“The water is too warm this time of year for it to preserve meat.” Midas flinched when he said it, but I knew what he meant. A layer of distance helped more than the mild insult to the dead hurt. “He meant for those bodies to be found. He left them in a public park, stacked them like a cord of wood. Eventually, if he hadn’t called us himself, someone would have investigated the blockage.”
“I agree.” I mulled it over. “Okay, the animals came first, as food. He likely hunted them while he was learning the area. He wouldn’t have wanted to draw too much attention to himself until he was certain his mother was here.”
“Once he had confirmation,” Midas continued for me, “he started enacting his plan.”
“He’s been taunting her.” I could almost hear him. “Look what you made me do.”
“He wants to turn her conscience against her.”
“He wants her to surrender to him.” An oily sensation writhed in my gut. “He could have taken her from the shelter. The age of this cache proves he was already in the area when you brought her home with you. He was playing with her, letting her think she had gotten away. When you showed interest, offered her a support network, he set his plan in motion. He couldn’t risk her revealing herself. He would assume your pack would covet her for her gwyllgi blood and double down on protecting her.”
“You’re good at that,” he remarked. “Getting in his head.”
I wasn’t in his head, but I had Ambrose in mine, and his thought process had given me keen insight into the criminal mind. “Bonnie filled in a lot of blanks for us. It’s hard not to draw a mental picture.”
“I can see why Linus felt confident enough to leave you alone in the city with this case.”
Pleasure at the compliment unfurled through my chest, but motion caught my eye, and it drained away just as fast.
Ford stood with his back to us, gazing in the direction of the house, or maybe he was looking at his truck. He had a hand in his pocket, and he was jingling his keys like he was ready to go or wondered why he was here at all.
Midas caught the drift of my stare and remembered Ford too. I could tell by the way he took a large step away from me and refused to meet my eyes, no matter how long I stared at him.
As much as I wanted to point out I was single and could talk to whomever I wanted, I read the building tension between the two men and hated I was the cause. The fact Midas wanted me to be aware I was hurting Ford by not paying him my full attention stung. Fine. If that’s how he wanted it, I could shut down this… Crush? Fixation? Infatuation?
After all, I wasn’t the one who marked him. Accidental or not, he had marked me.
“I want to make sure there are no more surprises waiting for us out there,” I told them. “I’m going to follow the path, see where it ends, mark his likely points of entry into the section of the park where he made his cache.”
Tired of the puffed chests and grumpy faces, I didn’t wait to see if either or both decided to tag along. It was easier this way, I assured myself. Working alone meant I wasn’t distracted, my attention wasn’t divided. It also meant I could utilize Ambrose to his full potential.
“Follow the magic,” I told my stalking shadow, who leapt from tree to tree. “There must be remnants.”
There was no reason for the killer to hunt animals as anything other than himself. There were no laws, well, no supernatural laws, against the killing of prey animals in the city for the purpose of feeding yourself or your family. That included feral animals but excluded pets. Not that tossing a collar in the dumpster after you got the midnight munchies was hard. Charms of all kinds were expensive, an education I had recently received. They also had a limited shelf life. There was no reason for him to burn magic hunting deer when he would need it hunting his own kind.
The shadow reshaped himself into an arrow pointing off the beaten path, and I followed his directions with only a slight hesitation. Ambrose had tried to kill me once to be free of me and move on to a new host. As much as I wanted to believe those days were behind us, I knew in my bones the reason he acted charming was to con me into lowering my guard.
A tattoo in red ink that glimmered black when it caught the light marked my ankle, one of Linus’s own designs, a riff on a triquetra, and it bound me to Ambrose. He wasn’t getting free of me without killing himself, and Ambrose was far too canny for that, but I had learned the hard way to never underestimate his hunger for freedom, or magic.
“Hmm.” A hollow tree was the only eye-catching landmark nearby, so I went to explore it. Rot had eaten a hole in the front, near the ground, giving the bark the appearance of having been curled aside and pinned back against the trunk. “I’m going to be pissed if I stick my bare hand in there and come out covered in bees or worse.”
Mimed laughter was his response, and if I felt the tickle of his amusement, I stamped it out fast.
Fabric, not fuzzy insect bodies, greeted my fingertips, and I hooked a nylon strap. Tugging as gently as I could, I dislodged what appeared to be a backpack. A go-bag was my guess. My suspicions were confirmed when, after Ambrose examined it for magical traps, I opened it to find several thousand dollars in cash along with three fake IDs, a change of clothes, shoes, water, protein bars, and…charms.
I fanned the IDs across the ground and snapped pictures of them, front and back, then forwarded them to Bishop. The names, addresses, and other identifying information were different on each, and none of them matched the rental address, meaning these weren’t in the name he was currently exploiting.
“There’s not much cash here.” I fanned through it again, thinking. “He would need more than what I’ve got to dump this identity and pick up the next.” I crammed it back into the pack. “There are more of these, there must be, but I don’t see the point in tracking them down.”
In this area, kids would probably find the others one day while playing in the woods and shock their parents stupid with a stack of bills no one would ever claim.
“Tell me about these charms.” I counted three, each a different size and shape. “What do they do?”
Happy to oblige, the shadow dipped its fingers into the center of each then licked them clean.
A flutter of panic filled my chest when he sharpened himself into a spear and hurled himself at my heart.
Agony pierced me, and for the second time tonight, I imagined I heard his mocking laughter.
The information trickled into my thoughts as I massaged my chest, thinking on what he had discovered.
“One to hide his scent, one to change his appearance, and one to…?” Fresh pain twisted my heart like an orange on a juicer, but I got the message. “Amplify?”
The shadow took a mocking bow, his outline more defined than I would like, given the magic he had skimmed off the charms.
Rubbing the last one through my fingers, I admired its design. “What does it amplify?”
A combination of charms this potent would punch up the magic on the user enough to knock out electronics, like video cameras, but a person wearing this combination was in hiding deeper than I was, and that was saying something.
“You talk to yourself a lot.”
Tension strung my spine taut, and I could have kicked Ambrose for letting Ford sneak up on me. High on magic, my shadow self was skirting a dangerous line.