Chapter 17 - Bigby

Lisa's apartment is an homage to everything about her—the kitchen is fully stocked with every kind of ingredient, including squid ink and fresh lavender. There's a wall with a peg board featuring every size and shape of pan, and the kitchen still smells like freshly baked bread.

There are muffins and scones on the counter, which look like they were baked the day before. The oven is cold, and the fridge has cream and butter. A cat purrs as I hold her in my hands, petting her under the chin.

A coffee cup sits on the counter, the cream congealed on the top.

But no, Lisa.

Nothing looks amiss, Ado sends, coming out of the bedroom, shaking his head. I always like working with Ado because he's meticulous and exact. He doesn't waste time or get distracted from the mission. He also takes care not to sneak up on me—we're like the elephant and the mouse.

I sigh, sitting down at Lisa's kitchen table and looking around the room again. The cat lets out a noise and jumps down from my lap. We've been here for at least an hour, scouring the rooms, trying to find any sort of clue that might tell us where Lisa is. There doesn't seem to be any sign of a struggle or a break-in, but according to all her friends and family, she would have told somebody before leaving.

And she never would have left the bakery unattended.

Every morning after my runs at the lake, driving through town, I'd catch her setting up the shop, bringing in ingredients, setting out baked goods, flicking on the open sign.

"It's just—" her sister said when I spoke to her on the phone. "I want to trust you, Bigby. I want to trust that your people are going to do something about this. But it's been going on for so long, and we haven't even seen you out here, helping…"

Since Rosa came to Rosecreek, I haven't had time to think about the human-shifter alliance or pack politics. I've been spending all my time thinking about and hovering over Rosa and Kaila. And clearly, the humans can tell.

I stand, and we're just about to leave the apartment when I see the cat dart into the living room, mewing loudly. I turn, and the hint of a scent wafts through the apartment, catching my nose.

Wait , I signal to Ado, who immediately stops, holding deathly still, his eyes darting around, looking for the danger. Do you smell that?

Ado takes a breath, then shakes his head.

I creep back into the apartment on high alert. I smell another shifter in the apartment with us, but there's something strange about it. Something familiar, but not. Like a recipe with a single ingredient changed.

It hits me at the exact moment I turn the corner and see the cat pawing at something on the windowsill. It's a tuft of hair stuck in the window frame, moving with the breeze. The tiniest tuft of curly fur.

The cat is gray and white, but this fur is golden.

It's fur I have only ever seen before on a single shifter. I tell Ado to go around the outside of the apartment, and he does, appearing outside the window a moment later. His eyes widen when he sees the fur, and when he meets my gaze, there's the faintest trace of tears brimming in his eyes.

Ado grabs the fur, and I shimmy the window open the slightest bit, allowing him to pull it out without it floating away on the breeze. He holds the fur close to his face, smelling it, his nose wrinkling.

There's something strange about this , Ado sends, and I nod, agreeing with him. It's Percy, but not.

When I met Ado outside, we put the fur in a plastic bag and hurried to my Jeep. Ado is usually a wall of cool composure when it comes to grief over things like this, but I can feel the tiniest hint of sorrow right now.

I throw the Jeep in reverse and peel out of the apartment parking lot. Aris is going to want to know about this right away.

***

" Percy, " Aris says, his voice low, his throat thick with grief and confusion as he holds the bag with the tuft of fur. The second we opened it, he'd stood up from behind his desk, stalking over and taking the bag, his eyes wide. "Where did you find this?"

"In Lisa's apartment," I explain as Ado takes the fur back from Aris and places it in the bag. My mind has been racing since we found the fur—Percy must be alive. That's the only plausible explanation.

I have the strange urge to find Rosa and discuss the situation with her. She has an excellent mind for solving problems and always offers a solution I haven't thought of.

Of course, there's always the possibility that the fur was from before Percy died, but why would he be in Lisa's apartment? It could just be a piece of fur floating in the wind that happened to get stuck in Lisa's apartment window when she closed it, but that's too much of a coincidence. I won't accept it as an explanation.

"What does this mean?" Aris breathes, and I feel the guilt and confusion coming off of him in waves. "That we left him out there to die, and he didn't die? Percy isn't dead?"

The door to the office bursts open, and Linnea runs in, her hand over her heart and tears in her eyes. She looks between all of us, her breath coming quick. At once, I realized what had happened—she could feel the emotions in this room and hear Aris say, Percy. They named their son after our lost team member to honor him, but sometimes it causes miscommunications.

"What about Percy? Where is he? I thought he was with the nanny," she gasps, her eyes darting around the room frantically. "Aris, what's going on? Where's Percy?"

"Oh, sweetheart," he says, going to her and putting his arms around her. I watch as Linnea melts into him, jealous, immediately imagining how it would feel to have that from Rosa, that contact, that soothing presence. "Not our Percy," Aris says, running hand over her curls, the hair popping back up immediately. "Our other Percy. Bubba is fine, dear. Can't you feel him?"

"Percy is fine," she murmurs, then pulls back, meeting Aris's eyes, her face the perfect picture of shock. "Percy is alive ? Is that why you're so—"

"—Guilty. Yeah." Aris finishes, his hands balling into fists. "I gave Percy that gun. I let him go out into the woods. The smallest respect we owed him was to give him a proper burial, and we didn't even do that. We would have known if—"

"His body wasn't there," Ado says, raising his gaze from the table. We all stare at him. He stands tall, his chin tipped up as he looks between Aris and me. "I went back. Percy was gone. His body wasn't there. His scent was changed. I thought—"

"You thought he was taken by animals, or washed down the river," Aris murmurs, rubbing his hand over his chin. "Thank you, Ado. You did what we all should have done. You bring the pack honor."

Ado dips his chin, and I clear my throat.

"I think we're missing the most important thing, here," I say, starting to pace as the realization dawns on me. Increasingly, the room is beginning to feel smaller and smaller, like there's not enough room for me. I try to calm my breathing, but it comes faster and faster.

"What? Isn't the fact that Percy is alive pretty astonishing to you?" Aris says, quirking an eyebrow at me.

"That's not it," I say, shaking my head and running my hands over my short hair. "Of course I'm glad that he's alive, but you can smell that fur as well as I can. That's not our Percy. There's something—something serum-related going on there. And, if we're running with the assumption that Percy is alive because we found this in Lisa's window, then we also have to run with the assumption that Percy is the one kidnapping the humans. Hopefully just kidnapping, and not something worse."

Linnea gasps, her head rocking forward like she might be sick. She puts a hand over her mouth and turns to Aris, speaking through her fingers.

"Why would Percy do that? He wouldn't, right?"

"You've seen the shifters down in the compound," Aris says, not meeting her eyes, instead staring at a spot on the floor like he needs to burn through it with his vision alone. "You've seen how they act like animals. We can only assume that if Percy is alive, the serum has taken complete control of him. There's little to no chance that we're going to find those humans alive. If we manage to find them at all."

Ado lowers his head further, and the familiar rage that's been growing inside me—all the pent-up anger and stress and wanting for Rosa all day, every day since I first laid eyes on her again—it washes over me like poison. I try to move out of the room, but there's furniture in my way. I kick the side of a table.

"Hey, man," Aris says, starting to come my way, "it's okay—"

I let out a roar, moved away from the table, and threw a chair into the wall.