A Hunt By Moonlight (Werewolves and Gaslight Book 1) (9 page)

Not only had he found the victim’s trail, he might have found the killer’s.

He was off in a steady, ground-eating lope, just slow enough that he didn’t risk losing the scent. Jones fell in behind him without complaint. The man was fit, he’d give him that.

And then the trail stopped being a trail and became a pool of scent. The victim had stopped here, stayed here for some time, but which way did she go? Other scents overlaid hers, distracting him. Horses had been here, too, but horses were all over London, placid cart horses, high-stepping carriage horses, saddle horses. He caught the scent of blood. Human or animal? Too faint to tell. The girl had not been killed here, or the scent would be stronger. He circled, sniffing, trying to make sense of it. He slowed. Step, sniff. Step, sniff, sniff.

Jones was talking at him, but the words were lost. Background noise.

Jones grabbed the scruff of his neck. “Listen, you! Quit playing around and get tracking. Is this some sort of game, to waste my time?”

Focused on scents, on the hunt, Richard gave an off-hand growl at the intrusion.

Jones let go, jumped back, and drew his gun.

Oh, dear God. Richard flattened his ears. He hadn’t meant it as a threat. Lost in the scent-world, he hadn’t remembered how humans reacted to ’wolves. He’d thought Jones had a cooler head. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one caught up in the primal fever of the hunt.
 

He backed away slowly, ears and tail down, tensed to wheel and run, wondering how good a marksman Jones was.

The inspector lowered his gun and gave a shaky laugh. “All right. Just—all right. Sorry. You’re kind of scary, you know.”

Richard sat, waiting it out.

“All right,” Jones said. “Sorry. Stupid of me.”

Richard flicked his ears forward and back.

Jones took a deep breath. “So, all sorted?”

Richard stood cautiously and went back to trying to make sense of the smells. Would he be better at this if he had consciously practiced using these skills? It had been almost literally a lifetime ago since, still a child, he’d wandered out to help the dog he’d heard whimpering in the night and had been bitten by a rogue werewolf. He’d hated the wolf within for all these years. But the wolf within him had saved Catherine’s life and now might help stop another killer.

If he could only figure out why the scent trail seemed to end here, with no girl and no body.

He had a human mind, even in the wolf’s body. He needed to start using it. He cast about, and this time instead of filtering out the scents that weren’t hers he took them in as well, analyzing. A half-dozen or so alley cats had passed this way over the last couple of days—irrelevant. More rats than he cared to think about. Cats and rats—could the inevitable clash be the source of the animal blood? His wolf instinct said something else, something more, but his human mind could not puzzle out why.

A dog, sickly smelling, probably a stray. Scent strong enough to be only hours old. Nothing to do with the girl or her abductor. Carriage or cart horses— most likely cart horses making deliveries to back entrances of shops, as this was not a normal carriage thoroughfare.

Cart horses. Some scents current, some quite old. One trail the approximate age of the missing girl’s scent.
 

He started to follow its track.

Seven

The chase took him down alleys, across fields, further outside the heart of London. He hunted silently, the only sound in the night his breath, which came through gaping jaws in great pants. He panted from excitement, not exertion. This body was strong; he marveled how strong, how fast. It was all he could do not to break into a full-on run, but he would risk losing the scent.

And risk losing his human partner, who
was
panting with exhaustion. Richard’s human brain had to keep reminding the wolf why this mattered, especially when his wolf instinct told him they were getting closer, closer. . .

There.
The girl’s scent again, outside what looked like an abandoned storage building among a row of warehouses. The scent pooled; she had been here for some time, and the man’s scent was here as well. He circled, sniffing. The wind shifted, and he raised his muzzle to sample it.
Oh, dear God.
The scent of fear. Pain. Death. Human blood. He cringed back, and an unholy sound came from his throat unchecked, a howl and a growl blending. Jones urged him forward toward the building, but he bellied down on the grass. He couldn’t. The scent was bad enough, the scent told him what had happened here, the important parts. Not the how but the what—the depth of that poor girl’s terror and agony. There was nothing more that could be done for her, and he could not go any nearer.

“What?” Jones asked. “You have to tell me what you sense.”

Even in his human form, Richard couldn’t have found the words. He regretted the overwhelming nature of scent to his wolf form, the totality of information. He howled again.

“Oh,” Jones said. “The girl?”

He nodded, his wolf-body finding the human expression foreign.

“Is she. . . Is there any hope?”

Death had a smell, even a fresh death such as this. He whined and lowered his head, ears flat to the sides.

Jones paled visibly in the moonlight. “Oh.”
 

Richard watched the man pull himself together, the consummate professional. Not uncaring. Just determined to function for the sake of those who needed his skills. Richard damned himself for being every bit the useless bit of blue-blood fluff Jones named him. All he could think of was
pain-blood-death
.

“Is the killer still here?” Jones whispered.

Richard lay down, burying his muzzle in his paws as if that could somehow hide the stench, fighting the urge to flee.

“Pull yourself together, damn it!” Jones crouched and, trusting or daring, grabbed the thick ruff of fur on either side of Richard’s face. “I need to know before I go in,
is the killer still there?
”

Jones was a better man than he would ever be. Even if he could not be his equal, at least he could try not to fail him. The man’s scent was here, yes. Impossible to tell how fresh, as it was obscured by… He couldn’t think about that now and remain useful.

He focused his other senses. Eyesight was different in this form, good for catching distant movement but less able to make out details. His hearing, though, his hearing was meant to find a deer moving through the brush a mile away or a mole scurrying in its burrow under three feet of earth.

Nothing moved in the old building in front of him save some rats scurrying at the edges, gathering their courage to— no, don’t think about it. No loud human breath except Jones' beside him. No other human heart beating.

“I need to go in,” Jones said. “Is it safe?”

Safe. Was it safe? Hard to think over the sensory overload that assaulted his nose. But the killer had gone. He was sure of that much. He nodded.

“Will you watch my back anyway?” Jones asked. “You can stay at the doorway, no point in both of us seeing the girl in our nightmares. But just in case you're wrong about the killer, I’d feel better knowing you were there to jump in and lend a hand. Or fang.”

Richard padded to the door, even though the scent was stronger there, and stronger still when Jones opened the door. Moonlight streamed through high windows, apparently giving Jones just enough light to pick his way around the scattered boxes of the mostly-empty warehouse to the table in the center where the scents of horror came from, the table with a form on it that Richard, mercifully, could not see from where he stood.

Richard kept his ears focused for any sounds of danger, watched the deep shadows in the corners of the building carefully. Jones gasped, retched with dry heaves, straightened himself, and continued forward to examine the body.
 

The inspector had lived this nightmare over and over again. No wonder he’d been so desperate for any advantage that he’d wanted to recruit a reluctant werewolf as a tracking dog. If Richard had aided him when he'd first asked, would they still be here tonight? Perhaps, but then again perhaps not. With his nose telling tales of a death beyond lupine or human imagination, that uncertainty loomed large and terrible.

A thin strip of horizon had begun to grey toward dawn before Jones returned to the doorway. The pallor of his face was more than the illusion of moonlight. Jones looked as if he had been the one to bleed out. “I knew her,” Jones whispered. “Dear Lord, I knew her.”

The man swayed a little on his feet. In this form, Richard would not be able to catch him if he fell. He stepped closer anyway, pressing against the inspector’s legs in a lupine gesture of support.

“I didn’t recognize her name on the missing person’s report. Mary-Lea must have been her full name. Mary-Lea MacArthur. I don’t think I ever knew her surname. She was just Molly at the fish and chips stand, the lovely Molly-o.” Royston choked on the last words. “She gave me extra chips if I flirted.”

One advantage of not being able to speak— he didn’t have to find words when there were none.

Jones took a few deep breaths. Pulling himself together. Richard waited, trying to close out the scents of death and blood that told too clearly what had happened to this girl Jones used to flirt with.

“She died like the others. But she was killed here, not dumped. The coroner thought that some of the others might have been dead up to a day before they were dumped, so maybe he heard us coming and ran, or maybe he wasn’t planning to move the body until tomorrow. Either way, finding her at the place she was killed may give us more clues. You did a good thing, finding this place.”

Richard was a large wolf and Jones not a tall man, and so without bending down Jones laid a hand on Richard’s shoulders. The touch was not that of a man praising an animal but that of a police inspector acknowledging a colleague.
 

He stood under the hand for a moment before glancing at the paling horizon, then back to Jones.

“Yes, you had best get out of here,” Jones acknowledged. "Will you meet me here again at moonrise? I’d like to see if we can find out more from the scene.”

Richard nodded, then turned and fled. Daylight was fast approaching, and even in this form, it was a long run home.

***

Richard joined Catherine for a late tea, as was their custom. It was more a breakfast for him this time. He’d barely made it home before dawn and had slept the whole day away. It had been a good day to sleep, anyway—gray and dismal with a chill rain falling. He’d be thankful for the thickness of his wolf-pelt tonight.

“So,” he said conversationally as soon as the maid finished laying the plates and left the room. “Jones was rather surprised to see me last night.”

She slathered honey on a scone without looking at him. “I imagine he was,” she answered.

“He said something about threats. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

She put down her scone and looked away, telling him all that he needed to know.

“Catherine, what did you do?”

She didn’t look at him the whole time she told him the story.

“I can’t believe you did that,” he said when she had finished.

“I know,” she said miserably. I can’t believe I did, either. I regretted it almost the instant I had done it. It seemed like a good idea, at first. I mean, I wouldn’t have carried through the threat, you know I wouldn’t have. So there was no actual harm done.”

“No actual harm?” he repeated.

“I didn’t think. . .”

“The problem is, you spend too much time thinking, and not enough time feeling.”

She winced. “I know. I wouldn’t have done it for myself. But to protect you. . .”

Richard drew a slow breath. She was not malicious by nature. He knew that, or he wouldn’t love her like he did. But sometimes she didn’t think deeply enough about how her actions affected others. Not until it was too late to change anything.
 

 
He took her hand in his. “I know.”

She twined their fingers. “Do you forgive me?”

“Always,” he said. “But I am not the one you need to apologize to.”

She nodded acknowledgement. “Do you think I should send him a letter?”

At the moment, he suspected that Jones was still angry enough to tear her letter up and burn the pieces. Perhaps without reading it first.
 

“I can’t help thinking. . .” she broke off, uncharacteristically hesitant. “Do you think, if we'd helped the Inspector when he first asked, that that girl would still be alive?”

He heard her unspoken question.
Is her death our fault? My fault?

He shook he head. “I don’t know. Even with my tracking, we might not have caught him in time. We didn’t get him last night, though we were close.” How close, he would never know. Would another half-hour have made a difference? Another hour? “But it was my decision, too, not to help. Whatever guilt there it is ours, not yours.

***

The next night, Royston shivered in the damp, overcast night, waiting for the werewolf. The coroner’s men had taken Molly’s body away at dawn. Royston and his team had been over the warehouse and the surrounding area, but the search had yielded surprisingly few clues. It was almost as if the killer had studied their methods and knew how to thwart them.