Carrie Vaughn: Kitty's Greatest Hits

And she smelled blood. Great quantities of reeking, rotten blood and bile. People hadn’t just died; they’d been shredded. Her human sensibilities gagged. The Wolf merely cataloged the information: several bodies, human, gutted, and they’d been out awhile. Carrion, Wolf thought. Kitty shook the thought away.

Had they been dead long enough for David to be the culprit? Almost, she turned around and went back, because she didn’t want to know.

Just a little bit farther, though. If she could smell the bodies, she ought to be able to catch a scent of what had done this to them. Since she couldn’t get close, she concentrated on the land around them. If something had killed them here, then that same something had to have fled. The trail might be covered with snow now, but she might find a trace of it.

She smelled David.

Pausing a moment, she tasted it, fearing what it meant. But no, this was fresh. Still warm. The touch of him on the air was more human than wolf. He was in human form. His trail didn’t have the reek of a predator who’d just devoured prey.

Ahead, she saw him, a dark figure stretched out on the ground, collecting bits of snow in the wrinkles of his clothes. She was in the perfect position to sneak up on him and pounce. In fact, her hands itched, the claws wanting to come out, Wolf wanting to grab this opportunity.

And wouldn’t that be a complete and utter disaster? She refrained, not wanting to give him a heart attack—or a good excuse to turn wolf at this particular moment.

“David,” she called in the loudest whisper she could manage, creeping up until she was beside him.

Despite her caution, he flinched and twisted back to look at her. Then he sagged with relief.

“What are you doing here?” he hissed back.

“Following you. Have you found out anything?”

He took a deep breath. “I don’t think a werewolf did it. There’d be some trace of it, wouldn’t there?”

There would. She’d smelled the aftermath of a werewolf-killed body before, and he was right—if David had done it, they’d be smelling blood, bodies, and wolf.

“Yeah, there would,” she said.

He slumped and made a sound that was almost a sob. He’d come out here for no other reason than to reassure himself.

Tentative, she touched his shoulder. Leaned close to him in a wolfish gesture of companionship. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. Let’s go back now.” Back to the warmth, light, virgin eggnog, Jimmy Stewart, and a wonderful life.

“If I didn’t do this,” David said, “who did? What did?”

“That’s for the police to find out.”

Something seemed to have taken hold of him. Some newfound determination. Like the evidence had given him confidence—proof that he wasn’t an out-of-control ravening monster.

“We ought to be able to find something out,” he said. “We can smell the trail. The police can’t do that. If we can, shouldn’t we help—”

“‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ Is that what you’re thinking?” she said with a smirk.

Looking away, he frowned. “It can’t hurt to try.”

She wanted to apologize. She shouldn’t tease him.

“So,” she said. “You feel like a hunt?”

He stared out at the murder scene. He might have had a human form, but crouched there, his gaze focused, body tense, ready to leap forward in an instant, his body language was all wolf. She felt the same stance in her own body.

“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

Together, they took off at a jog, keeping clear of the cordoned-off area and the circle of lights that marked it.

Prowling out of sight of the police, they found a trail, the barest scent of blood on the air. Probably not so much as a drop was left on the ground for the police to find. But it was there, lingering, fading rapidly because of the falling snow. If they were going to do this, they needed to hurry.

They ranged back and forth along the same half-mile stretch of prairie leading away from the frontage road, looking for the sign they’d discovered: blood on the air, and oil, like the person they were looking for worked in a garage. There was something indefinable—something she as a human being couldn’t describe. But the Wolf inside her knew the flavor of the smell. This was a predator they were looking for. A taste of aggression rather than fear, like there’d be with prey. The feeling put her on edge. She was sure, though: The murderer was human.

A few miles from the interstate, another set of police cars gathered around a house at what looked like a junkyard. Acres of wrecked and rusting cars lined up on the land around it, roped in by strings of barbed-wire fencing. The familiar ring of lights and yellow tape bound the house. And the tang of blood and slaughter drenched the air. This scene was more recent than the other.

“What is this?” Kitty whispered. “Is some guy roaming the countryside murdering people he just happens across?”

The thought of a crazed murderer running around out here didn’t frighten her; she was a werewolf. Unless his weapons were silver, he couldn’t hurt her without really working at it. Even so, this was turning into one of her more harebrained adventures.

“What are we going to do if we find the killer?” David said.

“Call 911?” Then she grumbled, “Ignoring for a moment the fact that I didn’t bring my cell phone and I’m betting you don’t have one … we tell the police what?”

“I don’t know. I thought you were the one with all the answers.”

Ha. Why did everyone think that again? Just because she ran her mouth more often than not was no reason to actually put any faith in her.

She had no desire to get closer to this murder scene, and the killer’s trail was fading.

“Let’s go,” she said, and took off at a jog. After a moment’s hesitation, David followed her.

It made her wonder, just for a moment, what it would be like to have a pack again. The thought made her lonely, so she shook it away. The thing now was to find this killer. Figure out a way to throw him at the cops. Or to stop him, if it came to that.

The guy was on foot. If he had left footprints, the falling snow covered them. They tracked by scent alone, but the smell of human blood was strong. Not exactly subtle. Nothing about these murders was subtle. Kitty could tell that much by the police response, without even seeing the bodies. She didn’t have to be a trained profiler to tell these were unplanned. He was lashing out, haphazard.

David must have been thinking along the same lines. Briskly, they walked side by side, following the trail that the police hadn’t found yet. “He’s racking up a body count, isn’t he? That’s what this is about. Whoever he is, he’s gone postal.”

“Looks that way,” Kitty said.

“We’re going to have to kill him if we find him, aren’t we?” David said.

“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to get in the habit of killing people. Even if they are bad guys. I don’t think you want to get into that habit either.”

He pursed his lips and nodded.

When they spotted another house up ahead, lit by the yellow circle of a lamp by the door, Kitty’s stomach sank. They’d found his next target.

It wasn’t really a house, but a weather-beaten single-wide mobile home, white aluminum siding rusting at the edges, sitting by itself at the end of a long dirt road. The minimum of what could be called a homestead. But it had a fenced-in yard with spinning plastic sunflowers sticking out of the snow, and a satellite dish attached to the roof, which was outlined in colored holiday lights. Somebody loved this place and called it home, and the killer had headed right for it.

She tugged on David’s arm and broke into a run. Dodging the fence, they went to the front door. The place seemed peaceful. Soft, shaded light shone through the fogged windows. Faintly, the sound of Christmas carols played on a radio, muted. Maybe nothing was wrong. Maybe they’d made a mistake.