Page 16 of The Claiming of the Shrew (Fated Mountain Lodge #4)

FAWKES

Fawkes had spent the evening painstakingly going over every possible angle to a) prove that someone had been in his room to plant the jewelry, and b) find out who it was.

Unfortunately the intruder, whoever they were, had been very good.

He dusted the whole room for prints and found nothing but his own and a number of smudgy partial prints that probably belonged to the housekeeping staff.

The lock must have been picked, but they’d left no trace—although the rooms still used old-fashioned keys rather than key cards, so all it would take to get in was a set of basic lock picks.

He ought to have set up some kind of recording device inside. Next time, he was going to bring a small webcam and have Sam monitor it.

“Okay, think it through,” he murmured aloud. “Someone set you up. It’s either the actual jewel thief, or someone else who knows why you’re here. They wanted someone to find this—Leah, the housekeeping staff, it didn’t really matter, you’d be in trouble either way.”

What he really needed to do was talk it over with Leah.

Unfortunately, she seemed to have vanished after the hallway disturbance.

He’d slipped off while the commotion was going on, planning to come back and talk to her after she and Maggie were done.

But now he couldn’t find her anywhere. He found himself tense, on edge, in a way that was hard to explain even apart from her inexplicable absence—as if something inside him was telling him to worry.

She didn’t answer his knocks at the door of Joy’s room.

Leah wasn’t in her tent or her car. If she didn’t turn up soon, he would break into Joy’s room, but he was saving that as a last resort.

It was possible she’d simply gone in to wait for him and fallen asleep.

It was also possible she still thought he was a jewel thief and had no intention of talking to him at all.

He was circling her campsite and considering shifting to track her by smell when he stopped abruptly. He could have smacked himself in the forehead for the obvious thing he’d overlooked.

By now it was fully dark outside. The hotel lobby remained unlocked all night, and Fawkes bounded up the stairs two at a time and let himself into his room.

One of the biggest advantages he had over a human P.I.

, other than the ability to get in and out of tight spaces, was his sense of smell.

He had occasionally used it in the past. In this particular case, it had been useless around the trashed set because so many people had come and gone.

Even the shears had smelled like too many different people to be sure of who had handled them last.

But he ought to be able to smell out whoever had been in his room.

The only other smells would be himself and Leah, as well as the much more attenuated smells of cleaning staff and traces of former guests.

The cleaners didn’t enter every day when a room was occupied, so the freshest scents by far should be Leah and whoever had put the jewelry in his pillowcase.

As soon as the door was locked behind him, he shed his clothing and went raccoon-shaped.

If he’d only thought of this before Leah took the pillowcase, he would have had the freshest scent of all; that was what he got for letting his higher brain functions go out the window.

But as he sniffed his way all over the floor, then climbed up on the bed and sniffed all over that, there definitely was another scent here.

Leah’s was the strongest by far, and difficult to ignore.

But someone else had been in the room. It was familiar; he had definitely smelled them around somewhere recently, though he couldn’t put his finger on exactly where.

Great. I’m going to have to sniff everyone in the theater company. As a raccoon.

Might as well get to it.

He put aside talking to Leah as a problem for Future Fawkes, which might also go along with being able to bring her the culprit’s identity like a particularly tasty piece of trash, and tried to push down the part of his brain that was jangling anxiously at him: Where is mate?

Find mate now! If it was going to be like this every time he wasn’t sure where Leah was, he’d better start learning to ignore it.

Leah was not exactly an easy person to keep track of.

Instead, he stayed in the room just long enough to get dressed and grab his dark backpack for stashing his clothes while exploring. Then he was off, slipping out a side door and under the dark trees, and a few moments later a raccoon was wandering about the grounds of the lodge.

It was a good thing this was a shifter-friendly area and not the sort of place where someone was going to set traps or take potshots at a random, not particularly well-loved pest mammal. He had spent more time as a raccoon in the last two days than he normally did in two months.

Rather unexpectedly—though he should have guessed—he came upon other shifters under the trees, taking advantage of the night’s privacy to exercise their shift forms. In rapid succession, he met a gazelle, a pair of porcupines, and an aardvark.

He took the opportunity to come up and touch noses with each of them in a friendly shifter greeting, which also gave him the chance to sniff them.

Shifters didn’t have a unique smell compared to normal animals or humans—that is, a shifted gazelle just smelled like a gazelle.

But what they did tend to do was carry some of their other shape’s smell with them.

This was particularly true of shifters in their animal form, because they had just been in contact with their human shape’s clothing and personal items.

If he hadn’t been looking for a certain smell, this would have told him nothing except that these animals had been in contact with humans recently. But with that smell strongly patterned in the back of his brain, he was seeking its elusive vibe.

None of these animals had it.

He still felt as if he was on the right track.

He made a circuitous path through the encampment, and when he got to the set, among the crisscrossing scent trails, he suddenly stumbled on the smell he was looking for.

There was a clear patch of it on the stage.

Someone had sat or leaned on it, touched it with their hand.

All the surrounding scent tracks were too confused for him to actually trail the person like a bloodhound; it was just a big mishmash of different people smells.

But they had been here very recently, just hours ago.

They were either in the camp or the hotel tonight.

Fawkes wrinkled his muzzle, drawing it back from his teeth in something that could be read as a snarl or a smile, or both. Gotcha .

Now he just needed to figure out who it actually was, and find Leah so she could be in on the takedown. Piece of cake. How hard could that be?