions. "He died a lot slower than Daniel. The soul sucker let a werewolf play around with him for a while before she sucked his essence away."
She tried not to think of the bits of humanity strewn across that room. Tried not to remember the blinding fear and agony that had savaged her mind and cut through her soul. She failed miserably at both. But it was what had followed those emotions that had sickened her the most. The smells and sensations of sex. The soul sucker had mated amidst all the carnage.
"Hang on," she said and hurriedly put the phone down, staggering away to the fence to lose the little she'd eaten for dinner.
She was wiping her mouth with her hand when the cops came in. Benton took one look at her and ordered an officer to go get a bottle of water.
"Where?" was all he said to her.
"First floor, to the left."