“Can you smell the fey through all of this?” I asked Ian and Donovan.

“Yes. You can smell the scent if you sort out all the rest,” Ian said.

Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough. I took a bigger whiff through my nose and gagged. All I could smell was blood, dead flesh, bile, and excrement. Sorting through that? No. Not happening. Ian was crazy. If I wasn’t worried about looking tough in front of someone I didn’t know very well, I would’ve pulled my shirt over my nose.

Donovan hunkered down near a pile of mushy flesh and took a big inhale.

Oh Christ. I almost gagged for him.

“It’s not one I know.” He looked up at Ian. “You’re sure you’ve not scented this one before?”

“No. Since the Americans made their little debut, we’ve not seen nor heard from any of the courts, even the Lunar. They’ve kept their distance.”

Something about this didn’t sit right with me. There was no way a creature fey could come through the stronghold without notice, and kill the second strongest in the pack. The way here was so convoluted that I had no clue how to get back to the front entrance. The creature would have to make it through the castle, not running into a soul, before finding John—the wolf whose death would destabilize the pack the most. And that didn’t take into account how hard it must’ve been to actually kill John.

Or maybe this thing was just that bad?

But I couldn’t get over how this fey monster—whatever it was—had found John without anyone in the pack seeing or hearing anything.

Even with Van’s handy-dandy teleportation powers, killing John like this—turning a second, and not just any second, but Donovan’s second to bits and mush—would’ve taken time and caused a whole lot of noise. So this thing had to have had inside help. That thought turned my blood to ice.

I didn’t want my theory to be true, and honestly my first thought went to Vivian, but I didn’t know the pack well enough to make that assessment. It was my own bias making me want to point the finger at her.

I ran my hands down my face as I tried to think of what we did know, which wasn’t much.

“The fey are in the process of closing their underhills,” Donovan said as he rose from the floor. “Maybe in the confusion of closing the Irish hill, something escaped?”

“Or maybe something was let out,” I said. I switched to using our bond, not wanting Ian to overhear the rest. But that would mean it was an act of war.

That’s what I’m afraid of. And I find it pretty interesting that Cosette manipulated a meeting with you just before my second was killed. It’s as if she knew this was going to happen.

Cosette had seemed like she knew something was coming, but Donovan was getting it all wrong. She’d been warning me about the pack. Not the fey. And I was the one who’d invited her to the mall, not the other way around.