“The smell of magic is the same—and he killed her the same way he took out one of the horses,” I told him. You see enough hunts, you pay attention to how prey is killed. “He tore out the throat and ate it before disemboweling her, just like he did the horse. A lot of predators develop a favorite style of kill.”

I took a step closer, and the slight change in angle highlighted the ground. Paw prints, canid and huge, dug into the barren earth. They were bigger than my hand when I set it beside them. A timber wolf’s paw prints would have been bigger, too—but these were a lot bigger than any timber wolf’s.

“Not werewolf,” I said with a relieved sigh. “Werewolves have retractable claws that don’t dig into the dirt unless they are running—almost like a cougar’s. These have claw marks like any other canid.”

“Werewolves have retractable claws?” asked the officer who’d been still at the scene when we came here. “I’m forensics; why didn’t anyone ever tell me that? I can’t look for werewolves if I know squat about them. Do you have a werewolf who will let me examine him for a while?” The last question was directed at me.

“You’ll have to ask Adam,” I told her. Who would have to ask Bran, which I didn’t tell her.

“So what was it?” Most of the cops had stayed at the other site, but a couple of others had followed Willis, Tony, and me. It was one of those who asked.

“I don’t know,” I told him.

I knelt beside the body and put my nose down as close to the dead woman as I could get. She had been here longer and was beginning to rot. I sorted through odors as quickly as I could.

Between the rot and the burnt smell, it was difficult.

I sat up. “I definitely smell a canid, though not coyote, wolf, werewolf, or any dog I’ve smelled.” I looked at Tony. “I’d like to be more help. I’ll recognize the way our killer smells if I run into it again. If you want, we can have some of the werewolves take a shot at identifying it.”

“We are taking her word that it isn’t a werewolf?” asked Willis, disbelief in his voice. “The wife of the Alpha?”

“Yes,” said Tony. “We’re taking her word—but we’ll let forensics double-check. Would a werewolf have a better chance of identifying it than you, Mercy?”

My nose was as good as most werewolves’, better than some. But Samuel was very old, and he’d run into a lot of things over the centuries. He was not a member of the pack, but he’d come look if they’d let him.