Dry leaves crunched under Arawn’s paws as he ran, his tongue hanging out. The air had a bite to it here, a welcome chill to balance his heated body. Light rain pattered on his black fur, and the forest smelled of water-kissed earth and sighing plants.

A run was just what he needed to restore his thoughts to order and banish the memory of amber-gray eyes and red hair sticking to rosy skin. At least for a little while. So he could focus on other matters again.

Sire.

He didn’t slow down at the mental voice of Deimos, kept running over the leaf-strewn forest floor. Tell me.

There is something you should look at, his second replied. Right outside the northern border. Near the gnome colony.

I will be there in a few minutes. He didn’t question whether the issue was important enough for him to investigate personally. Deimos had decades of experience managing the day-to-day business and administrative tasks of keeping Arawn’s growing empire running smoothly. If his second asked him to come, it would be something significant.

He ran to the next opening amid the trees, leapt off a boulder, and changed mid-jump from his wolf form to a large, black eagle. A few powerful beats of his wings later he soared above the forest sprawling over hills and mountain ridges, the rough, untamed beauty of the Cascades in his territory. Most of it was untouched by human taint, Arawn’s magic being a powerful repellent to the people living nearby. Other parts of his dominion included human settlements, but this stretch was the pure wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, and, much like the fae sanctuaries, it was protected against human interference by strong magical wards. On maps it appeared as a national park that, for some reason, no one ever wanted to visit.

Nearing the northern border, he began his descent and spotted Deimos by the side of a creek. Arawn landed on the moss- and fern-covered ground a few feet from his second and shifted to his human form. A dryad peeled herself out of a nearby tree and brought him a pair of flowing black pants, one of many he liked to keep stored all over his territory for moments such as this. The tree nymph bowed low and retreated while he pulled on the pants, then turned to Deimos.

His second inclined his head in greeting. “Over there.”

Arawn followed him, his nose twitching at the metallic scent drifting over on a breeze. Blood. Someone—or something—recently made a kill. A human kill. Unsanctioned as it was.

Granted, his territory ended here, and with it Arawn’s jurisdiction, but few dared to spill human blood so close to his dominion. Killings tended to draw attention from human authorities, and having to deter their focus was aggravating. Cleaning up the mess even more so.

But Deimos wouldn’t have called him here if this was a simple kill by rogue demons.

The smell of blood now hung heavy in the air, only dampened a little by the feather-light rain. He stepped onto the clearing behind Deimos and halted. The swaying was the first thing he noted. Stirred by the wind, the bodies swung slightly to and fro, suspended from the rope around their necks.

No. Not rope.

He prowled closer, stepping carefully so he wouldn’t disturb evidence, and studied the scene more thoroughly.

The two dead humans were hung from the tree—by their own intestines. He tilted his head. Interesting. Wasn’t the colon usually too soft to hold a body’s weight? Another step closer. Ah. The intestines had been looped and braided several times to make them strong enough.

Both humans—a man and a woman in hiking gear—had bloody holes where their eyes should be, and their arms ended in sawed-off stumps instead of their hands. He glanced down to the ground below the bodies, where the severed hands of both victims were arranged with their palms up, cupping the gouged-out eyeballs.

Naturally, the bellies of the two bodies gaped open where the guts had been extracted. He peered into the wounds.

“Have any other organs been removed?” he asked Deimos.

“No.”

“Feeding injuries?”

“None.”

“What about blood loss antemortem?”

“Only due to the wounds, as far as we could tell. I had Sofia take a cursory look at the bodies.” The lynx shifter worked as a coroner in a nearby human town, her senses sharp, and her experience handy when it came to analyzing sticky situations for Arawn. “According to her, cause of death seems to be the disembowelment and related blood loss. And it wasn’t taken.” He nodded at the dark stains beneath the dead. Blood crusted the grass and moss, enough to account for the fatal loss.

“The killer did not feed,” Arawn mused. Which ruled out the most common reason for killing humans. He stalked around the hanging bodies, drew in air and sampled the scents. “What do you smell?”

“Besides blood, gore, and feces?” Deimos curled his lip, shook his head. “No demon signature, not from what I can pick up. No shifter either.”

Arawn closed his eyes, spread his senses, tasting the magic lingering in the air. “No fae.”

“I was wondering if this might simply be the work of a human killer.”

Certainly humans were more than capable of bloody slaughter like this. But… “I am not picking up another human scent.”

Deimos sniffed and sighed. “Yeah. Me neither.”

Underneath the different smells drenching the area, there was something, though… He couldn’t quite pin it down. The faint trace wanted to jog a piece of his memory, but it was like tugging at a thread sticking out of a hopeless tangle of yarn. For someone who’d seen the dawn of time, had collected more memories than the largest human library could hold, trying to sort through this maze of knowledge and impressions could prove irritatingly difficult. Sometimes it took him weeks to unearth a single memory from the vaults of his mind.

He tucked the scent trace away, to be worked on in the background while he attended to other things. His focus landed on the arrangement of hands and eyes again.

“What do you make of this?” he asked Deimos.

“It’s a statement.”

“Obviously.” But of what?

Deimos rubbed his neck. “I could come up with a dozen clichés about what eyes and hands stand for, but unless we know more of the specific context of these killings…” He shrugged. “It could mean something. It might not mean anything.”

Yes, given the myriad ways in which madness worked, this could simply be deranged, senseless violence. Or it could be a carefully crafted message.

Arawn studied the scene again, then the area. “I assume you did a sweep for any other tracks or traces.”

“No signs of a vehicle, but we found hints that someone covered their tracks coming and going. Nothing beyond that, and even those few hints aren’t enough to follow.”

“If this was not for feeding,” Arawn said, his voice echoing the deadly quiet he felt inside, “and yet it was dropped this close to my border…”

Deimos eyed him. “I haven’t heard a peep from the demon clans or the shifter packs. They’re all lying low, and word is no one has any desire to fuck with you, especially after Anselm.”

As well they shouldn’t. Some of them had become annoyingly uppity in recent times, making a display of power necessary. So when a clan of demons thought it wise to kill one of Arawn’s enforcers without provocation, he reminded them why his people were considered untouchable among otherworld creatures. Echoes of the nightmares he unleashed upon them carried on whispers to the nooks and crannies of the community, and the subsequent hush of newfound respect for those who belonged to the Demon Lord was barely enough to calm Arawn’s anger.

And if the usual suspects of discord in the area were still impressed by his recent show of force, it raised the question of who was insolent enough to provoke Arawn’s ire with this kind of slaughter on his doorstep. If this was, indeed, meant as a threat or intimidation—the notion almost laughable—any opponent worth their salt would not have hidden their tracks. As an overture to war, it was pathetic.

That aside, killing humans as a way to get to him was…curious. Not to mention weak. They were the easiest to kill, no challenge whatsoever. A targeted assassination of Arawn’s favor-bound creatures, on the other hand, would make for a stronger impression.

“Have Sofia do a full autopsy on the bodies,” he ordered Deimos, “and dispose of the humans when she is done. Get the area cleaned up, and interview the gnome colony. Ask them what, if anything, they have seen, and make sure to follow any other creature’s scent you find and interrogate them as well. I want to know who has been here recently and what they may have noticed. Pay special attention to the fairies, gnomes, and dryads.”

In a living, breathing forest like this, someone was always around. It was highly unlikely the killer could have come and gone without at least one otherworld creature seeing them.

“Will do, sire.”

“And keep your ear to the ground for any buzz in the otherworld community. Maybe no one telegraphed this move beforehand, but it is possible someone may claim it now.” Although to boast about it in conversations, but not to the face of the Demon Lord would say a lot about the perpetrator’s integrity. Or lack thereof.

He sneered at the bloody display in front of him. The least one could do was own up to one’s kills, especially if they were meant as some sort of message.

He pulled off his pants, flung them at a nearby tree to be picked up by a dryad later, and changed into a giant black bear, his sense of smell strongest in this form. Nose on the ground, he tracked around the clearing, noting and archiving every single scent trace, to be sure.

That one elusive thread…

Stopping at a spot where the mysterious aroma was a bit more discernible, he drew in several tasting breaths.

“Got something?” Deimos asked.

I am not sure, he replied mentally. I cannot place this one, but I have smelled it before.

And he almost, almost remembered… But every time he thought he could grasp that particular memory, it slipped through his fingers like smoke.

I will keep pondering this scent, he told Deimos. Reinforce border security and send out word to our people outside the territory to be on alert. Tell them to retreat to my lands in case of any more obvious threats.

Many of Arawn’s creatures lived within his dominion, but he’d long ago started spreading a wider net of resources, informants, and the favor-bound outside the boundaries of his territory proper.

Deimos gave him a nod, his cell phone already pressed to his ear.

Time for another run, this one along the border to check for any other scents. He started with a widening circle around the site of the murders, and went east when he didn’t find anything else remarkable to pick up.

The long, curved claws of his bear paws dug into moss and earth and fallen branches, the light rain stroking his fur. Squirrels rustled in the trees above, birdsong a constant musical backdrop to his journey.

He was atop a cliff when he heard it. A whimper.

Sniffing the air, he followed the trace of the new scent on the breeze, down into a small forest valley. The magic of his border was a hum in the air. He crossed the invisible line to the other side, toward the bundle laid out on a moss-covered boulder.

He knew the species long before he got a look at the babe. An algos demon, feeding on pain. Wrapped in a torn and threadbare blanket, the youngling whimpered again, one of its legs deformed, its normally dark red skin paled to rose. Probably due to hunger and cold, having been out here who knew how long.

Surrendered to Arawn, like so many others.

He huffed, gripped the edges of the blanket with his teeth and carried the babe away.

Like so many others.