Page 51

You know why I’m so smart, Eleri? I know falcons don’t have a great sense of smell, no better than humans. I don’t have to waste time covering up a scent trail, because they can’t track me or you that way—and this town doesn’t have many surveillance cameras.

—Unsent message written by the Sandman

The problem with her theory, Eleri thought, was that Psy had stopped procreating with changelings over a century ago, with Sascha’s child one of the first— the first?—of the new generation.

Unless someone had defected before Sascha.

Not just defected, but sired or borne a child?

It still didn’t make sense, not given what she’d seen of Adam’s pack.

They lived in and around each other on a daily basis.

No one would miss a half-Psy child. And Adam had been clear that he had no Psy in his clan.

“Convince me you’re who you’re pretending to be,” she said, fighting to buy time so she could figure this out. “I’m not moving for a copycat.” Of course she would because losing Malia was not an option, but she had to play the game, get what she could.

So she used his need for validation, his focus on his image, against him. “I’m only interested in the Sandman.”

“I’m glad you understand the importance of my work—I always knew you did, but it’s good to have that confirmed.” No laughter in his voice now. “I make them red dresses. Beautiful red dresses that turn them into goddesses in death.”

That piece of information hadn’t been released anywhere .

Neither the fact that all three victims had been found dressed in red, nor that the dresses had obviously been made at speed, the seams ragged and the cut far from professional.

He might believe them beautiful, but even Eleri knew no woman would choose to put those creations on her body.

“Now, move,” he ordered. “You have thirty seconds to get that drink down you or she’s dead.” He hung up.

And Eleri was out of time.

Throwing her phone under the desk, she just managed to push the emergency assist button built into the back.

Invisible unless you knew it was there, it would send up a red flag with the Quatro Cartel, along with a GPS location.

She wished she’d reset it to Adam’s phone, but they’d had no time…

would’ve had even less if she’d left this morning.

Even if that failed, Dahlia would realize something was up when Eleri stopped forwarding her the IDs of the vehicle owners, would no doubt send a falcon to check. Eleri had to do whatever she could to give them a trail to follow in the few short seconds she had left.

Lifting her hand to her mouth as she ran, hoping the movement would be hidden in the motion of her flight—or that the Sandman was too distracted by excitement to notice, she bit down on the thin skin on the inside of her wrist hard enough to draw serious blood, then dropped her hand back by her side.

Someone in WindHaven could track by scent—they’d traced Malia to the parking lot.

This was Eleri’s chance to give them a stronger trail to follow.

The numbness inside her that had stopped her from feeling Adam’s touch in all its primal intensity also insulated her from physical pain.

Her suit jacket slid neatly over the wound, covering it from view.

Whatever she was about to drink would no doubt affect her ability to make conscious decisions, but her blood would continue to drip. Whether in a vehicle or elsewhere, it’d leave a trace.

The silver flask was exactly where he’d said it’d be.

Silver flask.

She had it, his identity. But it made no sense. And she had no way to let anyone know because her brain was shutting down, whatever drug she’d just ingested acting fast.

Her knees went out from under her, her mind a blank.

···

Adam zeroed in toward the purple signal flare that had just gone up.

That color was reserved for him and to be used only in emergencies. Landing on the Canyon plateau at rapid speed, he shifted—to find Kavi standing there with a comm in hand.

“Call from some guy named Bram,” the nurse said. “Says Eleri sent out an SOS. Dahlia’s already on her way to the station—I was helping scan the road surveillance footage and Eleri stopped responding to our messages right before this call came in.”

Heart thundering, Adam grabbed the comm. “Bram, where’s Eleri?”

“Her phone sent out the alert from the Enforcement station in Raintree. No response to PsyNet attempts at contact. Her shields look normal, but as a J, she has heavy-duty ones that won’t show any external damage until it’s too late.

” No attempt at calm in that voice. “Adam, she’s never sent out an SOS in all the years I’ve known her. ”

“I’ll call you from the station.” A glance at the ID screen and he’d memorized Bram’s call code before he shifted and took off at brutal speed.

Beaufort was just jogging into the station when he landed. The detective took Adam’s shift in stride. “Adam, what—”

But Adam was already inside. Even as the senior detective threw him a pair of sweatpants from a gym bag, he’d already spotted Dahlia at the far end of the station, near the back door. “D!”

“Eleri bled here,” she said, because unlike him, Dahlia had a dazzling sense of smell.

It wasn’t because she was a gyrfalcon. Neither peregrines nor gyrfalcons had a great sense of smell, but while Dahlia’s father was a gyrfalcon, her mother was a vulture.

Most changelings with parents from different species shifted into one, with little to no crossover, but Dahlia had inherited her mother’s acute sense of smell alongside her father’s raptor form.

It made her one hell of an asset.

“He’s got her.” Teeth gritted, Adam pulled on the pants because he knew his nakedness would distract any humans or Psy in the vicinity. Beaufort was having difficulty even looking at Dahlia. “How far can you track her?”

The answer was—not far. “Droplet here,” she said after taking a few steps outside. “Nothing else. He put her in a vehicle.” She looked up.

“Go! Eleri and Malia, hunt for both their scents.”

Shifting in front of him, Dahlia took off on a powerful gust of wind, a stunning bird of snowy white with gray and white top feathers who would be a ghost if she hunted in the snow.

Her scent receptors were some of the best in the sky, but she had to have a pungent smell to track from above.

The traces left by Jacques’s shooter hadn’t been enough, had dissipated on the wind by the time of her arrival.

But fresh blood that was dripping and falling to decay on the earth? That, Dahlia could track.

As she flew, he ran back inside the station. “Phone.”

When Beaufort threw over his own, already unlocked, Adam called Bram. “Is Eleri still in the Net?”

“Yes. What—”

“Abduction.” His eye caught on a glint below the desk.

Grabbing a disposable glove out of a box on the wall, he used it to crouch down and pick up Eleri’s device. “Do you know how to get into her phone?”

“No. J devices are heavily secured—iris print, live voice code, all of it. No way to get into it even by the manufacturer.”

Fuck. “Watch for her on the Net, contact me if anything changes.”

“Adam, I’ve got it,” Beaufort said at the same time that Adam hung up. “Outside camera feed.”

Vaulting over the desk to the screen on the other man’s desk, Adam watched as a black van he recognized as belonging to the local bakery stopped by the station’s back door and a black-clad figure in a grotesque horror mask got out.

The person went into the station, dragged a limp Eleri out, and bundled her into the van before driving off.

All in under a minute.

“Not one of the Thompsons,” the detective said. “Definitely male.” He was already programming an alert on the vehicle.

Falcons on the ground would hear it, too, signal wing mates to new data via screens mounted on their ground vehicles. This wasn’t WindHaven’s first search; they’d long ago learned to coordinate from ground to sky and back.

“You talk to the Thompsons,” he said to the detective, aware that the elderly couple—both women—probably hadn’t even noticed the van was missing. “I’m going up.” The recording showed that Eleri was taken only eleven minutes ago.

Adam and his clan would find her and Malia both.

As it was, he saw Dahlia dive down in the distance as he took off. Arrowing toward her, Adam a far faster flyer than his gyrfalcon clanmate, he dived at the same spot thick with trees—to find her standing beside the open sliding door of the van.

She shook her head, her hair a tumbling darkness to her waist but for that streak of white. “Gone, but she bled in here.”

The abductor had driven Eleri out of the central area and out of sight of any security cameras before moving her into his own vehicle and taking off. “Can you track on?”

Leaning close to the carpet, Dahlia took a long breath. “Fresh. Not coagulated.” She shifted and was in the air a heartbeat later, Adam at her wing as they chased the scent of violence.

WindHaven didn’t advertise Dahlia’s ability, not even when they used that ability to help find the lost. No one outside the clan knew she could track over literal miles with the merest hint of a scent.

And today, she had a blood trail Adam’s mate had left for them.

The murderer’s first mistake had been to take one of their fledglings, his second to go after Adam’s mate.

He wouldn’t get the chance to make a third mistake.