by Tanya Huff
“No. Just that there’s werewolves in the mountains, but if that’s the case then…”
“Then?” Henry prodded when Kevin’s voice trailed off.
“Well, you know. Werewolves!”
“Is that it?”
“One of the Martins’ neighbours saw something large and hairy carrying a small body.”
“In its mouth?”
“No, but…”
“Werewolves don’t have an intermediate state. They look like wolves, or they look human.” Essentially like wolves and essentially like humans but close enough. “It’s not werewolves.”
“The old lady seemed pretty sure it wasn’t a Sasquatch.”
Even six months ago Henry would have believed it wasn’t a Sasquatch went without saying. “Large and hairy?”
“That’s what she said.”
They couldn’t save every child who went missing in British Columbia, but large and hairy pointed toward something the police might not be able to handle. “Give me the witness’ name and we’ll check it out.”
*
“So…” Just past the Spuzzum exit, Henry pulled out and passed an empty logging truck then tucked his 1976 BMW back into the right lane. “…where’s Lee?”
“He’s down in LA for a couple of days, auditioning for a movie-of-the-week.”
“He’s leaving Darkest Night?” Lee Nicholas, Tony’s partner, was one of the leads in the popular syndicated vampire detective show.
“What? No.” That pulled Tony’s attention off the screen of his PDA. “They’ll be shooting in Vancouver, so he figures he can do both. CB’s willing to adjust our shooting schedule if necessary.”
“That doesn’t sound like him.” Chester Bane was notoriously inflexible when it came to situations that might cost him money.
“He’s hoping he can scam some free publicity.”
Henry snorted. “That does. What,” he asked a few kilometres later when it became obvious Tony wasn’t going to pick up the conversational ball, “are you finding so fascinating on that thing?”
“Sorry, I was just going over the list of possible… um, things.”
“Things.”
“Suspects who might have taken the kid. But they’re not exactly people.”
Eyes nearly closed in the glare of oncoming headlights, Henry sighed. “Let’s hear the list.”
“Well, there’s Bugbears, a kind of a hairy, giant goblin. Or Chimeras, because the lion and goat parts are hairy and that might have been all they saw. It could be anyone of a number of different demons, but then we need to find out who’s calling them. Uh…” He squinted at the screen as he scrolled down. “Displacer Beasts look like cougars except they’re black and have tentacles so it wouldn’t necessarily be carrying the kids in its mouth. Ettins are two-headed giants that live in remote areas and…”
“Tony, where did you get this list?”
“Sort of from Kevin Groves.”
“Sort of?”
“He lent me an RPG monster index. RPG: role playing game,” Tony expanded when Henry’s silence made it obvious he had no idea what that meant. “Like Dungeons and Dragons.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“Really? Because it’s old. Well, oldish.” When Henry replied with more silence, he sighed. “I wanted to go in with more information than ‘hairy thing that eats children and hopefully isn’t a werewolf’.”
“So you went to a game?”
It was Tony’s turn to snort as he powered down and twisted around to slip the PDA into a side pocket on his backpack. “Yeah, well, believe it or not, Googling big hairy eats children doesn’t pull up anything useful.”
“But imaginary…”
“Henry, whatever this is, I guarantee it’ll be considered imaginary by most of the world. Hell, we’re considered imaginary by most of the world.”
“I’m sure more people than you expect believe in third assistant directors.”
“You’d be surprised.” Slouching down as far as the seat belt would allow, he propped his knees up on the dashboard. “Ninety-nine percent of the world’s population is in denial about something. Take you for instance.”
That drew Henry’s attention off the road. “Me?”
“You’re still in denial about Vicki’s birthday.”
“I said I’d get her something.”
“Yeah, but it has to be something good, and I don’t think you’re giving it much thought.”
“There’s a child missing…”
“You want to talk about that all the way to Lytton? Because I don’t.”
“Fine.” Henry pulled out and passed a pair of trucks. “What about a gift certificate?”
“Dude, it’s a good thing you’re hard to kill.”
*
The village of Lytton was about a two hour drive from Vancouver. Henry had picked Tony up at his apartment in Burnaby at twenty to eight, and it was a quarter to ten when Henry left the highway and steered the BMW down Main Street.
“You think they usually roll the sidewalks up this early,” Tony wondered staring out at the dark windows, “or is this a reaction to the Martin kid getting grabbed?”
“Bit of both, I expect.”
“I feel like we’re being watched from behind lace curtains.”
“Why lace?” Henry wondered.
“I don’t know.” Tony waggled the fingers of his left hand in front of his face, sketching lacy lines of power in the air that dissipated almost instantly. “It’s creepier I guess.”
“I don’t know about the lace, but we’re definitely being watched.” Henry could feel the fear and anger roiling through the town. Could feel some of it directed toward them. With a child missing in a village of only three hundred and eight souls, any and all strangers would be suspect. “It might be best if we were… unnoticed.”
“Do you have to use such cheesy set-up lines?” Tony muttered, laying two fingers against the metal strip between the front and back windows. In the last few months, he’d gotten enough practice in with the notice-me-not spell that he no longer needed to consult the instructions on the laptop. Of course, there were still one hell of a lot of spells he wasn’t as adept at so the laptop remained close at hand.
From their perspective within the car, nothing changed, but Henry felt the watcher’s attention drift away.
“Could be a troll under the railway bridge.”
“Julie Martin wasn’t anywhere near the bridge,” Henry reminded him. “And a troll would never hunt that far from home. They’re creatures of habit.”
Grace Alton, the witness who’d spoken to Kevin Groves, lived out past 8th Street where Main began to curve toward Cache Creek, three houses closer to town than the Martin’s. Old enough to be part of the original settlement, the small, white frame house was set back from the road at the end of a long, gravel driveway.
Henry pulled in behind an aged Buick and parked. “There’s lights on in the front room. She’s still up.”
“It’s just ten, why wouldn’t she be?” When Henry turned and lifted a red-gold brow, Tony shrugged. “Right. Country.”
*
Standing on the front porch, Tony fingered the ball bearing that anchored his personal notice-me-not and glanced back toward the car. Because he knew exactly where the BMW was parked, he could almost see a shadowy outline—anyone else would have to bump into it to find it. Which was how he’d found it the first couple of times although it had been more slam into it than bump. His right knee ached remembering.
“One heartbeat. She’s alone.”
“Does it matter?”
“Makes it simpler,” Henry said as he opened the door.
“The door’s not… Right. Country,” he said again as he followed Henry into the house. By the time he reached the living room, Henry was on one knee beside an ancient recliner, holding the hand of an elderly woman who was staring at him like he was… something elderly women really got into. Tony had no idea of what that might be although from t
he décor, crocheted doilies and African violets figured prominently. The place smelled like cat piss, and the fat black-and-white cat staring disdainfully at Henry from the sofa seemed the most likely culprit.
Unlike dogs, cats had no issues with vampires.
Or wizards, Tony noted as the cat turned that same unblinking green stare on him, and if there was a spell they deigned to acknowledge, he hadn’t found it yet.
“Just tell me what you saw,” Henry said softly, and by the way the old lady leaned toward him, Tony knew his eyes had gone dark and compelling.
“I was out back, wasn’t I, checking to see how the trellis at the end of the old summer kitchen had come through the winter. I have roses in the summer, pink ones, they climb right up to the roof. I saw something moving down by the river. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes.” Her upper lip curled. “I don’t care what that constable says, I can see at a distance as well as I ever could. All right, fine, up close maybe I should wear my glasses, but at a distance I know what I saw.”
“What did you see, Grace?”
She preened a little, an involuntary response to Henry’s attentions, which given the visible as opposed to actual age difference, was kind of creeping Tony out. “It was passing between those two clumps of lilac bushes. They’re nothing much now, but you should see them in the spring. Lovely. And the smell. Snotty young pup from the ministry wanted to tear them out. I tore him a new one, that’s what I did. Those lilacs are older than he is.”
Tony wasn’t without sympathy for the guy from the ministry, whichever ministry it happened to be.
“What did you see passing between the lilacs, Grace?”
“I saw something bigger than a man but hunched over. And it had a big hairy hump. The shape looked wrong. It looked… evil!” She drew out the final word with obvious enjoyment and Tony, who’d seen some terrifying things over the last few years, suppressed a shudder. “It was moving fast, but I saw, I saw clear as anything that it was holding a child. I saw the leg kick and the poor little thing had on a red rubber boot. Julie Martin was wearing red rubber boots when she disappeared, you know. I yelled for it to stop, but then it was gone, so I came inside and I called the Mounties, and they didn’t believe me. Oh, they were polite enough, those young men, but they didn’t believe me not for one minute. Are you sure the boot was red, they said. Like I couldn’t see a little red boot against a big hairy creature. Not like a Sasquatch, I told them, they’re just misunderstood poor dears. This was un-groomed, ratty. I don’t like to judge, but it was clearly a creature of evil appetites come down out of the mountains to feed. He asked me what kind of creature, and I said how would I know, did I look like I knew creatures. And he said maybe the light was playing tricks, so I said the light was a lot better back when I saw it because they hadn’t exactly hustled to get here, you know. When they left, I said to Alexander…” She gestured toward the cat, who looked bored. “I said, we’ll involve the fifth estate, that’s what we’ll do, and I called the paper.”
A messy pile of tabloids, topped by a copy of The Western Star, had a place of prominence beside her chair. The only visible headline screamed, IT’S NOT A RACCOON! Tony rubbed at a healing bite on his calf. It had actually been a Pekinese with a really bad temper.
“The man at the paper, he believed me.”
“I believe you, Grace.”
She patted his cheek with her free hand. “I know, dear.”
As amusing as it was to see Henry Fitzroy, vampire, treated in such a way, Tony couldn’t see how this was getting them any closer to finding Julie Martin. They’d gotten as much information from Kevin.
Then Henry leaned closer. “What did you hear, Grace?”
Her eyes widened. “Hear?”
“What did you hear?”
She frowned, slightly, and cocked her head to one side. “I heard rustling, through the bushes, but that might have been the wind. I heard the river, of course. I heard…” She looked surprised. “I heard a car door slam.”
*
“Werewolves drive.”
“Some of them,” Henry admitted as they crossed the back yard. “But not very well.”
“It’s been a long winter, and kids are easier to hunt than elk. Maybe they’re taking food back to the pack.”
“It’s possible, but unlikely that there’d be enough rogue werewolves around to form a pack.”
“You just don’t want it to be werewolves,” Tony muttered, staring into the gap between the lilac bushes. The gap was only minimally less dark than bushes themselves. The sky had clouded over and he could barely see his hand in front of his face. “You’ll have to guide me through to the other side. I don’t want to risk a light until I’m blocked from the road, there’s only so much a notice-me-not can cover.
“Guide me,” he repeated a moment later as Henry set him down. “Not carry me.”
“This was faster. You need to put more work into that night-sight spell.”
“Yeah.” Tony snapped on his flashlight, beam pointed carefully at the ground. “I’ll get right on that in my copious amount of spare time between working and saving the world. You got anything?”
Crouched, Henry brushed a palm over the crushed grass. “Unfortunately, the police believed Grace enough to check this out. There’s no scent here now but theirs.”
The tracks—the mess the police had made visible even to Tony—followed a path behind the lilacs probably created by deer or some other non-small-child-eating animal. The police appeared to have reached a set of tire tracks that led up between two houses and back to the road and stopped their search.
“Do you think Ms Alton told the Mounties about the car door?”
“No. She didn’t remember it until I asked her specifically what she heard. I think because this…” Henry indicated the tracks. “…is the obvious place for a car, but the tracks just as obviously haven’t been used this spring, the police assumed Grace was…”
“Making things up to get attention?” Tony offered diplomatically.
“Possibly. And you can’t exactly blame them; there’d be no reason to bring an abducted child down here unless you had a car and this…” He waved at the unused tracks again. “…says there was no car. But because we know there was a car involved we need to find another place you can bring in a vehicle. Wait here.”
“Why…”
“Because I’ll be moving quickly and I don’t want you to fall in the river.”
Tony sighed and turned off the flashlight. He couldn’t see the river, about three metres away and down a steep bank, but the sound of rushing water filled the night, drowning out every other sound.
Five minutes. The scar on his left palm itched, and he thought about conjuring a Wizard lamp. Ten minutes. When he got his first decent job in Vancouver, he’d bought a cheap watch with a luminescent dial, tired of spending unacknowledged time in the dark. Fifteen minutes. He yawned and nearly swallowed his tongue as Henry’s pale face appeared suddenly out of the shadows.
“Just past those cedars it’s all bare rock. It wouldn’t be impossible to get something with four wheel drive and a high clearance along the edge of the river and then back up to highway 12 right at the bridge.”
“Just because it wouldn’t be impossible doesn’t mean there was a car there,” Tony pointed out as they headed for Grace Alton’s driveway and the car. “I doubt Ms Alton heard anything over the sound of the river, Henry. That track’s likely got nothing to do with…”
Henry held up a small red boot.
*
Boot in one hand, laptop balanced on his knees, Tony scrolled through his spell directory. “Here it is, Pair-bonding, joining two halves back into a whole. I cast the spell on the boot and it acts like a compass leading us to its mate.” He pulled a black marker from the pack between his feet and slowly drew a rune on the instep of the boot.
“Whatever has the child reeks of old blood, old kills,” Henry growled, driving up onto the bridge. “The stench hides its nature.�
��
“If it isn’t rogue werewolf, there’s nothing that says some of the smaller giants couldn’t drive. I mean, as long as the car was big enough.” Pulling out a plastic grocery bag of herbs, he removed a spray of small red berries almost the same colour as the rubber, and dropped it in the boot. “Belladonna,” he explained. “To clear the way. I’m working the sympathetic magic angle. It’s a diuretic, makes you piss, and that’s clearing that way anyway.”
“I didn’t ask.”
Boot balanced on his palm, Tony reached for power and carefully read the words of the spell.
The boot slammed against the middle of the inside of the windshield.
Henry’s nostrils flared.
Tony sighed, powered down the laptop, and performed a quick clean cantrip. “Yes, I pissed myself,” he muttered defensively, cheeks burning. “Like I said, it’s a diuretic. At least the boot didn’t blow up. Or melt. Or break your windshield.”
“But you’re still using too much power.”
“Am not. New spells always need a bit of fine tuning.”
“Fine tuning? My car…”
“Is clean. Fresh. All taken care of.” He slouched down in the seat. “Whether they believed Ms Alton or not, the cops had to have searched the riverbank, how come they didn’t find the boot?”
“I found it by scent down deep within a crack in the rock. The RCMP would have needed to have gone over the riverbank with a fine-toothed comb to find it, and I doubt they have sufficient manpower even for this given the foolishness of the recent budget cuts.”
“You sound like Vicki. Only with less profanity.”
Although she hadn’t been a police officer for some years before Henry changed her, Vicki continued to take government under-funding of law enforcement personally.
“Speaking of Vicki…” Because speaking of the boot or the child or the thing that had taken her would only feed his anger and that would make it dangerous for Tony to remain enclosed with him in the car. “…do you think she’d like one of those purple plants?”
