“What the hell?” Tobias snapped.
“Dude, calm thyself,” Hylas said, waving the hand holding the joint, curlicues of smoke wreathing his hand with the motion. “I mean it in your defense.”
“I believe none of you,” Tobias said.
The thing was that he didn’t seem all that offended by it, that was how used to such things he was. Coming from Hylas and Dawn Marie, he put up with it even more amicably because he knew that they didn’t mean it. Nick wasn’t sure how he’d react to him or Nancy saying such things to him, but thought maybe Tobias would be okay with them as well. When they were all in high school though, he had seen Tobias get mad. It was a scary kind of mad; colder than winter in Hell and a hundred times scarier. Therefore, he was not willing or interested in testing the theory because well, Tobias was scary. It was a well-established fact. He didn’t mean to be, but that didn’t change that he was.
They all separated, each one going a different direction, taking in the place where Wes had fought for his life with morbid curiosity dressed up as them looking for his phone. Nick did not believe for one second that a werewolf had stolen his phone, though he did think it added weight to his argument that the crazy slasher was a human being after all. If the cops hadn’t picked it up and neglected to mention that to Wes or it hadn’t been stolen then the cell phone should be there in the front yard somewhere, it was only a matter of finding it in the tall, tangled grass.
Nick stopped searching though when he waded through some grass and came to a mashed down area. It was stained maroon so deep it was almost black. His stomach lurched as he stared down at the mess of Wes’s blood in the grass. He’d come at it from the side, not following the weaving trail of tire tracks through the yard and it caught him by surprise.
Hylas snapping a picture jerked him out of his daze and Nick looked across to the other side of the bloody patch.
“This is madness,” Hylas said. “Madness. Look at this shit. Poor dude.” He took another picture then paused to re-light his joint. “He granted me an interview, you know.”
“Be nice,” Nick said. It was a hollow thing to say, Hylas was almost always nice, but like his brother he had a nightmarish temper once he got good and angry. But also like Tobias, it seldom ever happened.
“Of course,” Hylas said. “How often have you heard of me badgering the shit out of some unfortunate fucker who’s been mauled?”
“Do you have much occasion to badger mauling victims?”
“No, but that is not my point, Nick,” Hylas said.
“So… What is your point?”
Hylas looked down at his mismatched Converse, lost deep in thought. When he looked up, his smile was quick and brilliant. “My point is, I’m definitely going to be gentle and tactful.”
Hylas was intelligent, but he was absentminded and scatterbrained to such a degree that people meeting him initially thought he was no smarter than the average pet rock. Nick started to say something, but from the other side of the yard Dawn Marie started calling for them. “Come over here and see! Toby found something!”
“Ooh,” Hylas said as he skirted around the dried blood to head that direction.
Nancy had parked herself on the third doorstep and sat there drinking her rum-and-coke for a moment before she rose and went toward Dawn Marie. She stood at the far edge of the yard on the border where the lawn became the woods, waving her arms over her head, jumping up and down. Tobias was next to her, hands folded in front of himself, head bowed, black coat billowing out behind him. He looked like he was praying over a grave.
Nick jogged along behind Hylas, passing Nancy since she was weighed down by Bacardi at the moment. She grumbled something he didn’t catch as he went past her and poked Hylas as he passed him as well.
“That’s cheating,” Hylas called after him. “I don’t know what game this is, but that’s not fair.”
Nick was laughing when he reached Dawn Marie and Tobias. She tipped her head down and pointed, too. Nick followed her gaze and his laughter stopped when he saw what she was pointing at.
It was a set of footprints pressed deep into the soil. It had rained the afternoon before Wes went out to the property and the trees shaded that part of the yard; almost no grass grew there. The ground, practically bare, had been a blank canvas. There was no reason for the cops to have looked that far away from the site of the attack and they had missed it.
“What the hell is that?” Hylas asked, crouching down beside Nick, bracing his hand on one of Nick’s legs to hold steady while he took a picture. “That doesn’t look like bear tracks. Does it look like a bear to you, Tobias?”
“No,” Tobias said. “I’m not a bear track expert though.”
“Neither am I,” Hylas said. “But I still don’t think it looks like one.”
Tobias crouched down as well to have a closer look. “It was heavy enough to be a bear though. These are deep.”
“Here, bear tracks,” Dawn Marie said as she passed Tobias her phone. “The internet is full of information.”
She stuck her phone in front of Tobias’s face and he took it, looked at the bear tracks, then passed the phone to Hylas who then passed it to Nick when he was done. A moment later, Nancy finally caught up and Nick passed the phone to her after she’d taken a look at the footprints in front of them as well.
“Those aren’t bear tracks then,” Tobias said.
“Most decidedly not,” Hylas said.
The tracks were long, shaped much like human footprints, save the long claw marks extending from the toes. The center of the prints weren’t as well defined as the front and back, which made Nick think maybe who/whatever it was had high arches. He had high arches in his feet and his footprints resembled the ones he was looking at somewhat. He didn’t have gnarly, overgrown toenails and his feet weren’t as long or wide near the toes though.
“So… what are they?” Nancy asked.
“Werewolf tracks,” Nick said.
“Oh fuck, really?” Dawn Marie said.
“Dude. No way,” Hylas said. “That is such bullshit.”
Tobias said nothing, just took Hylas’s camera and leaned close again to take a zoomed-in shot. He fished a dollar bill out of his pocket and laid it beside one of the tracks to establish scale and snapped another picture.
“I was joking,” Nick said. “Of course it’s not a fucking werewolf.”
Nancy pursed her lips and tapped her foot. “Ugly Christmas Sweater said it was a werewolf.”
“Who?” Hylas and Dawn Marie asked in unison.
“Wes, she means Wes,” Nick said.
“Yeah, him.” Nancy hiccuped. “Anyway. He said it was a werewolf.”
“Don’t start that shit,” Nick said.
“Don’t you start,” Nancy said. “Nick, you can only deny the evidence in front of you for so long before it becomes ridiculous.”
“Me denying the ‘evidence’ is not the ridiculous part here,” Nick said. “Not by a long shot.”
“If you continually see things that suggest something and refuse to acknowledge there might be more to it than what you want to believe, then yes, it becomes ridiculous,” Nancy said. “The evidence, no matter how completely batshit weird—and it is batshit weird—still supports the theory that it is something inhuman. I’m not saying it’s a werewolf, but I’m damn well not still going with your ‘it’s definitely a man’ crap because it’s not.”
Nick clenched his jaw and looked down at Hylas and Tobias who were both silently meditating on the footprints.
“Nick, my man, I am sorry, but I have to agree with the pretty doctor,” Hylas said. “These are not human feet prints.”
“Footprints,” Tobias corrected.
“I know that,” Hylas said. “I was making a funny.”
“Oh, sorry, I must’ve missed that,” Tobias said. “What with it not being funny.”
“Shushy,” Hylas said. He took a flask out of his inner coat pocket and took a sip. “These are not human footprin
ts then.”
“They’re faked,” Nick said. “You’re all fucking crazy.”
“We are, but that doesn’t mean we’re wrong,” Dawn Marie said.
“Yes, yes it does,” Nick said. “It does mean you’re wrong.”
Tick-tick.
It could have been the sound of claws on pavement, couldn’t it? A voice inside of Nick said, Yes, yes it could have been. It was claws.
He turned around, not interested in being a part of the Scooby Gang huddle any longer. A cold, damp wind licked across the lawn, moaning through the trees, whistling through the grass. The whole damn thing did feel like a scene out of a horror movie; an establishing shot or the part right before the big bad monster came charging out of thin air.
“Come on, Nick, don’t be that way,” Hylas said.
Hylas took hold of Nick’s leg again and he looked down at his long fingers clinging to the faded denim of his jeans. His gaze traveled past Hylas’s fingers to the toe of his boot then past it. In the mud about an inch from the toe of Nick’s boot, there was another print, partly distorted by their passing feet, but he could see it well enough. He could tell that he was looking at the smudged and trampled remains of a handprint; two of the fingers were still partially visible from the second knuckle up. The dips in the soft soil where claws curved from each fingertip were still visible. There was a third claw point, though the finger itself had been obliterated by one of Hylas’s sneakers.
Nick turned his head slightly to the left, searching the dirt for the matching hand print. It took a second, but he found it peeking out from beneath the heel of Nancy’s shoe. The palm was gone save the very curve where the hand branched into fingers, all of which were still there. The fingers seemed weirdly elongated, like they had been stretched, a gap in the prints like the knuckles hand been bowed upward—like whoever had been there was crouching, bracing themselves and using the tips of their fingers for balance, therefore bending their fingers to distribute the weight. The claw impressions were deeper on that side and longer. Wes’s attacker had crouched there at the edge of the woods and watched him, fingers pressing hard into the dirt. When the lunatic had gone after Wes, he must have pushed off from the side, dragging his fingernails (not claws, Nick hated the idea the more he thought about it) through the mud.
He turned around and looked at the footprints again. Hylas almost overbalanced, but caught himself on Nick’s leg once more and leaned there, studying the footprints with stoned fascination. Dawn Marie had the flask turned up, looking at the sky as she drank. Tobias was keeping his own counsel as he often did and Nancy seemed to be dozing, a mid-afternoon drinking binge nap lurking on her horizon.
It was really only Nick and the footprints then. Nick looking at them, trying to remember all the things Hunter had told him about animal tracks and how you could tell a creature’s position and which legs they favored, how you could ping onto them being lame or in fine shape. If they had been resting or waiting; if they had been stalking prey, wound tight in preparation to spring. A lot of it was lost under years of moderate to heavy drug use, but Nick did remember a little.
What he saw was evidence of something that had been hunting, had been stalking prey. It had rocked forward on its heels, resting more weight on its hands and fingers as it leaned forward for a better look; as it readied itself to take off after its intended target. The heel prints were not nearly as deep as the prints left by the ball of the foot and the toes. It had sat there like a runner waiting for the pistol shot to signal it was time to run.
But it hadn’t run had it? Something tickled the back of Nick’s mind, something about the grass that his conscious mind hadn’t fully registered.
He turned again and Hylas cursed. “Fuck, Nick. You’re going to cause me grievous injury here in a minute.”
Nick barely heard him. He was scanning the yard, searching… searching… What was it? What had he seen?
There.
The grass was broken and flattened in an almost straight line from where he stood nearly all the way to the porch. He hadn’t noticed it because without even being aware of it, that was the path he had followed; the path of least resistance because someone had already laid it down for him.
“Goddamnit,” Nick said under his breath. The more he looked, the more he saw what had happened the night Wes had been attacked and it made the hair on the back of his neck prickle as it stood up, chills running down his arms and spine.
He looked down at the hand prints again, searching the mud for more and he found them, fainter, beginning to be lost by the encroaching grass. It had crept forward and moved through the grass, staying out of sight, sneaking up on Wes.
Nick’s stomach turned in a weak somersault as he ran a hand down the back of his neck to try and smooth the little hairs down.
“What are you looking at?” Hylas asked, using Nick’s leg for balance to hoist himself back upright.
With a blink and a shake of his head, Nick looked away from the fingerprints and into Hylas’s sea-blue eyes. “Nothing,” he said. “Just thinking.”
He didn’t want to tell them about the handprints or the way the grass was flattened. Nick refused to encourage their werewolf delusion. It was just some barefooted creep with overly long nails on both their hands and feet. Nick had thought of them as it and he didn’t like that either, didn’t like the implication that he was starting to buy into their hocus-pocus bullshit without even being aware of it.
“You sure? You seemed pretty interested in something,” Hylas said. He blinked and yawned, then smiled. “Man, I should not be sleepy right now.”
“You’re always sleepy, Hylas,” Tobias said as he rose from his crouch in one sleek motion. He ran a hand down his coat and straightened the legs of his black trousers. “It’s just the way you’re made.”
“Is not,” Hylas said. He tipped his head from side to side in a pondering gesture. “Okay, maybe, but no. If I was always out of it and half asleep, I’d never get anything done. Besides, yawning at the scene of the crime really blows. It’s the scene of the crime, I should be more wakeful.” He tapped his fingers on his thighs and nodded. “I’m going to take more pictures, moving around should help.”
“Since when?” Tobias asked, eyebrows raised.
Hylas could fall asleep with no warning while at a dead run. It was the main reason Hylas never ran. He’d fractured his chin, broken his nose and shattered three teeth when he was five and had forever after learned his lesson. The only good thing about it happening then was that the teeth had been baby teeth, not his permanent teeth.
“Since now,” Hylas said as he struck off back toward the house. “Because I say so.”
“Heh,” Tobias said. Then he frowned and came to stand next to Nick. Nick’s skin started crawling all over again, but he made himself hold still. “I don’t like this,” Tobias said. “Doesn’t it feel… off… to you, Nick?”
“No more than any kind of place like this would,” Nick said.
“Hmm, I suppose, but… no,” Tobias said. “There’s something terribly wrong about all of this.”
“Are you going to start about werewolves, too?” Nick asked even as he sidled away from Tobias a couple of steps. If Tobias noticed, he didn’t say anything. “Because you don’t seem like the type, Tobias.”
“I’m not,” Tobias said. “It is odd and unsettling being here though. I don’t like it.”
“You know who I bet really doesn’t like it?” Dawn Marie asked as she wrapped an arm around Tobias’s chest, offering him the flask.
“Who?” Tobias asked as he took it and dutifully drank.
“Wes,” Dawn Marie said. “What with him being the poor motherfucker that got mauled.”
“I can see where he’d object to that, yes,” Tobias said with a flicker of a smile.
“Not to interrupt the party here, but Nick… Nick… I need you to help me back to the truck.” Nancy leaned against Nick’s back with a huff of breath that clouded around them all with the
sharp scent of Bacardi 151. “I’m drunk.”
“Yes, you are,” Nick said as she found her will to move and lurched around to lean against his side instead.
“Onward then,” Nancy said, gesturing in the direction of the truck. “Take me to yonder truck so I can sit on my drunk ass. It’s safer that way.”
“Safer?” Tobias asked.
“Less chance of falling down,” Dawn Marie supplied. “You know this.”
“I do know you,” Tobias said.
“Precisely.” Dawn Marie took the shoulder of his coat in her teeth and tugged lightly. “Now, come on, Toby, take me to see the blood before we have to leave.”
“You need a chaperone?” he asked, already walking away with her.
“Always,” she said. “You know I get into trouble.”
Nick heard Tobias’s tired sigh and soft laugh as they waded farther through the grass. He couldn’t believe no one could see what he was looking right at, the wide swath of broken and flattened grass. It wasn’t as pronounced where he and Nancy stood, but about halfway to the house, it got worse. He thought that meant the doer had stopped being careful; they had stopped slinking closer and had decided to charge. Maybe Wes had heard something or at least sensed something; something that woke up the old instincts in him and told him to get the hell out of there. Most people no longer seemed to listen to those instincts, they instead went to investigate whatever it was going bump in the dark. Nick firmly believed that was how people got eaten, too.
Nancy hiccuped then belched, blowing more rum fumes all over Nick. She was clinging to his arm with the tenacity of a drowning woman, fingers digging into the meat as she struggled to hold herself upright. “It just hit me,” she muttered as they began to walk toward the truck. “One second, I’m kind of buzzed, the next, holy shit look at how drunk I am.” She giggled, head tipping forward, hair flying every which way.
“That happens,” Nick said.
The first time he had ever gotten drunk it had happened exactly like that, hitting him so suddenly his poor stomach hadn’t known what to do. He’d puked from the living room all the way to his bedroom where he then tried to pass out, convinced no one would notice. About that, he had been wrong and wow, had he gotten in a world of shit with his aunt and uncle.
Shades of Night (Sparrow Falls Book 1) Page 20
