Grim Tidings

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Tanner didn’t so much as stir. Then again, if I’d polished off half a dozen beers on a mostly empty stomach I wouldn’t let a little thing like someone searching my bags wake me either.

  Sure, on the surface I was being paranoid and ungrateful snooping around, but this wasn’t what it looked like, on a lot of levels. Tanner’s call hadn’t been random bad luck. Lady wasn’t the victim of a run-of-the-mill murderer and when I looked at the box I knew Tanner wasn’t just some burned-out cop chasing said killer.

  The box had held bandages and iodine at one point, I was sure, but now it was crammed with bottles and tablets of an entirely different purpose. I could recognize a warlock’s kit in my sleep, but this required a little more consideration. The black dust was graveyard dirt—the staple of voodoo and folk remedies from back in my home neck of the woods. There were hand-stamped silver coins in there too, the kind Romany put on the eyes of their dead, neatly labeled packets that smelled like a restaurant, and a vial of something dark and sticky that rolled rather than sloshed. Blood, although I wasn’t opening the cork to take a whiff and see if it was human or other.

  I carefully shut everything back up and checked the duffel, which really did just hold a shotgun, a rifle, and a paper bag of shells.

  I looked back at Tanner’s snoring form, and then I got my clothes and shoes and slipped out into the cold. Whatever he was really doing here, Tanner knew too much about the world I inhabited, and that meant he might figure out what I was.

  As an afterthought, I scooped up the file he’d left on the floor and tucked it into my coat. The photos I left where they were. I had plenty of those kinds of pictures inside my skull. I didn’t need any more.

  I walked from the motel to the hospital to get the Packard, my shoes crunching frost-covered grass. I’d intended to just get in the car and drive until I was far away from Kansas, but I couldn’t shake the photos lying on the motel room floor, stark in the white light from the street outside.

  A nighttime road, an abandoned car. Faces obliterated to meat, so that even dental records couldn’t identify their bodies—bodies that were not just mutilated but chewed, as if he’d given up on fists and started using tooth and nail in the depths of rage.

  I climbed into the car, punching on the heater and opening the plain, coffee-stained folio. Nothing in Tanner’s files contained a single clue to the Walking Man’s actual identity. A psychiatrist had even typed up an opinion that took three single-spaced pages to say the Walking Man had feelings of anger and despondency that he acted out on his victims. He left no hair, no fingerprints, just bloody smears on window glass and chunks torn out of flesh with teeth.

  Only one medical examiner, in Tulsa, had even been able to find a definitive cause of death. There, a woman named Marge Taylor, mother of two, had stopped on her way home from the graveyard shift at a tire plant to offer a downed motorist a lift. After a beating that must have taken hours, her neck had been snapped clean as a whistle.

  I sat back, looking toward the hospital. Tanner was tracking the Walking Man, but Tanner also had the tools to track things that were much worse. If he hadn’t been a deep-sleeping drunk, I didn’t know if I’d have made it out of his motel room. Maybe he’d already clocked me, and I’d been so desperate to believe somebody didn’t have it out for me I’d fallen for the line.

  My breath made a misty full moon on the Packard’s window, one that froze as I turned off the engine.

  If Tanner thought he was on to something more than a maniac who liked to beat women to death on the highway, what would the harm be in taking a look for myself?

  I got out of the car.

  The hospital was quiet, the orderly with the long hair dozing at the front desk listening to the radio. I didn’t wake him, slipping off my shoes so I wouldn’t make any noise on the hard floors until I got to the morgue.

  Lady’s body was one of two in residence, side by side on narrow gurneys. I pulled back the sheet from Lady’s face. She’d died before any of the bruising had gone down. Nothing would ever make her look like herself again.

  They’d taken off her gown and cut away the bandages covering her arms and torso, and I reached out to almost touch one of the deeper bite marks on her upper arm. I’d seen a lot of bodies in a lot of states, but I wanted to remember Lady.

  I wanted to have something to picture when I finally tracked down the Walking Man.

  I shut my eyes, breathing in the sterile smell of formaldehyde and bleach, and then I opened them and got to work. I might not have a badge and a state crime lab to help me but I’d tracked down men worse than the Walking Man with less.

  Leaning close to Lady, I made myself inhale, deep. Aside from slow decomposition, all I could smell was her blood, coppery and sharp on her skin. Next the bites—a shifter would have just torn out her throat or her femoral artery to bleed her quick. They also probably would have eaten at least one of her limbs if it was a feral or a rogue pack. A hellhound like me would have a wolf’s bite, angular and much deeper than these shallow tears.

  These were human teeth. Sharp, but human. There were folks— from the tribes, Mohawk or Algonquin—friends of my grandmother’s who believed in the Wendigo, a man who filed down his teeth to consume human flesh, transformed at the first bite into a monster that could never eat its fill.

  I gently rolled Lady onto her side, checking her back, and her hair fell away from her neck. It was still in its perfect wave from the last time I’d seen her, the ends stained pink from sitting in her blood.

  The front of her neck was bruised from a hand—at least twice as large as mine—wrapping around it, probably to slam her head into a hard surface and knock her senseless. But the back of the neck was free of bruises, and the mark stood out clear and black. It didn’t look like much more than a pen mark, a backward lowercase r with a little tail curling off the back, but when I rubbed at it, it didn’t go away.

  When I touched it, I smelled the smell. That bitter, burnt, hopeless smell from the camps. The ashes that I still woke up with in the back of my throat.

  I lost my grip on Lady’s body as I shuddered and she slammed back onto the metal tray. I winced, hoping no one had heard. “Sorry,” I whispered.

  I was reaching out to pull up her sheet when her eyes snapped open, clouded over with the cataracts death leaves. Her mouth gaped, and she let out one short, agonized scream before she wrapped her hands around my neck.

  We both crashed to the ground, the gurney on top of my legs. Lady snapped frantically at me, screaming, spittle trailing out of her mouth to leave a freezing trail along my face and neck. “Lady,” I gasped, bracing my hands against her breastbone. “Lady, it’s me!”

  She whined, low in her throat, like a dog that hadn’t been fed in days. That was it, I realized as she slashed and clawed at me. Lady was hungry. Hungry and so desperate she didn’t even realize I couldn’t feed her. Not in the way she needed.

  And I had to make sure she didn’t get through me to all the human residents of this hospital, sleeping in their beds like an all-you-can-chew buffet.

  I braced one arm to keep her from sinking her teeth into my face and wrapped my other hand in her hair, knotting my fingers into her curls. They weren’t as soft as they looked, more like a doll’s hair now that she was dead. “Sorry, Lady,” I muttered, and slammed her head into the metal edge of the gurney as hard as I could.

  I would have crushed the skull of a living person—I think I put a pretty good dent in Lady’s—but she just rolled off me, dazed, shaking her head back and forth until her bloody hair fell in front of her eyes. I scrambled to my feet, glad now that I’d forgone my shoes and kicking myself that I hadn’t helped myself to Tanner’s gun.

  Lady howled at me again as she rose up, crouched like a mountain lion who’d cornered a deer. The full extent of her injuries was apparent—her abdomen was dark and distended from internal bleeding and there was a heavy boot print on her chest, across her left breast, where someone had held her down.

>   Held her down and fed her blood, like a vamp, the hound whispered to me. But poor Lady hadn’t been that lucky. She wasn’t a vamp, pale and sickly as a junkie looking for their next fix, kitten-weak unless they had fresh blood in them.

  I’d seen something like Lady only once before, and even as she screamed, pink foam flecking her lips, I resisted the thought.

  I lit on a jar of dirty instruments sitting in the deep-basin sink in the corner of the room and I lunged for them, but Lady was faster. Faster than me, and a whole lot faster than the ones I’d seen in the camps. She landed on me, slamming me into the sink so hard I felt a rib give and fireworks exploded in my field of vision. I pushed back, throwing her off me. She slipped in some of her own blood, pinwheeling and smacking the light fixture so we were plunged into darkness. Before she could lunge again, the door banged open and I saw a tall figure backlit in the hall. Lady turned on him, her mouth unhinging so wide it tore at the edges, and she screamed loud enough to rattle the light fixtures.

  The shotgun was louder, and the first shell spun Lady halfway around. The second dropped her like a heap of dirty laundry and she stayed perfectly still, like someone had discarded her on the floor.

  Tanner ejected the spent shell, turning to me. “You want to tell me why I just shot a naked dead woman?”

  I prodded my side gently and groaned. My rib was definitely broken. “You tell me. You seem like you’ve done this before.” The spots where the shotgun pellets had hit Lady were curling black smoke, like tiny candles, the flesh around them turning ashy and necrotic. The smell was somewhere between burning trash and rotten meat. I couldn’t resist reaching out and touching her cheek, just to make sure she was as cold and dead as she’d seemed a minute ago.

  “Eight times,” Tanner said. “First time she almost got the jump on me. Margaret Taylor.” He leaned against the wall, massaging his forehead. “The Walking Man gets ’em dancing, and I put ’em down. But I don’t know why, and I think you can help me out in that area.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re wrong there,” I said as my fingers chilled against Lady’s skin. Her jaw lolled open, and one of her feet trembled and twitched. “You seem like you’ve got this under control.”

  Tanner swallowed hard, grimacing at bile as it went back down. “I’m happy I have you fooled.”

  He shut his eyes for a moment and as he did I caught sight of something small and white inside Lady’s mouth, jammed so far back in it was practically down her throat. I pulled out the small piece of bloody paper and uncurled it, my hands shaking.

  Fly to me, little bird.

  I shoved the paper deep into my pocket, then wrapped my arms around myself, protecting my broken rib. Protecting myself from the cold. “Tanner, trust me, this isn’t something you want or need to look any deeper into. This isn’t about you.” The smell from Lady was overpowering, and I felt the sting of the wet, filthy snow on my skin all over again, even though we were indoors, in Kansas, miles and years removed from the camp.

  “You okay?” Tanner said, then shook his head. “Dumb question. I ain’t ever been okay with this and I’ve been doing it practically since I could walk.”

  “I need air . . .” I tried to say, but the words wouldn’t come. I clambered up, snatching my shoes and tugging them on as I stumbled into the hall. Lady’s blood squelched between my toes.

  I left Tanner then, left him and the hospital, only pausing in the door long enough to pull on my coat. I made it to the edge of the parking lot, where the hissing spotlights didn’t reach. If I had just gone with my first impulse to run from this town and poor Lady, I might have gotten away.

  But that was a lie, I admitted to myself, because he’d been trying ever since the war ended to get me back, and he’d finally found the right girl, raised the right amount of chaos, to make me come and see what had happened, make me show myself. To stop being Phyllis and go back to being Ava.

  I had just stepped out of the light and into the night beyond when I felt somebody fall into step behind me.

  “Took you long enough,” he said, those same slow words coming out like water droplets falling onto hot coals. “I’d think you’d want to see the man who gave you those scars, little bird.”

  “My scars healed,” I said. “And you’re not a man.”

  “I’ve left you bread crumbs all across these plains,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  I turned on my heel and faced him, but he stepped back into the shadows, laughing. “So what?” I said. “You wanted my attention, you got it. What do you want with me?”

  “There’s only one of me,” he growled. “And one of you, little bird. Together, we make a set.”

  I made myself laugh. It was better than screaming. How long had he been watching me? How much did he already know? “We’re nothing,” I said. “I’m nothing special.” I spread my hands. “The filed teeth I get. I know what some of you POWs had to do to survive during the war. But those airman’s boot prints you left on my friend? That mark on her neck? I’m not what you need to worry about.”

  “Detective Tanner, yes,” he said, inhaling like he was smelling a nice rare steak. “Without you to show him the ropes, what’s to keep me from walking in there and putting an end to him? He’s a tormented man. He still has dreams about the beach. About the sound of his own skin burning. About how that sniper’s bullet spun him around and left him dying in the snow.”

  A pair of lamprey headlights came up out of the dark, a Greyhound bus putting on its blinker and pulling over. I took a hard step toward the man from the camp, the evil spirit who’d almost torn my head off. For the first time in a while I didn’t feel like turning my back.

  “You want me, fine,” I snarled. “But Tanner’s just a man, and all those people were just human. You leave them out of it or you can never see me again.”

  “If I have you,” he said, “I have no need to make children, little bird. At least not the sort who snarl and bite, who feed on the good men like Tanner.”

  He stretched out his hand and laughed as the bus door swung open. “Don’t worry, little bird. This is where you want to be. Not locked up in a flesh den. Not standing next to a man who sweats booze and fear. You are not any of your names. You are with me now.”

  I looked back at the hospital. Not just Tanner, but all the people inside, would be dead in the time it took me to grasp the huge hand and feel its ragged nails scratch over my palm.

  “Good,” the man said when I took his hand. “Good, little bird. This is the last choice you will ever have to make in fear.”

  There was no one driving the bus, and I could see nothing outside the windows as it pulled away, the man and me sitting side by side.

  “Where are we going?” I whispered.

  “Where the road takes us,” the man rasped. “That is what we do. We ride.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  MINNESOTA

  NOW

  I tried counting every stain on the ceiling—and there were a lot in this glorified cult compound the hounds called home—but even that didn’t put me back to sleep.

  I hadn’t thought about Don Tanner in years—decades, really. Now he wouldn’t leave me alone. None of the nightmares would. There was no cure for them except to get out of bed and move, so I nudged Leo.

  “No,” he grumbled, burying himself deeper under the musty blanket.

  “Get up,” I whispered. He pulled a pillow over his face.

  “No means no, woman.”

  “We need to go back to Minneapolis,” I said. Leo yanked the pillow away and glared at me.

  “Give me a break. After that welcome? Let the raver chick down there set the meet and let me sleep.”

  I got up and pulled on my jeans. It was so cold even inside the house that my skin prickled all over. “Did dying make you stupid?” I said. Leo’s forehead wrinkled.

  “Ava, what’s the problem?”

  “Leo, you wouldn’t let this group of misfit toys get you a cup of coffee
, never mind orchestrate a meeting between you and the guy who wants to kick you out of your company parking space,” I said. “For all we know, there is no split and Owen has these clowns watching us.”

  “If I’m getting stupid, you’re even more paranoid than usual,” he said, sitting up. I tossed him his shirt.

  “Fine. I’m paranoid. But I’m also right.” I waited, keeping one ear tuned to the sounds of the house. I wanted to be long gone by the time the guard dogs woke up.

  Leo sighed, and then after a long moment he climbed out of bed and put his shirt on. I let out a tiny sigh of relief. Things were getting weird beyond the two of us—bad weird—and I didn’t need Leo falling apart on top of everything else.

  Downstairs, the hounds were sprawled on every horizontal surface. Viv snored softly, her Mohawk at half-mast. I opened the front door, wincing as the hinges shrieked, but nobody so much as stirred.

  Uriel was right—Gary had done a damn good job making everyone who wasn’t his direct hench-thug lazy, slow, and stupid. It was a wonder anything had gotten done in the past hundred years where the reapers were concerned.

  “So how angry is Thunderdome gonna be that we boosted her ride?” Leo said as I tipped the keys from Viv’s sun visor and stuck them in the ignition, turning them just far enough to make the radio hiss and crackle.

  “If they leave the keys it isn’t stealing,” I said, putting the car in neutral and rolling down to the end of the driveway. Leo gestured at me.

  “I’ll drive. You look like you need a lot more beauty sleep.”

  “I need you to stop saying things like that before I get out of the car and let Owen chew on your face,” I said, leaning my head back against the crusty velour seat of Viv’s old-man car. My skull was throbbing.

  “So what was it this time?” Leo asked, turning the engine over and putting the pedal down. We were gone in a spray of ice and gravel before I could answer.