“We did it,” I said slowly. “I did it. I made the pack unstable when I changed you.”
Eli sighed. “How were you supposed to know? Besides,” he added, taking my hand again, “I know it looks bad now, but Will is a good alpha. He’ll get them back when this stuff with Anastasia and Lydia blows over.”
“But how is it going to blow over?” I asked. As long as Eli was around, the pack’s integrity was going to be constantly threatened. “Ana seemed more than just irked. She’s losing it. You almost have to . . . leave town. And tell everyone you left of your own free will.”
Eli considered that for a moment. We both knew that if he left, it would most likely be the end of us. I couldn’t go with him unless Dashiell released me from my job arrangement, which was unlikely. And I couldn’t run away with him, because Dashiell was keeping my brother under his thumb for the very purpose of preventing that. Eli opened his mouth to answer, his face troubled, but at that moment my phone rang.
We both jumped a little. A tinny version of “Werewolves of London” came burbling out of my pocket. I fished out my phone and answered it without checking the screen.
“Hey, Will.”
“Scarlett,” Will said, his voice despairing, “there’s another one.” I met Eli’s blue eyes. He raised his eyebrows in question and I just shook my head.
“Another . . . ?”
“Another disaster. At my house.”
Chapter 12
After calling Jesse and giving him the address, I drove straight to Will’s house, beating Jesse by about twenty-five seconds. I backed the van into the driveway again, opened the van door, and pointed with my cane so Jesse would know to stash his sedan in the empty lot across the street from Will’s house.
“There’s really another body?” Jesse asked as he joined me. I nodded. Jesse was silent for a long moment, and when I glanced over, he was visibly distressed. So much for trying to catch the guy before he could kill anyone else. We walked toward the house, with Jesse going extra slow and me working extra hard to keep up. It worked, sort of. It seemed to take forever for me to get out and make my way toward the door, even after Jesse took my duffel bag for me. Will was waiting outside when we made our way to the wooden walkway next to his house. The alpha werewolf paced back and forth, looking cornered and agitated. He had stuffed a towel in the crack underneath the front door, and I realized it was to keep the smell out. Or rather, to keep the smell in. That meant that the smell of the body had gotten to Will, whose control had always been so total. I shivered in my thick sherpa hoodie, spooked.
Will hurried to meet us on the walkway, possibly so we could talk, or possibly to get in my radius quicker. “I brought her inside, just like last night,” he said abruptly. “I figured that would cut down on the amount of flooring I have to replace.” Now inside my radius, he took a deep, relieved breath, as though he’d just popped out of the water after a deep dive.
“Was it a werewolf again?” I asked, and Will gave me a tight nod.
“Same one. I could smell him.”
I nodded back, glancing at Jesse. His jaw was clenched tight, and he looked as agitated as Will. “I should have been here,” he muttered. “I should have been watching the house.”
I winced. Will tilted his head quizzically, and I explained, “He thought we should stake out your place, but I told him the guy wouldn’t be able to change for a few more days.”
Will shook his head. “I would have said the same thing. He shouldn’t be able to change this quickly.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Will admitted. “Come inside. We’ll talk there.”
The new body was positioned almost exactly like the one from the night before, and I had the strange impression that it had grown through the floor in the same spot, like when a new snack rises to the front of a vending machine to replace the one you took. She was a small Asian woman in her early thirties, with chin-length black hair and the well-defined back and leg muscles of a serious swimmer. She was wearing only a pair of simple satin panties, and like Leah Rhodes, her face was untouched.
But she was different from Leah Rhodes in that no part of her appeared to be . . . missing. Instead, this woman had died the death of a thousand cuts—maybe literally. Wide, messy scratches in clumps of four covered her arms, legs, and torso. Each clump was deep enough to need stitches, but I doubted that any one of them—or hell, any three of them—would have killed her. There were so many, though. She looked like she was wearing a red-and-white Jackson Pollock painting underneath her underwear. There was a band of untouched skin on each of her wrists and ankles. Unlike Leah Rhodes, this girl’s fingernails were smooth and buffed to a shine. She hadn’t fought her attacker. I hoped that meant she’d been drugged and unconscious while he did this to her, but it might have just been because she was tied down.
“Same thing?” I asked Will. “She was on your doorstep?” He nodded.
“Were there any witnesses?” Jesse asked immediately. He dropped my bag inside the door, almost exactly where I had put it the night before, and began walking around me so he could see the body.
“I don’t think so,” Will said grimly. “My next-door neighbor has been on vacation in Aspen. I got lucky. Again.” He shook his head. “But for a lot of reasons, this can’t keep happening.”