by Faith Hunter
“We’re not releasing that to the public,” Grizzard instructed.
“Fine by me. The press is plastering my name and likeness all over the airwaves. They aren’t my best pals.” I thought I had worked my way into their good graces and so I took a shot. “Can I see the site?”
Grizzard nodded to Sam. “Orson, take her on down.”
Relief poured through me. “One last suggestion,” I said. “Weres are really hard to kill. Silvershot may not kill them any faster than regular ammo, but silver will hurt them. Bad. If they suffer a wound—say silvershot double-oughts—I don’t think they can change form to heal until the silver is surgically removed, forcing them to stay in the form they were in when injured. Left in them long enough, it’ll poison their bloodstream. If you want, I got a local guy who hand-loads my rounds with silver fléchettes. I killed several in New Orleans with them.”
“You’ve killed these things?”
“Yeah.” I looked into the trees, down the slope. They had nearly killed me, but I left that out too. Lying was getting easier. I waited for some guilt but nothing happened. It was Sunday morning; I should be getting ready for church instead of lying to cops. Yeah. I was going to hell.
“Name? Cost?” Grizzard barked.
I gave him the name and contact info for the guy who hand-loaded my rounds. “I can’t tell you the cost. That’s dependent on the market value of silver, the amount of silver he uses in the fléchettes, a whole bunch of factors.”
“Okay. Take her down. Don’t fuck up my crime scene, Yellowrock.”
“You’re such a softie.”
Before he could reply, Sam grabbed my elbow and pulled me away. “You never did know when to shut your mouth,” he growled.
I looked down at him and grinned. “You can’t hold your liquor.”
Sam Orson did a little eye-roll-blow-out-breath thing and pulled me down the hill. On the breeze I smelled blood. Dead meat. Human.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Vigilante Law’s Got No Place in My County
The hundred square feet inside the yellow crime scene tape reeked of human blood, werewolf, and dead fish to my sensitive nose. The three humans the weres had feasted on were still near the tents, buzzing with flies. The smell in the campsite had drawn a murder of crows, sitting in trees, watching, waiting. One turned and looked at me, cocking its head to the side in a movement reminiscent of the way vamps move when they aren’t trying to ape humanity. Or when they don’t care if someone sees their true nature. I held my face still, nonreactive, and studied the scene, walking around the perimeter, viewing it from every angle. Some of the crime scene techs were bagging evidence, marking where each body part or piece of evidence was found. Others were taking photos or making notes or putting down little evidence markers for new physical trace to be added into the bigger picture.
The campers had been attacked in the night, the wolves rushing in from the west, tearing into the tents, then into the sleeping campers. Three had been killed quickly. Three others had run into the woods and been chased. “What did the surviving campers say?” I asked.
“They were chased, knocked down, bitten, and let go.”
“All of the live ones were female,” I stated.
Sam studied me as I analyzed the scene. “How did you know that? We implied to the press that the one who called for help was male.”
“Three tents, three coolers, three bear-bags of food. All the dead and eaten ones are male, but you have female clothing of different sizes scattered all over the site. I admit to an assumption that it wasn’t six cross-dressers, ergo three couples.” Sam snorted softly. “Also, the werewolves in New Orleans were trying to make mates. Werewolves aren’t like other weres. They don’t breed true. The only way they procreate is to bite a human.” Of all the weres—the Cursed of Artemis—the wolves were the ones still sick, and the disease that made them two-natured and furry also meant they weren’t the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. I finished, “Females who are bitten don’t survive, or if they do, they go insane and into permanent heat.”
Sam sucked in a breath as the words sank in. There was so much I couldn’t say to the cops, but the effects on the victims could not be kept secret. I thought about the grainy, poor quality photograph of Itty Bitty: delicate features, big blue eyes, pretty. I closed my eyes, feeling the gritty dryness of exhaustion. “Where did the wolves enter the campsite?” I asked, though I already knew, having tracked the scent on the wind.
Sam pointed uphill. “They came in from a church parking lot, up that hill there, about three miles. Went out the same way.”
“Dogs tell you that?”
Sam snorted. “Dogs got all squirrelly soon as the handlers drove up. Every single one. Went into full-blown panic mode. One bit his handler. Fu—freaking terrified.” I grinned at his careful change of wording. Cops aren’t known for their diplomatic language, but Sam was trying. “The handlers took them down to the river after the three-toed thing instead. What did you call it?”
“Grindy. Short for grindylow,” I said. “I need inside the perimeter, closer to the vics. Tell me where I can step and where I can’t. Then I want to see where the grindy came in from.”
“The grindy came from a stream at the bottom of the crevice,” he pointed. “I ain’t going down there. The fall’ll kill ya,” he quoted from an old movie. “And so will the hike back up.”
“Okay. Walk me in.” Placing my feet into Sam’s footprints, I got close enough to the victims to verify that they had been dinner. I’d seen a herd of deer after a werewolf pack tore into them. This was a lot like that. I also smelled witch blood, and since few male witches survive to adulthood, it likely meant that one of the bitten women was a witch. Itty Bitty was of witch blood. This wasn’t coincidence. The wolves had tried turning human women for mates and it didn’t work. Now it looked like they were going for witches.
Sam said, “Turned them into manburger,” and chuckled softly, the way cops do to separate themselves from carnage. It made them colder and harder than other humans, but it also kept them sane. I understood that, and didn’t respond.
Grindy-marks and tracks were pressed into the edges of the kill-site, indicating that the little green Yoda-golem-wolf-killer came upon the site after the killing. Maybe several hours after. The grindy didn’t have access to modern transportation and had to swim, hence the tracks up from the stream below.
As I worked, thoughts floated through my mind, a free association that meant nothing until my subconscious found the linchpin and tied everything together with a satin bow. Useless, tired thoughts like: I need to find the grindy and pair up with him to track the weres, speeding both our searches. But I have no idea how to find him. I wish I had access to a dog form by day, to scent-track. But if I shift, I’ll be stuck in the shape until moonrise or nightfall, whichever comes soonest. And if I come upon the wolves in dog form? No dog has the natural weapons of a werewolf. I’d be Janeburger. And lastly I noted that the wolves had been particularly grisly in the way they had attacked and eaten the men, going for maximum impact—leaving a message.
I crossed the crime scene tape again and was back on the periphery, leaving Sam chatting to a tech, when I smelled something unexpected. I placed Sam and the techs—all were busy—before dropping to my knees in the brush, the small backpack riding up under my arms. I moved across the ground on four limbs, half crawling. The scent was faint, the reek of old, dried blood, overlaid and almost masked by pungent were-scent. On hands and knees, I followed the old-blood odor to a pile of leaves at the base of a tree. Checked the others again, finding them involved in their jobs, Sam discussing manburger with a tech. I reached in and rustled through the leaves. My fingers encountered something hard and cool. Metal. I palmed it and eased it out.
It was Rick’s key chain, the old one the wolves had access to when they had him prisoner. I had seen his new one yesterday, enamel black leopard. This one was plain, on a worn-out biner. I’d seen it many times, but it was best i
dentified by the old scent of his blood.
The wolves dropped it, not by accident, but knowing it would be found. I palmed the keys, putting things together. I’d taken on the two surviving wolves of the Lupus Pack and won, as no human could have, not even with an element of surprise. They had bitten me, tasted my blood. They knew I wasn’t human. The weres were goading me, challenging me. Come and get us. If you can. And not just me. They had taken down victims, tried to turn them, in the Pigeon River at the bottom of Stirling Mountain. Which is where Rick and Kem were staying. Weres lived by smell, so they knew the were-cats were there. On the surface, the attack had been intended to turn humans. On the underside, it sent a message to me, Rick, and Kemnebi, leader of PAW, the Party of African Weres. I was the one who had brought Kem-cat and Rick here, which made it all my fault. Crap. I pocketed the key chain and jogged around the crime scene to Sam. “Describe the bottom of the gorge for me?”
He walked to the edge and looked down the mountain. “Thirty, maybe forty degree slope. Near vertical further down. Dangerous going and damn hard work coming back up. Debris-clogged storm runoff at the bottom.”
I thought about my paddler buddies. “Is it something that could be paddled or rafted?”
“Not by anyone sane, sober, or with ten functioning brain cells.”
I snorted softly. “Yeah, well, it was just a thought.”
“A stupid one.”
I lifted a hand and jogged away, back up the mountain. When I reached Grizzard’s position, hidden among the trees, he called out, “You learn anything?”
I thought about the key chain in my pocket, and knew Grizzard saw something cross my face. I had never been good at lying, and lying to cops was harder still. “Mmm,” I said, and scratched my chin thoughtfully. “I think there are only two, and they’re looking to make mates.”
Grizzard grunted. “Damn supes.”
“Yeah, well. The grindylow is on the humans’ side. Tell your guys to be on the lookout for a green Yoda with fangs and claws, about four feet tall. Don’t shoot it. It’s your friend.”
Grizzard’s eyes narrowed. “This grindy better not take the law into his hands. Vigilante law’s got no place in my county.”
I chuckled. “You corner the wolves, and they’ll go down fighting. Which means your men stand a chance of being injured and waking up furry. Then, if you do manage to subdue them, you have to put them in a cage strong enough to hold them, then feed them, and care for them, even when they go furry. Werewolves are more dangerous than any other supernatural creature, even a vamp. They’re literally insane. Let the grindy do his job. Just my advice.”
“I’ll take it under consideration. You guarantee that fangheads didn’t do this?” He jerked his head vaguely down the mountain.
“Guarantee.” I looked at my watch. I had missed church. Dang it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
You Chasing the Big Doggies?
I drove away, pulling up the GIS maps and Google and Yahoo! and MSR Maps, which offered aerial views that could be overlaid with or exchanged for street maps. I found an unnamed access road that might take me partway down, and hoped the MOC’s vehicles were as good off-road as they were on. And hoped the extra weight of the armor wouldn’t be a hindrance to getting back out. I made it halfway down the gorge, finding a place to execute a tight three-point turn that was more like a ten-point turn, the wheels threatening to slide off the narrow trail and carry me all the way down. I parked facing back up the hill, drank a liter of water, added two more to my pack, and took off, down to the bottom, hoping to end up at the convergence of another creek. It was a harrowing descent, and I worked up a sweat.
The Smoky Mountains are rain forest, creating their own mini-climates at different elevations and disrupting the natural west-to-east trade winds. The temperatures dropped the lower I went, and the air grew progressively more damp. The morning sun disappeared, an afternoon angle needed to warm the west-facing mountain wall. A mist grew around me, wispy and thin in long vertical strips, the mist for which the Smoky Mountains had been named. It stuck to my skin and clothes, cold and clammy. Small rills and runnels formed and merged, splashing down vertical rock faces and cutting into the mountain floor. My sweat chilled and my breath was loud in my ears, my palms growing raw from roots and trees, sliding across bark and rock that decelerated my descent.
Though surely the land had been surveyed, it looked as though no one had been here since the deforestation in the 1920s. I found no human trails, but lots of rabbit sign, deer scat and tracks, and ample bear sign: dead trees clawed for grubs, a honeybee nest high in a tree showing fresh claw marks and bark damage where the bear had climbed. And once I saw what looked like mountain lion sign, old scat, dried and strewn. Beast held me still, a paw on my mind, studying the scat with all her senses. My mouth opened and upper lip pulled back, sucking the scent in through nose and mouth, but my mostly human scenting ability left Beast nearly head-blind. She looked up the mountain, and spotted a tree with vertical claw markings from the ground up to about two feet. Mountain lion? I thought at her.
Finally she thought at me, uncertain, Bobcat. Male.
When? I asked.
Last snow time. Maybe.
Last year. Winter. I stood still, bringing in the scents of the place, smelling rushing water rising on the breeze, deer, bear, rabbit, opossum and raccoon, numerous birds, the dry reek of snake musk, polecat, and skunk. No large cats. I moved on down the mountain, Beast alert and curious. Hunting dead-fish-smell green thing? she asked.
I laughed, the only human sound in the gorge. “Yes.”
Kill and eat it?
“No. Definitely not. It’s hunting the werewolves.”
Beast hissed, deep in my mind. Kill and leave wolves to rot. Killers of winter food. Thieves of meat. Wasters of meat. There were few more horrible insults from Beast than wasters of meat. She said nothing else, but I appreciated her focus. She often saw and smelled things that I missed or ignored because I didn’t know what they meant. Like the scat and the claw marks.
I reached bottom an hour after I left the sheriff, and stopped on the edge on the creek, straddling a downed tree. The movement of water was quiet here, where I sat on the bank in the sun, my feet shuffled beneath last fall’s leaves, but I could hear the roar of water just ahead, where I thought the confluence should be, and from upstream, where it obviously took a drop. Hurricane Ivanna was sweeping slowly up the Mississippi River basin and dumping torrents of water to our west. Projections had it turning east, right for us, with forecasts of four to six inches of rain over two days. Soon this creek would be a raging torrent.
Lunch was protein bars, nuts, three brownies, and two bananas. It left me feeling full but not satisfied. I stored the paper and plastic, and tossed the peels high on the bank, knowing some veggie-loving animal would eat them despite the bitter taste. The pack much lighter, I headed downstream, watching the banks for grindy-sign. The sound of water on stone grew and the air was wetter with mist.
I spotted the three vertical claw marks just before I got to the confluence. They were slashed into solid granite, the fresh cuts still bright in the sun. I placed my fingers into the slash marks, finding the stone dry despite the heavy mist. I had just missed the grindy. “Dang,” I whispered. Below the slash marks were three-toed prints with claw marks deep in the soil.
I pushed on another twenty yards and stopped in the vapor, above the merging of two creeks. It wasn’t a peaceful marriage, more like a shotgun wedding, with noise and complaints roaring. The water formed a violent eddy, the water of the two currents hitting and rising in a foamy wall a foot high. The water churned so hard it flowed upstream for thirty feet in one place, a midsized beaver-gnawed log caught, swirling, and making no headway downstream. Other logs were trapped in rocks, held firm by the push of the water, making a sieve that collected and held everything solid carried by the water. Tires, two-by-fours, a torn mattress, buckets and paint cans, clothing, whole trees with leaves and roots we
re caught in the maelstrom.
The body of a deer was trapped on the pile farthest upstream, only the haunches and upper rear legs visible, flies buzzing, even in the wet mist. Downstream, the strainers were even worse, the bottom of the gorge filled with logs and human debris.
From my pack, I took a camera and snapped pictures, noting the GPS location. Sam was right. No one in his right mind would navigate the creek, not with the sieves and strainers that clogged the waterway. I had missed the grindy. The only thing I had accomplished all day was to prove to myself that the wolves were responsible for the mauling and killing and that the grindy was on their trail. Which I had presumed from the markings and the attack at the Pigeon River. Disgruntled, I made my way back up the mountain to the SUV for the difficult drive back to a real road. I could have taken the helo, I thought. Beast hissed with displeasure.
I was nodding at the wheel by the time I made it back to Hartford, on the Tennessee side of the mountains, but I couldn’t stop for the day. Not yet. I called Dave and Mike and both were available for an early supper/coffee/beer, as long as I was buying. Leo had given me a company credit card, and I intended to use it.
The afternoon was hot and airless; the air-conditioning and dim lighting of the Bean Trees Café was welcome. Mike ordered appetizers—garlic cheese fries, homemade onion rings, sweet potato fries. Though Beast turned up her nose at cooked meat, we all ordered burgers, loaded. The guys got beer, microbrewery stuff that I really wanted to try, but knew might make me sleepier, even with my Beast-hyped metabolism. I ordered a double espresso so I could make it back to Asheville without falling asleep. I wasn’t a coffee lover, preferring tea, but caffeine was one drug that my skinwalker metabolism did respond to. I was more awake when the food came.
“Most of the creeks between here and Asheville in Buncombe County run east to west across the mountains,” Mike said, his voice carrying even over the busload of noisy tourists. “They’re confined to the French Broad River Basin and empty into the Tennessee River Basin, and then into Mississippi River Basin.”
