Broken by Kelley Armstrong Page B

razor, clothes iron and eye drops. I’m sure he cultivated that look—the rumpled newshound, always on the hunt, low on sleep, coasting on caffeine—but it was about fifty years out of date. Almost certainly not a representative of Toronto’s journalistic constellations, the
Star,
the
Globe
or even the
Sun
.
    “We’re a few blocks over,” I said with a vague wave.
    “Did you know Mrs. Ashworth?” he asked, pen poised above his paper. “She lived right down there, in the green house. Old—older woman. Lived by herself.”
    “I believe we met her at the barbecue last month,” Jeremy said. “You talked to her for a while, hon, remember? About her roses?” He frowned at the reporter. “She isn’t hurt, is she?”
    “No one knows. Disappeared this morning. And I do mean disappeared. Neighbor claims he saw her crossing the road and then…poof.”
    “Poof?” Jeremy’s frown deepened.
    “Gone. Just like that.”
    We stared at him. He leaned back on his heels, relishing the moment.
    “She probably wandered off,” I said, then lowered my voice. “We have a lot of…older residents here.”
    The reporter scowled, as if he’d already come to this conclusion, but would really rather be writing the “poof” story than another sad tale of Alzheimer’s.
    “Still,” I said. “It is strange, coming right after those fireworks with the transformer last night.” I glanced at the reporter and tried to look nervous. “There’s no connection, is there?”
    A smug smile. “You never know.”
    Jeremy rolled his eyes. “No, hon, there’s no connection. A blown transformer and a missing elderly woman, just two random events, not uncommon—”
    “Plus, the woman in petticoats,” the reporter said. “You did hear about that, didn’t you?”
    “Petticoats?” I said slowly.
    “The cops got two calls last night, right after that transformer blew, people seeing a woman in petticoats running down the middle of the road. This very road.”
    “Probably a lady in her nightgown, running out to see what the fireworks were,” Jeremy said. “I hear it was quite a show.”
    The reporter muttered something about a deadline, and stomped off to find a more receptive audience.
     

    We’d returned to Toronto to reassure ourselves of two things: that the bowler-hatted man had been the only “portal escapee,” and that nothing else had happened as a result of last night’s events. The possible disappearance of the elderly woman thwarted our hopes of a hasty resolution on the second count. And now a sighting of a woman in petticoats suggested we weren’t going to have any more luck with the first. Something told me we wouldn’t be sleeping in our own beds tonight.
    Jeremy and I spent the next hour discreetly scouting the area for a second trail with that distinctive rotting smell. Bad enough I couldn’t change to wolf form, but having the area under media and police scrutiny made the search twice as hard or, more aptly, twice as large. Instead of scouring the road where the bowler-hatted man had appeared, I had to search all the perimeter streets, while trying to look like a restless pregnant woman and her doting husband out for a prolonged neighborhood stroll.
    We’d made it almost all the way around when I found a second trail. A woman’s scent, mingled with rot.
    I bent and retied my shoes—a simple act that was getting increasingly difficult.
    “Definitely a woman,” I said as I took a deep breath.
    “We’ll pick up the trail after dark and find her, see what she can tell us.”
     

    In the supernatural world, it’s sometimes tricky to know who to call when things go awry. Take a portal. It could be magical, in which case we’d want to contact a witch or a sorcerer. Or it could be connected to the nether realms, and then it would fall under the jurisdiction of a necromancer. The last time we’d been peripherally involved in a case with a portal connection, Paige and Lucas had been in charge, and they’d