Moon Sworn (Riley Jenson Guardian 9)

I blinked back the sting of tears and forced my gaze back to the body, trying to concentrate on the business of catching a killer. The victim was naked, his flesh sallow and sagging - the body of an old man, not a young one. There were no obvious wounds from what I could see, but Cole was kneeling beside him and obstructing my view of his upper body.

I drew in the air, tasting death and blood and something else I couldn't quite name. I frowned as I moved down the hill. Strong emotions could stain the air, and hate was one of one of the strongest, but this didn't quite taste like that. It was edgier, darker. Harsher.

If I had to guess, I'd say it tasted more like vengeance than hate. And the killer had to be feeling it in spades for it to linger in the air like this.

Cole glanced up as I approached, a smile crinkling the corners of his bright blue eyes. "Nice to see you back on the job, Riley."

"I'd love to say it's nice to be back," I said, shoving my hands into my pockets so he couldn't see them shaking,

"but that would be a lie." I pointed with my chin to the body. "What have we got?"

My gaze went past him as I asked the question, and the method of our victim's demise became starkly obvious. Someone had strangled him - with barbed wire. His neck was a raw and bloody mess, the wire so deeply embedded that in places it simply couldn't be seen. That took strength - more than most humans had.

But why would a nonhuman want to strangle a human with wire? Hell, most nonhumans could achieve the same result one-handed.

Unless, of course, our killer didn't only want death, but pain as well.

Which would certainly account for the bitter taste of vengeance in the air.

I knew about vengeance. Kye's death had been an act of vengeance as much as it had been a requirement of my job. He'd been a killer - a ruthless, cold-blooded murderer. And yet he'd made my wolf soul sing, and she still ached for him.

Would probably always ache for him.

Cole offered me a box of gloves, forcing me to take a hand out of my pocket. If he noticed the shaking, he didn't say anything.

"As you can see, he's been strangled," he said. "He's probably been dead for about five hours, and there's no sign of a struggle."

"Meaning he was probably drugged beforehand." I couldn't imagine anyone not fighting such a death. Which didn't mean he wasn't conscious or feeling every brutal bit of it.

"Or," Cole said grimly, "that he was killed somewhere else and dumped here. There's very little blood on the ground."

I snapped on a pair of gloves then walked around to the opposite side of the body, squatting near the victim's neck. The bits of wire that weren't embedded or bloody shone brightly in the growing sunshine. "The wire looks new."

"Yeah. And we've got very little chance of tracing it back to the source."

Not when barbed wire was still a staple fencing material for most farms - and Melton, despite being a suburb of Melbourne, was surrounded by farms of one kind or another. I touched the victim's chin lightly, turning his head away from me so that I could see the back of his neck. The wire appeared just as deeply embedded at the back as it was the front. I wouldn't mind betting it had severed vertebrae.

"Who discovered the body?"

"Anonymous phone call." I raised my eyebrows at that, and he grinned. "Line trace said the call came from 12

Valley View Road. That's the white brick house above the lake."

I twisted around and looked at the row of neatly kept houses that lined the park. The curtains twitched in 12

er 1

How do you say good-bye to a friend?

How do you say sorry I wasn't there for you, that I wasn't strong enough, that I should have shot the bastard when I first had the chance? How can you say those things when he's no longer around to hear the words?

And how can you get over the grief when his body is little more than memories on the wind and his soul long gone from this life?

You couldn't. I couldn't.

So I just stood there on the edge of the precipice, surrounded by the dark beauty of the Grampian Mountains and buffeted by a wind that seemed to echo with wild hoofbeats.

These weren't the mountains Kade had been born in, but they were the ones that he had chosen in death. His ashes had been scattered here three months ago, the funeral attended by his mares, his children, and his coworkers from the Directorate.