Titus snorted. “No, he has a bi-weekly cleaning service.”
“Of course he does.” I tried not to roll my eyes or sound too jealous of a nineteen-year-old attending a private college with no student debt, living alone in an expensive apartment with someone else to clean up all his messes.
Justus’s life was not without problems. Thus the reason for our visit.
I set my toothbrush on the glass coffee table. “Okay, I’m unpacked. So, where do we start?” Titus had been calling Justus every few minutes since we’d left the mansion, but he’d gotten no answer. “Is he onl your cell plan? Can you track his phone?”
“Yes. But I’m going to give him one more chance to answer.” He tapped a name in his contacts list, then held his phone up to his ear. It rang once from Titus’s end—then again from the front bedroom.
“He’s here?” I whispered, suddenly unnerved to realize we weren’t alone in the apartment.
“I doubt it.” Titus marched across the room and pushed his brother’s bedroom door open. “He would have heard us.” He flipped a switch on the wall, and light flooded the room.
I followed him through the doorway, then stopped short, staring at the colossal mess. “Definitely not a neat freak.” But maybe an actual freak. “Does it usually look so…?”
“Destroyed?” Titus supplied, as he ended the call, and I nodded. “His room is only ever clean on cleaning days, but this is…excessive.”
“When was cleaning day?”
He slid his phone into his pocket and stared through narrowed eyes at the mess. “Thursday. Two days ago.”
“And he’s been here since then.”
Titus dropped into a squat at the edge of the bed and inhaled deeply, to verify through scent that Justus had trashed his own room. “Yes. And he’s definitely a shifter.” He sank onto his heels. “I don’t think I truly believed it until now.”
I took a deep breath through my nose. “Wow! He smells so much like you!” Even though the lingering scent in his room could be from before Justus was infected.
“I know.” Titus stood and moved around the bed, stepping over clothing, video game controllers, and an open jar of guy hair gel on his way to the built-in shelves lining one wall beneath a row of windows.
“Can you tell who infected him?” I couldn’t detect anyone else’s scent woven through Justus’s, but that could be because I didn’t know his infector.
“No. It’s probably too faint to catch in trace scents. We won’t know until we can actually smell my brother in person, and chances are we won’t know even then. He could have been infected by someone we’ve never met. The vast majority are infected by strays totally off the radar.”
“Well, we can’t track him if he doesn’t have his phone. So, what, we just wait here for him? How long does he usually stay out?”
“He’s nineteen years old. He could be out all night.” Titus plucked his brother’s laptop from a pile of laundry on the floor. “While we wait, we snoop.”
I spotted Justus’s phone on top of his chest of drawers, peeking from beneath a battered chemistry textbook and a wrinkled jumble of note cards. The device was locked, but when I woke it up, missed call alerts lit up the lock screen. I scrolled to the beginning, past nearly a dozen calls from Titus.
“Well, we could have plenty of time to snoop.” I held the phone out so he could see the list. “He hasn’t answered a call in forty-five hours.”
“What?” Titus took the phone from me and scanned the alerts. “So, what? Justus got here right after the apartment was cleaned, tore up his room, then left, never to return? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Or maybe it does.” I knelt to pull a scrap of lace and wire from another pile of clothes and held the shredded bra up for him to see. “Unless your brother has a pretty big secret, this might be about a girl. Was he dating someone?”
“More like everyone. Justus is very…social. I probably didn’t set a good example in that department.”
A bolt of jealousy shot through me. How many girls had Titus brought home?
Titus scrubbed one hand over his face, and sleep deprivation seemed to catch up with him all at once. “And that’s only one on a long list of regrets over how I took care of my brother after our parents died.”
“This isn’t your fault. You didn’t infect him.” A photograph caught my eye from beneath the rim of an overturned aluminum mesh trash can, and I nearly tripped over a dumbbell on my way to it. “Are you sure he didn’t have an actual girlfriend?” I asked as I studied the photo. Which was actually half a photo, showing a smiling young brunette woman with a man’s arm wrapped around her waist. The rest of the man was on the missing half of the picture. “Because this looks like fallout from a bad breakup to me.”
“That would be a new development, but certainly possible.” Titus took the photo and stared at the girl. “So, two days ago, he trashes his room—possibly over a girl—and disappears. That night, he infects Corey Morris in the woods east of I55. How are those connected?”
“Let’s find out.” I took the laptop from him and picked my way across the cluttered floor. “In the living room.”
I settled onto the couch with Justus’s computer on my lap, and Titus headed into the kitchen. “I need a snack,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
