Crowbones

CHAPTER 69

Them

Earthday, Novembros 4

He’d wondered if he could influence a human like Edward Janse, and now he knew that he could. Supposedly, Intuits had an extra bit of intuition or sense of their surroundings. Supposedly, they weren’t as susceptible to doing things outside their normal behavior or being provoked into irrational behavior, but Janse’s impulse to help other people was a weakness easily exploited—especially after Janse had ingested a hefty dose of feel-good that had been mixed in a mug of tea.

How else could he have convinced the Intuit that someone needed help that required walking into the woods last night?

He wished he had dared to go out and see the body for himself. Had the terra indigene killed Janse? Or had his rival’s former subjects—her little monstrosities, as she liked to call them—been given extra treats filled with gone over wolf before being aimed toward the cabins, toward him?

He wished he could interview them and find out how they had managed to elude the Others in order to reach the cabins, but all her subjects became unmanageable after a certain age—although a combination of fear and reward seemed to keep them sufficiently subservient to her.

Was this about rivalry? Had Edward Janse been killed by the Others because he’d been at the edge of the woods and was easy prey? Or had he been killed because his rival’s little monstrosities had been pointed toward someone wearing a certain color coat?

Picking up his olive green coat from where he’d dropped it last night, Richard Cardosa hung it in the closet out of sight.