Midnight.

A strong, hot wind blew up from the southwest and drove the clouds across the moon like he was in a 1950s creature-feature film. The only difference? Peter Frost was the creature, and he was just fine with it.

Peter called Deacon Portage when he was about an hour outside of town, and had him meet him at the hotel. After a brief handshake and a little small talk about how long the drive had been, Deacon led him out to the burnt farmhouse just outside Edmond. They pulled up in separate cars, their tires crunching to a halt on the gravel and dirt road that led up to the skeleton of a building that had been left behind.

Even in the old Bronco he could smell the char and smoke that hung over the area. He climbed out of the car and slammed the heavy door shut as Deacon climbed out of his car.

“This is it,” Deacon said. “About what you expected from the pictures?”

“Just about,” Peter said as he looked his old military buddy up and down. The years hadn’t exactly been kind to Deacon, but they hadn’t been too hard on him, either. He was a family man now, from Peter’s understanding, and he’d put on the weight of a comfortable, happy man. He wouldn’t look out place at a little league baseball or peewee football game anywhere in the country.

Peter couldn’t blame him, either. If he’d been normal, he probably would’ve done the exact same thing after the service. Found love, gotten married, had a whole litter of kids that looked just like him. Maybe even join law enforcement like Deacon, or some other job with a little risk, but not too much. Just enough to keep his heart thumping every now and then, and still give him an excuse to go for a light jog every morning.

But Peter wasn’t normal. And there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

“Get any weird reports in the area that night?” Peter asked as he walked up to the edge of the crime scene tape that was taped up in a cross-formation over the front entrance.

“Nope,” Deacon replied. “Just a call from a neighbor who’d been driving by on the farm road, saw the flames licking the sky.”

“That high, huh? Must be almost a mile to the road from here.”

“Just a little over,” the police officer replied. “Managed to get the volunteer fire department out here, but they couldn’t do much. Building was so far gone, and there aren’t exactly hydrants this far out.”

Peter looked it up and down. Even in the dark, he could tell the building was blackened to the beams. There was no salvaging anything from the farmhouse. It was gone. Entirely gone.

And, just at the fringes of his sense of smell, he could sense that same cloying fragrance as his parents’ farm. Barely. Just barely.

“Mind if I take a look?”

“Promise you ain’t gonna tell anyone?”

“Promise, Deacon. Want me to swear on someone’s grave?”

“Depends. Whose grave you got in mind?”

“Shut up, Deacon, and let me in.”

“You owe me one for this,” he said as they approached the burnt building. “You know that, right?”

“Thought this was you paying me back,” Peter said as they stepped up to the front entrance and Deacon began to tear down one of the strips of police tape. The smell was even stronger here, pushing its way into his nose and mouth like it was trying to waterboard him with its oily fragrance. Herbs, wolfsbane, burnt hair, and meat.

Deacon and Peter turned on the mag lights they’d each brought. Peter didn’t really need his, but his friend didn’t know anywhere close to the full truth about him, or his ilk. He didn’t want to look like some kind of biological oddity traipsing around with just the moon to see by, taking in all the details of a darkened crime scene with his sensitive eyes.

“About what time did it start?” Peter asked. “Any idea?”

“Fire investigator can’t say for certain, since the building was almost completely consumed by the time the firefighters got here.”

Peter, not for the first time since he’d gotten the call, wished he had decided to bring along Matthew Jones, their arson expert. He’d been a firefighter and done some serious arson investigation himself for a few years before Peter and Richard had found him in the news, a giant wolf saving children from a burning house, and scooped him up from his job. But Matthew was currently out on a job in Denver, and Peter couldn’t exactly scoop him up on a non-paying gig with their resources already being so thin.

Besides, Peter didn’t want to tell his pack about any of this. Not yet. Not until he knew more. And, as much as loved and trusted Matthew like a brother, he’d never ask him to the carry that burden of dishonesty. Not unless he absolutely had to.

“Round about time, then? Estimate?”

“Sometime after midnight is the best guess,” Deacon replied as they moved through the entrance of the small house, their mag lights shining on the floor as they picked their way through the blackened remains. “But, like I said, still just a guess.”

Richard nodded, sweeping his flashlight in an arc over the ruins as they turned the corner, the wind blasting against the side of the place and sending a whole creaking sensation through the foundation.

“How stable is this, you think?” Deacon asked warily, his voice suddenly just above a whisper as he looked around at the creaking timbers.

“Wouldn’t recommend trying to climb the walls or anything,” Peter replied. “Or sticking around longer than we have to.”

Deacon nodded. “Yeah.”

This whole place made Peter uneasy and sick to his stomach. Every ounce of him told him to run from this place as memories of his old homestead pushed to the forefront of his mind. He realized he’d forgotten to breathe at one point, and had to consciously remind himself to suck in air before he passed out.

“Where’d they find the bodies again?”

“Back room. Follow me.” Deacon led him through the living room with its burnt rug; blackened, teetering fireplace that was about to come crashing down; and dead husk of a couch burnt to a cinder. They passed the kitchen and went down a little hallway that led back to the bedrooms and bathroom.

Peter swallowed, his nerves frayed and on edge. Even Deacon, who wasn’t having the olfactory onslaught he was having, seemed skittish about this place. He didn’t blame Deacon, either. They were walking through a murder scene, after all, at midnight under moonlight. It was spooky as all fucking hell no matter what you were, shifter or human.

As they moved down the hall to the back of the house, the smell of the burnt herbs grew stronger, along with the smells of hair and flesh crackling on the bone.

“Up there,” Deacon said, pointing to the second-to-last door on the right. It hung shut against the frame, but had visible axe strikes against it. “The firefighters cut it down to get to them. Too late, of course.”

Peter stopped next to Deacon. “Not coming in with me?” he asked his friend.

“Fuck no. I always hated shit like this, and you know it. If it was anyone but you, I’d have told him to fuck off and go to hell before I came out here.”

Peter took a deep breath and let out a sigh. He’d always hated shit like this, too. Poking through rubble, looking for evidence of who’d been behind burnings and bombings. At least here, the corpses were already cleared. In the SEALs he’d still sometimes get asked to come in right after an incident, and the blood would be on the walls and the screams would fill the air. But when you were a SEAL you changed the way you dealt with the world, at least on the outside. It wouldn’t do to have an elite soldier freezing up while in the field or during a situation like that. Especially not when they were an example to all the other soldiers around them.

He’d been able to keep his feelings in check then. Here it was different. Here, he was facing something that wasn’t half a world away from his home, happening to people he didn’t know. Here, he was facing one of the worst memories of his life, just replicated. It was like a nightmare had leaped from his brain fully formed and taken up residence on this little farm in southern Oklahoma.

He walked up to the door and sniffed lightly at the light breeze coming through at the edges. It was just like he’d remembered. The oily smell seemed to claw its way down into his lungs and slither into his belly, coating the inside of his nose and throat. Definitely wolfsbane. Definitely.

Peter pushed the door and it easily swung open with a low creak. The room had been a bedroom before, a master bedroom, Peter figured, from the king-size bed dominating the far wall. Rather, what was left of the king-size bed. One of the load-bearing beams of the house had tumbled from the rafters and crashed into the middle of the floor. The chest of drawers to the left was a burnt hulk of wood, a woman’s vanity to the right nothing more than a blackened grave marker for a woman who would never again use it.

He stepped through the doorway with a shudder, the blackened wood that had tumbled from the ceiling crunching beneath his feet with each step as he trespassed into the deceased couple’s sacred space. This had been their marital bedroom, maybe the place they’d consummated their entire relationship. Who knew?

The realization didn’t help Peter’s feelings about the situation, even if he was here to investigate their murders. He walked around the beam that had tumbled from the rafters, stopped at the foot of the bed, turned to the south wall, and began to search for something he’d noticed was missing from the crime scene photos Deacon had sent him earlier that day.

“They found them in here?” Peter asked, looking to the north wall.

“Yeah,” Deacon said from the hallway, still refusing to step foot into the room. “Laid out on the floor, next to the bed, I think. Mutilated, like they had meatball surgery performed on them.”

That sounded exactly like Peter remembered it. Bodies practically destroyed, then burned. The only saving grace of the whole matter was knowing that the victims hadn’t been burned alive. They’d just been forced to endure the pain of their initial deaths. They’d been laid out, their corpses forced to wait as the flames consumed their homes, then their motionless bodies.

“Four, right?” he asked, glancing back at his old friend through the open doorway.

Deacon Portage nodded solemnly. “Four. Husband, wife, teenage son, baby daughter. A fucking infant. A baby girl, not much younger than my youngest. Can you believe that shit, Pete? What kind of monsters do this sort of thing?”

Peter nodded as he turned around in the room, his flashlight staying just behind where his eyes were really looking. “No signs? Or symbols, though? That you found, I mean?”

“Signs?” Deacon asked, clearly confused. “Like, what kind of signs? You never mentioned any signs.”

“Something that would look like it was painted onto the wall is the best way to describe it, I guess.”

“Painted in what, Peter?”

“Sheep’s blood.”

Deacon gave a short, surprised bark of laughter, but Peter just looked at him with cold eyes.

“I’m not kidding,” Peter said after a moment.

His friend shook his head, his composure returned. “I think I’d remember something like that being found, don’t you?”

“You’d think so,” he replied, turning back to his search.

If this had been anything like his family farm, the symbol would be in here, where they’d left the mutilated bodies. He glanced over the remaining walls and thought he saw something. He pulled his trusty leatherman multitool from his pocket and whipped out the little knife at the end of the metal handle.

“What?” Deacon asked, his curiosity overtaking his previous reticence and finally pushing him into the room. He came up beside Peter as he began to scrape at the soot on the wall. “What the hell are you doing? This is a crime scene, you know.”

“And you can take all the credit for finding it,” Peter murmured to his buddy, flashing him a grim smile as he scraped off a layer of soot to produce a deep crimson streak.

“And that’s a bingo,” he said, peeling off more and bringing it to his nose for a small whiff. It was sheep’s blood, alright. No doubt about it.

“Peter,” Deacon whispered as he looked at the dried fleck of cooked blood his buddy had at the tip of his blade. “What is this shit? What are you involved in?” He glanced at Peter’s face, concerned and slightly fearful.

“Nothing good,” he replied grimly.

“Is this some kind of serial killer shit?”

“In a sense,” Peter replied. “But not anything the FBI or anyone is worried about. Believe me. They don’t even know this exists.”

“What then?”

“Wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he replied, folding the blade closed and stuffing the tool away in his pocket.

“Try me,” Deacon said, crossing his arms.

Peter sighed and looked around almost conspiratorially. “Let’s get out of here first, okay? I still have a couple questions to ask you, but they can wait until we’re back out at the car.”

Frost and Deacon walked back through the burnt ruins of the house, careful not to disturb anything else as they passed. They didn’t speak again until they were back at Deacon’s car.

“Mind telling me what the fuck this is about now?”

Peter looked at him dead in the eye. He wasn’t sure if he could break it to him or not, that the world wasn’t quite as cut and dry as he’d thought it had been. But Deacon had always seemed to be a God-fearing sort, the guy who went to the chaplain for more than just guidance during the bad times. Out of all the soldiers he’d known, in fact, Deacon seemed to be the most religious, the most open to a world that was more spiritual and unexplainable than what science had led him to believe.

“One other question first,” Peter said. “Then I’ll tell you anything.”

Deacon folded his arms and leaned against the side of his car. “Shoot.”

“The girl. You said you found four bodies. As far as I could dig up, there was one missing. A teenage girl. Where is she?”

His friend sighed, made a face, and shook his head. “You know I can’t, Peter. There’s all sorts of confidentiality on that. Layers and layers of red tape, things I can’t even touch.”

“Come on,” he said. “I came all the way down here. Hell, I even found you a piece of evidence you might have missed.”

Deacon Portage looked away from him, back to the destroyed house. “Gonna be honest. I don’t know if you did me any favors by finding that sheep’s blood in there, and you know it. This whole thing gave ‘em the willies before, and now you done upgraded it all to heebie-jeebies.”

Peter shook his head. “Look,” he said, “I think I can help the girl. Maybe. But I’ve gotta know where she is. Did she go into the foster care system? A group home? Anything you can help me with? It’s important I meet her, find out more about her. But I can’t do that by myself, and you know it.”

“What do you want with her? She can’t help you find who did this, she was out all night with her boyfriend, and she’s barely said a word since. She didn’t see anything, Frost. The firefighters were here when she got home to find all this.”

Pete rocked back and forth on his heels in contemplation. “Okay. I’ll tell you what it’s all about, but you gotta promise to find a way for me to see the girl. I need to meet her.”

He eyed Peter warily, measuring up whether or not it was worth it. Peter wouldn’t have blamed him if he denied him access. He would have done the same thing in his friend’s shoes. How could he know how Peter was involved, or that he could help the girl? All he knew was that Peter had been asking around about information on a specific kind of crime, and had driven twelve practically straight hours to get there and investigate a morbid mass murder of a family butchered and burned in the night.

No, if Deacon didn’t want him in touch with the girl, he’d understand. It wouldn’t stop him from finding some other way, like using Lacy or another method, of course. But he’d still understand.

“Do I really want to know the answer?” Deacon asked after a long, pregnant pause.

“Want me to be honest?”

His old friend nodded.

“It’ll blow your mind and change your world.”

Deacon’s eyebrows raised a little.

“But, no, I wouldn’t want to know if I were you. I’d keep my mind intact, and my world unchanged given the choice. We already saw enough shit to question our world views overseas, Deacon, I wouldn’t add any more to the burden if I were in your shoes right now. And that’s a fact.”

Deacon Portage nodded.

Peter crossed his fingers that his old friend wouldn’t keep asking. Peter already knew Deacon had seen too much shit to count, too much shit to already process. A grown man would probably cry himself to sleep every night from just half of what was in Deacon’s head. Add the duties of his day job and the inhumanity of the civilized world to the things a soldier had to see and do in a warzone? That was more than twice what the average man could handle. And Deacon, for all his great points and strengths, was still just a man, plain and simple. A man with a family, a good job, and a home.

Deacon Portage shook his head. “You’re right, I don’t want to know. This is already creepy enough; I don’t really want to know the why of it. Do I?”

Peter shook his head. “Believe me, you don’t.”

“Good. Let’s keep it that way. You staying in town tonight, I’m guessing?”

Peter crossed his arms and nodded. “Down at the Motel 6 on the edge of town.”

“Coming up in the world, huh?”

“Better than the Bronco. This thing gets hot at night. And it’s even more uncomfortable than grabbing some sack time in the back of a Humvee, if you’ll believe that.”

Deacon winced. “Well, come by the house tomorrow. I got the day off, I’ll have the old ball and chain cook us up a feast fit for two old vets.”

“Before or after you tell me about the girl?” Peter asked.

“You just don’t let shit go, do you? Like a pitbull once you get your teeth in something, aren’t you?”

“Something like that. So, what’s the verdict? You gonna find out for me or not?”

He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Her name’s Mary. Mary Waynescott. And the foster system couldn’t get to her fast enough, so she’s been staying with me and my family.”

Peter’s breath hitched in his throat in shock and he rocked back on his heels again. “With you? And your family?”

“Look,” Deacon said seriously, looking Peter in the eyes, “I know about tragedy, alright? Not many other guys on the force have families like I do, and not many people seen as much shit as me. Or you, for that matter. You’re probably one of the only ones in the country to see more. So, yeah, Mary’s staying with me till the state can figure out where we can put her.”

“And I can speak to her?”

“I mean, you can try. Poor kid’s barely said a word since it happened. So if you want to meet her, be my guest, but I don’t think you’ll get much more out of her than I did.”

“Alright,” Peter said with a nod. “What time?”

“Little before noon. Alice’ll be pissed if you get there any later. She’s worse than a drill sergeant.”

Frost grinned. “I’ll be there.”

They shook hands and went back to their respective cars. Peter climbed into the driver’s seat and breathed a sigh of victory, if that’s what it could be called. He’d found a survivor. He’d found someone left from the family.

Maybe, just maybe, he could help her.

Or she could give him a clue as to who he was actually searching for. Or what, rather, he was searching for.