Iron Kissed

I closed my eyes and slid from human into my coyote form. I scratched the last tingle out of one ear with my hind paw, then hopped out the window I'd left open.

My senses as a human are sharp. When I switch forms, they get a little better, but it's more than that. Being in coyote form focuses the information that my ears and nose are telling me better than I can do as a human.

I started casting about on the sidewalk just inside the gate, trying to get a feel for the smells of the house. By the time I made it to the porch, I knew the scent of the male (he certainly wasn't a man, though I couldn't quite pinpoint what he was) who had made this his home. I could also pick out the scents of the people who visited most often, people like the girl, who had returned to her spi

Except for her very first statement, she and Zee hadn't exchanged a word that I had heard. It might have meant they didn't like each other, but their body language wasn't stiff or antagonistic. Perhaps they just didn't have anything to say.

Zee opened the door when I stopped in front of it, and a wave of death billowed out.

I couldn't help but take a step back. Even a fae, it seemed, was not immune to the indignities of death. There was no need for the caution that made me creep over the threshold into the entryway, but some things, especially in coyote form, are instinctive.

CHAPTER 2

It wasn't hard to follow the scent of blood to the living room, where the fae had been killed. Blood was splattered generously over various pieces of furniture and the carpet, with a larger stain where the body had evidently come to rest at last. His remains had been removed, but no further effort had been made to clean it up.

To my inexpert eyes, it didn't look like he'd struggled much because nothing was broken or overturned. It was more as if someone had enjoyed ripping him apart.

It had been a violent death, perfect for creating ghosts.

I wasn't sure Zee or Uncle Mike knew about the ghosts. Though I'd never tried to hide it—for a long time, I hadn't realized that it wasn't something everyone could do.

That was how I'd killed the second vampire. Vampires can hide their daytime resting places, even from the nose of a werewolf—or coyote. Not even good magic users can break their protection spells.

But I can find them. Because the victims of traumatic deaths tend to linger as ghosts—and vampires have plenty of traumatized victims.

That's why there aren't many walkers (I've never met another)—the vampires killed them all.

If the fae whose blood painted the floors and walls had left a ghost, though, it had no desire to see me. Not yet.

I crouched down in the doorway between the entryway and the living room and closed my eyes, the better to concentrate on what I smelled. The murder victim's scent, I put aside. Every house, like every person, has a scent. I'd start with that and work out to the scents that didn't belong. I found the base scent of the room, in this case mostly pipe smoke, wood smoke, and wool. The wood smoke was odd.

I opened my eyes and looked around just in case, but there was no sign of a fireplace. If the scent had been fainter, I would have assumed someone had come in with it on their clothes—but the scent was prevalent. Maybe he'd found some incense or something that smelled like a fire.

Since discovering the mysterious cause of the burnt-wood smell was unlikely to be useful, I put my chin back on my front paws and shut my eyes again.

Once I knew what the house smelled like, I could better separate the surface scents that would be the living things that came and went. As promised, I found that Uncle Mike had been here. I also found the spicy scent of Yo-Yo Girl both recent and old. She had been here often.

All the scents that were left I absorbed until I felt I could recall them upon command. My memory for scent is somewhat better than for sight. I might forget someone's face, but I seldom forget their scent—or their voice, for that matter.

I opened my eyes to head back to search the house further and…everything had changed.

The living room had been smallish, tidy, and every bit as bland as the outside of the house. The room I found myself standing in now was nearly twice as big. Instead of drywall, polished oak panels lined the walls, laden with small intricate tapestries of forest scenes. The victim's blood, which I'd just seen splattered over an oatmeal-colored carpet, coated, instead, a rag rug and spilled over onto the glossy wood floor.

A fireplace of river stone stood against the front wall where a window had looked out over the street. There were no windows on that side of the room now, but there were lots of windows on the other side, and through the glass, I could see a forest that had never grown in the dry climate of Eastern Washington. It was much, much too large to be contained in the small backyard that had been enclosed in a six-foot cedar fence.

I put my paws on the window ledge and stared out at the woods beyond, and wonder replaced the childish disappointment of discovering the reservation to be a particularly unimaginative suburbia.

The coyote wanted to go explore the secrets that we just knew lay within the deep green forest. But we had a job to do. So I pulled my nose away from the glass and hop-scotched on the dry places on the floor until I was back out in the hallway—which looked just as it always had.

There were two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a kitchen. My job was made easier because I was only interested in fresh scents, so the search didn't take me long.

When I looked back into the living room, on my way out of the house, its windows still looked out to forest rather than backyard. My eyes lingered for a moment on the easy chair which was positioned to look out at the trees. I could almost see him sitting there, enjoying the wild as he smoked his pipe in a haze of rich-smelling smoke.

But I didn't see him, not really. He wasn't a ghost, just a figment of my imagination and the scent of pipe smoke and forest. I still didn't know what he'd been, other than powerful. This house would remember him for a long time, but it held no unquiet ghosts.

I walked out the open front door and back into the bland little world the humans had built for the fae to keep them out of their cities. I wondered how many of those opaque cedar fences hid forests—or swamps—and I was grateful that my coyote form kept me from being able to ask questions. I doubt I'd have had the willpower to keep my mouth shut otherwise, and I thought the forest was one of those things I wasn't supposed to see.

Zee opened the truck door for me and I hopped in so he could drive me to the next place. The girl watched us drive off, still not speaking. I couldn't read the expression on her face.

The second house we stopped at was a clone of the first, right down to the color of the trim around the windows. The only difference was that the front yard had a small lilac tree and a flower bed on one side of the sidewalk, one of the few flower beds I had seen since I came in here. The flowers were all dead and the lawn was yellowed and in desperate need of a lawn mower.

There was no guardian at this porch. Zee put his hand on the door and paused without opening it. "The house you were in was the last one who was killed. This house belongs to the first and I imagine that there have been a lot of people in and out since."

I sat down and stared up into his face: he cared about this one.

"She was a friend," he said slowly as his hand on the door curled into a fist. "Her name was Co