Page 28 of Ascendant King

Nothing in the hallway. The town house had looked like it had two more stories. Walking to the entryway, I used the hem of my shirt to open the front door. On the other side, Coral and Joel immediately stepped back, their pulled lips and twitching noses saying they smelled exactly what I did.

“Come in.” I gestured, and they shuffled past. I nudged the door shut with my elbow. “We need to find the bodies. You guys start down here. Cade and I will see if they’re on the second or third floor. Be careful. This is a crime scene.”

Joel held up his hands. “You got it, boss. Popo already have my prints on file, and I’m not interested in any more toilet bowl hooch. Always ends up with the runs for everyone.”

Cade’s expression was nearing a sneer, and I took the box he held with the evidence from the basement.

“Joel, store this in the car first.” Then, I nudged Cade toward the stairs. “Let me know if you guys find anything down here.”

The house was clean, pale blue wallpaper giving it the feel of an updated classic, a restored, renovated version of what it must have looked like when it was built. The white banister led up to a second level, where most of the walls had been knocked down so that it was open plan, the furniture dividing it into a family room with couches and a TV mounted to the wall and a small home office with headphones charging on the stand, the enormous computer monitor turned off.

No obvious corpses, and when I nudged open the bathroom door, it only revealed a small half bath.

“Nothing,” I said to Cade.

“Next floor?” He looked toward the stairs, and I nodded.

The third floor would have to be bedrooms, and I wasn’t sure what I hoped for, but the rooms were empty, clean, hospital corners on the beds. There was one bathroom on the floor, and before I even opened the door, I winced away from the smell.

“What is it?” Cade asked, but from his expression, he already knew. “The bodies are in there?”

I nodded, unable to speak. The smell was in my nose; I could taste it on my tongue. I felt like I had to scrape it from where it coated the inside of mythroat.

His mouth twitched to the side, annoyed, and he reached forward, pressing his hand to my nose and mouth. Surprised, I jerked back, but Cade stepped into my space, refusing to let me get too far. His magic crawled over my skin, and when I stilled, I felt it cover my nose and mouth.

For a second, he left his hand there, and I breathed against his palm, feeling it move with me. Swallowing, I touched his wrist with my hand, and he jerked back, blinking.

I took a deep breath and smelled nothing. The relief was instantaneous. My shoulders slumped away from my ears, and I nodded my thanks.

Cade looked away dismissively, raising the same hand to his own nose and mouth. When he removed his hand, the lower half of his face was covered in complicated, inky lines.

Reaching forward, I used the hem of my shirt again to open the bathroom door. Inside was something I never would have imagined. When they had renovated, they’d expanded the single bathroom. There was enough room for three bodies to be lined up, one next to the other. Black plastic covered every inch of the bathroom, no tile visible, no mirrors. Just plastic and bodies.

“What is this?” Cade asked, his voice hoarse.

“I don’t know.” Frowning, I crouched down, looking at the corpses again.

They were desiccated to the point where they were almost unrecognizable. I had expected to see more liquid and melted tissue than flesh—the bacteria that decomposed bodies wasn’t kind, but it was efficient. Thesmellindicated something rotting. Instead, the corpses looked like mummies carefully preserved for a thousand years. But there was something about the curl of their hands…

Standing, I walked out into the hall, searching the photos on the wall.

“What are you looking for?” Cade asked.

“I think they’re wolves,” I said.

Cade looked back at the open door. “How can you even tell? They’re nothing more than dried skin and bones.”

I couldn’t tell, which was a problem. It was only a gut feeling about the way that their fingers looked almost like claws. They hadn’t willingly lain down to die. They’d been fighting.

One of the photos showed three smiling people: two adults and a teenager. He was wearing a graduation gown, andthe background had long, draped hangings that declared it a historically werewolf university.

Cade came up beside me, frowning. “What could have done this to them?”

“I don’t know.” I was still staring at the picture. It was impossible to tell when it had been taken. With the state of the bodies, it wasn’t obvious when they’d been killed or even how.

“Let’s search their rooms and the office downstairs,” I said.

Footsteps on the stairs told me that Coral, Lily, and Joel had finished the downstairs. They grimaced at the top of the stairs, hesitating.