After a while I did catch a scent. I didn’t bother about finding the side-road. I followed the scent cross-country through the woods, past a house that had been almost completely hidden by trees. I didn’t care about private property or rugged terrain. All I cared about were the scents drifting in the air and what they could tell me. I stopped every now and then to take a few deep breaths, turning into the wind, sorting through the various scents. Running, I might miss something. Standing still, eyes closed, breathing deeply, I could sort through far more scents—plant, animal, human, mineral—than I wanted to bother with.
There was a gradual change. After a while, what I smelled most was smoke—old smoke, days old, and ash clinging to the trees, stirred up by my feet, by the feet of animals, by cars on the narrow little roads I crossed.
Smoke and burned flesh. Human flesh and Ina flesh.
When I found my father’s and brothers’ homes, they looked much like the ruin of my mothers’ community. The buildings had been completely destroyed, burned to rubble, and then trampled by many feet. My father and my brothers had been there, but they were gone now. I could smell death, but I could not see it. I did not know yet who had died and who had survived. Someone had come for my male family, and whoever it was had been as thorough as they had when they came for my mothers and my sisters.
The place that had been Iosif’s community was full of strange, bad smells—the scents of people who should not have been there, who had nothing to do with Iosif or his people. Whose scent was I finding? The arsonists? Firemen? The police? Neighbors? All of these, probably.
I stood amid the rubble and looked around, trying to understand. Was Iosif dead? And Stefan? I hadn’t even met my other three brothers and their symbionts. All dead? None wounded and surviving in hiding?
Then I remembered that some of Iosif’s symbionts worked away from the community, even lived away from it part of the time. Did they know what had happened? If they didn’t, they would be coming back here soon. They would come, needing Iosif or one of my brothers. When they found out what had happened, they would have to find another Ina to bond with just to survive. Could I help? Was I too young? I was definitely too ignorant. Surely they would know of other Ina communities. If they had come home and found only rubble, they might already have taken refuge in some other community.
When had the fire happened? Days ago, surely. The place was cold. Even the freshest human smells I found were all at least a day or two old.
Who had done this and why? First my mothers’ community, now my father’s. Even Iosif had had no idea who attacked my mothers. He had been deeply angry and frustrated at his own ignorance. If he didn’t know, how could I find out?
Someone had targeted my family. Someone had succeeded in killing all of my relatives. And if this had to do with the experiments that had given me my useful human characteristics—what else could it be?—then it was likely that I was the main target.
I began to run again, to circle the community, stopping often to sample scents more thoroughly and hunting for fresh scents, any hint that some member of my family might be alive, hiding, healing. I found the narrow private road that led to where the houses had been, and I followed it out to a two-lane public road. There, I closed my eyes and turned toward where Wright was waiting. I could get back to him in half an hour.
But I didn’t want to go back to him yet. I wanted to learn all I could, all that my eyes and my nose could tell me.
I went back to the rubble—charred planks, blackened jagged sections of wall, broken glass, standing chimneys, burned and partially burned furniture, appliances, broken ceramic tile in what had been the kitchens and the bathrooms, unrecognizable lumps of blackened plastic, a spot where an Ina had died …
I stood still at that place, trying to recognize the scent, realizing that I couldn’t because it was the wrong scent, that of a dead male whom I had not met, burned to ash and bone, definitely dead.
I had not known him. He must have been one of my brothers but one I had not met. He had died in one of the three houses I had not entered.
I stared at the spot for a long time and caught myself wondering what the Ina did with their dead. What were their ceremonies? I knew something about human funeral services from my vampire research. I had read through a great deal of material about death, burial, and what could go wrong to cause the dead to become undead. It was all nonsense as far as I was concerned, but it had taught me that proper respect for the dead was important to humans. Was it important to Ina as well?