She shrugged. “I told you it was weird. Is weird. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s something with will and power and—” Her voice tightened. She didn’t finish that thought. “What I was following, the killer’s trail, was a trace it left behind.”
“Zee told us that the sickle—the one he came here looking for—was sentient,” Adam commented. “What if what you are feeling is that sickle?”
She nodded. “Someone is using it to kill people. Someone without a scent—but because I have this tie to the abyss, the sickle, I could follow it.”
“Your instincts are pretty good,” he said.
He did not doubt for a minute she was correct. Her magic, a gift of Coyote, was exactly like any gift a trickster god might bequeath—irrational, chaotic, and only sometimes useful. But Mercy was adept at sussing out how to deal with it using instincts and intellect.
She was also good at throwing herself into danger, following where her magic led her. An image of the dead woman’s ruined body flashed in his mind. That would not happen to Mercy. He wouldn’t let it.
“You believe me?”
“I do,” he told her.
“Okay,” she said. Then her body stiffened a little as though she was forcing herself to talk. “I think that the murderer might be Stefan.”
“Why?”
Like Adam, Stefan was a killer. But there was a reason his name in the vampire world was the Soldier. Like Adam, by preference, Stefan’s kills were neat and quick. The kind of theatrics at play here didn’t feel like Stefan, even if he were wielding an artifact.
An artifact that Zee had told them could control its wielder. Stefan was old and powerful. Adam had a hard time believing an artifact could control him.
“Because I trailed the killer,” Mercy said. “He appeared, just appeared, in the store. Then disappeared in the back lot. He didn’t get in a car—there’s a feel to the trace when a door closes.”
Adam knew what she meant. Since he hadn’t been able to sense the killer, he didn’t know how what happened to scent when someone got into a car translated to whatever Mercy had sensed. But he trusted her judgment that whatever and whoever the murderer was, he had disappeared in the same way that he had come. And that sounded like something Stefan could do—Stefan and Marsilia, Stefan’s maker.
“Could it have been Marsilia?”
“There wasn’t a scent,” Mercy said. “Stefan could tell me not to recognize his scent.”
“He couldn’t have told me,” Adam reminded her. “I couldn’t scent the killer, either. Marsilia can teleport, too.”
“After he’d killed—” She hesitated. “After he or she killed the boy—” She paused again.
“Aubrey Worth.”
She sighed and bounced her head against the side of his jaw gently. “I didn’t want to know that. I didn’t want his name.”
“After he or she killed the boy...?” Adam asked, since she didn’t seem inclined to finish her thought. When she still didn’t say anything, he said, “Maybe the sickle makes it so we can’t scent its wielder.”
She made a frustrated noise.
“Once you add magic in, it’s hard to know how to limit it,” Adam observed sympathetically.
“It was magic—or rather there was a lot of magic all over.” She let out an irritated huff of breath, sounding, for the first time, almost normal.
She got like that when she was trying to explain magic with words when all she had were feelings. Especially since, as a female mechanic, she was leery about explaining things that might be called into question without empirical evidence—even to Adam. The more “woo-woo” (her words) something was, the more defensive she got.
“I’d like to talk a bit to Zee about what I think I felt there. What he thinks it all means. When that boy—” Her voice broke off. “Okay, okay.”
She sucked in a breath, gave an irritated growl, and wiggled to put some space between them. When she was done, she was sitting sideways in her seat as if ready to get out of the SUV. He stepped back against the open door so she could get out if she wanted to—and to give her space, which is what he thought she really needed.
He wasn’t hurt. He’d been expecting her physical withdrawal as soon as her shivering lessened. Mercy wasn’t much given to public displays of affection—still less if they were driven by a need for comfort. She didn’t lightly reveal weakness—he understood that entirely.
She waved her hands as if in surrender. “Okay. Okay,” she said again. “It helps if I talk through this. I’m sorry if it’s too woo-woo.”
“No problem,” he said.