Raven Cursed

CHAPTER TWO Vamp-Fang and Werewolf-Bite Scars

Eyes gritty from lack of sleep, I knelt on the bank, jeans absorbing the wet from the river-slick rock. Just upstream from me, two commercial rafts slid under the bridge where a couple had been attacked before dawn, the screaming voices of laughing children tearing the air. Someone slapped a paddle onto the water, the sound echoing. My Beast flinched deep inside, but I didn’t react. I was too busy studying the scratches on the rock in the early morning light.

There were three parallel lines, the one in the center longer than the ones to either side. I put my fingers into the grooves, feeling the rough edges of the slashes. Using the excuse of a better view, I bent lower, getting my nose to the rock. I sniffed. The water smelled of iron and fish, sunscreen, treated sewage, chemicals, and age. The grooves smelled different. Still fishy, but with a particular, sour, dead-fish stench I recognized.

Grindylow, Beast thought at me. Water smells of grindylow, not vampire, not pigeons.

It took me a moment to understand. Beast was a literal creature, and the river was named the Pigeon. To her, it should either smell of the vampires who had been accused of attacking the boating couple just upstream of where I knelt, or of pigeons. Not a grindylow, a creature once thought to be mythical, from the U.K. by way of Africa and New Orleans. A grindylow brought unexpected, puzzling possibilities into the equation. I stared up at Stirling Mountain, wondering just how much responsibility for this attack rested on me.

I rose to my feet and dusted the wet grit off my hands, watching rafts float toward me. They were filled with families, church teens out on a field trip, college kids lazing away a September Saturday, the river guides looking young and carefree. The water of the Upper Pigeon River rippled and frothed at the end of the run, spilling out into a wide placid pool beneath the bridge where the attack took place, dividing around islands and curling into smooth eddy pools where commercial rafts could launch or be pulled up the banks. Just downstream the river dropped again, becoming the Lower Pigeon, a slower, easy-paced river.

I scuffed a boot heel over the three cuts in the rock. I had an idea what supernat had mauled the two last night, and it wasn’t a rogue-vamp. Proving that would make the local vamps and the parley safer. Despite the territory-marking sign and the grindy scent, the grindylow wasn’t the assailant either. Leo had made this my problem, and it was, but not solely for the reason he thought. Crap. This was gonna be a booger. And if I could prove it, it was my fault. A sense of dread settled in my gut.

I held out my hand for the photographs of the couple who had been savaged. The poor-quality, grainy, low-pixel-count photos were clear enough to make my knees weak. Yeah. Provided I could find evidence to support it, I knew what had attacked the couple, unlikely as that might actually be.

According to witnesses, the young woman, who went by the moniker Itty Bitty, had been attacked first. Though in her twenties, she was tiny enough to look like a very young teen—hence the nickname. In the photos, she was swathed in bandages, except for a few superficial wounds on one calf, and those were familiar. I had a few fading scars that looked similar. The man, her boyfriend, was former military, and his wounds were more severe. He’d defended her and paid the price. In the dark of early evening, neither had been able to identify the creatures that attacked them and pulled them under the water, mauling and biting. Itty Bitty had seen nothing at all; her hero boyfriend had reported hairy men, dogs, and vampires.

Without looking up, I handed the photos back to the deputy. “Yeah. I know what attacked the couple.” Holding in a resigned sigh, I pushed my sunglasses back over my eyes and tapped the scarred rock with my boot heel. “But it isn’t what made this.”

“So what did?” the cop asked. “Fangheads, right?”

I pulled my gaze from the water-washed rock to the river guides, the cop, whose name was Emmett Sontag, and my best friend, Molly—here for moral support and curiosity. “These three cuts were made by a grindylow.” At the guides’ blank reactions I said, “Grindys are like the enforcers of the were community. They kill weres who try to turn humans, and keep an eye out on the young weres to make sure they abide by were-law.” When they still looked blank I spelled it out for them, keeping my own reactions inside, hidden. “I think werewolves attacked the couple last night.”

“We got werewolves here?” a young guide said, his steel tongue stud catching the light. “Awesome.” He turned and looked around, as if seeing his workplace in a new and exciting way.

Molly’s eyes widened as she took in the implications of werewolves and a grindy in the Appalachian Mountains. From her mutating expressions, Molly was figuring out everything I just had, and most of that information was not something I was willing to share with the others. I caught her gaze, directed hers to the sheet of photos in the cop’s hands, and let her read my concern. Her gaze slid up Stirling Mountain, as mine had, worried. She did an eyebrow shrug, raising and lowering them in sympathy, saying clearer than words, This is gonna be a mess of trouble, Big-Cat.

I managed a defeated grin at the sentiment.

“Werewolves. Damn.” Emmett looked around, eyes narrowed, and rattled off a series of questions that suggested he was more than just gun, swagger, and belly. “Is this grindy thing dangerous? Can you prove it was werewolves? Do we need to pull the rafts?” He resettled his heavy utility belt, one hand on the butt of his 9 millimeter handgun. It was cop body language, looking for trouble and being ready for it. Not. A werewolf would eat his innards for dinner.

Pulling the rafts off the water would mean a financial hardship for the rafting businesses operating along the river. I started to say it was safe, but closed my mouth on the words. I had no idea what grindys ate, or whether they were primarily nocturnal. I was assuming that the grindy was here because of its life mission, but I’d drawn conclusions and made deductions before based on insufficient info, and humans got hurt. I didn’t want that happening here.

Having weres in the hills wasn’t gonna make the locals happy. Like the itchy deputy, local law enforcement types all over three counties were already agitated—passing out stakes, holy water, crosses, and garlic against vamps—and there was grumbling about taking down all the fangheads in an old-fashioned hunt. Now they’d be after weres too, and I had good reason to want them not to. I said, “Grindys don’t eat people, and werewolves are mostly nocturnal. Keep everyone off the water after sunset, but you don’t have to pull the rafts during daylight hours.”

Emmett didn’t like it. He wanted action, and he wanted it now, but he was also conscious of Cocke County’s economic situation. He pursed his lips, thinking, fingers tapping his gun butt with little pats of sound. “Mike, Dave,” he said, addressing two river guides, “you’ll see word gets passed? I’ll run patrol down here throughout the night, but I’d rather not have to arrest somebody or pull a dead stoner outta the water.”

The two men nodded. Mike Kohlenberger, also known as Jedi Mike, or the Old Man of the River, had over thirty years of rafting experience, and Dave was a raft guide, a Class-V kayak paddler, and a Level Four instructor—meaning the two were the best of the best. I’d met them back when I was a midlevel investigator at a security company, before I went out on my own. Someone in the small paddling community had been breaking into local businesses protected by RJY Securities and I’d been sent to look around. They weren’t friends, but, for business competitors, they had a good working relationship.

Mike squinted into the sun glare on the river, his lined face drawing tight, one hand adjusting the red scarf he wore like a do-rag. Voice booming, he said, “We’ll pass the word.”

I started the climb back up the riverbank, still looking for evidence of the creature I believed had attacked Itty Bitty and her boyfriend. At the top of the short rise, I stopped, a fresh scent reaching me. My sense of smell is a lot better than most humans, likely because of the decades I spent in Beast-form, before I found my human shape again and reentered the human world. I flipped my hip-length braid out of the way and dropped to hands and knees in the brush.

The dead-fishy smell was here too, but this time it overlay another familiar scent, the scent I had expected to find after seeing the pics of the injured. With one hand, I pushed aside the sharp-edged grass, not touching the ground beneath or disturbing the roots, but exposing a partial paw print. I had found my evidence and I didn’t know whether to be pleased with myself or even more worried. “Werewolf,” I said, louder.

The cop jostled closer to get a better view.

I pressed more grass aside, revealing more paw prints. They were as large as my hand, the nonretractable claws leaving long indentations in the damp soil. One forepaw had been bloody, the smell of dried blood, rank and old. Not much of a leap to assume it was Itty Bitty’s blood. I bent and sniffed. Witch blood. Itty Bitty was from a witch family. I motioned to Molly to take photos of the prints while I crawled forward, pressing the long, sharp grass to either side of the wolf tracks.

I bent lower, letting my nose tell me what my eyes couldn’t, the musky scent rising to fill my head. And I shivered in the heat. I knew these wolves. I’d fought them. I put it together fast, dread leaping back onto me. I had helped to kill off all the members of the Lupus Pack of werewolves, except for two wolves who had been in jail during the raid. I had forgotten about them, until now. They had made bail, tracked me down, and that one forgetful mistake was coming back to bite me on the butt. I had gotten sloppy. Directly or indirectly, they were here because of me. “Two wolves, at least,” I said, keeping my head low so they couldn’t read my face, pretending that it was visual clues giving me the information. “I may know them. Contact Jodi Richoux at New Orleans PD for names and mug shots.”

The cop cursed and reached for his cell phone. “I gotta tell the sheriff ’bout this, ’n secure the area. Get me some backup. Crime scene.”

“Good idea,” I said. Crime scene techs would have been a better idea this morning, before several hundred tourists had access to the area, and before the powerhouse released thousands of cubic feet of water, but who was I to point out someone else’s mistake.

While Emmett pushed back the guides and gawkers and called the sheriff, I followed the tracks on my hands and knees across a gravel parking area to the small, two-lane road. The scent of shifter magic filled my nostrils where the wolves had changed back to human form. Yeah. I knew them. And I knew it was no coincidence that they were here. The attack, here, now, so close to Stirling Mountain, so close to the parley of vamps I was guarding, wasn’t an accident. It was a personal challenge and a private threat, issued on the body of innocents.

A growl vibrated through me—Beast, angry, thinking of the photographs. Yearling human. Not experienced kit. Her claws milked into my mind, piercing and withdrawing. Too young to fight off pack hunters. Hate pack hunters. Stealers of winter food. Thieves of meat.

I stood and brushed off my hands again, looking from the street back to the river and the bridge, envisioning the wolves waiting in the tall brush just downstream of the bridge, slinking into the water in the dark, attacking the young woman, Itty Bitty. The wolves dragging her—bleeding profusely, terrified, screaming—to shore and deliberately infecting her with the were-taint. In my mind’s eye, I saw her boyfriend leaping from his kayak, seeing indistinct shapes swarming in the night, hearing her cries, rushing in, swinging a sharp-bladed paddle, only to have the wolves turn on him, savaging him for interfering. Other predawn paddlers coming fast. The weres slipping away in the ruckus. Anger burned under my breastbone. This had happened because of me. The wolves were here because of my actions and decisions. My advice. My plans. Crap.

“The victims are both going to go furry at the next full moon, aren’t they?” Mike said. After the decades of shouting to be heard over rushing whitewater, the guy had a voice with little volume control, but this time, his words were muted with worry.

“Maybe not,” I said. “I have a few contacts with the vamps. They have some healers.”

Emmett snorted, not impressed with vamp healers. He muttered under his breath something insulting about suckheads, weres, and witches in his county. I glanced at Molly, an earth witch, who ignored him, so I ignored the comment too, thinking instead about the logistics of getting a Mercy Blade here to heal the injured couple. I didn’t know if there was a Mercy Blade in North Carolina or Tennessee, but I’d find one somewhere. I turned my attention to other logistics.

“How far”—I paused, uncertain, trying to recall the distance from a long-ago vacation—“is it from here to the Mississippi River?” The last time I saw a grindylow was on a bayou that emptied into the Mississippi, west of New

Orleans. And New Orleans was the birthplace of everything that had happened to me for the last six months, most of it bad. I wanted to know how the green-skinned, semiaquatic grindy got from there to here. Sure as heck not on a Harley.

“It’s four hundred miles from Knoxville to Memphis,” Dave said, his voice raspy and soft, in contrast to Mike’s booming volume. Memphis was a Mississippi port city, and the most direct route overland to the river, but the water-loving grindy hadn’t taken an overland route.

I indicated a group of playboat kayakers coasting in after a run on the Upper Pigeon. The small, human-teenager-sized grindy would likely need as much water as a playboat. “Is it possible to paddle from the Mississippi to here, if you only count water big enough to handle something that size, and you prefer cold water, rocks, and privacy?” I looked around at the numbers of boaters. “Usually.”

The guides both looked northwest, downstream. Dave squinted, shading his blue eyes with a hand, and said, “If you can jump dams and paddle a lot of miles of waterway, all upstream,” he paused to draw in air, and my eyes slid to the scars on his throat. They looked like the result of a down and dirty tracheotomy, though I’d never asked how he came by them. “Then yes. The Pigeon goes west to Knoxville, eventually joins into the French Broad and heads south into northern Alabama. It empties into the Tennessee River, which empties into the Miss.”

Mike added, “I know people who’ve paddled the distance downstream, but it’s a hell of a long paddle even moving with the current. I don’t know anyone who’s paddled it upstream.”

I didn’t know what the grindy’s speed was, or if it could handle long distances, or upstream currents. Which might mean that the grindy had hitched a ride on boats, making it a once-mythical supernat who was comfy with modern transportation. I smiled sourly. I didn’t know much about grindys, and had been hoping to keep it that way. But the grindy wasn’t my problem. The wolves were.

I looked up and out, seeing the gorge where the rafting businesses were nestled in the little town of Hartford, Tennessee. Just in visual distance, there were thousands of square acres where wolves could run and hunt and never be seen by a human. If I was wolf-hunting in Beast form, it would take a long time to cover this much territory. Wolves liked to run long distances. Beast wasn’t fond of it, wasn’t built for it, and even with humans in danger, she would fight me every step of the way. Beast is not dog, she murmured into my mind, sounding sleepy. Do not hunt nose to ground. I scowled and walked from the water, its tinkling quickly muted by the sound of nearby Interstate 40, back toward Fang.

The wind changed and I caught a scent of wolf away from the water. On the far side of the road, something gleamed in the bright sun. Silver-tipped wood. It was mine. I sometimes lost stakes in the heat of battle, easy for an enemy to take. I bent and picked up the sterling-silver-tipped ash-wood stake.

Deep inside, my Beast hissed with displeasure and showed killing teeth. The wolves had left me a personal message and challenge. I looked around. No one except Molly had seen me pick up the stake. She watched with a quizzical expression as I sniffed along its length, smelling wolf, sweat, and motor oil, something spicy like Mexican food, and cheap liquor. No help here. No scent-clue jumping out and saying, “The wolves stayed there, in that hotel, in that town, last night.” Giving her a small shrug, I tucked the stake into a belt loop.

Boots crunching on gravel, I walked back to the parking lot of Rapid Expeditions, the mom-and-pop rafting and kayak business owned by Dave Crawford. Molly and I sat on the old church bench in front of the shop and accepted Cokes from Dave, pulled from an icy cooler. Molly sipped delicately, tucking a strand of bright red hair behind an ear. She’d always been a lady, contrasting to my motorcycle mama image. I popped the top and drank deeply before rolling the can over my forehead for the chill. It was hot for September. Global climate change and all that.

Dave lounged in the middle of the church bench, propping one bare foot on the old wood. He was lithe as a snake, solid muscle, and bare-chested in the heat, water-wicking pants hanging from hips to knees, exposing more surgical scars. His dog, Josie, leaped up and curled beside him, her eyes on me and her ears back. The mutt was gentle and sweet, but she didn’t like the way I smelled and wanted to make sure I knew it.

Mike pulled hard on his Coke, standing in the sun with one fist on a hip, looking around as if expecting the wolves to reappear any moment. “You want to see the other sites?” he asked, gesturing to the river behind the shop. “I can take you down anything that’ll take a two-man raft or ducky. If you paddle, Dave can get you into any tight areas in a hard boat.” He pronounced it as if it were one word, hardboat.

I wasn’t familiar with the lingo, but hard boats sounded like kayaks. And no way was I strapping myself into a kayak and bouncing down a mountain creek. Beast hacked softly, stressing her opposition to the activity. And then I actually heard the question. “Other sites?”

“Places where that thing made the three scratches.”

I stopped, the Coke can still on my head, and let a smile form. If a grindylow was marking territory, then it was likely leaving scratches where it smelled weres, tracking them to take them down. Justice among weres was quick and final. The grindy could do my work for me. I lowered the can and drank, finishing it off. “To start, can you put out the word to the locals,” I said. “I need a map of all the places where people have seen the grindy’s scratch marks. Kayakers, rafters, hikers, park rangers, anybody who’s seen anything. If we can get a decent count and locations, we can determine the perimeters of the grindy’s territory, and maybe pinpoint the center of it. I can start my search for the werewolves there. I can pay you for your time.”

Money talks. Dave and Mike met eyes and nodded. “Yeah, we can do that.” Mike stuck out his hand and I took it for a firm shake. Shouting for the river guides he managed at the competing rafting business, Mike branched off toward the Bean Trees Café, demanding maps, GPS coordinates, beer, and PowerPoint displays, leaving Dave, Molly, and me sitting in the shade. I looked over at Emmett, who was waving in another deputy driving a marked car. This place was going to be a circus again tonight.

Dave turned his intense blue eyes to me and focused on my scars, the visible ones on my throat, and the ones on my left arm that hadn’t yet disappeared. Mine were vamp-fang and werewolf-bite scars. “How dangerous are they?” he asked.

“The grindy? Not much, unless you’re a were who hurt a human; then you get to die, as soon as he can catch you. The wolves?” I lifted my arm to display the scarring around my elbow. “You ever think about taking on a full-grown mountain lion? Bare-handed?” When he shook his head, an almost-grin on his lips, I said, “Well, two wolves will take on a big-cat. And sometimes win.” Beast growled low in my mind, not disagreeing. “They have claws hard enough to rip skin and jaws that can crush a human skull or take out a human throat with one swipe. Werewolves are worse.”

He pointed to my throat. “Is that where you got those scars?”

“No. Vamps did that.”

His eyes widened and a small smile played on his lips. “And you still work for them?”

Molly snorted. “She never was too bright.”

I shrugged. What could I say? It was true. I followed Mol to her newish van, and leaned in the open window. “Thanks for coming,” I said. “I wasn’t sure if we’d need your healing talents.”

“I’m always happy to help,” she said, arranging her belongings in the passenger seat. “It was interesting. I like watching you work when you’re not staking vamps and trying to save people from them.” Together, we had gone up against vamps before, and not everyone made it back alive, but I’d saved her children, Angie Baby and Little Evan, and her sister and baby the year before that, before I left the mountains for New Orleans. I gave her a wry half smile.

Molly patted my arms on the window. “I need to get home. Big Evan wasn’t happy about me getting involved with this.”

“Yeah. I know. I really appreciate it. Breakfast at the café soon?”

“Almost every morning. I’m always there after I drop Angie off to school. Which still feels strange. She’s growing up so fast.” She shook her head at the passage of time. “My sisters know you’re back in town and ask after you every morning. They want to see you.” I didn’t make friends easily and knowing that Molly’s family had all but adopted me after I helped to save the pregnant Carmen from a young rogue-vamp made me feel all sappy inside. Her eyes twinkled at me. “You could bring a boyfriend.”

“I already said, I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Hmmm. There’s Rick LaFleur. He stands around with his tongue hanging out whenever you’re around.” I sighed and Molly shook her head, vexed, starting the van. “Take care, Big-Cat.”

She was pulling away before I realized that she hadn’t asked me to the house for dinner. No invitations to visit with her there had been forthcoming at all, and I didn’t think it was because of my schedule. It was because her husband no longer trusted me to keep Molly safe. And he had good reason.