Raven Cursed: A Jane Yellowrock Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

human world. I flipped my hip-length braid out of the way and dropped to hands and knees in the brush.
    The dead-fishy smell was here too, but this time it overlay another familiar scent, the scent I had expected to find after seeing the pics of the injured. With one hand, I pushed aside the sharp-edged grass, not touching the ground beneath or disturbing the roots, but exposing a partial paw print. I had found my evidence and I didn’t know whether to be pleased with myself or even more worried. “Werewolf,” I said, louder.
    The cop jostled closer to get a better view.
    I pressed more grass aside, revealing more paw prints. They were as large as my hand, the nonretractable claws leaving long indentations in the damp soil. One forepaw had been bloody, the smell of dried blood, rank and old. Not much of a leap to assume it was Itty Bitty’s blood. I bent and sniffed. Witch blood. Itty Bitty was from a witch family. I motioned to Molly to take photos of the prints while I crawled forward, pressing the long, sharp grass to either side of the wolf tracks.
    I bent lower, letting my nose tell me what my eyes couldn’t, the musky scent rising to fill my head. And I shivered in the heat. I knew these wolves. I’d fought them. I put it together fast, dread leaping back onto me. I had helped to kill off all the members of the Lupus Pack of werewolves, except for two wolves who had been in jail during the raid. I had forgotten about them, until now. They had made bail, tracked me down, and that one forgetful mistake was coming back to bite me on the butt. I had gotten sloppy. Directly or indirectly, they were here because of me. “Two wolves, at least,” I said, keeping my head low so they couldn’t read myface, pretending that it was visual clues giving me the information. “I may know them. Contact Jodi Richoux at New Orleans PD for names and mug shots.”
    The cop cursed and reached for his cell phone. “I gotta tell the sheriff ’bout this, ’n secure the area. Get me some backup. Crime scene.”
    “Good idea,” I said. Crime scene techs would have been a better idea this morning, before several hundred tourists had access to the area, and before the powerhouse released thousands of cubic feet of water, but who was I to point out someone else’s mistake.
    While Emmett pushed back the guides and gawkers and called the sheriff, I followed the tracks on my hands and knees across a gravel parking area to the small, two-lane road. The scent of shifter magic filled my nostrils where the wolves had changed back to human form. Yeah. I knew them. And I knew it was no coincidence that they were here. The attack, here, now, so close to Stirling Mountain, so close to the parley of vamps I was guarding, wasn’t an accident. It was a personal challenge and a private threat, issued on the body of innocents.
    A growl vibrated through me—Beast, angry, thinking of the photographs.
Yearling human. Not experienced kit.
Her claws milked into my mind, piercing and withdrawing.
Too young to fight off pack hunters. Hate pack hunters. Stealers of winter food. Thieves of meat.
    I stood and brushed off my hands again, looking from the street back to the river and the bridge, envisioning the wolves waiting in the tall brush just downstream of the bridge, slinking into the water in the dark, attacking the young woman, Itty Bitty. The wolves dragging her—bleeding profusely, terrified, screaming—to shore and deliberately infecting her with the were-taint. In my mind’s eye, I saw her boyfriend leaping from his kayak, seeing indistinct shapes swarming in the night, hearing her cries, rushing in, swinging a sharp-bladed paddle, only to have the wolves turn on him, savaging him for interfering. Other predawn paddlers coming fast. The weres slipping away in the ruckus. Anger burned under my breastbone. This had happened because of me. The wolves were here because of my actions and decisions. My advice. My plans.
Crap
.
    “The victims are both