Ashes (Ashes Trilogy 1)

She licked her lips. “I smelled him.”

Kincaid’s eyebrows crawled for his hairline. “Smell? As in a scent?”

She nodded. “It was the same way I figured out that Harlan was there. Harlan has … had a certain scent I recognized.”

“You saying Yeager has a scent? You smell him?”

“Well, when you say it like that, it sounds like he’s got BO, but … yeah. Everyone has a scent. Some are more”—she searched for the word—“concentrated than other people. A lot of the times I think what I smell is how they feel.” She explained about her sudden flashes of memory. “Like I associate the scent with a memory that gives me a certain feeling, and then I know what they’re feeling. It doesn’t always work, because there are some things I just can’t put a name to. Like … you know, a squirrel smell is a squirrel smell.”

“Do I got one?”

“Yeah. You smell like leather and”—she thought about it—“baby powder.”

“Well, leather’s good. If I weren’t such a manly man, I might have trouble with baby powder, though.” He grinned. “What about the Rev?”

“Opaque. Like really dense fog, or, you know, how cloudy glass has that cold smell. I couldn’t really get a read on him, and then when I guessed about his, you know, touch, I could tell he was surprised because it was like something suddenly opened up and then I smelled rain. I think that means it was raining when it happened for him.”

“That,” said Kincaid, “is true. It was raining here that day. The glass smell is interesting, too. What do you make of it?”

“I think he was staring out of a window.”

A smile flirted with Kincaid’s mouth. “Yeah, that’s true, too.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I was sitting next to him when it happened.”

“Where?”

“Where we were living, along with all the other Awakened,” Kincaid said. “In the Alzheimer’s wing of the hospice.”

53

Alex gaped. “You were a patient? You had Alzheimer’s?”

“Yeah. Why do you think we’re called the Awakened? I wasn’t terminal, but I was close. Stage six. Believe me, no one was more surprised than me to wake up in diapers. Thank God, I was dry.”

“How can you joke about something like that?” All she could think of was Kincaid, crapping in his pants and drooling. “I don’t think that’s very funny.”

Kincaid hunched his shoulders in a shrug. “At my age? You learn not to take things so seriously. Anyway, I woke up in front of the picture window strapped to a wheelchair, and the tech—young fella, maybe thirty—he’s dead as a doornail. Try working your way out of those straps without help. Those things are geriatric straitjackets. Take a Houdini to get out of one. Near about strangled myself.” He looked at her and laughed. “You know, you don’t shut that mouth of yours, you’re going to be catching flies.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Awakened? Just five, including me and the Rev.”

“So, do you … can you sense …?”

“Nope. I’m just me. Besides the Rev, there’s only one other person has something similar. Hears stuff a long way off, kind of like a bat, I guess, but with nuance, which can come in handy. You’re the only one can sense them, though. You’re like the dogs that way, when they catch a whiff of the Changed.” He favored her with that one-eyed squint. “But you, they see you as a friend. More than that, they’ll protect you. So you must have changed another way, too. Pheromones, probably.”

The word was familiar. Something from biology … “What are those?”

“Chemicals made by the body that produce certain odors that trigger certain responses. As far as I know, all animals make them. So do a lot of insects. That’s how bees and ants communicate, for example.” Kincaid’s lips turned in a regretful grin. “I always thought my wife smelled like lilies. After she died, I hung on to her clothes for the longest time. Walking into her closet was like getting wrapped up in a hug.”

She remembered how Tom had smelled, that complex spice that made her dizzy and hungry for his touch, and a hollow ache that she recognized as grief settled in her chest.

Kincaid saw the look on her face, and misinterpreted. “Thanks, kiddo. You never quite get over losing someone you love, but I’m okay.” He squeezed her shoulder. “Now, there’s nothing we can do about the dogs deciding you’re their new best friend, but we can spin the Harlan thing pretty easy. We’ll just say you recognized him, okay? The Rev is right about keeping this super-smell thing under wraps. Don’t even tell Chris.”

“Don’t worry about that.” She wasn’t tempted to tell Chris anything. That Kincaid assumed she might confide in him was a little alarming. Maybe they’re already seeing us as a couple. Maybe that’s why Jess badgered him into being my escort when he wanted to bail. “Would people really try to hurt me?”

“It’s a possibility. They might think you got some agenda. This super-sense-of-smell thing you got going … it’s a blessing and a curse. Good for us because you might catch kids the dogs don’t—and they have missed a few.”

A vision of children being paraded past for her inspection floated into her mind. “I don’t want to do that.”

Kincaid gave her a hard look. “You’re a smart girl, so don’t make me spell this out for you. We need to use every advantage we got—and that includes you. But that’s also where it could be a problem, because then it’s your word against theirs. You can’t see or touch a smell.”

“You guys always believe Yeager.”

“Yeager’s one of the Five Families. He’s head of the Council now.”

Yeah, now … but she couldn’t believe they’d let some demented guy decide policy. So who had called the shots before Yeager Awakened? “I wouldn’t lie.”

“You know that, and I know that. Yeager and the Council would know, but why would regular folks trust you? If what you can do gets out, then somebody else just might decide they’ve got a super-sense, too. In other words, they would lie. Even with the Council and the Rev to say otherwise, things could get pretty nasty. See what I’m saying? We could have our little version of the Salem Witch Trials, and we got no time for that kind of crap.”