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sniffled as we turned at the edge of the field, eyeing the periwinkle-colored sky in distrust.
    Danger had never literally come out of the blue before. Out of tree branches, yes. Overhead beams, second stories, and even porch roofs. But never from the sky, and suddenly I felt unbearably vulnerable standing in a wide-open field, where before, such surroundings had always made me feel free and eager to run.
    And my paranoia was not helped by the fact that, though no one had said it out loud, we were obviously looking for a body on our own land.
    On our third pass through the field, I dug a tissue from my left pocket and held it awkwardly to blow my nose—yet another simple activity rendered nearly impossible thanks to my cast. Then I froze with the folded tissue halfway to my pocket. My first unobstructed breath had brought with it a familiar scent, and an all-too-familiar jolt of fear.
    Blood . Werecat blood.
    “Marc,” I said, veering from the path in search of the source of the scent. He followed me, sniffing dramatically, and his pace picked up as he found the scent. Cats can’t hunt using only their noses. Unlike dogs, we just aren’t equipped for that. But we could find the source of a strong scent if it stayed still.
    And this scent was horribly, miserably, unmoving.
    The scent grew stronger the farther north we went, and after race-walking for less than a minute, glancing around frantically for any sign of the missing tom, I froze in my boots when my gaze snagged on a smear of red on a stalk of grass, half hiding a pale hand lying limp on the ground, fingers half curled into a fist.
    I made myself take that next step forward, in spite of the dread and fury pulsing inside me. And when the body came into full view, I gasped, horrified beyond words.
    If the whole mess hadn’t been nearly frozen, we would have smelled it sooner.
    Jake Taylor lay on his back, so covered in blood that at first I couldn’t make sense of the chaotic, violent images my eyes were sending my brain. There were too many gashes. Too much blood. Too little sense.
    “Oh, hell ,” Marc said, and I flinched, though he’d spoken in little more than a whisper. He flipped open his phone and autodialed my father with the hand not holding the wrench while he squatted next to the body, careful not to step in the blood.
    But I still stared.
    I’d seen a good bit of carnage in my seven months as an enforcer, but nothing like this. Nothing so utterly destructive. So senselessly violent. Not even the scratch-fevered stray I’d seen perched in a tree, consuming a human victim. Even that had made a certain mad, gruesome sense compared to Jake’s death. The stray had been hungry, and had only damaged his victim in the process of eating him.
    But Jake was damaged beyond all reason. His face was a mass of shredded flesh, eyes ruined, his nostrils and lips almost torn from his face. His arms had fared no better; the sleeves of his jacket were ripped along with his skin, from wrist to elbow, probably in defense of his face.
    But the worst was his stomach. Jake had been completely and thoroughly eviscerated from so many lacerations—any one of which would have been fatal—that it was impossible to identify individual wounds.
    “East field, near the tree line.” Marc glanced up to see if anyone else was nearby, the phone still pressed to his ear. “But it’s…gruesome. Don’t let the Taylors over here. They shouldn’t have to see this.”
    “Thanks. We’ll be right there,” my father said from the other end of the line.
    Marc pocketed his phone, and I knelt before he could ask if I was okay. I was fine. An Alpha-in-training was always fine, right? There was no other choice.
    “Damn, these bastards are brutal,” Marc said, and I nodded, plucking a brown-and-black chevroned feather from the grass where its tip had landed in blood, like the devil’s quill. It was easily twice the length of my hand.
    “But this wasn’t either of the birds who took