“It’s him, all right.” She circled the hanging corpse, edging around the spatters on the floor. “Just a guess, but I’d say he hasn’t been dead too long.” “No.” I wiped my mouth—you’d think that I had nothing left to throw up, considering how long it’d been since I’d eaten, but apparently my body felt otherwise. “No, that’s not it.” I made myself look at him, at the thing they’d hung up. “He doesn’t smell like Deke anymore.” Rena gave me a look that clearly questioned my sanity. “Of course not. He’s dead.” “That’s not how it works.” I walked up to Deke’s body, over the blood—and it too lacked the right scent, lacked even the tackiness that drying blood ought to have. “Death changes a scent, but not by this much. He—Roger and Dina did something to him, Rena. They made him not Deke anymore, she changed him so much that he didn’t even smell human. And then they left him to die.” I rubbed my nose, briefly glad even for the stink of bile on my breath, just because it blocked out what Deke’s scent had become.
