I nodded. It wasn’t a secret; the witches had been hiding in plain sight for a hundred years or more. In places like New Orleans or Salem (Massachusetts, not Oregon), they were virtually a tourist attraction. That human culture dismissed the validity of their claims was something the witches I know thought was a delicious irony: when they had tried to hide, they had been hunted and nearly destroyed. In the open, they were viewed as fakes—and, even more usefully, a lot of the people claiming to be witches really were fakes.

“But this wasn’t witchcraft,” I said again, in case he’d only been paying attention to part of what I’d told him. “Not any witchcraft I’ve smelled before, anyway. If you ask, Adam has someone he can send to check it out.” Elizaveta Arkadyevna was our pack witch on retainer. “She won’t agree to talk to you, but we can get the information for you if you would like.”

“Not admissible,” grunted Willis.

“Neither, probably, will Mercy’s testimony be,” agreed Tony. “But at least we won’t be running around in the dark with blindfolds on.”

Sister …

The whisper came out of nowhere. I glanced around, but no one else seemed to have heard it. A movement caught my eye—and there was a coyote crouched in the brush about fifty feet from where we all stood.

It could have been a real coyote—there are a lot of them around Finley. But I knew that the coyote was Gary Laughingdog, not because I had some sort of special way of telling walkers from coyotes—his body language said he was looking for me, and I wasn’t on speaking terms with the local coyotes. He met my eyes for a full second, then slipped away: message received and understood. He wanted to talk to me; otherwise, he would never have shown himself. Maybe he knew something about what had happened here.

I blinked at the dead a moment. Could Coyote have done this? It was a useless question because I had no idea what he was capable of. There were no stories that I knew about Coyote killing like this, but I didn’t know all the Coyote stories.

“All the women are wearing clothing,” said one of the police officers.

“Could still have been sexual assault,” said another one.

“Cougars hide their prey, so that they can eat it over a few days,” the first officer offered tentatively, and someone made a gagging noise.

I don’t think they realized I could hear them because they kept their voices down.

“Just for the record, you think this was done by something supernatural?” Tony asked me in a low voice.

“Yes. I told you, I smell magic.”

“A werewolf did this,” said Willis with authority.