Page 18 of The Claiming of the Shrew (Fated Mountain Lodge #4)

FAWKES

Fawkes returned to his backpack and clothes to find a missed message on his phone. It was a voicemail from Hester, the lodge owner. That didn’t seem like a good sign, as late as it was. He listened to the message while pulling on his socks.

“Hi, sorry to bother you, but Leah’s sister Joy wants to get in touch with you pretty urgently. I’m still up and will be for the next hour or so. Call me back if you aren’t asleep.”

What did Joy want with him now? He wondered warily if Leah had told her about the jewelry. He thought about letting it go until morning, then decided he ought to get it over with, and dialed Hester back.

“Fated Mountain Lodge.”

“Hi,” he said. “This is Fawkes. I thought this was your personal phone.”

“It is. It rings through from the main lodge number after hours. Just a minute.” She moved her head away from the phone and he heard her say something about ... finishing the dishes? There was a laugh and a reply in a male voice that he couldn’t hear very well.

“Sorry,” Hester said, returning to the phone. “I’m just doing some after hours work at home. Mmm, Mauro, that’s nice, but just give me ten minutes.”

Another quiet male laugh, and the other voice—her husband Mauro, Fawkes decided—said, “I’ll go lock up the equipment sheds for the night. If you’re off the phone when I get back, I have a surprise for you.”

A door closed in the background. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Fawkes said.

“In a few minutes you would have been. But I did ask you to call.” Hester’s voice turned brisk.

“Joy, Leah’s sister, has called me a couple of times.

She’s not spending the night at the lodge, and she wants to know where her sister is.

Joy says Leah isn’t answering her phone. She hoped she was with you.”

“No,” Fawkes said. He looked up at the bulk of the lodge, with most of its windows dark. “I was supposed to meet her earlier, but she wasn’t around.”

“Let me text you her sister’s number. She said it was all right to call or text her and let her know.”

His phone vibrated with an incoming text.

“Thanks,” Fawkes said. His heart was hammering. He had known something was wrong. “By the way, I think I’m pretty close to figuring out who your thief is. Hopefully I’ll be able to tell you in the morning.”

And hopefully Leah hadn’t found the thief first, and gotten in trouble.

“Oh, by the way,” Fawkes added, stomping into his shoes. “Can I get a key to Joy’s room from you? You know she’s not there, and I can check with her if it’s okay for me to be there, but that’s where Leah was supposed to meet me. I can check if she’s asleep or whatever.”

“I don’t know about actually giving it to you,” Hester said. “But I’ll meet you up at her room.”

Fawkes texted Joy: She’s not with me, but I’ll check her room.

Joy texted back: Thx. I know it’s dumb but I couldn’t get in touch earlier this was a different person than the one who had been in his room.

And there were animal smells. Squirrel for sure.

He also thought he detected some kind of bird.

As well as all of that, there was a sweetish, pungent smell he couldn’t identify. It was stronger near the wastebasket. He reared up to put his head in, and the smell was much stronger, enough to make his head swim. Dizzily, he sat down on his haunches and huffed to clear his sinuses.

“What did you find?” Hester asked.

Fawkes shifted back. Hester matter-of-factly grabbed his clothes and shoved them in his direction. It was clear that she was used to dealing with shifters.

“Are there any squirrel shifters here that you know about?” he asked.

“I think Joy’s sister turns into one.”

So much for that.

“Well, I did smell another person in here. And there’s this.

” He started to reach into the wastebasket, then got a pen off the desk and used that to hook the thing he’d smelled.

It was a crumpled tissue. As a human, he could no longer smell the odd scent until he brought it close to his nose and caught a whiff of the same chemical he’d smelled earlier.

Hester recoiled when he sniffed at it. “What are you doing?”

“I think this is saturated in some kind of volatile chemical, something that would knock a person out.” Taking a deep breath with his face close to the tissue had given him another wave of vertigo, although it passed quickly.

“You think Leah was drugged?” Hester asked. She scowled. “If that’s the case, we might need the police.”

Fawkes was thinking the same thing. But Leah had probably been carried out as a shrew; otherwise someone would almost certainly have noticed a naked, unconscious woman.

He suspected that Help, someone has drugged and kidnapped my pet shrew wouldn’t lead to an urgent police response.

“Let’s hold that back for a little while.

I think we’re dealing with shifters, and it’s possible the police would be more of a problem than a help—if you get what I mean? ”

“Yeah, I get it.” Hester sighed and looked around. “But guests going missing is obviously a big problem. I can get Mauro started looking for her.”

“Not quite yet. I picked up a scent in here, and I want to see what I can do with that first. If she is in danger, tipping off her kidnapper might make her situation worse.”

The simmering uneasiness that had been in the back of his head all evening, ever since he and Leah had parted in the hallway, was now trying to roar up and claim the rational parts of his mind.

He fought it down. What he wanted to do was tear her kidnapper limb from limb.

Let’s see them deal with a furious raccoon to the face!

But finding Leah was going to take level-headed investigation, not a berserker raccoon.

“How can I help?” Hester asked.

“Uh ...” He started unfastening his pants. “Look the other way, I guess. I really need clothes that go on and off faster.”

Hester took down one of the hotel’s complimentary bathrobes from a hook on the bathroom door. “How about I just follow you around with this.”

Fawkes did a quick snuffle around the room just in case he’d somehow missed Leah lying unconscious or hurt (no, please no) underneath something. She wasn’t. The jewelry also definitely wasn’t here.

He went to the door, and Hester opened it so he could waddle out into the hall.

He immediately encountered a problem, which was that the hall was absolutely full of overlapping scents.

He stopped, snorted a few times to clear his nose, and tried again, but he just couldn’t pick out anything well enough to follow it.

He was going to need to practice scent trailing in a heavily contaminated environment later, he decided.

For right now, what he decided to do was sniff under each door in the hall. Most of the room lights were off, and the scents of their occupants were strong, as well as other smells—perfume, shampoo, alcohol.