“Clever.”
“I have my moments.” I eyed her white down jacket, the only one she’d brought from the dorms. “Are you warm enough?”
“Yup.” Abby grinned. “I run hot.”
Was that a double entendre? Or was she just pointing out the obvious—that a shifter’s metabolism kept us both slim and warm?
She closed her door and I locked the car with my key fob, then caught up with her as she stepped into the woods. “So, what’s the plan?”
“First, we scout to make sure no one’s home. Unless there’s an app for that too.”
“Give it a couple of years, and there’ll be one that scans for human heat signatures.”
“Until then, we’ll have to use what nature gave us.” Our eyes and ears, of course. And our noses. Cats can’t track by scent, but we have very well-developed senses of smell, and we can identify nearly every odor we come into contact with. “When we’re sure the house is empty, I’ll find us a way in.”
“We’re breaking and entering?”
I shrugged. “With any luck, just entering.”
That’s when I realized Abby was wearing hiking boots rather than the party heels she’d worn the day before. She’d known from the moment she got out of bed that she would talk me into taking her to the crime scene one way or another.
I’d never even stood a chance.
We made our way through the woods quietly, on alert for any sign that another shifter had been there recently. But I saw no claw marks on bark, which would have indicated that a cat had climbed the tree. Both the undergrowth and bed of fallen leaves and pine needles were too thick to show any paw prints. And the only other cat I smelled was Abby.
She smelled like warm flesh, airport coffee, and good health. And strawberry lip balm. And a little like whoever she’d borrowed her jacket from. The residual scent was familiar.
“Is that Robyn’s?”
Abby glanced down at the jacket. “Yeah. I couldn’t find mine.”
I’d never formally met Robyn, and I’d only had the chance to smell her once. She’d been unconscious and bleeding by the time I’d arrived at the cabin where those sick hunter bastards had tried to lure Abby to her death, then hang her taxidermied head on their wall. But once was enough for any cat worth his claws, and I should have recognized Robyn’s scent earlier.
“How’s she doing?”
Abby rounded a clump of evergreens a few steps ahead of me. “Better. She was having nightmares for a while, but those have mostly stopped. Her parents call all the time now, and I know they just want to help, but she never wants to talk to them. I don’t think she knows what to say. I offered to take her to a counselor on campus, but she wouldn’t even discuss it.”
“It’s a good thing she has you to talk to.” Post-traumatic stress could be a real bitch, especially for humans, most of whom rarely witnessed any death, much less the violent slaughter of several close friends at once. “But I guess it could have been worse.” And no one knew that with more certainty than Abby.
She turned to give me a very grave look. “It was plenty bad.”
The sudden change in her demeanor worried me.
In college, Abby had made friends and gained both independence and confidence. By the beginning of her sophomore year, she’d regained her sense of humor and had become almost compulsively cheerful, as if putting her trauma behind her was a conscious decision and one that required relentless reinforcement.
Seeing her somber now was jarring, and it did not escape my notice that the change was in response to her friend’s recent trauma rather than her own. As far as I knew, Faythe was the only person she’d ever spoken to about her own ordeal, and that was because Faythe had been there for part of it.
“Hey, is that the house?” she whispered, and I followed her gaze to a low-pitched roof barely visible between the treetops.
“I think so.” I stepped in front of her to assume the point position, and she didn’t argue.
Listening carefully, I pushed my other senses to the back of my mind as we crept to the edge of the yard ahead, sticking to the cover of the woods for the moment. The house was small and one story, with a cellar. The exterior cellar entrance was secured with a padlock and chain, neither of which I could break through without bolt cutters.
We had several pairs back at the lodge, and I’d thought I’d have a chance to pick them up, along with a couple of experienced enforcers.
I glanced over the deserted, overgrown backyard and found a weatherworn shed in one corner, next to the obligatory old car on blocks. The only thing I could make out inside the doorless shed was an ancient and rusted riding lawnmower.
The back wall of the house boasted peeling paint, several grimy windows, and a metal door centered over a set of prefab concrete steps. I probably wouldn’t be able to hear any heartbeats or pulses coming from inside, but by all appearances, there wouldn’t be any to hear.
