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But then we had broken free. It had taken Noah contracting Arcanavirus to do it, but when they’d taken him away in the ambulance, that had been enough for me.

I wasn’t ready to forgive my mother for it not being enough for her. I felt guilty about it, but I still wasn’t ready.

I also wasn’t ready to revisit the house where so much of what had made my life a waking nightmare had happened. But I was clearly about to, whether I was ready or not.

I drew in a long breath, letting it out again and hating the fact that it shook.

“Tell me what I can do to help,” Elliot said softly.

“I—don’t know if there is anything. Just… Just be there.”

He squeezed my thigh. “I can do that.”

I wasn’t really doing any better by the time I directed Elliot to turn down the gravel track that led to the Community, its houses well-spaced and nestled into the Appalachian forest.

I hated that it was beautiful—the sunlight filtering through the trees, the glimpses down the side of the mountain. I wanted it to be dark, creepy, ugly. I wanted the outside to match the feelings that roiled through my gut.

But the world doesn’t work the way things do in movies, where the bad guy’s remote cabin was dilapidated and falling apart, the branches of the trees gnarled and stripped of leaves.

The woods around us were full of birds and squirrels and sunlight, the houses well-kept, even if they were mostly wooden and rustic, gardens tended.

Elliot said nothing, but I could see the slight surprise on his face.

The Community didn’t look like the sort of place that tortured people. That pushed people into an ultra-conservative evangelical religion that gave no quarter when it came to adherence to what they believed was the one true faith.

“There,” I pointed to a set of gravel tracks that served as the driveway to the house where I’d been raised, a strip of grass, green but trimmed, running between them, dotted here and there with white flecks of clover and a bright yellow splotch of dandelion.

If we’d kept driving, we would have entered the main Community settlement, where the open park with the big open field that the kids used for soccer and football and the bigger central buildings—the Church and the oddly-shaped schoolhouse that had been expanded to make room for more pupils as the Community had grown—stood.

I knew that if Noah and I had stayed that long, we’d have attended the school until our eighteenth birthday, when it was no longer required by law.

There was no graduation in the Community, and only those who were called—or directed by the Elders—to work outside of it ever got a GED, despite having ‘formal’ schooling.

I knew from personal experience that what they’d covered in our classes didn’t meet state standards, especially for subjects like science, history, or literature, because at fifteen, Noah and I had a lot of catching up to do.

Elliot drove down the side track, following the nearly three-quarter-mile drive past the alpaca farm that belonged—or used to belong, anyway—to the Hills, then around a curve and up, to where it spread into an open area of gravel spread between the barn, the shed, and the house with its sloping roof and Southern-style long front porch that ran the length of the building.

I saw Elliot draw in a breath as though he were about to say something, but then he didn’t, keeping whatever thoughts he’d had to himself. Part of me wondered why—the rest was too anxious to be able to process anything.

There was a car parked by the house—a sleek, black Mercedes.

As Elliot pulled in beside it, the driver’s side door opened, and Humbolt emerged, sans suit jacket.

Given the fact that it was almost ninety-five up here in the mountains, I didn’t blame him for ditching the extra layer, and I could see the darker places on his shirt where sweat stained the fabric.

Mine would look about the same in another ten minutes.

Elliot opened his door, then looked at me. Probably because I hadn’t even reached to open mine.

“Do you want me to go talk to him?” he asked.

I shook my head, steeling myself, then grabbed the handle and half threw myself out to make sure I actually went. My shoes crunched on the gravel, and I squinted against the sun before pulling my sunglasses down off the top of my head to cover my eyes.

I stared up at the house, which seemed so much smaller than I remembered it.

Not that it had ever felt like a particularly large house—it had three bedrooms, the last added on in the back while Noah and I were very little because it apparently wasn’t appropriate for us to share a bedroom once we were out of the toddler stage of life.

The newest bedroom had belonged to my parents and had been put in around what had been the old back door, which now had a tiny hallway out to the yard and the door of their bedroom. I assumed, anyway. That’s the way it had been when I was fifteen.

As a kid, I’d always thought of our house as looming, its porch imposing and its dark windows—sometimes lit like a demon’s eyes, sometimes not—hollow.

Now, it just looked like a house. Weathered, but not uncared-for, the wood having aged to a greyish color and starting to splinter, but not to the point where it needed replacing.

The shingles looked newer, maybe a handful of years old, and the steps leading up to the porch still had some of their blond-wood tone to them.

Except for where there were dark stains that my crime-scene-experienced brain knew immediately was blood.

“Are you—” Elliot began.

“She died on the porch,” I said, my words sounding oddly flat even to my own ears.

“Yes,” Humbolt confirmed, walking over and looking in the direction I was facing.

“How do you know that?” Elliot asked.

“Blood on the stairs,” I replied, then forced my feet to walk in the direction of those same stairs.

“Seth—” Elliot hurried to catch up to me.

“What?” I asked him

“Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“No,” I replied. “But what else am I going to do?”

“I mean the…” He trailed off.

“Blood?”

“Yeah.”

“It might tell me more about what happened,” I replied.

He didn’t respond, but a glance over told me that his silence was one of agreement and resignation, not annoyance.

I stopped at the bottom of the stairs, pulling off my sunglasses to get a better look at the spatter pattern.

In Richmond, we’d had a woman whose whole job was blood spatter and trajectories.

Not in Shawano, so I’d done quite a bit of research into it because it bothered me that we’d only been guessing most of the time. Educated guessing, but still guessing.

Between spatter patterns and arson investigation and fire fighting, I’d learned a lot in the last year.

The stains on the stairs were the result of arterial spray mixed with spatter, most likely from her struggling against her attacker, and then smearing as the result of someone walking through or moving something through the blood and not being particularly careful about it.

I got close, very close. And then I saw one possible reason why they were so stuck on Noah—because I could see the outline of a wolf’s print in one of the smears of blood.

If their CSI team was observant, they’d know that it was a wolf who had killed Momma.

And, thanks to the Virginia shifter registry, they knew Noah was a wolf.

They knew I was, too, but I had an alibi they couldn’t question, and Noah didn’t.

Shifter types ran in families.

So it was likely that if my theory about my father being a shifter was correct, he was also a wolf. Which meant that this print also fit with my theory that my father was a murderer.

“What did you find?” Elliot asked.

I pointed to it. “Wolf,” I replied.

“What’s a wolf?” Humbolt asked.

“Whatever walked through this blood,” I replied.

The lawyer bent down, his lips—visible because wasn’t wearing a mask outside—pursed as he studied the blood. “Where?”

I sketched the lines with my finger hovering over the dried blood smears.

“Oh. Yes, it does look that way.” He cleared his throat. “Is…?”

“Yeah, Noah and I are both wolves,” I replied.

Humbolt looked at me, startled. “You’re a shifter, too?”

I nodded.

“Your mother knew about your twin’s illness, but she didn’t mention you’d also fallen sick,” he said.

“I didn’t as a kid,” I replied. “It happened a little over a year ago.”

“Ah,” Humbolt sounded satisfied and gave a nod. “That explains it, then.”

I looked at him, curious about his complete lack of judgment. Even people who weren’t particularly anti-shifter didn’t usually accept it with that much equanimity.

Humbolt shrugged. “My son is a shifter,” he replied simply. “European red fox. He lives in Charlottesville now. Married. Two kids.” He smiled fondly.

“I feel sorry for their mother,” Elliot remarked. “Having to cook enough to feed all of them.”

Humbolt chuckled. “Darren does most of the cooking,” he replied. “His wife’s an ER nurse.”

“Good for him,” Elliot replied, smiling. He’d clearly decided Humbolt was okay. I’d already liked the man, but this meant that I trusted him even more. Enough to let him in on what I was thinking.

“I think it was my father,” I said out loud, not wanting to second-guess myself again, although the minute I said it, I regretted the fact that I’d ruined what was becoming a friendly exchange.

“What was?” Humbolt asked, frowning.

“The wolf,” Elliot said softly. “The killer.”

Humbolt’s eyes widened. “You think?—”

I gestured across the steps and up to the much larger discoloration of blood on the porch, still thick and starting to crack. They hadn’t even bothered to try to clean it up. My mother’s blood.

She’d died here, bleeding her life out onto the old wood of the porch, near the creaky spot that I’d always listened for as a child that would tell me my father had come home. That the few moments of peace or laughter we’d shared were about to be silenced.