Ethan’s beam of light joined my own, and he stepped slowly forward as my heart pounded in my ears, putting himself between me and…whoever lay dead in the woods. He knelt, and my pulse spiked as I heard leaves rustle.

Then my brother stood and spun to face me. I couldn’t see his smile in the dark, but I heard it clearly in his voice. “It’s not him. Faythe, it’s not him.”

I exhaled, unaware until that moment that I’d been holding my breath. Then I crashed through the leaves toward him, and in less than a second I was kneeling on the frozen ground at his side, staring at the back of a dead man’s head.

I inhaled deeply through my cold, stuffy nose, taking the scent all the way into my lungs, grateful for once for the freezing temperatures, which had kept the corpse from decomposing. So far.

“It’s Eckard,” I confirmed, relief coursing through me in spite of the fact that I smelled Marc’s blood, too. “Marc won.” Joy spiked through my veins, and my whole body tingled, head to toe. “He’s alive, Ethan.”

Ethan smiled cautiously, his eyes sparkling like emeralds in the edges of my flashlight beam. “At least he was when he was here. And it looks like he found some extra clothes.”

I followed the beam of his flashlight far enough to see that Eckard was naked from the waist up. Ethan was right. Marc now had an extra shirt, and hopefully a coat. Even with the massive blood loss, he could have made it with warm clothing. Right?

“What’s that?” I frowned, squinting at a quarter-size spot of blood on Eckard’s upper back.

“The death blow?” Ethan suggested, obliging my curiosity with his light.

I shook my head. The crunchy, frozen blood beneath my boot said that Eckard’s neck had been ripped open. And the back wound hadn’t bled much, which meant Eckard’s heart hadn’t been pumping when he came by the injury. The back wound was probably postmortem. I edged closer for a better look.

There, between Adam Eckard’s shoulder blades, just to the left of his spine, was a small cut, with neat, straight edges, as if the flesh had been precisely sliced.

“What the hell…?” I asked, but Ethan could only shrug. “Marc sliced open his back. Why the hell would he do that?”

Fourteen

“That makes no sense.” Parker knelt in the cold for a better look at Eckard’s back, aided by the battery-powered camping lamps he and Dan had brought. “He clearly used a small knife. Probably a pocketknife. But since Eckard’s throat was ripped open, I’m guessing Marc didn’t have possession of the knife until after Eckard died. So it was probably Eckard’s knife. Why on earth would he mutilate the body?”

“He wouldn’t.” Marc had respect for the dead. Even the dead bad guys. And I had no doubt that if he’d had the strength to dig into frozen ground, he’d have buried Eckard. But even with the additional clothes, Marc was injured and suffering a grave loss of blood, as well as the dangerous temperature. Burial hadn’t been an option.

“Why didn’t he take the phone?” Dan pointed to a slider cell phone, lying in a pile of leaves a foot or so from Eckard’s head.

“It’s dead.” Ethan picked the phone up to confirm what Kevin had said on Eckard’s answering machine. He pressed and held the power button, and when nothing happened, he nodded and slid it into a pouch on his backpack. Hopefully later we could charge it and search it for relevant phone numbers and messages.

“Any reason to keep the body?” I glanced from Ethan to Parker for an opinion, and both toms shrugged in the muted, clean white light.

“Not that I can think of,” Ethan said.

“Okay, let’s put him to rest.”

We only had three shovels, including the one Eckard had brought to dig Marc’s grave, and since I was the slowest digger—I’d had the least practice—I got stuck searching and wrapping the body while the guys worked on the hole.

Eckard’s wallet contained no surprises, and I slid it into my back pocket to be incinerated later. Other than the ruined throat and the slice on his back, he had only one other injury: a gash across his right forearm, which I examined with my flashlight. The wound stank faintly of metal, and I deduced that he’d been slashed with the screw sticking out of a broken piece of Marc’s furniture. And that the resulting wound had provided us with the blood sample Hooper Galloway had identified.

When I was done with the body, I relieved each of the guys in turn, for a water break. Digging graves is hard work, even for a werecat. Even in cold weather. And while I dug, standing in a mostly dark three-foot-deep hole, working too hard to talk, I had nothing to do but think.

At first, I thought about our next move—how best to find Marc, who seemed to be injured and lost in a national forest. But that led to questions and other thoughts I didn’t want to think.

Marc had obviously walked away from the fight with Eckard, but where the hell was he? How long could a seriously injured man survive in below-freezing temperatures? He was obviously in human form—based on the fact that he’d taken Eckard’s clothes—which meant he was too hurt to Shift immediately. So why hadn’t he headed back toward the road? Eckard’s car was beyond functioning, and Marc couldn’t hitchhike and risk passing out with a human who would take him to the hospital. But he could have followed the road from the woods, and eventually have reached civilization.

Then again, having lost so much blood, he probably wasn’t thinking clearly enough for that, especially if hypothermia had set in. He could have been wandering the woods, lost and disoriented, for more than a day.