Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

thought that a folding chair, thrown very hard, might break through a window like that.
    A metal machine that looked oddly familiar had left a dent in the wall before landing on the ground. I pawed it over and realized it was an old-fashioned mail meter. Someone had been sending out bulk mail from here.
    I put my nose down and started to pay attention to what it had been trying to tell me. First, this room was more public than the kitchen or first bedroom, more like the back door and hallway had been.
    Most houses have a base scent, mostly a combination of preferred cleaning supplies (or lack thereof ) and the body scents of the family who live in it. This room smelled different from the rest of the house. There had been—I looked again at the scattering of chairs—maybe as many as ten or twelve people who came to this room often enough to leave more than a surface scent.
    This was good, I thought. Given the way O’Donnell had rubbed me wrong—anyone who knew him was likely to have murdered him. However—I took another look at the window—there hadn’t been a fae or any other magical critter in the bunch that I could tell. No human had taken out the window that way—or torn off O’Donnell’s head either.
    I memorized their scents anyway.
    I’d done what I could with this room—which left me with only one more. I’d left the living room for last for two reasons. First, if someone were to see me, it would be where the big picture window looked out onto the street in front of the house. Second, even a human’s nose could have told them that the living room was where O’Donnell had been killed and I was growing tired of blood and gore.
    I think it was dread of what I’d find in the living room that made me look back into the bedroom, rather than any instinct that I might have missed something.
    A coyote, at least this coyote, stands just under two feet at the shoulder. I think that’s why I never thought to look up at the pictures on the wall. I’d thought they were only posters; they were the right size and shape, with matching cheap Plexiglas and black plastic frames. The room was dark, too, darker than the kitchen because the moon was on the other side of the house. But from the doorway I got a good look at the framed pictures.
    They were indeed posters, very interesting posters for a security guard who worked for the BFA.
    The first showed a child dressed in a fluffy Easter Sunday dress sitting on a marble bench in a gardenlike setting. Her hair was pale and curly. She was looking at the flower in her hand. Her face was round with a button nose and rosebud lips. Bold letters across the top of the poster said: PROTECT THE CHILDREN . Across the bottom, in smaller letters, the poster announced that Citizens for a Bright Future was holding a meeting the November eighteenth of two years ago.
    Like the John Lauren Society, Bright Future was an anti-fae group. It was a lot smaller organization than the JLS and catered to a different income bracket. Members of the JLS tended to be like Ms. Ryan, the relatively wealthy and educated. The JLS held banquets and golf tournaments to raise money. Bright Future held rallies that mostly resembled the old-fashioned tent revival meetings where the faithful would be entertained and preached at, then passed a hat.
    The other posters were similar to the first, though the dates were different. Three of them were for meetings held in the Tri-Cities, but one was in Spokane. They were slick, and professionally laid out. Stock posters, I thought, printed at the headquarters without dates and places, which could be added later in Sharpie black.
    They must have been meeting here and sending out their mailings. That’s why there had been so many people in O’Donnell’s house.
    Thoughtfully, I padded into the living room. I think I’d seen so much blood the night before that it wasn’t the first thing that struck me, though it was splattered around with impressive abandon.
    The first thing I noticed was that, under the blood and death, I caught a familiar scent that was out of place in this room. Something smelled like the forest fae’s home. The second thing I noticed was that whatever it was, it packed a tremendous magical punch.
    Finding it, though, was more problematical. It was like playing “Find the Thimble” with my nose and the strength of the magic to tell me if I was hot or cold.