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“We have to head back to the Smythewhites’.” As I spoke, I was already rising, digging through the bags Luke had nabbed from our motel landing on his way back to the duplex.
Because it turned out our eviction had resulted from the most innocuous of reasons—lack of funds on my credit card. Luke had settled up with the owner, and I now had clothes to wear other than that little black dress Grace had crammed me into when we set off to invite ourselves in for a tour of the Smythewhite residence.
Bastion should have had clean clothes also, but his packing method was frustratingly random. One pocket of his bag was full of a box of bullets cushioned amid a layer of underwear, the next paired up stationary with socks.
“It’s alphabetical. Pants are with power cords.”
I blinked. “Really, Bastion?”
“Yeah. Justice packed it. But don’t bother. There’s no point in going back to that house.”
I sat back on my heels. “No point?” I waved my hand at him, trying to indicate the very obvious point. “We have to find....”
“You looked under the mattress?”
I nodded.
“Then it’s not there. I felt it. Strong, as if it had sat in Clarence’s room for days, or as if it had been used there recently. But I could tell once I was on the bed that it wasn’t there any longer.”
No wonder Bastion’s energy had so abruptly snuffed out.
I glanced at Luke, trying to decide how much to say in front of a werewolf. But before I could work my way around verbal gymnastics, he proved I’d already failed at the woelfin-secrecy test.
“You’re looking for a wolfsfell. Did I pronounce that properly?”
I hesitated. This was far too close to revealing woelfin secrets.
Bastion apparently had fewer reservations. “Wolfsfell,” he corrected.
“What would a wolfsfell”—this time Luke hit the stress point perfectly—“be used for?”
Shifting to wolf form. Sharing pleasure. Being a woelfin.
And...none of that was what Luke was asking. He wanted to know what a thief would do with our pelts. So that was the question I answered.
“I’m not really sure. Our wolfsfells weren’t the first to be stolen, but we usually don’t catch up to the culprit before....”
My voice trailed off. Bastion waved away my squeamishness. “You can say it.” He mimicked a damsel fainting back against the pillows. “Before we perish.”
My fun-loving cousin was trying to make this easy for me. But there was no easy. If we didn’t find the pelt, if Bastion didn’t rebound....
It wasn’t just the world outside the window that would turn unremittingly black.
I glanced once more at Luke, expecting him to do the easy addition. Wolfsfell plus life necessity equals woelfin.
The werewolf’s back remained to me, so it was hard to be certain. But he seemed only interested in the puzzle at hand.
So I ignored the tightrope we were walking and focused on the mystery. “As far as we know, no one died last night. Which supports the hypothesis that Mr. Smythewhite is the killer. He went after Clarence, then the police came and he couldn’t get away to try again.”
Luke hummed in such a way that it was impossible to tell whether he was agreeing or disagreeing. “How does that relate to the wolfsfell?” he asked the window, his shoulder blades continuing to express nothing.
It was strange to talk to Luke’s back, but Bastion motioned me on with one hand also. So I shrugged and continued working my way through the puzzle pieces I’d started putting together in my head.
“If Mr. Smythewhite is the killer, then he might have stashed Bastion’s pelt under Clarence’s bed the day before to make the eventual killing of his son more powerful. I’ve noticed Bastion feels better every time someone dies. Presumably, the killer gets the same boost times a thousand.”
“Makes sense,” Luke murmured. He sounded like he was only half listening, but it was helping me to talk out thoughts that had been tangled inside my head for days. So I continued.
“Mr. Smythewhite couldn’t do anything to Clarence in the house, though. Not with his wife, me, and Luke all present. So he bundled up Clarence and the pelt, planning to take them far enough away so we wouldn’t hear the screams....”
“Hush.”
Luke’s interruption was soft yet demanding. I frowned. “What do you think happened?”
Luke’s head was cocked, his face so close to the glass he nearly touched it. Still, he answered as smoothly as if he’d been sitting across the table from us, sharing a coffee-shop conversation.
“No clue. Your guess sounds good to me. But there’s someone trying to break in downstairs.”
***
“STAY HERE,” I ORDERED Bastion.
“Hell no,” he answered.
Already, my cousin was standing and swaying. He’d get in the way if he came downstairs with us...and, more importantly, would use up energy we needed to track down his pelt
So I pulled the family card. “I need you to do this.”
And Bastion must have been tireder than I thought because he caved easily. “Okay, but you owe me.”
I shivered. Bastion was right. I did owe him, far more than I could ever repay. The agony he’d suffered over the last five days alone....
“Oh, snap out of it.” He tapped me on the head. “Anything in there? You know what I want.”
The same thing he always wanted. “A night of dancing?”
“Bingo!”
I could only hope Bastion had the strength for the evening entertainment he craved when this was all through and done.
Still, I didn’t let doubt paint my face. Instead, I nodded agreement. One second later, Bastion struggled across the room to close the door in my face.
Then Luke and I were creeping downstairs through pitch darkness, too far from the windows to use moonlight as our guide. His feet were unerring. Mine nearly slipped off a step, at which point he caught my arm to guide me. His thumb stroked absent circles across the sensitive skin inside my wrist.
At the bottom, Luke spoke too quietly for me to understand what he was saying. Hunting with a skinless was a different experience from partnering with Bastion. Frustrated, I shook my head.
And Luke understood. Or so I realized when his breath tickled my earlobe. “Sinus trouble?”
My cheeks heated. So he had realized my previous excuse was bogus.
I didn’t so much speak as mouth my answer. “Something like that.”
For half a second we were united in a heady rush of something powerful. Then his fingers tightened on my wrist.
“He’s in. Go down the hall. I’ll circle around outside and cut off his retreat.”
***
LUKE WAS GONE BEFORE I could answer. He slid out the front door so quietly I barely heard the latch click.
For my part, I’d never been so glad to have tools once more at my disposal. Before leaving the upstairs bedroom, I’d belted on a dagger, a stun gun, and—after a moment of reflection—a lethal-force pistol. I never used the latter during hunts with Bastion, but the stakes were now too high for moral squeamishness. Now, as I felt my way through the living room, my fingers skimmed over the stun gun and settled on the hard metal butt of the handgun instead.
Hugging the wall, I angled toward the kitchen. That must be where the intruder had entered, assuming Luke had been watching shadows slide across the grass.
Assume, assume, assume. I knew nothing about skinless. I also knew nothing about whoever had broken into Luke’s house.
Would the intruder know where he was going? If he’d scouted the space out previously, he might be out of the kitchen and in the hall already. The dining room yawned off to my right, the wall I’d been following disappearing from beneath my fingertips.
Here, illumination from the streetlights turned the room into a mishmash of light and shadows. Right in front of me, a window-shaped beam shone like a spotlight waiting for an actor’s entrance. If I took one more step forward, I’d be totally exposed.
I reached for my pelt, not intending to shift but instead seeking comfort. But I’d left the fur with Bastion. Could tell from the pins and needles in my fingers that the pelt was busy transferring energy from me to him.
I couldn’t waste my cousin’s few minutes of lucidity on tentativeness. There was no way around the light other than through it. I took a single step forward...then everything happened far too fast.
My pistol spun out of my fingers as if it had been struck by a baseball. The gun clattered against wood, disappearing into darkness just as an arm clenched hard around my neck.
I gasped...or tried to. Meanwhile, the cool circle of another handgun’s nozzle pressed hard against my temple.
Fear turned my senses almost lupine. Manufactured scents of grease and metal enfolded me. The harsh flow of someone’s breathing rustled the hair atop my head.
My assailant was taller than I was. The muscles pressing against my throat spoke to strength and certainty. The gun backed up his threat.
Luke’s voice emerged from the far end of the hallway. “Shit.”
Backup had arrived just one moment too late.