I closed my eyes for a moment to let the irritation fizzle out. Honestly, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I shouldn’t have expected anything less from Callista McCoy.
“Okay, fine. Just don’t take off again.”
“No promises.”
I just barely held back another sigh, and instead, focused on what we were doing. The smell was getting stronger and more rank the closer we got. And worse, the sinking sensation in my stomach was getting harder to ignore. I had an awful feeling I knew what we’d find at the end of this trail and I just hoped I was wrong.
We walked in silence for a few minutes, both our hackles rising higher the farther we went. Finally, we stepped into a small clearing and found the source of the stench.
Lying at the base of a massive pine tree was a scantily clad woman who had clearly been dead for a while. She looked like she was in her twenties, with dark brown hair and eyes that were open, vacantly staring at the canopy above us. A shiver raced down my spine as all my senses ramped up on high alert.
“Callie. I need to get you out of here.”
“What do you think happened to her?”
“Callie. I’m serious. We don’t know who the wolf is that did this. I need to get you somewhere safe.”
“Wolf? You mean a werewolf did this?”
I winced internally. Clearly Abraham hadn’t divulged that much to his sister. “Yes.”
“Are those bite marks on her?”
My stomach clenched as my eyes caught each bite wound covering her exposed legs and arms. There must have been a dozen. “Yes,” I said again.
She started pacing, walking back and forth between me and the body. “I don’t understand. How do you know this was a werewolf and not a regular wolf? Or a mountain lion? Or a bear? We are in the mountains.”
I swallowed harshly and nodded toward the poor woman lying lifeless on the forest floor. “She’s partially shifted, Callie.”
She stopped in her tracks and slowly turned her head to peer at the dead woman again. I could tell the moment she noticed the small tufts of fur and the way her legs were bent at odd angles like they’d been broken.
Everyone knew humans rarely made it through their first shift. It was what stopped my own father from trying to turn my mom. He wouldn’t take that risk with her life. So, what was this wolf doing? Why did he keep biting these women when they all just kept dying? What could his motives be?
Her hackles rose higher, tail pointed straight in the air. “Who would do this?” she whispered in my head.
I didn’t have an answer for her, but I didn’t think she was really expecting one. All I knew was I needed to get her somewhere safe. Every shadow, every creak or whistle of the wind was a potential threat, each one putting my nerves further on edge.
“We need to go.”
“What’s that smell?”
I sighed again, knowing there was no way I was getting her to leave. She was too inquisitive, too independent, and too damn hard-headed to do what I asked, regardless of the circumstances.
Instead, I closed my eyes and took a deep inhale, weeding out the typical scents like pine, dirt, woodland creatures, and the decaying body in front of us. It wasn’t hard to figure out what she was talking about. It was pungent and intrusive.
“It smells like piss.”
“Yes, but don’t you smell the chemicals in there too. It’s not just urine. It’s something else too.”
“Wyatt. We’re following your scents. We’ll be there in moments,” Abraham said, cutting into my thoughts.
“Your brother’s almost here,” I told Callie.
She nodded as she slowly crept around the body, careful not to touch anything. “I think they used store-bought wolf urine.”
“That’s a thing?”
She turned around to give me an unimpressed look. “Yes. We encourage farmers to use it instead of harmful pesticides to protect their crops from animals like deer and rabbits. This werewolf must have used it to mask his scent.”
I stood there stunned. Abraham and all his enforcers, myself included, had been working on figuring out and stopping these murders for months. In less than five minutes, Callie had given us the first big break we’d had in all that time.
Damn.
Was there anything she couldn’t do?
Callie’s ears perked up the moment I heard the distant sound of thumping paws on the forest floor. We glanced at each other before focusing on the edge of the clearing in anticipation of Abraham and his men. Seconds later, five large wolves burst through the vegetation, stopping short just in front of us.
We stepped aside as the new wolves, Abraham, Calvin, Clyde, Huxley, and Beatrice all gathered around the body. They were quiet for a long time before Abraham finally spoke up.
“It’s him.”
Chapter 13
Callie
“It’s who?” I asked.
Abraham swung his big head my way, blue eyes narrowing. “What are you doing out here?”
I peeked at Wyatt out of the corner of my eye and read the guilt plastered all over his face. But why?
“I… um… was out running and ran into Wyatt.”
“You were out running alone?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah. And?”
“I’d prefer if you stuck with the pack. Or at least one of our sisters.”
“I don’t need a babysitter.”
“I didn’t say you did. I would just feel more comfortable if you weren’t out this far alone.”
“I wasn’t alone. I was with Wyatt.”
He turned to look at the wolf in question. “What were you doing out this far?”
I glanced at him too and found an interesting array of emotions on his face. He looked guilty, but there
