Page 35 of The Claiming of the Shrew
“She would never leave this behind,” he said, looking up at Hester, who stood uncertainly in the doorway. “She must have shifted if her clothes are here, but ... hang on.” He looked inside her purse. “She didn’t take any of the things she normally does when she shifts. And she can’t walk if she’s a shrew. She’d have to crawl. Someone took her.”
Her phone was in her purse. The screen was locked, but it showed multiple text and missed call notifications.
“Should I call her sister?” Hester asked.
“Not yet.” He looked around the room again. “I’m going to shift. Everyone here are shifters, right?”
“Right,” Hester said, but she stepped inside, moving carefully and looking down at her feet, and closed the door. “What are you going to do?”
“Sniff things.”
He was already stripping out of his clothes. Might as well start wearing tearaway stripper pants at this rate, he thought as he shed his jeans for what felt like the twentieth time that day. He collapsed into his raccoon form. Everything around him got monochrome and taller.
“Oh, interesting,” Hester said from somewhere above him. “I never met a raccoon shifter before.”
Fawkes grunted acknowledgement and snuffled around. There were a lot more unfamiliar smells here than in his room, and it took him a little while to sort them out. Leah’s smell was very strong. There were multiple other human smells. The strongest was probably Joy. He found some of her clothes and snuffled at them to get her scent so that he could tell it apart. Then he crisscrossed the floor. There was definitely another human smell here, not the one he had been tracking with the jewelry theft earlier; this was a different person than the one who had been in his room. And there were animal smells. Squirrel for sure. He also thought he detected some kind of bird.
As well as all of that, there was a sweetish, pungent smell he couldn’t identify. It was stronger near the wastebasket. He reared up to put his head in, and the smell was much stronger, enough to make his head swim. Dizzily, he sat down on his haunches and huffed to clear his sinuses.
“What did you find?” Hester asked.
Fawkes shifted back. Hester matter-of-factly grabbed his clothes and shoved them in his direction. It was clear that she was used to dealing with shifters.
“Are there any squirrel shifters here that you know about?” he asked.
“I think Joy’s sister turns into one.”
So much for that.
“Well, I did smell another person in here. And there’s this.” He started to reach into the wastebasket, then got a pen off the desk and used that to hook the thing he’d smelled. It was a crumpled tissue. As a human, he could no longer smell the odd scent until he brought it close to his nose and caught a whiff of the same chemical he’d smelled earlier.
Hester recoiled when he sniffed at it. “What are you doing?”
“I think this is saturated in some kind of volatile chemical, something that would knock a person out.” Taking a deep breath with his face close to the tissue had given him another wave of vertigo, although it passed quickly.
“You think Leah was drugged?” Hester asked. She scowled. “If that’s the case, we might need the police.”
Fawkes was thinking the same thing. But Leah had probably been carried out as a shrew; otherwise someone would almost certainly have noticed a naked, unconscious woman. He suspected thatHelp, someone has drugged and kidnapped my pet shrewwouldn’t lead to an urgent police response. “Let’s hold that back for a little while. I think we’re dealing with shifters,and it’s possible the police would be more of a problem than a help—if you get what I mean?”
“Yeah, I get it.” Hester sighed and looked around. “But guests going missing is obviously a big problem. I can get Mauro started looking for her.”
“Not quite yet. I picked up a scent in here, and I want to see what I can do with that first. If she is in danger, tipping off her kidnapper might make her situation worse.”
The simmering uneasiness that had been in the back of his head all evening, ever since he and Leah had parted in the hallway, was now trying to roar up and claim the rational parts of his mind. He fought it down. What he wanted to do was tear her kidnapper limb from limb.Let’s see them deal with a furious raccoon to the face!But finding Leah was going to take level-headed investigation, not a berserker raccoon.
“How can I help?” Hester asked.
“Uh ...” He started unfastening his pants. “Look the other way, I guess. I really need clothes that go on and off faster.”
Hester took down one of the hotel’s complimentary bathrobes from a hook on the bathroom door. “How about I just follow you around with this.”
Fawkes did a quick snuffle around the room just in case he’d somehow missed Leah lying unconscious or hurt (no, please no) underneath something. She wasn’t. The jewelry also definitely wasn’t here.
He went to the door, and Hester opened it so he could waddle out into the hall. He immediately encountered a problem, which was that the hall was absolutely full of overlapping scents. He stopped, snorted a few times to clear his nose, and tried again, but he just couldn’t pick out anything well enough to follow it.
He was going to need to practice scent trailing in a heavily contaminated environment later, he decided.
For right now, what he decided to do was sniff under each door in the hall. Most of the room lights were off, and the scents of their occupants were strong, as well as other smells—perfume, shampoo, alcohol.
