Kitty's House of Horrors (Kitty Norville 7)

“Come on, guys, please don’t split up,” Gordon said. “Who am I supposed to follow?”

“Easy—whichever one of us takes the right trail, right?” I said. “Did Joey tell you where he hid the thing?”

Gordon almost looked surly. “Jerome, you wait here. I’ll follow Kitty first, then come back and follow you.”

That was actually a fairly elegant solution. Jerome didn’t look happy about it, but he crossed his arms and waited.

We split up.

The trail continued faintly, mostly because there were so many smells, so much to take in. This area may have been isolated, but other people had been through here. Hikers, hunters, whatever.

I lost the scent in a clearing. No—the trail stopped. I walked around the perimeter, and it didn’t continue further. Provost had stopped here, but I didn’t find a locket piece. His scent didn’t linger in any one place; rather, he seemed to have come here, paced around, then left again by the same path.

I did find other signs, though: the remains of a meal, bone and gristle from someone’s chicken dinner, haphazardly buried with a thin layer of dirt thrown over it. A mashed-down square space—a tent footprint. A tree that had done latrine duty. Someone had camped here recently.

“Hey, Gordon? Do you know if anyone else has been in the area? Was anyone from the crew camping or something?” I glanced over my shoulder to ask. I showed him what I was talking about, the evidence of occupation.

He had to lower the camera to see what I was looking at. After a cursory glance, he shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think it was any of us.”

That moment, Jerome found us hunched at the edge of the camp, staring. My face scrunched up with concentration.

“I got it,” he said, holding up a piece of locket on a chain.

“Hey, you were supposed to wait!” Gordon said, then hurried to lift his camera in place and start recording.

Jerome ignored him. “What’s wrong?”

“What do you make of this?” I gestured around the clearing and gave Jerome a few minutes to find the same things I had. A normal person without a whole lot of tracking skills would have overlooked the signs. To a werewolf with a hyperactive sense of smell, the evidence jumped out.

Jerome looked at me. “Who do you think was here?”

“Besides Provost? I don’t know. There were two others, I think. Valenti maybe?”

“You think maybe someone’s spying on us? On the lodge, the production, whatever?” he said.

“Where are they now? Where’d they go?”

The trails went out, then disappeared. Whoever had been here had scattered. I shook my head.

“Should we be worried?” Gordon said.

I sighed. “I’m always worried. We should get back.”

We returned to the lodge, and if Jerome and I looked unhappy, the others assumed it was because we had the slowest time yet. Next up, the vampires took about as long as the psychics had, and I couldn’t have said how they did it. Maybe they just looked.

Odysseus Grant, all by himself, ended up winning. When his turn came, Conrad started the stopwatch. Grant held the original piece of the locket for a moment, running his thumb along the chain. He set it down on the table, walked out the front door, closed it behind him. Less than half a minute later—not even enough time for the rest of us to sit back and start a conversation—he returned. Holding up the other half of the locket.

I assumed that all four prizes were hidden about an equal distance away from the lodge. Jerome and I had managed to find ours, after some trial and error and a lot of hunting, in an hour. The box with the locket piece itself was at least a quarter mile away—it took fifteen minutes just to walk there and back, so how had Grant returned with it in mere seconds? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. This may have been all about putting the whammy on Conrad, but I had limits.

“Wait. How did you find it so fast?” Conrad said.

“I pulled it out of my top hat,” Grant said.

Conrad sputtered, “I thought you said—”

Tina glared. “Odysseus? You don’t have a top hat.”

Grant just smi