“Oh, yes.” He tipped his head back and to the side, expression faraway. “Two. Ferals. Human handlers; one of them was bleeding – one of the wolves, I mean.”
Beside him, Sasha bared his teeth and growled unhappily.
“Ferals?” Trina asked.
“Not all turnings go well,” Nikita said, and she remembered, through the visions he’d shared with her, Monsieur Philippe talking about a Russian wolf named Mitya who’d been a drooling idiot. “Some minds can’t last it. They’re wild.”
“Okay, that’s terrifying. But that begs the question: did you know there were other wolves in the city?”
“There weren’t,” Sasha said, sounding strangled. “I would have found them by now.”
~*~
Trina walked them up. Nikita smelled wolf on the stairs, against the walls, the musk of dirty, mud-clumped fur and unwashed human skin caked with filth. Madness, he’d long ago learned, smelled of dirt, saliva, and noxious fear sweat. He smelled it here, thicker as they climbed; and he smelled traces of Jamie and Lanny, even himself, where they’d walked only hours before.
They’d just missed these animals.
Nikita wished they hadn’t; unlike the family who’d opened their door and stepped into a nightmare, he could have put a couple of rabid ferals down.
In the apartment, the bodies had long since been taken away, but he could still smell blood, and shit, and the hot meat of ripped-out organs. Blood had soaked the rugs, the floorboards; splattered across the walls and furniture.
Sasha stood in the center of the room, revolving slowly, mouth tight and brows drawn low. He whined, and said, “Why would they do this? Why?”
Trina stood against a patch of miraculously clean wall, arms folded. “You said they had human handlers, which means they weren’t here on their own.”
“No,” Nikita agreed. “They were used as hunting dogs.”
“What – or who – were they tracking?”
He sighed. “I think they were trackingus.”
