Page 57 of Quest of the Wolf

She started to speak, but her gaze snagged on the living room behind me, the painted message visible from the door now that we’d righted the couch and coffee table. We hadn’t yet swept up the broken plates and the rest of the carnage.

“Someone vandalized your apartment?” Dubois asked.

“While robbing it, yes. I’m missing—” I broke off, realizinggrenadesprobably weren’t items one should admit to a police officer that one had. Even a sword might be considered an odd thing for a property manager to own. “A valuable family heirloom is missing.”

Surely, that sword had beensomefamily’s heirloom.

“I’m sorry,” Dubois said, more sympathetic than I expected. “This place is quite the magnet for crime, isn’t it?”

Her gaze didn’t seem suspicious, not of me, when she met my eyes. That made me feel guilty. She suspected Rue, not I, was atthe center of everything. How could I set the record straight without landing myself in jail?

“Lately, some weird stuff has been happening, yes,” I said.

“I’ll see if I can get an unmarked patrol car down here to stake out the apartment complex for a while.” Dubois waved toward the street beyond the parking lot.

“To stop robberies or to catch Rue when she comes back?”

“Maybe both.” She smiled as she lifted a hand and departed.

Poor Rue. She never should have moved from her apartment in Seattle. All she’d had to deal with there were bible-toting grannies who’d called her a heathen while leaving graffiti on her door.

Even as I had the thoughts, I hoped she would return. As vile as her concoction had tasted, I could use a potion to help me find Radomir and Abrams. Of course, I didn’t have any of their cells oressencesto give to her.

“Too bad I didn’t get a chance to bite them in their asses,” I muttered, though I doubted Rue could collect a blood sample from my canines weeks after the fact. “Alas.”

“Are you going to be okay?” Jasmine knelt by the wall, picking up shards of broken plates.

“Fine.” I was about to step inside when the phone rang, Bolin’s number popping up. Before answering, I checked to make sure the police officer had disappeared around the corner. “Hello?”

“Hi, Luna. I’ve made or acquired a few items that you may find useful.”

“Great. I’ll take whatever they are as soon as possible. I’m hoping to use them before long.”

“Are you planning to infiltrate a fortress of evil?”

“As soon as I can find it.”

While I stood with the door open, a salt-and-pepper-furred wolf trotted between two rhododendrons and toward my apartment. Duncan had returned.

He sniffed the air and looked in both directions along the walkway before changing back into his human form.

I leaned into my apartment to grab his clothes. “Did you learn anything useful about those men?”

“One doesn’t shower regularly and left the scent of his powerful body odor on every grass blade between here and the street four blocks that way.”

“Does that mean you found him, pounced on him, and forced him to say he would never bother me again?” Under other circumstances, I might have admired Duncan’s physique as he pointed off toward the neighborhood, but I offered him his clothes, not wanting the female officer—or any officer—to return while he stood naked on my threshold.

“I followed the men to that street, but cars picked them up, and I wasn’t able to track them farther.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“One had slashed a Z into a tree trunk near where they were picked up. I’ll assume that means they’re the ones who took the sword.”

“A Z? Did he think he was Zorro?”

Duncan spread his arms, then accepted his underwear and bent to put it on. Three apartments down, a door opened, and one of the tenants stepped out, a twenty-something woman with a couple of canvas grocery totes in her hand. She glanced in our direction, gaped at Duncan’s bare ass, and stepped back into her apartment, shutting the door firmly.

As I handed him his T-shirt, I wondered if naked Duncan was a more alarming thing to find on the walkway than furry Duncan.

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