Not that anyone had reported seeing them, but witnesses might have gone home before Brody had become alarmed, and therefore wouldn’t know there’d been need to report it.
Cormac lowered his head and snuffled around again. There were many footprints and many scents, but now that he was in bear form, he could take the time to sort them out.
Nell waited beside him while he worked. Her warmth gave him an anchor, and his human senses, buried deep, observed that the view of her legs wasn’t bad either.
Not far from the back door, Shane’s scent suddenly unfolded from the others, a layer that smelled a bit like Nell, even more like his brother Brody. The scent held the fiery hint of Shifter bear, and a bite that was all Shane’s own.
Now to figure out where the scent went.
He felt Nell come alert. “Have you got him?” she asked.
Cormac grunted. He very carefully traced Shane from the scent pool, in a line that moved from the back door toward the Dumpster.
Cormac followed, one step at a time. The trail of the garbage was cloying and distracting. Cormac closed his eyes and forced himself to focus on Shane alone.
If someone had put him into the Dumpster . . . No, the trail moved beyond that.
A vehicle had been parked behind the garbage containers. Cormac smelled exhaust and oil, a drip of antifreeze. The car or truck had been parked here, away from the bulk of the parking lot, in a place with easy access to the alley that ran behind the club. Whether the driver had understood that stopping the truck near garbage would confuse the scent, Cormac couldn’t tell.
Cormac inhaled at a spot on the pavement where he calculated the driver’s side door might have been, then moved from there in an expanding circle, nose to the ground. Nell walked next to him, carefully keeping her heeled shoes out of the noisome puddles around the trash containers.
He caught scent of someone else, froze. Wait . . .
Cormac lifted his head. The scent was familiar. Wasn’t it? No, he couldn’t place it.
Cormac stretched his body, willed himself to rise again to his human form, muscles and sinews crackling.
“What?” Nell demanded.
“Shane was tranquilized and brought out here to a car or small truck. By a human.” Cormac inhaled again. “I swear I’ve smelled the human before.”
“Where?”
Cormac knew what she meant. He guided her to stand where the vehicle had been and kept his hand on her arm as she inhaled. Nell tested the cold scents a good long time before she shook her head.
“No one I recognize.”
“But it’s familiar.”
“Lots of humans come to this club. Maybe we brushed by them on the dance floor.”
Cormac thought about that, playing over his scent memory of the night. The problem was, he’d filled every one of his senses with Nell, especially on the dance floor—her warmth, her scent, the feeling of her body against his.
Cormac still scented her on himself. He took a step closer, right against her back, and wrapped his arms around her.
“I can’t remember,” Nell said. He heard the tears in her voice.
“It will come.”
Cormac closed his eyes, not fighting his need to melt into her. Fighting the senses only clouded them.
They stood together, locked as one, comfort and need twining them. Nell’s scent filled him again, covering the stench of the garbage, and everything else but Shane and the . . . Ah.
Cormac opened his eyes. “He was here. In the club with us. The guy at the next table.”
Nell’s eyes also came open, and she looked up and back at him. “I remember. He was sitting alone, and Shane bumped into him. Nearly spilled his beer. Please don’t tell me he’s out for revenge because a Shifter almost spilled his beer.”
“I don’t think so. This was well planned. The guy didn’t just happen to have a syringe full of tranquilizer in his pocket.”
“But why Shane?” Nell’s voice rose toward panic. “Or is he a hunter who’ll take any Shifter?”
“Hunting Collared Shifters is highly illegal. Even the human cops wouldn’t look the other way for that. Too touchy.”
“Then he wanted Shane specifically.”
“That’s my guess.”
“Why?”
Cormac closed his arms more tightly around her. “We’ll find him, and we’ll ask.”
“Do you remember what he looked like?” Nell said, worried.
“Yes. Every detail.”
Nell looked at him in surprise. “Every detail? I barely noticed the guy.”
“Habit I picked up growing up. I notice everything around me at all times, every scent, sight, sound, feel—taste if necessary. I learned to live like an animal long before I understood what it was like to live as a human. I was nearly twenty before I found the rest of my clan.”
Life had been . . . interesting. The true bears had given him a wide berth because he’d smelled wrong.
Cormac had wandered alone, a cub calling for someone, anyone to help him, and realizing finally that there was no one to come. He’d learned survival on his own, hunting and killing his own food, eating it raw.
“I’m sorry,” Nell said.
“What I learned comes in handy,” Cormac said without self-pity. He released her from his arms but took her hand. “Let’s use it to find your cub.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The human employees still inside the club went bug-eyed when Cormac walked in naked, but the Shifters didn’t notice.
Nell noticed, but then, she’d become hyperaware of Cormac. His scent was on her and hers on him. Scent-marked—the first step in the mating game.
Cormac became bear again to sniff around inside, and he was joined by Jace in his Feline form. Jace and Cormac hunted around the tables, while Graham looked on, his human girlfriend watching with her fingers steepled at her lips.
They found nothing at the table. The guy had left no trace of himself but his scent.
Nell vaguely remembered the man nursing a bottle of beer while she’d sat at the next table trying not to pour out her heart to Cormac. But the bartender confirmed that the table had been cleared a long time ago, any beer bottles left there now in the gigantic pile in the recycle bin.
“We could get fingerprints from the chair and table,” Brody suggested. “See if he’s got a record, anyway.”
Cormac shifted into his human form as Brody spoke. “Then we’d have to involve the police.” He looked at Nell. “You want to do that?” Cormac knew from experience that getting human police interested in Shifter problems complicated matters more than they helped.
“We don’t have to,” Nell said. “We have a secret weapon.”
Cormac raised his brows, unsure what she meant, but Brody relaxed. “Diego and Xavier,” he said. “I’ll call them.”
“Take it easy,” Joe said. “You’re groggy.”
The Shifter-man’s eyelids fluttered as he tried to open them, then Shane gave up and slumped back into the chair—the sturdiest chair Joe possessed.
Joe had been driving out to his cabin, keeping with his plan to kill the bear there then decapitate him, when his cell phone buzzed. The man on the other end had been Miguel, the Shifter who’d hired him.
“How’s it going?” Miguel had asked.
“I got one,” Joe answered. “You’ll have proof in the morning. Twenty grand, right?”
The voice took on a Shifter snarl. “I want them all.”
“Can’t promise that. Too problematic. I think a hundred grand’s even too low for all four. I can give you this one, and you hire someone else to go after the others.”
“I want all of them, especially the Shifter bitch and her mate. I’ll give you the hundred thousand for just those two.”