Chapter 13

We took my car, and in forty minutes arrived at the sheriff's department and county jail in Walsenburg. Marks had booked Cormac by the time we got into the building, and the hunter was ensconced in a back room, out of sight.

Marks glared at us over the front desk. "He's already asking for his lawyer. You want to get back here so we can take his statement?"

Ben was tense. I knew him well enough by now that I could tell without touching him.

"You'll be fine," I said. "Just breathe slow and think about keeping it in. Stay calm."

"Easier said than done."

"Yup." I tried to make my smile encouraging.

He straightened his shoulders and stalked forward like a man preparing to go into battle.

I'd seen him talk down cops before. I'd seen him face a panel of senators and hold them off. In those cases he'd had this hawk's stare, the fierce-eyed glare of a hunter that had always instilled confidence in me, because he was always on my side.

The hawk was gone. I should have seen it, but it wasn't there. Instead, he looked like he'd been cornered.

I watched him go, wringing my hands on his behalf. Then all I could do was wait in the lobby on a hard plastic chair, leafing through copies of news magazines a month out of date. I wanted to climb the walls. The place was clean, not terribly old or worn out. But it smelled of sweat and fatigue. It was not a good place. People ended up here when they'd hit bottom, or were about to hit bottom.

My wounds still itched. They should have been almost healed. Cursed, Tony had said. I hadn't realized how much I took the quick healing for granted. Then again, if I didn't have rapid healing, I wouldn't go around inter­cepting attacking wolves.

I watched the clock. Hours later, after midnight, Ben came back to the lobby. He was pale, ill-looking, and sweat dampened his hair. He looked like he'd run a race, not talked with the cops. I stood and met him.

He smelled musky, animal, like his wolf was rising to the surface. I took hold of his hand. "Keep it together, Ben. Take a deep breath."

He did, and it shuddered when he let it out. "I don't know what Cormac did earlier, but Marks has it in for him. He already called the prosecutor. They want to file charges. Six eyewitnesses saw Cormac save your life, and they want to press charges. They won't set bail until the advisement hearing tomorrow. And I just sat there and stared at them."

"How does this usually work? You make it sound like this isn't the way things normally go for you guys."

"Usually I have plenty of evidence that Cormac had a good reason for doing whatever he did, and the charges don't even get filed. But we have a couple of problems this time. Somebody around here wants to make a reputa­tion for themselves."

"Marks?"

"Marks and George Espinoza, a very earnest prosecu­tor who's probably never encountered anything more seri­ous than trespassing." His tone was harsh.

"And?" There was an "and" in there.

"She was already dying when he killed her. It was excessive force, even for Cormac. That's the argument Espinoza's going to use."

This was going to be about splitting hairs. Cormac did what he had to—I could convince myself of that. A hun­dred horror movie climaxes said he did the right thing.

But how would a judge see it?

"How's Cormac?"

"Stoic. He's Cormac. There's something else. They've ID'd the body. The skinwalker. Miriam Wilson. She's the twin sister of John Wilson, the werewolf that Cormac shot. The one that got me. A missing person report on her was filed three months ago."

As if we needed the situation to be any more compli­cated. I tried to imagine a state of affairs where a brother and sister would become the things they were, and wreak the havoc they had.

"Brother and sister? One of them a werewolf and one of them a skinwalker. What's the story behind that?"

"I wish I knew."

"And her family reported her disappearance to the police, but they hired Cormac to hunt down the brother?"

He shrugged. "We don't know that it was her family that filed the report. I'm guessing they didn't send Cormac after her because she wasn't a werewolf. We don't know if they knew what she was. We don't know anything. Christ, I'm going to have to go buy a suit. I left all my clothes in my car back in Farmington. I can't go to court without a suit." He was currently wearing his coat over jeans and a T-shirt, like he'd been wearing for the last week.

"We'll go buy you a suit in the morning. Is there anything else you need to do? Can we get out of here?" I wanted to get him out of this place, with its unhappy smells and atmosphere of confrontation.

"Yeah, let's go."

That started a very long night. Ben used my laptop and spent hours looking through online legal libraries for precedents and arguments that would spring Cormac. He scratched out notes on a notepad. I watched, lying on the sofa, wondering how I could help. He grew more agitated by the minute.

"Ben, come to bed. Get some sleep."

"I can't. Too much to do. All my work is back in my car, I have too much to review, I have to catch up." He glared at the screen with a frantic intensity.

"How much are you going to be able to help him if you're falling asleep in the courtroom?"

He took his hands away from the keyboard and bowed his head. I could see the fatigue radiating off him. When he came to the sofa, I sat up, made room for him, and pulled him into an embrace. My body was healing, finally, but still sore. I didn't complain. He needed me to com­fort him, however much I wanted someone to comfort me. We stayed like that a long time, his head pillowed on my shoulder, until the tension started to seep out of him. I got him out of his clothes, into bed, and held him close, curled up in my arms, until he finally fell asleep. He never fully relaxed.

The next morning, we went to buy a suit. We weren't going to find anything fancy in Walsenburg. This put Ben even further out of sorts. But we managed, somehow.

He changed clothes in the car on the way to the Huerfano County Courthouse, where Cormac's first hearing was scheduled to take place. The suit didn't fit quite right, it didn't make as slick a picture as he might have wanted. I brushed his hair back with my fingers, straightened his tie, smoothed his lapels. Like I was sending him to the prom or something.

Ben looked like I was sending him to an execution. He was still holding himself tense, shoulders stiff, like the raised hackles on a nervous wolf.

"You going to be okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah, sure. This is just a formality. The judge will look over his statement, the witness statements, and throw out the case. That's all there is to it."

He headed into the building alone to meet with Cormac before the hearing. I made my way to the courtroom. In other circumstances I might have admired the hundred-year-old building, made of functional gray stone and topped by a sim­ple decorated tower. They built them to last in those days.

I didn't know what I expected—some kind of dramatic, busy scene like in a courtroom drama on TV. But the place was almost empty. Marks stood off to one side. A couple of people in business suits conversed quietly. Fluorescent lights glared. The whole place gave the impression of dull bureaucracy. I sat in the first row behind the defense side. I was sure this would be educational if I weren't so ner­vous on Ben and Cormac's behalf.

Without any preamble, a couple of bailiffs guided Cormac into the courtroom. He'd had a chance to shave, which made him look slightly less psychotic than he had last night. A point in his favor, and that was probably part of the strategy. It was a shock, though, to see him in an orange prison jumpsuit, short-sleeved, baggy, unflatter­ing. It gave me a terrible sense of foreboding.

Ben followed, and both of them positioned themselves behind one of the podiums before the bench.

The whole procedure followed in a kind of haze. The judge, Heller, a middle-aged woman, brown hair pulled into a bun, wearing a no-nonsense expression, came into the room and took her place. Ben and Cormac remained standing before her. Across from them, one of the busi­ness suits, a surprisingly young man—no older than Ben and Cormac—shuffled papers on the desk in front of him. George Espinoza, the prosecutor. His suit was neat, his dark hair slicked back, his expression viperish. A cru­sader. No wonder Ben was worried.

The prosecutor read the facts—and just the facts, ma'am. The time and place of Cormac's arrest, the nature of the crime, the probable cause. The charge: murder. Not just murder, but first-degree murder. That was serious, way too serious.

Espinoza explained: "The accused was heard to say that he had tracked the victim, had in fact been focused on her for quite some time with the intent to kill her. He was seen in the area of Shiprock, New Mexico—the vic­tim's hometown—on several dates over the last month. He was, in fact, lying in wait for the victim's appearance. This presents a clear display of deliberation, meeting the requirement for a charge of first-degree murder."

Cormac had been tracking her. He had meant to kill her. Which made the whole thing murky. I was glad I wasn't the lawyer.

This wasn't a TV show. Nobody shouted, nobody slammed their fists on the tables, nobody rushed in from the back with the crucial piece of information that would free the defendant, or pound the final nail in the prosecu­tion's case.

They might have been lecturing on economic theory, as calmly and analytically as everyone spoke. It made it hard to concentrate on the words.

The judge spoke: "Mr. Espinoza has requested that Mr. Bennett—" Cormac Bennett. I'd never heard his last name before. Even such a small detail as that made the scene surreal. It was like Cormac should have been beyond something as mundane as a last name. "—be held without bail, on the basis of his past associations and the belief that he is a flight risk."

Ben argued: "Your Honor, my client has dealt with law enforcement agencies in several jurisdictions, and has always been cooperative. He's never once given the indi­cation that he's a flight risk."

"Perhaps his past association with the Mountain Patriot Brigade hasn't been an issue until now. It is the experience and opinion of this court that members of such right-wing paramilitary organizations are, in fact, flight risks."

Again, the world shifted, becoming even more surreal, if that was possible. I'd heard of the Mountain Patriot Bri­gade: it was one of those militia groups, right-wing fanat­ics who ran around with guns and preached the downfall of the government. When they weren't actually blowing things up.

That didn't sound like Cormac at all. Not the Cormac I knew. Well, except for the running around with guns part. The number of backstories I didn't know was getting frustrating.

Ben's hesitation before responding was maddening. Hesitation meant uncertainty. Meant a weak position. Maybe even guilt. Which made me wonder: Where had Cormac learned about guns? Where had he become such a great shot?

Ben said, "Your Honor, Mr. Bennett's association with that group ended over a decade ago. It hasn't been an issue because it isn't relevant."

"Mr. O'Farrell, I've granted the prosecution's request that Mr. Bennett be held without bail."

"Your Honor, I'd like to lodge a protest. You've got his record—he's never jumped bail."

"And don't you think it's just a little odd how often your client has been arrested and had to post bail? Don't you ever get tired of standing with your client at these hearings?"

"Frankly, that's not your concern."

"Careful, Mr. O'Farrell."

"Your Honor, I'd like to move that the case against my client be dismissed. Miriam Wilson's attack was so brutal, lives were at risk. Katherine Norville's attempt to stop her without lethal force resulted in great injury to herself. My client was well within his right to use force against her under Title eighteen dash one dash seven-oh-four of the Colorado Criminal Code."

Espinoza countered: "The law protecting the right to use deadly force in cases of defense does not apply in this case. On the contrary, the accused was in fact lying in wait for the victim's appearance." That was wrong. I almost stood up and said something. I had to bite my tongue. The prosecutor continued. "Your Honor, the victim was a twenty-year-old woman weighing a hundred and twenty pounds. Her ability to inflict lethal damage with her bare hands is questionable. Moreover, the evidence suggests she was highly mentally disturbed during the incident." He consulted a page of notes. "She was wearing a wolf skin at the time and it has been suggested that she believed that she was a wolf. I find it hard to believe that in such a mental state, judging by her physical attributes, she was at all a danger to anyone. Especially when she already had three bullet wounds in her chest. The victim was already incapacitated when the defendant fired the final, killing shot. In that moment this stopped being a case of defense and became a murder."

And nothing about any of that was false. She had been wearing a wolf skin. That it actually turned her into a wolf—suggesting that would sound ludicrous in this set­ting. And maybe she'd been fatally wounded. Maybe she wouldn't have lashed out with her skin/walker magic. But Cormac hadn't know that.

Ben offered another volley. "Seeing that a psychologi­cal evaluation of the victim is impossible, I would like to offer evidence and precedent that such a mental illness would in fact make her a danger to those around her, even while injured."

Heller asked a question. "The witness who was involved in the physical confrontation with the victim—how extensive are her injuries?"

A moment of silence weighed heavily on the room. How extensive were my injuries? They weren't, not anymore. I had a few scabs, where the worst of the scratches had healed, a few pink marks. In a couple more days even those would disappear. But if I hadn't been a lycanthrope I'd be in the hospital. If I hadn't been a lycanthrope, we could say, Look, this is what Cormac saved us from, this iswhy he shouldn't be in jail. But we didn't have that.

In lieu of an answer, Heller continued. "Was Ms. Norville even examined by a doctor after the confrontation?"

"No, Your Honor," Ben said softly. I should have let him take me to a hospital. He'd wanted to take me to a hospital. We could have at least taken pictures of what the wounds looked like.

None of us thought we'd be here arguing it in court. That we'd need the evidence.

"Then the violence of the victim's attack has perhaps been exaggerated?"

I should have just let Miriam Wilson kill me. That would have gotten Cormac off the hook. Made everyone's lives a whole lot easier. Nice defeatist thinking there.

Ben's voice changed, falling in pitch, becoming tight with anger. "You have the witness statements, Your Honor. At the time, they all feared for Ms. Norville's life. That's the scene my client encountered, and that's what should be taken into account. The only reason there's even a ques­tion is because Sheriff Marks has a grudge against him. This court is biased." He landed his fist on the table. From behind him, I could see his breathing quicken, his ribs expanding under the cheap suit jacket.

Heller shook her head, preparing to close out the hear­ing. "I am not inclined to dismiss this case on the basis of the evidence you've presented, Mr. O'Farrell."

Hissing a breath, Ben bent double almost, leaning on the table in front of him, bowing his head. The pose was familiar—it's what I did when the Wolf fought inside me, when she was close to the surface and trying to break out.

I stood quickly; leaning forward as far as I could, I was able to touch Ben's back. It was stiff as a board, in pain. Cormac gripped Ben's arm with his bound hands. Please, not here, I begged silently. Feel my touch, stay human, keep it together. I tried to see his hands—that was where it usually happened first. The claws—did he have claws or fingers?

"Mr. O'Farrell, are you all right?" Judge Heller frowned with concern.

Everyone in the courtroom stared at us. I didn't care. I kept my hand pressed against his back, hoping he'd respond. Cormac and I both watched him intently, waiting.

Finally, he straightened. Creaking almost, like he had to stack each vertebra into place. His face was pale, and his neck sweating.

"I'm fine," he said, though his voice was still rough, like a growl. "Sorry for the interruption. I'm fine." He smoothed his suit and shook himself out of the spell. Slowly, Cormac and I sat back in our places.

My heart was racing. I couldn't help but feel like we'd had a close call. He shouldn't have been doing this, he shouldn't have had to face the stress of a courtroom in his condition. He was still just a pup.

Heller resumed. "Both parties should consult in order to agree on a time for a preliminary hearing, at which time the defendant will enter his plea to the charges filed."

Then, almost abruptly, anticlimactically, it was over. And Cormac wasn't leaving with us. Held without bail.

The courtroom rustled with activity. Bailiffs approached to take charge of Cormac, who looked over his shoulder at me. "Keep an eye on him. Don't let him out of your sight," he said in a low voice. I nodded quickly and watched them lead him away. He knew how close it had been, too.

Marks glared at us across the room, but didn't stick around for a confrontation.

Espinoza approached Ben, who still looked like he was about to pass out. I could hear his heart racing. I was ready to jump up and leap to his side, if he showed the slightest indication that he needed help—if he was about to break down. He held it together, though. He didn't look good, but he stayed upright, kept breathing.

I didn't like George Espinoza, even though I knew that wasn't fair. I didn't know him, I'd never spoken to him. But I saw him as a threat. He was attacking my people. My pack. I kept wanting to slip in between him and Ben and growl at him. But I had to just step aside and let things happen.

They talked in low voices. Ben did a lot of nodding. The bailiff hustled them out of the room then to make way for the next hearing. I trailed behind, trying to eavesdrop. I heard a couple of phrases. "Give me a week," and "plea bargain."

I approached Ben only after Espinoza left the lobby outside the courtroom. He stood stiffly, hugging a file folder that stood in for his briefcase. He carried himself rigidly—angry, and trying to hold it in. He was used to being able to channel his anger in the courtroom. Using it to strengthen his arguments. Now, the wolf wouldn't let him do that.

I put my hand on his shoulder. "Let's get out of here."

He let me guide him out of the building, leaning on me until we were outside.

Out in the sun I was able to ask him, "How close did you get in there? How close to Changing?"

He shook his head absently. "I don't know. I felt like I could have breathed wrong and it all would have come loose. I felt it push against the inside of my skin. I just don't know." He closed his eyes and took a deep, trem­bling breath. "I'm losing it."

"No, you're not. You're fine, you kept it together."

"Not me," he said. "I don't care about me. I'm talking about the case."

"It can't be that bad. Can it?" He was the lawyer. Who was I to second-guess him?

"Any rational person looks at the evidence and comes to exactly the conclusion Espinoza presented. If I stand up there and say, no she wasn't just wearing a wolf skin, she'd actually become a wolf, I sound insane. When it comes to believing the eyewitness reports of a few people who were in the dark and scared out of their skulls, or the hard evidence of the coroner's report, it isn't much of a contest. And she was incapacitated when Cormac killed her. He wasn't defending anyone at that point."

"We didn't know that, not for sure. Marks was there—why doesn't he tell them? He's a cop, wouldn't his testi­mony hold any more weight?"

"He's signed off on Espinoza's version."

Of course he would. "That's not fair. You'd think after everything he did to me he could at least stand up for Cormac."

"Except he's decided that she wasn't that dangerous, and Cormac overreacted. The coroner's report makes more sense than skinwalkers, so that's what he's sticking to. That's what's going to hold up in court. Not the ghost stories."

I wanted to shake Ben. Tell him to snap out of it and get his confidence back. He had to save Cormac, and he wasn't going to do it talking like that.

Ben said, "He shouldn't have shot her there at the end. That was a mistake."

"I know."

And that was what we kept talking around. That Cormac had gone too far to save this time. Nothing we said or did would ever erase that moment.

We walked a few more paces, and I changed the sub­ject. "Why wouldn't the judge set bail?"

He scowled. "Espinoza doesn't want to take a chance on him getting away. Heller's right, those militia wing-nuts do have a history of jumping bail. It's a case of them looking at the facts they want to and not the ones that mat­ter. There might be some past history there that's coloring her judgment."

That brought up a whole other set of questions. We'd reached the car by then. "So what is all that about Cormac and the Mountain Patriot Brigade?"

Ben kept on, almost like he hadn't heard, climbing into the car and not looking at me. I'd started the engine before he finally said, "I'm not going to answer that."

"Why not? You know those guys are practically neo-Nazis?"

"I won't argue with that."

I couldn't fit that and Cormac in my mind at the same time. "And?"

"And I don't think the group even exists anymore. It's some guy in a basement running a Web site."

"How do you know this? How are you two even involved?" My voice was becoming shrill.

"I don't owe you an explanation."

That just pissed me off. "Oh, really?"

He glared at me, and I bristled. That was just what we needed. A fight. Posturing. A pissing contest. I didn't want to rile up his wolf any more than it already was.

I put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking lot.

The movement of the car, driving down the highway back to the cabin, settled us down. Ben didn't want to tell me, and that was his right, I supposed. But I had other ways of finding information. We had a lot of other prob­lems to deal with right now.

A few more miles of ranch land sped past us when he said, "I want to get a hotel room in Walsenburg, to be closer to the courthouse."

We packed that night, and in the morning found a place to make camp for the duration.

The next day saw Ben working on building his case. Mostly, this involved talking to people, legwork, phone calls. He went to Alice, Joe, Tony, and Sheriff Marks. They were Cormac's defense. I offered to come along, but Ben said no. Cormac's lawyer needed to handle this, he said. My being there would muddy the issue. Remind them of their biases. Maybe he was right. Cormac told me not to let Ben out of my sight. But I let him go.

Besides, I had a research project of my own.

The public library, a couple of blocks down from the courthouse, had several computer terminals. I went to one and started searching. After a half an hour, I took my notes to the reference desk.

"Do you have copies of the Denver Post from these dates?"

The nice lady at the desk set me up at a microfiche machine, and away I went. It took about three hours of hunting to find the whole story.

Starting about fifteen years ago, a group of Front Range ranchers began protesting new restrictions and higher fees for grazing their cattle on public lands. Millions of acres across the West were owned by the government, and ranch­ers had been given access to those lands. To a lot of people, federally owned was the same as public, and anything that barred their access to those lands impinged on their rights as citizens. Some of them did the sane thing: they lob­bied Congress, lodged complaints, took the issue to court. Others, though, turned to militias. They stockpiled arms and began to prepare for the violent overthrow of the gov­ernment they saw as inevitable.

A man named David O'Farrell showed up in a series of articles. This was Ben's father, who at the time owned a ranch near Loveland. He was arrested several times on ille­gal weapons charges and went straight to the top of the fist of people suspected of being the head of the Mountain Patriot Brigade, one of a network of paramilitary groups that gath­ered and trained in the backcountry, with the ultimate goal of defending by force their right to use public lands. Through the early nineties they had almost constant confrontations with local law enforcement—except in a few cases where local law enforcement happened to be members.

Eight years ago, after lengthy FBI surveillance and a carefully prosecuted case, Ben's father had been con­victed on various felony weapons violations and conspir­acy charges. He was still in prison.

The name Cormac Bennett didn't show up in conjunction with the Mountain Patriot Brigade in any of the articles and references I found. He'd never been arrested or suspected of any wrongdoing as part of the group. Espinoza's information about him came from FBI and police reports about the group. Young Cormac didn't rate the attention that the group's leaders did. He hadn't been considered a threat. But the association was there, especially since he was David O'Farrell's nephew.

I found another newspaper article, from a couple of years earlier than all the Mountain Patriot Brigade busi­ness, that featured Cormac. It reported on the strange death of Douglas Bennett. The coroner reported that the forty-eight-year-old had been mauled by an animal, possibly a bear or a very large dog. The police, on the other hand, claimed that he'd been murdered by a deranged assailant. Douglas's sixteen-year-old son, Cormac, had witnessed the attack, and shot dead the assailant. The police had the all-too-human body, with Cormac's rifle bullet in its head and Douglas's flesh between its teeth. The shooting was deemed a case of self-defense. No charges were filed against Cormac, who went to live with his aunt's family, the O'Farrell clan. His mother had died in a car accident when he was five.

It was deja vu, this disagreement between the witnesses and the coroner's report. And Cormac had been in this situation before. Cormac had killed his first werewolf when he was sixteen years old. I didn't even know what to think about that. Once, I asked Cormac how he'd become a werewolf and vampire hunter, where he'd learned the tricks of it. He said it ran in the family. Which might explain why Douglas was in a position to get mauled to death in the first place, and why Cormac was there to wit­ness it: Douglas had been training him.

I wondered what his mother would have thought of that, if she'd been alive to see it.

I printed off that article and a dozen or so others. By then, it was dinnertime. I called the hotel room, but no one answered. That meant Ben was either off being lawyerly—I hoped—or he was moping. I took a chance and picked up a pizza and beer for dinner.

When I got back to the room, Ben was there. Doing a little of both, it seemed: my laptop was on, plugged into the phone jack, and papers were spread over the table and half the bed. But he sat in the chair, staring at the wall. I couldn't even say that he was thinking hard. He was back in that fugue state.

He jumped when the door opened, clutched the arms of his chair, his mouth open slightly, like he was about to growl. He calmed down almost immediately, slouching and looking away. Tense—just a little.

"Hungry?" I said, trying to be nonchalant.

"Not really."

"When was the last time you ate?" He only shook his head. "You ought to eat something."

"Sure, Mom." He gave me the briefest flickers of a glance—half accusing, half apologetic. I must have glared at him. I didn't appreciate the label. I didn't appre­ciate having to behave like that label.

He cleared a spot on the table where I deposited the pizza.

I pulled my stack of papers out of my bag and set them between us. I'd put the one about Cormac's father on top. A grainy, black and white picture of the man occupied the middle of the page. He'd been lean and weathered, with short-cropped, receding hair. In the picture, a candid snapshot, he was smiling at something to the left of the camera, and wearing sunglasses.

Ben stared at it a moment, his expression blank. I thought I knew him pretty well by now, but I couldn't read this. He was almost disbelieving. Then, his lips quirked a smile.

Finally, he said, "I'd forgotten about that picture. It's a good one of him. Uncle Doug." He shook his head, then looked at me. "You've been busy."

"Yeah. It's funny how much of your family's history is plastered all over the newspapers."

He started shuffling through the articles. "Real busy."

"Just remember that the next time you think you can keep a secret from me."

"Why go to the trouble?"

"I wanted to make sure that you and Cormac aren't bad guys. I have to say, you have kind of a creepy past. When you say this stuff doesn't matter, I really want to trust you."

"I'm not sure that's such a great idea. You might be bet­ter off on your own. Get out of Dodge while the getting's good."

We were pack. I'd see this through. "I'll stick around."

"I haven't seen my father in over ten years. We had a throw-down screaming match over this Patriot Brigade garbage. I was twenty, first one in my family to go to col­lege and so full of myself. I was educated." He gave the word sarcastic emphasis. "I knew it all, and there I was to throw it back in the face of my poor benighted father. And he was so full of that right-wing nut-job rhetoric… I left. Cormac was still there, helping him work the ranch. That's the only reason he got tangled up with that crowd, was because of my father. When I left, so did he. I still don't know if it was something I said that convinced him. Or if we'd just spent so much time looking out for each other—we were already kind of a team, then.

"Dad called me right before that last trial. I'd just passed the bar. He wanted me to represent him. I said no. I'd have said no even if we were on good terms. He really needed someone with experience. But all Dad heard was that his only son, his own flesh and blood, was turning his back on him. The funny thing about it all, I wanted to convince him he was wrong. There wasn't a govern­ment conspiracy out to get him, I wasn't trying to sell him down the river. But everything that happened, from the FBI wiretaps to me walking out on him, confirmed every­thing in his mind. He's too far gone to come back."

"You haven't been to see him. You haven't talked to him at all," I said. "Do you want to? Do you think you should?"

He shook his head. "I made a clean break. We're all better off if it stays that way. Cormac and I always kind of knew that something he'd done in the past would come back to haunt him. I didn't think it would be this." He tossed the printouts back on the table.

"Where's your mom?"

"She divorced my dad after thirty years of marriage, sold the ranch to pay his legal expenses, and is now work­ing as a waitress in Longmont. And that's the whole story of my sordid, screwed up family." He shook his head absently. "You know what's always gotten to me? My dad and I aren't that different. It's where we came from, that whole independent rural culture. I remember telling him, yeah, sure, take back the government, put it back in the hands of the people. That's great. But you're not going to do it with a stockpile of dynamite and hate speech. Me—I went to law school. Thought I'd work the system from the inside, sticking it to the man." His smile turned sad. "Maybe we were both wrong."

I wanted to hug him and make silly cooing noises. That Mom thing again. He had this traumatized look to him. Instead, I hefted the grocery bag. "I brought beer."

"My hero," he said, smiling.

We settled down to beer and pizza. "What have you been working on?"

"Precedents," he said. "You'd think in a state where half the population totes around guns in their glove boxes this sort of thing would have come up before. We have a Make My Day law for crying out loud. But there isn't too much out there to cover if you shoot something thinking it's a wild animal, then it turns out to be a person."

"Except for the werewolf that killed Cormac's dad."

"Which isn't going to help Cormac's case at all if the prosecutor digs it up, so I'd really appreciate it if you didn't draw anyone's attention to it. Judges get nervous when weird things keep happening to the same person."

I turned an invisible key at the corner of my mouth. "My lips are sealed."

He gave me a highly skeptical look. I wanted to argue—then realized I couldn't, really. We fell into a moment of silence, eating and drinking. He stared at the computer screen as if it would offer up miracles.

"How did the rest of your day go?" I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

"Pretty well, I think," he said, but the tone was ambivalent, and he still looked exhausted instead of fired up. "Tony's going to stick around to give a statement, Alice is downright enthusiastic about testifying. She seems to think she owes you a favor. But you know what? I keep running into that same problem."

"What problem? I don't see a problem. Eyewitnesses, that's what you need, that's what you have. Isn't it?" I had the feeling he was about to tangle me up in some legal loophole.

"Why were we all there in the first place?" he said.

I wasn't sure I could explain it anymore. It seemed so long ago. "We were going to remove Alice's curse. Tony said he had a ritual."

"Magic. Witchcraft," he said curtly. "So how do you convince the legal system that this is real? That when Tony and Alice talk about casting their spells, they're serious, and it's real. That they're not crackpots. I'm afraid Espi­noza's going to use that angle to discredit their testimony. He'll say, of course a couple of people who are out in the woods at dusk lighting candles and burning incense are going to think up some story about how this woman really turned into a wolf. Of course they'll say that even shot through the chest and dying she was a threat because she was a skinwalker. He'll say they're as deluded as Miriam was and therefore their testimony is suspect."

He was twisting the words, manipulating the story. Just like a lawyer. Just like Espinoza. Ben was thinking of all the angles, but none of them seemed to work in our favor.

"So you can't use their testimony."

"Oh, I'm going to use it and hope for the best. Maybe I'm wrong and Espinoza won't shoot them down."

This was looking grimmer and grimmer. Grasping at straws. "What about Marks? He had it in for me in the first place—that's why we were at the cabin when Miriam attacked. Can't you use that to discredit him as a witness?"

"If you want to sue Alice and Sheriff Marks for harass­ment, I'm all for it. I think you have a good case against them. You don't even have to bring up magic to prove that leaving dead dogs in someone's yard is harassment. But it's a different case. I'll certainly bring it up, but the judge might decide that a suit against Marks doesn't have any bearing in the case of Miriam Wilson's death."

The pizza had gotten cold and I'd lost my appetite. Ben wasn't eating either.

"The whole thing seems rigged," I said. "It's not fair."

"Welcome to the American justice system." He raised his bottle of beer as if in a toast.

"Cynic." I pouted.

"Lawyer," he countered, grinning.

"Ben. Drink your beer."

I went to see Sheriff Marks the next morning. I told Ben I was taking a walk to the grocery store for donuts.

Carefully, I approached the front desk at the sheriff's department like it was a bomb. I asked the woman work­ing there, a nonuniformed civilian, "Hi, is Sheriff Marks in? Could I speak to him?"

"Yes, I think he is. Do you have an appointment?"

"No," I said, wincing. I fully expected Marks to refuse to see me. But I had to try.

The receptionist frowned sadly, and I tried not to be mad at her. She was just doing her job. "Then I'm afraid he probably won't be available, he's very busy—"

"It's all right, Kelly." Marks stood in the hallway to the side, just within view. His expression was guarded, point­edly bland, like he'd expected me to be here all along and didn't mind. He knew his place in the world and I couldn't shake it. "I'll talk to her. Send her back."

He turned and went down the hall, presumably to his office.

"Go on back," Kelly the receptionist said. I did.

Marks disappeared through a doorway halfway down the hall, and I followed him into a perfectly average, per­fectly normal cluttered office: a desk with a computer sat against the wall. There was an in-box overflowing with papers and files, bookshelves, also overflowing, certificates and plaques on the wall, along with a huge map labeled Huerfano County. Colored pins marked various spots; a red pin was stuck about where I guessed my cabin was.

Marks sat at the desk and gestured me toward a couple of straight-backed plastic chairs by the opposite wall.

"Thanks" I said, sitting. "I didn't think you'd even talk to me."

He gave an amiable shrug, donning the persona of a friendly small-town cop. "I figure the least I can do is hear you out."

"The least you can do is let Cormac go."

"Have you seen that guy's file? You know what he's done? He should have been locked up years ago."

"And if he had, I'd be dead, and so would you and four other people." I matched him, glare for glare. "He saved my life, Sheriff. That's all I'm paying attention to right now."

His glare set like stone, unrelenting. "That man's a killer."

Yes, but… "You can't deny he saved my life."

"That girl couldn't have really hurt anyone," he said, giving a huff that was almost laughter.

"Didn't you see what she did to me?"

"You had a few cuts," he said.

Then I realized, maybe he hadn't seen. It had been dark; I hadn't even known how bad it was until I got inside and saw all the blood. Marks simply might not have seen it. Once again, I kicked myself for not taking pictures.

I said, "Then you don't believe she really turned into a wolf. You're buying the 'insane woman in a wolf skin' version." He answered with a cold stare that said it all. "How can you believe in werewolves but not in skinwalk­ers? How can you believe in magic enough to curse my house, but not enough to believe what she was? You just want to put Cormac away because you can, without giv­ing him the benefit of the doubt or anything!"

"Ms. Norville, I think we're done here."

"You're a hypocrite—you've broken the law yourself, in the name of protecting people, when you did those things to me. Well, Cormac was doing the same thing."

Marks leaned forward, hand on his desk, his glare still hard as stone. Nothing could touch this guy, not when he was like this. "He shot and killed an injured, dying woman in cold blood. That's what he's being charged with. Good­bye, Ms. Norville." He pointed at the door.

I glared at him, my throat on the edge of a growl, and he couldn't read the stance. All he saw was an angry, ineffectual woman standing before him. And maybe that was all I was.

I left, gratefully slipping out of his territory.

* * *

I went back to the hotel, where Ben greeted me with, "Where are the donuts?"

I'd forgotten. Crap. I shrugged and said, "Didn't get them. Got lost."

"In Walsenburg?" Clearly, he didn't believe me. I just smiled sweetly.

Later, we returned to the county jail to see Cormac. I hadn't had a chance to talk to him, not after the attack, not before or after the hearing. It had been frustrating, sitting five feet away in the courtroom and not being able to say anything to him.

I had hoped Marks would be there to meet us. That he'd have seen the error of his ways and come to make amends by releasing Cormac. That all this would just go away. Wishful thinking. He wasn't there, and Cormac was still locked up.

"Has Marks talked to you?" I asked Ben. "Maybe changed his mind about all this?"

"Are you kidding? He's not even returning my calls."

So much for my grand speech at him having any influ­ence and giving us that Disney happy ending.

Still, Ben had a plan. "I have to go to New Mexico. Talk to people who knew Miriam Wilson. Find out if they knew what she was, and if she killed anyone there. Espinoza's not going to have to dig too much to prove that Cormac's a dan­gerous man. So I have to prove that he didn't have a choice but to kill her."

"He didn't," I said. "Did he?"

"That's what I have to prove."

A deputy ensconced us in a windowless conference room, like a thousand others in police stations and jails all across the country. I bet they all had the same smell, too: dust and old coffee. Strained nerves. Ben got me in by claiming I was his legal assistant. Then the deputy brought Cormac.

Ben and Cormac sat across from each other. I hid away in the corner. I both did and didn't want to be there. I hated seeing Cormac like this. I didn't know exactly what this meant. Objectively, he looked the same as he always did, half slouching, appearing unconcerned with what went on around him—moving through the world without being a part of it. That orange jumpsuit made him look wrong, though.

Ben had a pen and paper out, ready to take notes. "I need to know everything that happened while you were gone. Between the time you left the cabin in Clay and when you got back in time to shoot her."

"I told you before."

"Tell me again."

"I got in my Jeep, I drove all night to Shiprock. Stopped to get some sleep at a rest stop. Went back to the place where we'd gone to bait them." As in, the place where Ben was attacked. "I spent a lot of time just looking around. I honestly didn't think she'd leave the area. That was her territory."

"Except she wasn't a lycanthrope. She didn't have a territory."

"Sure, we know that now."

"Go on."

"I talked to the werewolf's family. The people who hired me. The Wilsons. Trying to find out more about the sec­ond one. They wouldn't tell me anything. They wouldn't believe me when I said there was a second one running around. They thanked me for freeing their son from his curse, and that was it. End of story. I didn't know anything about Miriam. I didn't know they were related."

I hadn't intended on interrupting, but I did. "You shot this guy and nobody said anything. Nobody hauled you in on murder charges there."

"No one reported it. No one witnessed it. Bodies just vanish out there."

That was just weird. But I'd never understood Cormac's "profession."

"They didn't mention their daughter?" Ben asked. "Not once?"

"Not once. I spent a couple more days looking. Then I got your message."

"Not checking your phone?"

"I was in the backcountry most of the time. I didn't have reception. I came back as soon as I did get it. I don't think she followed us. How could she?"

"You heard what Tony said. She was a witch. It may have taken her a few days, but she found us."

Then Cormac asked, "What are the odds they can pin this on me, Ben?"

Ben shook his head. "I don't know. The primary wit­ness has it in for you, Espinoza's a hot young prosecu­tor who'd love to land a Class One felony conviction. We don't have a whole lot in our favor."

"We have a bunch of witnesses," I said.

"And Espinoza will do everything he can to discredit them."

"You'll figure something out," Cormac said. "You always do."

Ben's shoulders bent under the weight of Cormac's trust. "Yeah, we'll see about that," he said softly.

After an awkward moment, Cormac said, "What hap­pened back there, at the hearing—should I be worried? Are you up for this?"

They stared at each other, studying each other. "If you want to get someone else—"

"I trust you," he said. "Who else is going to understand this shit?"

Ben wouldn't look at him. "Yeah. I'll be fine. Some­how. Not getting bail was a setback, but you'll be okay."

He didn't sound confident, but Cormac nodded, like he was sure. Then he made a sour-faced grimace and mut­tered, "I can't believe they dug up that Brigade shit."

I jumped on him. "Yeah, what the heck is up with that? Those guys are insane. It just doesn't seem like your style."

"And what would you know about it?" Cormac said.

Before I could fire back, Ben said, "She spent yester­day in the library digging up every article the Denver Post ever printed on the Brigade. Got the whole story."

"Talk too much, and you're nosy as hell," he muttered.

"I also found the story about your father," I said, almost chagrined at the confession, because when he put it that way, it did seem like going behind their backs. But what else was I supposed to do when no one would tell me any­thing? "I'm really sorry, Cormac. About what happened to him."

He waved me away. "That was a long time ago."

"And now she knows everything about our dark, secret past," Ben said.

"Shit, I was having fun being all mysterious."

"Now you're just making fun of me," I said. "The Brigade. Start talking."

"So. You want to know why I spent a couple of years running around with a bunch of gun-toting wannabe skin­head maniacs?"

"Uh. Yeah. And you can't dodge, 'cause I'm going to sit here until… until—"

"Until what?"

Until you convince me you aren't crazy. I looked away.

Then, he spoke almost kindly. "I was working on my uncle's—Ben's dad's—ranch. He got caught up in it, and I tagged along. I was just a kid, must have been nineteen or so. I didn't know any better. Those guys—I was still getting over losing my dad, and I thought maybe I could learn something from them. But they were playing games. They weren't living in the real world. They hadn't seen the things I had. I left. Quit the ranch. Spent a couple years in the army. Never looked back."

Simple as that. I knew as well as anybody how a person could get caught up in things, when that pack mentality took over. He'd been a kid. Just made a mistake. I bought it.

"Why are you worried about it?" he said, after my long hesitation.

I didn't know, really. After seeing what Cormac was capable of, it seemed strange to find him involved, however tangentially, with such garden-variety creepiness. I said, "I keep finding out more things that make you scarier."

And I had trouble balancing both liking him and being scared of him.

He stared at me so hard, so searching, like it was my fault we'd never been able to work out anything between us. Which one of us hadn't been able to face that there was anything between us? Which one of the three of us? Because Ben had dropped all those hints. He'd known. And now it was Ben and me, with Cormac on the outside, and all three of us locked in a room together.

He'd run, and that wasn't my fault. He scared me, and maybe that was my fault.

Then the spell broke. Cormac dropped his gaze. "It still cracks me up, that you're a goddamned werewolf and you can talk about me being scary."

"It's like rock-paper-scissors," I said. "Silver bullet beats werewolf, and you've got the silver."

"And cop beats silver bullet. I get it," he said, and he was right. Almost, the whole thing made sense. Cormac turned to Ben. "What's the plan?"

"I'm going to go to Shiprock to learn what I can about Miriam Wilson. There's got to be someone willing to tes­tify that she was dangerous, that it was justifiable. We'll decide our strategy when I get back."

"Has Espinoza said anything about a plea bargain yet?"

"Yeah. I told him I didn't want to talk about it until I had all my cards in hand. Hearing's on Wednesday. We'll know then, one way or the other."

He nodded, so it must have sounded like a good plan to him. "Be careful."

"Yeah."

Ben knocked on the door, and the deputy came to take Cormac back to his cell.

"I hate this," Ben said when he was gone. "I really, really hate this. We've never gone as far as a preliminary hearing. I want to tear into something."

I took his arm, squeezing to offer comfort. "Let's get out of here."

We'd only just stepped outside, into the late-morning sunlight, when we were ambushed. Not really—it was only Alice, lurking across the parking lot and then head­ing straight for us on an intercept path. My heart raced anyway, because all I saw was someone half running, half trotting toward me. I stopped, my shoulders tensing, and only an act of will forced me to smile.

Ben grabbed my arm and bared his teeth.

"Hush," I whispered at him, touching his back to calm him. "It's okay. It's just Alice."

He froze, seemingly realizing what had just happened. His features shifted; he didn't relax much, but he didn't look like he was going to pounce anymore.

Strange how I was still getting used to this new Ben. He was a new Ben—strangely, subtly different, slightly less steady, slightly more paranoid. As if he were recovering from some sort of head injury. Which maybe he was. Maybe all of us who'd been infected with lycanthropy were.

"Kitty! Kitty, hello. I'm so glad I caught you." She smiled, but stiffly, as you do in awkward social situations.

"Hi, Alice."

"I just came to give another statement to the sheriff. I thought it might help your friend. Even Joe gave another statement, said that if he hadn't come along—well, I don't know what would have happened."

I did, or I could guess. It really wasn't worth describ­ing to her. "Thanks, Alice. I'm sure it can't hurt."

I was about to say goodbye, to get out of there before I said something impolite, when Alice spoke.

"I wanted to give you this. I've been thinking about what Tony said, about how much we all might still be in danger. It's not much, but I want to help." She offered her hand, palm up. "Tony may be right, I may not know what I'm doing most of the time. But this came from the heart, and I can't help but think that means something."

She held a pendant to me, a clear, pointed crystal about as long as my thumb. The blunt end of it was wrapped with beads, tiny beads made of sparkling glass and pol­ished wood, strung together in a pattern and bound tightly to the crystal. A loop of knotted cord woven into the beadwork had a string of leather through it, so it could be worn around the neck. It was a little piece of artwork. It glittered like sunlight through springtime woods when I turned it in the sun.

"I usually use silver wire to string the beads," she said. "But, well, I didn't this time. I used silk thread."

It was so thoughtful I could have cried. If only it hadn't been too little, too late.

Did I trust it to actually work? A talisman made by Alice, who'd cast that horrific curse against me—and cast it badly, gutlessly, so that it hadn't worked. Had that one come from her heart as well? Did I trust her?

At the moment, it didn't cost me anything to pretend that I did.

"It's beautiful," I said. "Thank you."

She stood there, beaming, and I hugged her, because I knew it would make her feel better. Then I put the pendant over my head, because that would make her feel better, too.

She went to her car, waving goodbye.

"It's hard to know where to draw the line isn't it?" Ben said. "About what to believe and what not to believe. What works and what doesn't."

I sighed in agreement. "She's right, though. If it comes from the heart, it has to count for something."

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