Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson 13)

Intent on that, I heard a new voice speak quietly. Tony had made it here from the Kennewick crime scene.

I ignored him for the moment, worried that if I took my attention off my job, I’d drown in the swamp of knowing and not be able to pull myself out. It took some effort, but I forced the tide of magic back so I could detect something other than the dead boy and his murder.

I found people who worked at the store. I knew that was who they were because their scents were layered over days and weeks. I found the police officers who carried with them the metallic smell of weapons—gunpowder, gun oil. I found forensic people who smelled of chemicals and their nitrile gloves. Despite the darkness that filled my mouth, those scents came to me as scents usually did.

There were bloody footprints that led to the push-bar door, and I tried to scent the killer around them. Police tape meant I couldn’t get right on top of them, but that shouldn’t have mattered.

The footprints smelled of the blood of the victim. I was going to smell him in my dreams. I almost gave up. Had lifted my head to look at Adam—when I figured it out.

“Mercy?” Adam said.

I ignored him. I closed my eyes because this was ephemeral, this was something that I shouldn’t be able to detect. Along the edge of the bloody footprints and the understanding of who the victim was—right on that edge, I felt the abyss.

I had felt it in that vision I’d shared with Stefan and in the one in Stefan’s house when I broke through the spiderwebbed spell. I’d forgotten the endless, unfathomable depth of it. It didn’t smell of anything and it smelled of everything at the same time. Magic. Madness. As I became aware of it, I could feel it feeding upon the death here, feeding but not consuming.

And I had been able to taste it since I fell through the spiderweb of magic and attracted its attention. I should have panicked, but in my coyote form, I was focused on following the not-scent the killer had left.

Adam caught me with a hand over my chest before I blundered past the yellow tape. I floundered a moment with the scent of the abyss in my head—how could I follow it if I couldn’t go past the tape? I was aware that my mouth was open and I was panting as if I was in pain as I struggled with Adam.

“Open it,” Adam said.

George opened the smaller of the roll-up doors, on the far side of the big bay door, well away from the police tape. Adam set me down and I ran out, hopped down the concrete steps, and bolted to the outside of the door the killer had left by. It, too, was sealed with crime scene tape, but I didn’t need to go in through the door.

I caught the scent that wasn’t a scent; I caught the feeling of the abyss and followed it to the small lot marked Employee parking, where it disappeared.

I tried again. Ended up back in the parking lot, where the scent stopped. Not like the killer got into a car or something. But like he vanished.

Like Stefan could vanish.

It didn’t smell like Stefan. I put my nose on the ground again to make sure.

I had been raised by werewolves, by monsters. I’d seen monstrous things. I knew what vampires were capable of. Stefan was capable of this. He could kill a young man who’d gone to the store to buy groceries. He was very old, and the ties between us meant he could order me not to recognize his scent—that could be why I couldn’t smell the killer except for the taste of the abyss it carried with it.

I thought of the self-loathing in Stefan’s voice.

“I’ll survive. That’s what I do,” he’d said. And, “Marsilia and I have given you a game to play.”

Stefan could have done this.

I trotted back into the store and followed the victim’s scent, because it was easier to track than the abyss. I tracked the young man to the place he’d been taken—in the middle of the flour and spice aisle. I wondered if that had been on purpose, because the overwhelming scent of spice made it very difficult to smell anything else.

Sneezing, I tried to catch the slippery feeling that the abyss had left behind. It was like those optical illusion pictures that became three dimensional when you unfocused your eyes. That wasn’t an exact analogy, but it was close.

I followed it. I was so focused that only when I reached the wide door to the back area did I realize I’d caught the trace of the killer taking the victim to where he’d been killed. I broke off, went back to where the victim’s scent encountered the abyss, and cast around a bit. Nothing. It was as if the darkness coalesced right there, right where his victim had been taken.

I might believe that whatever had killed here was able to teleport like Stefan and Marsilia. Maybe just like, though the thought made my stomach hurt. But common sense told me that the killer had to have located his prey somehow. Found the right victim and waited until he was alone.

I looked up.

This store wasn’t like Costco or some of the other warehouse stores that put in overhead shelving to store merchandise. But the top of the shelf was still pretty high, a couple of feet over head height. Not really out of sight, but there were a lot of magical creatures who could remain unseen if they were still enough. Werewolves could. I was pretty sure vampires could as well.

I hopped onto the top shelf, landing on bags of flour. I trotted along the ridge where the two opposite-facing shelving units met. Nothing.

I leaped to the other side of the aisle—and found the abyss. The killer had waited on the shelving for a while. I could tell because of the depth of the darkness. I backtracked it from that perch and along the top of the shelving—it was dexterous enough to run along a path no more than an inch and a half wide. I had no trouble with it, but I was pretty sure that I couldn’t have run it wearing my human form. At the end of the aisle, I dropped to the ground, but the darkness disappeared.

After a moment’s consideration, I jumped on top of the next aisle and found it again. It wandered from one unit to the next and finally dropped to the ground near the front entrance. I trailed it almost to the doors before it disappeared again. I looked out the window and thought that something that could teleport might be able to look through the window and show up inside the store.

I didn’t know why they hadn’t just come through the open door.