“Offering? As in ‘Hey, pal, want a ride?’”
“Though I have often been amazed at the stupidity of humans, I do not think that anyone confronted with a talking donkey would decide that accepting a ride was a good idea.”
“You never know,” Kris muttered. Humans and stupidity did seem to go hand in hand, regardless of race, creed, or international borders.
“Touché,” Edward agreed. “However, the Anaskelades is not a talking donkey. It is a shape-shifting donkey.”
“Which is so much less weird.”
“It does not shape-shift until its victim climbs aboard. Then it grows to the size of the nearest mountain and tosses the unsuspecting traveler into the abyss.”
Kris couldn’t think of anything to say to that, except: “What else you got?”
“In Australia, over a dozen bodies have been found in remote areas without their heads. Investigation reveals they were followed for many miles by a human with very large feet.” Kris lifted her eyebrows, waiting for more. “The locals began to whisper of the Thardid Jimbo, a cannibalistic giant that tracks its favorite food—humans—and partakes of the delicacy of their heads.”
“Okay,” Kris said. She didn’t know what else to say.
“In Hudson Bay cairns have been discovered. Beneath them lay the corpses of five whose backs had been splayed and holes drilled through their bodies.”
“What kind of monster does something like that?” Kris asked.
Edward answered as if the question had not been rhetorical. “The Ikuutayuuq, an Inuit legend, which translates to ‘one who drills.’ The Ikuutayuuq hunt down any human in their territory and torture them to death, then build a cairn to mark the kill.”
Kris considered what he’d told her. She was still missing something. “Why do you think these incidents are similar? They’re all different places, different legends, different modes of death.”
“And they are all fake.”
“Fake legends?” Kris perked right up.
“Of course not. Haven’t you discovered by now that legends are real?”
Had she? Kris remembered plunging into the loch, the cold, the murk—
The monster.
“Maybe,” she allowed.
She wasn’t ready to tell anyone else what she’d seen while in the loch. She’d been scared, drowning, dying—not having a hallucination would have been strange. Certainly Kris was less inclined to dismiss Nessie as fiction, but she wasn’t willing to completely accept her as fact, either. Not until Kris saw the creature with her own eyes, in broad daylight or even beneath the moon. However—
“I don’t think Nessie is doing this.”
Mandenauer’s gaze sharpened. “Why not?”
Kris explained how she’d been attacked in her yard and again on the overhang above Loch Ness, finishing with: “The last victim had a silver knife stuck in her chest. Why drown and then suddenly stab? Why stab if you can drown? Besides, Nessie doesn’t have the opposable thumbs necessary to—” Kris made a stabbing motion.
“Unless she’s a shape-shifter,” Mandenauer said. “Then she could take human form, use the weapon, then become … whatever the monster is.”
“I thought shape-shifters couldn’t touch silver.”
“Most can’t. Some can.”
Fabulous, Kris thought
“There’s one other problem,” she began, and the old man lifted his bushy white brows. “The silver knife that was found in the chest of the latest victim…” Kris pressed her lips together, not wanting to say the rest, but she had to. “Was probably mine.”
His brows crashed downward. “Whoever is behind the murders is aware you are looking into them.”
“I kind of got that as I was flying off the cliff and into the water.”
“So you conclude that a human is behind the attacks?”
“The ones on me, definitely.” Human hands had bonked her on the head, then attempted to drag her into the loch. Nessie could not have pushed Kris off the cliff when she’d been waiting below to pull her out.
“What about the bodies?”
“If there’s a body attached,” Kris said firmly, “Nessie isn’t involved.”
“Continue,” Mandenauer murmured in the tone of a professor with a brand-new but very promising student.
“If the monster were killing humans, she’d make certain they remained at the bottom of the loch. Why ask to be hunted any more than she’s already been?”
“You think Nessie possesses the intelligence to reason that far?”
“I think to avoid detection this long she’s gotta have human-level intelligence.”
Edward nodded slowly. “You’re right.”
“One thing I don’t get,” Kris continued. “Nessie’s legend is of a benign being that slowly trolls the loch and peeks out at the tourists now and again.”
“Saint Columba would disagree.”
“Considering that there have been no documented cases of monster attacks since, I’m thinking Columba used his tale of the monster to make a play for sainthood.”
Edward tilted his head. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“All the cases you mentioned involved a—,” Kris made quotes in the air with both hands, “bad monster. But Nessie, according to most reports, isn’t bad. So how is this case similar to the others?”
“Nessie isn’t really the legend.”
“Everyone knows that the Loch Ness Monster is called Nessie.”
“Only since the 1930s.” Mandenauer frowned, glanced down, rustled some papers, and squinted. “May 1933 to be exact. The Inverness Courier followed up on several sightings, and within the year Nessie was born.”
“But, according to Columba, Nessie has been here since the sixth century. Probably before.”
“The monster was here; however, the legend of Nessie was invented by the media. Before 1933, the locals called it the beastie. And they knew what it was.”
“What?” Kris asked.
“Of all the local legends the one that most fits is the tale of a supernatural water horse. Each Uisge.”
“Kelpie,” Kris murmured. “Except if Nessie is a shape-shifter, wouldn’t she have to be human some of the time?”
“Not necessarily. Monsters do not survive a million millennia without adapting—to time, to place, to climate. If they are very smart, they even encourage the wrong legend to be passed down, thereby ensuring that no one truly knows what they are, where they are, how to find them, or how to kill them. There are also variations within the legends themselves that relate to how they became what they are.”
“How?” Kris echoed.
“Some are born; some are cursed; some are engineered. Bitten. Injected. The possibilities are endless, and any one of them can alter that legend. Sometimes I think there are nearly as many kinds of werewolves as there are werewolves. And even though silver will kill most of them, with others it only pisses them off.”
Kris was beginning to understand why Mandenauer walked around armed for Armageddon. He never knew what he might face, where he might face it, or what he might need to kill it.
She began to wonder not only how he’d survived this long but also how he’d done so with his sanity intact. Although a week ago if an old man had told her how to kill werewolves and other assorted shape-shifters she would have been the first to call for psychiatric assistance. Now, though she couldn’t say with absolute certainty that she believed everything Edward said, she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“When you first learned about these deaths, you believed they were committed by the creature in question, right?” Mandenauer inclined his head. “Then why didn’t you, or one of your agents, go there with plans to blast a monster to smithereens and either do that or snatch the imposter?”
He sent her another of those withering looks that made Kris feel as if she were too stupid to live. In his world, she probably was. “I sent an agent to each place. By the time he or she arrived, the perpe
trator was gone.”
“Gone,” Kris echoed. “Isn’t a cannibalistic giant kind of hard to lose?”
“One would think,” Edward said without missing a beat. “Which again makes me favor human and not monster.”
“Because?”
“Monsters remain near their lair. Depending on the myth, some can’t leave. That the killer does says a lot about his humanity.”
“Maybe your agents just couldn’t find him.”
A glare followed this statement. Obviously, if a Jäger-Sucher was dispatched and did not find a monster, there was no monster to be found.
“In each incident,” he continued, “there were clues that led us to believe someone is mimicking the supernatural rather than truly being a supernatural.”
“Like what?” Kris asked, fascinated. She loved taking apart a legend, piece by piece, discovering the truth, then proving it a hoax.
“The actual legend of the Ikuutayuuq involves brothers who hunt together, stalking whatever is in their territory and eliminating it. In the cases reported, only one set of tracks was found and the victims were restrained, hand and foot, indicating a single killer.”
“Maybe this Ikuutayuuq doesn’t have a brother.”
“If the inconsistencies existed in one place only, I might agree. However, as I said, there are inconsistencies in every case. For instance, in Crete the donkey tracks were the size of donkey tracks. They did not grow to the size of a mountainous donkey. The same in Australia. The giant’s tracks…” He flipped his chicken bone fingers outward.
“Not so gigantic,” Kris finished. “So in your opinion we have a traveling serial killer, making use of local supernatural legends to dictate his modus operandi.”
The old man nodded, his gaze distant. “At first I considered the likelihood of a superior shape-shifter with the ability to become each one of these legendary beings. But I concluded that was too far-fetched.”
“Well, thank God for that,” Kris muttered. The idea of a super-duper shape-shifter roaming from country to country, leaving a trail of dead and mutilated bodies in its wake, before parking itself in Drumnadrochit made her very nervous.
“These monsters are rooted in the histories of their cultures,” he continued. “It is very rare for a shape-shifter to be able to assume the form of a being with which he does not share an ancestry. Only a Scot could become a kelpie. Only a Cherokee can become a Raven Mocker. Only a Norseman could become a Berserker. Although…” He frowned. “In America you have that infernal melting pot.”
“So someone could become each one of these shape-shifters if they possess an ancestor from the country of legend.”
“Theoretically,” Mandenauer agreed. “Regardless, what you need to do now is find the culprit and kill it.”
“I’m not so good with the killing.”
“Everyone thinks that, until they are faced with the option of death or pulling the trigger.” He straightened his stack of papers. “I will e-mail you an inventory of the deaths, their legends and locations.”
“I can remember three.”
“Those are only the tales I chose to tell. The list is much longer—Iceland, South Africa, Brazil.” He made a “and so forth” motion with one hand. “We are still searching our databases, speaking to agents about unsolved cases. I will no doubt have updates daily.”
The idea that the murderer in their midst had killed so many times they needed a catalog, and that more instances could crop up daily, scared Kris more than anything ever had. And it should. She was a reporter dabbling in things she had no business dabbling in.
But was she going to stop?
Hell, no.
This was the story of a lifetime.
CHAPTER 20
Alan Mac found Liam lolling in the sunshine. After the thick, chill mist of dawn, the warmth was too welcome to ignore.
“Aren’t ye supposed to be trolling the loch?” the constable asked, then glanced in the direction of Loch Side Cottage. “Ye’re going to get fired if ye keep this up.”
Liam snorted. He was definitely not going to get fired.
Alan Mac lifted the paper in his hand. “The information ye wanted. Yon wee girlie’s brother has been quite the busy boy.”
Liam’s eyes narrowed.
“I traced his passport.” Alan Mac peered at the white sheet. “Went from America to France, then Russia, Tasmania, blah-blah, Africa, yada yada, Canada, and Scotland. This is all in the past year. Couldn’t find anything on what he does for a living, which would be suspicious even without all that gadding about.”
Liam resisted the urge to rush across the loch and station himself in front of her door to prevent Kris’s mysterious brother from gaining entrance again.
“I put in a call to Interpol,” Alan Mac went on. “But they have some sort of security hold on his file.” He lowered the paper with a frown. “That he has a file is not a good thing in my experience. But as soon as they get back to me, I’ll let ye know.”
Liam, still peering at the cottage, lowered his head in acknowledgment. He hadn’t seen Kris come out. He hadn’t seen any kind of movement in there at all. For all he knew she wasn’t even in there but had gone to the village, to Inverness, or even back to America.
The despair that swamped him at the last location was sharp and deep and a little frightening. They didn’t have a future. Someday she would return to her life and he would return to his. Such that it was. He’d always known this, yet still he had touched her.
He’d understood that being with her was a mistake, that any relationship would end badly. But he hadn’t been able to stop himself.
“I’ll leave a copy of the list at your place.”
Liam started when Alan Mac spoke. He’d been so intent on the cottage, on Kris, he’d forgotten the man was there.
But the constable was used to Liam’s broody silences, especially when he was on duty at the loch. With a lift of the hand that still held the paper, Alan Mac left.
Long after the sound of the constable’s car had faded toward Drumnadrochit, Liam remained. The sun caused his eyes to droop, his body to warm and become languid. But the sharp splash to the north jerked him awake. Within seconds he was headed in that direction. He knew that sound.
It was the exact thump-cush a body made when it hit the surface of the loch.
*
As Kris came out of the bedroom, freshly showered and dressed, she noticed the yellow notepad she’d been scribbling on while she and Mandenauer talked sitting on the table. Something about it made her skirt the couch and pick it up.
“Whoa,” she said.
She had doodled each tattoo separately. She remembered doing that. Then, with her brain occupied by other legends, her subconscious had put them together and she’d drawn something else.
“What is so disturbing about that?”
The voice made Kris start. Mandenauer was back on the screen, sharp gaze focused on the sketch of Nessie that had formed on Kris’s yellow pad.
“Nothing, until you understand that this—” She tapped the monster. “Contains all of these.” She tapped each of the four tattoos.
“Explain.”
“I saw…,” Kris indicated the hump, “tattooed on my landlady’s…” Now she waved vaguely in the direction of her own breasts. “This—” The flipper. “On her brother’s wrist. That,” the thick line that had circled Alan Mac’s biceps, “was on the chief constable’s arm. And here—” Jamaica’s ankle tattoo. “We have the head of what I thought was a snake but could, when put together with the rest, become—” Again she pointed at the picture of Nessie.
“Interesting,” Edward murmured. “Tattoos have been employed as a…” He searched for the word. “Magnet. For instance, some Native American shamans used tattoos to draw their magic from—” He shrugged. “Wherever they drew it from.”
“Bullshit land?”
“You don’t believe in magic?”
“Not yet,” she said. Which was a far cry from last week
’s answer of Not in this lifetime.
“I’ve also known tattoos to be used as an aid in shape-shifting.” Mandenauer’s thin lips pursed. “You saw the marks on four different people?”
“So far.” Kris paused, putting two and two together. “You think they’re all Nessie?”
“Some say there are a herd of them.” Now he paused, doing some addition of his own. “Of course, they could take turns, which would help avoid detection.”
“How so?”
“If someone comes too close to identifying one shape-shifter, that shifter merely allows himself or herself to be seen at a time when Nessie—another shifter entirely—is seen as well. And the theory falls apart. I’ve also known tattoos to be used with guardian cults.”
“Say what?” All she needed, on top of everything else, was a cult.
“Imagine living in a hut, or on a hill, eking out an existence. You hunt. You gather. Yet barely you survive. Then a being comes along that is stronger, faster, it has powers that defy logic, and it rarely, if ever, dies. What would you think?”
“God.”
Mandenauer inclined his head. “At first, paranormal creatures were worshiped. As time went on, and the demands for human sacrifice became excessive—”
“Wait a second,” Kris interrupted, remembering what she’d learned about Obeah. “Could the killings be some sort of sacrifice to a god?”
The old man’s eyes narrowed. “I have never heard of the Loch Ness Monster being considered a god.” He lifted his thin shoulders, then lowered them. “But who knows? Do you have a suspect?”
Kris hesitated. If she told him about Jamaica, would he send one of his agents to interrogate her? Would they kill her? Should Kris stop them? If Jamaica was sacrificing people to the great god Nessie, something had to be done.
So Kris told Edward what she knew.
“Sacrifices involve blood,” he said. “There is power in it. These drownings…” He shook his head. “Not very bloody. There is also a ceremony. Tossing bodies into the water or leaving them on the shore with no ring of fire or midnight chant is not sacrificial. Still, you should keep an eye on her.”
Moon Cursed Page 19
