Sascha wrapped her arms around her knees. The panther noticed the mirroring and filed it away. "Why didn't the other changeling groups do anything?"
"Several reasons, the major one being that this was buried so deep, no one had any idea it was a serial until we started digging."
"The other reasons?"
"A combination of the choice of victims and Enforcement complicity. The first woman wasn't part of a defined pack - her parents went to the authorities but got nowhere." He knew exactly why. "The second two belonged to fairly weak groups. None are dominant in their area and they simply didn't have the physical or strategic strength to push for answers when doors were slammed in their faces.
"The fourth was blamed on a rogue and since he was already slated for death by his pack, the case was termed to fall outside Enforcement jurisdiction and closed. The fifth and seventh were loners - there was no one left to fight for justice. The sixth victim was killed at the same time that a human serial killer was preying in the region and even her pack wasn't certain she hadn't been one of his victims. But when you set it beside the other Psy kills, there's no question it's the same predator."
"Then came Kylie."
"She was his first mistake." Lucas felt his claws pressing against the inside of his skin. "The second we put together the pattern and unearthed the other forgotten women, we started to hunt. We also got a warning out to every changeling group we could reach."
Sascha didn't speak. Not quite sure why he felt the need, he turned his body until he was facing her, one of his legs behind her, knee bent. The other he dropped loosely to the ground, crossed under the raised leg, before picking up her braid to play with the end.
He needed touch. Contrary to what Sascha believed, not just any touch would do. Usually only packmates were able to give him the peace he craved. Usually. "We're not weak," he began, pulling off the tie that kept her braid together.
She blinked and her body tensed but all she said was, "No, you're not."
Was she trying to be gentle with him? He looked into those infinite eyes and wished he could read her mind. "And we're not going to stop searching because the Psy want us to. Brenna will be saved and the killer will be executed. If DarkRiver is taken down, the SnowDancers will continue the fight. When they fall... there are others."
The world was changing and sooner or later, the Psy were going to come face-to-face with their worst nightmare - the relegation of their emotionless race to nothing more than a footnote in the history of man.
"How can you be absolutely certain it's a Psy?" she asked. "I won't betray my race on the basis of a suspicion."
Springy, silky curls began to overflow his hands as her braid started unraveling on its own. The panther was delighted by the texture and life in his hands. But it wasn't enough to make him forget blood and death. "I was with Dorian when he got the feeling that something was wrong. We must've arrived at Kylie's apartment on the killer's heels." What he'd seen there had been enough to make him believe in evil as a living, breathing entity. If Sascha wanted proof, he had it, seventy-nine precise pieces of it, all covered in blood and horror.
Those mysterious eyes looked at him with what he wanted to believe was sympathy. "That's why Dorian is so damaged. He thinks if he'd only been that much faster..."
No longer surprised at her understanding of the emotions that drove people, Lucas nodded. "When we got there, Kylie's body was warm to the touch but she was gone and so was the killer. However, he'd left behind a scent, one that's unmistakable to us."
He'd also left behind a faint psychic vibration in the air, something that Lucas alone had picked up. He knew the ability stemmed from the same sense that warned him when Psy power was being used. It wasn't something he was ready to share with his Psy, though he was almost certain that she was far more akin to him than she was to the people she called her own - almost wasn't good enough for an alpha.
"Is that the best evidence you have?"
He stopped playing with her curls. "He cut her. Precisely. Neatly. No mistakes. No hesitations. No cut deeper or shallower than the others. No cut shorter or longer. He cut her exactly seventy-nine times."
"Seventy-nine?"
"Just like in the last four kills." The Psy had been unable to bury that fact, because though the Arizona medical examiner was human, one of her older cousins was married to a changeling. They were a very close-knit extended family - something the Psy hadn't taken into account, crippled as they were by their inability to understand the bonds of blood. Dr. Cecily Montford had been so disturbed by the careless way her reports were being treated that she'd been more than willing to break confidentiality and talk to DarkRiver.
"Tell me, Sascha," he asked, not letting her look away, "can you think of any other race on the face of this planet with the control to do something that heinous and keep exactly to a set pattern?" His voice dropped an octave, the craving for vengeance bringing out the beast.
"He didn't make a single deviation in the length, depth, or width of those cuts across the five bodies we were able to get information on. He sliced them like they were lab rats. None of those cuts was fatal except the last."
Rage was powering him, making him push her in a way that he would've never pushed any other woman. He was used to protecting but Sascha's calm evaluation of the violent deaths of eight women - women who'd mattered, who'd been loved - had turned him savage. "Oh, and the autopsies showed that their minds were literally mush though their skulls hadn't been damaged. Who can do that aside from the Psy, Sascha? Who?"