Free A Hunt By Moonlight (Werewolves and Gaslight Book 1) by Shawna Reppert Page B

wagged its tail like a dog that wanted to be taken for a walk.
    It felt like some sort of a setup, only Royston couldn’t work out what it might be. And, damn the ’wolf and his lady both, he couldn’t pass up anything that might help him catch the monster stalking his city. “Right, then. We’ll go her workplace first so you can get the scent, and then we can go by where she disappeared and see what you can pick it up.”

    ***

    The girl used a strong, cheap perfume that smelled of violets, so it was easy for Richard to pick up her trail from the bakery shop where she had last been seen over the traces of warm, homey sugar and vanilla still wafting from the bakery door. Richard caught traces of a more subtle scent alongside hers, a male scent that stung his nose with anger, excitement, and dark arousal. The overlay of tobacco gave pause, brought back memories, but it was not of the type Blackpoole smoked, and the scent was not his. Both the girl’s trail and the man’s were a few days stale, crisscrossed here and there by random, fresher trails.
    Not only had he found the victim’s trail, he might have found the killer’s.
    He was off in a steady, ground-eating lope, just slow enough that he didn’t risk losing the scent. Jones fell in behind him without complaint. The man was fit, he’d give him that.
    And then the trail stopped being a trail and became a pool of scent. The victim had stopped here, stayed here for some time, but which way did she go? Other scents overlaid hers, distracting him. Horses had been here, too, but horses were all over London, placid cart horses, high-stepping carriage horses, saddle horses. He caught the scent of blood. Human or animal? Too faint to tell. The girl had not been killed here, or the scent would be stronger. He circled, sniffing, trying to make sense of it. He slowed. Step, sniff. Step, sniff, sniff.
    Jones was talking at him, but the words were lost. Background noise.
    Jones grabbed the scruff of his neck. “Listen, you! Quit playing around and get tracking. Is this some sort of game, to waste my time?”
    Focused on scents, on the hunt, Richard gave an off-hand growl at the intrusion.
    Jones let go, jumped back, and drew his gun.
    Oh, dear God. Richard flattened his ears. He hadn’t meant it as a threat. Lost in the scent-world, he hadn’t remembered how humans reacted to ’wolves. He’d thought Jones had a cooler head. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one caught up in the primal fever of the hunt.  
    He backed away slowly, ears and tail down, tensed to wheel and run, wondering how good a marksman Jones was.
    The inspector lowered his gun and gave a shaky laugh. “All right. Just—all right. Sorry. You’re kind of scary, you know.”
    Richard sat, waiting it out.
    “All right,” Jones said. “Sorry. Stupid of me.”
    Richard flicked his ears forward and back.
    Jones took a deep breath. “So, all sorted?”
    Richard stood cautiously and went back to trying to make sense of the smells. Would he be better at this if he had consciously practiced using these skills? It had been almost literally a lifetime ago since, still a child, he’d wandered out to help the dog he’d heard whimpering in the night and had been bitten by a rogue werewolf. He’d hated the wolf within for all these years. But the wolf within him had saved Catherine’s life and now might help stop another killer.
    If he could only figure out why the scent trail seemed to end here, with no girl and no body.
    He had a human mind, even in the wolf’s body. He needed to start using it. He cast about, and this time instead of filtering out the scents that weren’t hers he took them in as well, analyzing. A half-dozen or so alley cats had passed this way over the last couple of days—irrelevant. More rats than he cared to think about. Cats and rats—could the inevitable clash be the source of the animal blood? His wolf instinct said something else, something more, but his human mind could not