Donovan stared at the fabric in the box for some unknown amount of time. It could have been two seconds, two minutes, or two hours. He couldn't really tell.
He knew that pattern. He knew the lightness of the linen. It was his mother's scarf, the one he had kept after she died, the one he had hidden from his father. It was the first thing he grabbed each time his father picked him up in the middle of the school day, or woke him in the dark of night, demanding that they suddenly move.
For a while, Donovan had tucked the fabric down into his backpack, carrying it to school with him every day, just in case his father pulled him from classes and pushed him directly into the car. Once had been all it took for Donovan to learn that nothing was sacred to the man. He’d scooped their things into trash bags, and it was sheer luck the scarf had been bagged with Donovan’s belongings. Many of his toys and clothes hadn’t made it that time. Or other times.
Now, the scarf somehow sat in the bottom of this box that had been mailed to him. When he was younger, Donovan had taken it out and touched it every day, using it as an emotional anchor. But somewhere during college and med school, he'd grown more confident about his things. His home was his own. Since he no longer worried about his father ferreting him off into the night, he’d let the practice slide. It had been enough to see it at the bottom of his t-shirt drawer every once in a while.
When had he last laid his hands on it? He didn’t know.
That was when he reached into the box and snatched it out as though it were on fire.
Maybe this was a duplicate. Somebody had figured out which scarf his mother owned and bought another one like it. But, before he even got it to his nose, he knew that theory was dead wrong. It smelled like her.
Fuck. The only way this worked was if someone had broken into his home, stolen it, stuffed it into this box and mailed it from— he didn’t know. Grabbing the box, he flipped it over, examining it. He’d looked before. He already knew it was missing a return address, but maybe there was other information. This time, he used his laptop to open systems he had access to as an FBI agent and keyed in the red-inked postage marks. It took only a handful of tries to determine that the box had originated in New Orleans.
Fuck, he thought again, wondering whether it would have been worse if it had been mailed from his own hometown. Or if it was worse that the scarf was stolen, taken back to New Orleans, and then mailed to him. None of those options was good.
Once again, as if to reassure himself that his initial assessment had been correct, Donovan lifted the scarf to his nose and inhaled deeply. It was definitely his mother's scent, and it catapulted him back into a mix of clearly defined and fuzzy memories of her. One was the classic scenario of his mother making him cookies. Another memory hit—the non-classic scenario of curry wafting down the road from his kitchen. He had memories as well of his father raising his hand to the woman Donovan loved most. Donovan's memory cut off abruptly at the threat of a fist. To this day, he remained unsure of what had happened next.
He did have faint memories of applying Band-aids to his mother. But in the memory, he was so young that he couldn’t tell if he was actually helping or simply playing along. Some of the memories were far fuzzier, just feelings of warmth and being held. Feelings of safety, or at least what he had taken for safety at the time.
It was almost too much, and he set the scarf onto the tabletop, unwilling to put it back into the box. He immediately picked up the phone and called Walter.
Luckily, she answered. “Hey, Donovan.”
“Hey, babe.” The affectionate term had begun rolling off his tongue a few weeks ago, and he found he liked it. “Not a pleasant call, I'm afraid.”
“Is everything okay?” He could practically hear the expression on her face through the line.
“Everyone is physically fine.” Not a great start but. . . “I got a box. In the mail. That was addressed to me. . . as ‘brother.’ It came from New Orleans.”
“Holy shit,” she replied.
“Yeah, and it gets worse. Inside is a scarf—it’s one of the few things I have from my mother. There are also several pictures of this man with her.” He clarified, making sure Walter understood that the scarf was the pressing issue. “The scarf was in my T-shirt drawer. I need someone to go to my house and see if they can figure out how this person got into my home.”
“So when would they have been in your home? When did you get the box?” She asked questions he should have been ready for, but it left him having to admit that he had hadn't told her about the box, despite having it in his possession for a while.
“Minimum timeframe is probably two or so weeks ago. Maybe longer. I don't know when I last saw the scarf in my drawer. It might have been missing for as much as several months. I don't know.”
Even as he said the words though, that timeframe didn't make sense. He'd only seen the startling face for the first time just over a month ago. The other man appeared to have been as shocked as he was. He couldn’t have even known to break into Donovan’s home, steal the scarf—and who knew what else?—at any time before that. It simply didn't make sense. So he told Walter his idea and the amended timeframe.
“I can't help.” She sounded sorry about it, thought. “I'm in Colorado. Westerfield’s got me chasing down Pines. Let me tell you, this is the biggest suck-ass assignment ever. How do I trace a psychic who can make anyone believe she wasn't ever there?”
Donovan didn't have an answer, and he let the silence hang between them. Because while he appreciated her dilemma, his own felt far more pressing. “All right, I'll see if I can find someone else. Good luck catching up to Pines. And good luck remembering that you did it the next day.”
She chuckled and they chatted briefly for a few more minutes, but there wasn’t too much to catch up on. Donovan hung up and called Wade.
“I'm in Atlanta,” the other agent told him. “At a conference. I can maybe get there in three or four days. But if someone broke into your home, wouldn't you have smelled it?”
Donovan stopped dead. Wade was right. He should have. The two men lived secure-feeling lives in part because they could smell most everything that would happen, often even before the threat arrived. They only used smoke detectors because they left their homes to travel for long stretches of time.
Sometimes, when someone managed to be very, very quiet, or when Donovan was asleep, he smelled the person before he had any other sensory information of them. Had someone rifled through his clothing, surely Donovan would have at least known that another person had been in his home. He would have sensed this even if he hadn't found any windows or locks tampered with.
“I didn't notice anything,” he confessed to Wade. “I mean, I guess I might have not been paying attention—”
“I don't know,” Wade interrupted. “I've been in hotel rooms where someone went in when I wasn't there. I can smell that the maid has been in the room, and I'm not ever paying attention for that. One time, the room wasn’t made up and I could smell that the maid who had come the day before had been in there anyway. So I would imagine you wouldn’t miss it if someone broke into your home—far enough to get into your bedroom?”
He asked the last word with a question. And Donovan replied, “Yes. It was in my bedroom dresser, in my T-shirt drawer, under the shirts.” He was thinking it before Wade said it.
“You wouldn't have missed it. You would have smelled that.”
“My brother. . .” the words felt strange coming from his own voice, “he's running with the Dauphine sisters. He’s Lobomau. I mean, do you think they've discovered a way to completely disguise their scent?”
He waited while Wade worked out what he could. “It's plausible. But the things I think are most likely to occlude a scent include coffee beans and peanut butter and covering yourself with mud. Even that only works partially against someone as sensitive as us. I mean, if you've been in wolf form in your own home in the last week”—which Donovan had—“then you would have had a more open nose. You would have noticed it, even if it wasn't a human scent. They would have had to make all scent disappear for you to not notice.”
“Shit,” Donovan replied. Wade was right. Then how had his brother gotten the scarf? And why did he send it to Donovan? What specifically did the message mean?
“I'll still go and check,” his friend volunteered. “I'm several days out on the end of this conference. Let me know if you find someone else who can get there sooner.” Donovan agreed before letting Wade go. But, as of right now, there was no one else he could think of. He knew of Wade's relatives, who also had their skills. But he'd not yet met anyone else in NightShade, besides the two of them, who had this particular skill set. Certainly no one he trusted to go into his home and rifle through his personal belongings.
Though he’d hung up with his friend—knowing that it was impossible for Wade to call back in a few hours with an answer, as he had hoped—he wasn’t ready to take the next step. Sitting back down, he again stared at the three pictures laid out across the surface.
Something was nagging at him about the middle photo.
So he mentally listed everything he could about them. . . until it hit him.
In the middle picture, this brother was younger, much younger but still definitely in his teenage years. And he was standing with his arm around Donovan's mother.