“Oh, I understand,” Emme says. She looks to the cougar who doesn’t quite figure it out. “Ted couldn’t smell.”
“Ted couldn’t sense jack,” I agree. “It’s called nose blindness because the sense of smell never develops. But it affects all the other senses, too, reducing them to subpar human levels or less.”
The weres in the other room gasp. As a species known for our badassness, they’ve never imagined something so horrible. I get it. Our senses are among the main things that make us who we are. They help us hunt, protect, and makes us the formidable beings we are. It’s probably why Ted was such a dick. He felt the need to make everyone feel less than him since he was less than what he was supposed to be. But it was this pseudo dominance that likely caused his death.
I rise with the largest piece of evidence in the cluster. Emme backs away and toward the living space where the other weres who gave chase continue to wait. She stops when I don’t follow.
“It’s why I sensed what I did, and so did the others,” she tells me. “I could because of my magic. Ted didn’t have it in him to sense anything.”
“Yup. And another reason why this dump didn’t bother him as much as it should,” I agree.
“But why did it kill him?” Emme asks.
I bend and exchange the bag for another. The evidence is smaller, but the bruising is more pronounced.
“Bren?” she says.
I don’t want to tell her. I’m already pissed. Saying it makes it worse. “My guess?” I ask. She nods. “It thought you were together and wanted to get anyone who might protect you out of the way.”
Her features reflect her shock and her fear. “Don’t worry,” I say. “Aric is with Ceel. Shayna and Koda are together, and Taran is causing yet another international incident on the other side of the globe.”
Emme meets me square in the face. “That’s not who I’m worried about right now,” she whispers.
Her reply hits me in the chest like a punch. Nothing’s going to happen to me, sweet one…And I’ll be damned if I let anything hurt you.
Emme glides out of the bathroom and into the hall where the cougar is waiting. The cougar shadows her. I catch him eyeing up Emme and just about slap him upside the head with a piece of Ted.
I don’t like how close the cougar is to Emme and step between them when we enter the living room. “Here,” I say. I brush what has to be a good inch of Cheeto dust off a stool and motion to it.
Emme grimaces when her focus skips to the plastic baggie in my hand.
Oh, yeah. That. “It’s okay if you want to sit someplace else,” I say.
“No,” she replies softly. “I want to be with you.”
I puff out my chest and all but beat it with my fists. “Well, someone around here’s gotta protect you.”
Although I’m trying to pretend what she said and how she said it, didn’t affect me, it actually did. Damn.
I turn to address the crowd, thinking I masked my reaction well enough until the bear in the corner holds up his fist. “Yeah, dog,” he tells me.
Thanks, dipshit. “All right, folks,” I say. “Listen up. What we have here is—”
A weasel near the infected recliner whips his hand up, interrupting me. “Ted?” he offers.
“It wasn’t a question,” I say. Christ, Koda gets the witches and this is what I have to work with?
I start again. “We have an unknown enemy among us. You see this?” I reach into the bag and yank out what’s left of a knee and accidently splash Emme with leftover Ted bits. “Oops. Sorry there, Em.”
A female rips off a somewhat clean paper towel and passes it to Emme. Emme graciously accepts, but not without a slight lurch of her stomach.
It’s about then, I start to lose the room.
“Like I was saying, we have an unknown enemy among us,” I say. I add some power behind my voice. It’s what Aric does when he addresses the pack, and look at that, it works. I hand off the bag to the cougar, holding the knee and pointing to different parts. “What do you see?” I roll my eyes when the weasel lifts his hand again. “Besides blood, muscle, tissue, and bone?”
No one answers. Oh, boy. I swipe the skin and try again. “Bruises,” the cougar says. “Lots of them.”
“Yup,” I agree. “Whatever killed Ted crushed multiple parts of him, almost evenly and at the same time.”
“What the hell kind of thing can do that?” someone asks.
“And then rip him apart into such small pieces so quickly?” a female adds. She glances around the room. “We were right on top of that thing. It didn’t have time to work Ted up like you say it did. It must have been magic, a curse or something else.”
“No, you would have smelled—.” I stop mid-sentence when I catch the scent of something I shouldn’t catch. I sniff again, just to make sure.
“What is it, alpha?” the cougar asks.
“Do me a favor,” I say to him. “Pour me a glass of water.”
He does and passes me the glass. I take whiff. All the funk from Ted’s place interferes with the aroma of the water. I have to practically shove my nose into the glass to catch a better trace.
The weres lean in, waiting for me to break down the complexities of my theory in the most eloquent way I can. And I do. “This shit’s fucked up.”
I place the glass down and roll the decapitated knee in my hand, specifically where the
