I was also counting on the fact that it would be too obvious if we disappeared in the woods to actually risk killing us if we did find someone—or something—that didn’t want to be found. And it was also likely that my father had left town after killing my mother to avoid being caught.
It was still stupid.
We were doing it anyway, because clearly the Augusta County Sheriff’s Office hadn’t found the paw prints, or, if they had, they hadn’t investigated further. Whether you wanted to call it a professional obligation or just being irritated at base-level incompetence or desperately wanting to doanythingto help my brother get out of jail, I had good reason. For the record, it was all three.
“You’re sure about this?” Elliot asked me.
“I need to make sure there isn’t something the police missed,” I said. “Something that might help Noah.”
I could tell from his expression that Elliot wasn’t happy about it, but he nodded. “Let’s go, then. Before it gets dark.”
It was a reminder that two different people had warned us against being up here at night. It was almost enough to make me want tobehere at night—to find out what it was that everyone was so concerned about. Between Elliot and I, we had quite a bit of muscle and weight—to say nothing of teeth and claws. And, yes, if my father was a wolf shifter like me, he would have teeth and claws, too, but there was one of him and two of us.
Not that I wanted to fight my father in fur. Or at all, because I really didn’t. But I felt like if we were prepared, Elliot and I would at least be able to defend ourselves against one wolf shifter.
So I carefully tracked the prints in the mud, avoiding stepping on them, with Elliot following cautiously behind me. I turned, looking back, and saw that he was picking his way by stepping in my footprints.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
He looked up. “Trying to preserve evidence?”
I blinked. It was… considerate. I’d been avoiding the paw prints, but I hadn’t really planned to try to preserve evidence, since I wasn’t sure that anyone was going to actually listen to anything I had to say. “I doubt anything I find out here will matter,” I told him. “It’s not like there was a murder weapon, or something.”
“Wasn’t there?” Elliot asked me.
I frowned. “She was killed by a shifter,” I pointed out.
Elliot shrugged. “Nobody’s saidhowshe was killed,” he countered.
“They found shifter saliva and blood,” I said.
“But that doesn’t mean that’s what killed her,” he replied.
I blinked, then frowned. He wasn’t wrong. It was a sharp reminder why I was an evidence tech and not a detective.
“I mean,” Elliot said, sounding a little nervous. “It might have been. I’m just saying we don’tknowthat.”
“No,” I agreed. “We don’t. So if you see a gun or a knife by the path, tell me.”
“Fuck,” Elliot muttered, mostly under his breath. I wasn’t sure he intended for me to hear it, but he also knew I had excellent hearing. I chose not to respond, simply resuming my slow pace alongside the wolf tracks.
We followed them until they stopped in a muddle of dirt and grass about a mile-and-a-half from the house. I crouched down, trying to find some better clue about what had happened in the clearing, the forest floor a mess of dried churned-up mud, grasses that had been bent, broken, and trampled, scuff marks on the large, flat stones that were exposed through the dirt and grass.
It was hard to find the order in the tracks—impossible, even. It was also difficult to know how old any of them were. It had rained the day before Momma died—and not again since, although I knew it was supposed to rain again tonight and would obscure any and all of these tracks, especially if it came down hard the way summer storms often did.
“Um. Seth?”
I looked up, seeing Elliot staring into one of the bushes.
I grunted as I stood, then crossed the clearing, trying to see whatever he was looking at. “What?” I asked him.
“Come down a few inches,” he said.
“What?”
“Crouch. It catches the light.”
I was about to ask what the hell he was talking about, although I did as he asked, anyway, but then I saw it. A flash of sunlight off metal.
