Raven Cursed

CHAPTER FOURTEEN You’ll Be True-Dead.

A bump-and-grind Country Western number could be heard out in the street, even over the steady patter of rain, an oldie goldie about a funeral in a bar, the singer propped up by the jukebox, dead. Which fit a few of the people inside, some of whom weren’t breathing and had no heartbeat to speak of. When we walked in the door, the place was mostly deserted of normal human customers, but there was still a crowd composed of vamps and the hangers-on of the vamp community, blood-slaves and junkies. Oddly, there were no blood-servants. If I didn’t already have alarms going off in my head, that alone would have spelled trouble. The place smelled of cooked meat and the dry, herblike scent of dead meat. Vamps. I tucked my three silver crosses into my shirt as Beast rose in me and peeked out, curious.

Only one couple was dancing; it was a version of the two-step, but with way more pelvis action than the song or dance style warranted. Lincoln Shaddock and Evangelina Everhart had their legs entwined and their faces close together, whispering, laughing. I smelled vamp and witch blood and sex on them, heated from the dance. And the pink spell covered them both.

I already knew that Lincoln Shaddock had bitten her, leaving two constricted pinprick spots on her neck, but I didn’t know why. They had lived in the same area for years. Nothing in my research suggested they had been together before. So why now? Why was Evangelina spelling the region’s most powerful vamp? What exactly did the pink rosy spell do? As I watched from the shadows, I saw a red mote of spell-light flash out of Evil Evie and zip around the room like a bat out of a hellhole. It whipped around and disappeared into Shaddock’s chest. “Crap,” I whispered. I’d seen that before. To my muscle, I said, “Do you see a pink glow on them?”

“No, but they need to get a room or turn around so I can get a better view,” Derek said.

Before the witch noticed us, I pulled my men into a shadowed corner table. I’d had my share of booths with their restricted sight design and problematic body realignment options. We sat, my jeans stuffed into Lucchese boots with ash wood stakes exposed at the tops, each of us loaded with enough concealed guns, knives, and silver to bring true-death to every fanghead and human in the joint. I spotted Chen, standing at the end of the bar, his face like a slab of granite and eyes black as midnight. He inclined his head slowly, and moved toward the back, disappearing into the shadows. I figured that was tacit permission to do whatever I needed to his boss.

When a perky waitress came we gave cola orders so we could keep sitting at the table. “Drink nothing, eat nothing,” I said, thinking of knockout drinks to disable us, or poison to finish us off.

“Copy that,” Derek said.

I studied the scene. The vamps were all sitting, lounging actually, on long booth seats, one or two to a booth, their human blood-meals gathered at their sides. Blood-drunk slaves were smiling vacuously while being dinner or were working as security, cooks, waitstaff, bartenders, and busboys. Once they looked us over, they returned their attention to the dancers, a security lapse no blood-servant would ever make. One-handed, I checked the placement of my hair stick weapons: six wood stakes and a slender-bladed, sheathed knife. With my other hand, I pulled my cell and dialed New Orleans, ignoring the way my heart tripped when it rang.

The connection opened, and I heard R&B/island music in the background, the signature sound of the new house band at the Royal Mojos Blues Club, a bar and dance joint owned by the vamp master of New Orleans. “Good evening, Jane. How are you?”

I pulled in a slow, calming breath. “Hiya, Bruiser. I’m good. You?”

“Do you need me?”

I thought about that for a moment and decided to go with pretending there weren’t a dozen innuendoes in that one question. “I need you to run an errand for me.” I ignored his “Pity” and went on. “I need you to go to my bedroom and into the closet. I need you to pick or smash open the weapons cabinet in it, and look for a black velvet bag. If it’s there, I need you to open it and pour the contents out on a table. Don’t touch it. And call me. Will you do that?”

“Why?”

“I need to know if Evangelina stole something from me.”

“I can think of far better things to do in your bedroom than play smash and grab, but yes. I’m only a few blocks from there. I’ll call you shortly.” The call ended.

Lincoln had his hand under Evangelina’s shirt. Public displays of affection were not Shaddock’s style; I didn’t like what that said about his state of mind. As for Evil Evie, she was once the most stuck-up, inhibited, repressed woman on the planet. Now? Not so much. I set the phone on the table, wondering how much power Evangelina was siphoning off her sisters and if that was more dangerous than interrupting the spell. I studied Shaddock and his dance partner, thinking about what I’d just set in motion due to the red mote I’d seen.

When Bruiser got to my freebie house in New Orleans he would know I hadn’t planned to return. My belongings were in cardboard boxes on the floor of the closet, packed for shipping. They had Molly’s address on them. They had postage attached. I didn’t know what Bruiser might say or do, but I figured it wouldn’t be pretty.

While we waited, I saw movement among the vamps as two powerful walking dead stepped into the restaurant. They weren’t powerful as in physically imposing, but they were formidable. Commanding. Dominant. Compelling. Dangerous. And, crap. They had decided to pay us a visit. They surged toward us across the floor with the boneless, nearly gravity-defying grace of the hunting vamp. “Heads up,” I said. “Dacy Mooney and Constantine Pickersgill at the door. They want something.” But then Lincoln’s heir and spare would do nothing unless they wanted something. “They’ll smell the gun oil and ammo.”

As they neared, I felt the crosses under my shirt start to glow. The vamps draped themselves into chairs at our table, Dacy wearing a beaded buckskin fringed jacket and dark brown jeans with boots. She had feathers woven into her blond hair. On her, the look worked. Seeing the glow on my chest, Dacy laughed low, as if crosses didn’t scare her. Her fangs snapped down with a small click, one and a half inch bone-white killing teeth. Beast huffed in delight, which always surprised me. She liked sane vamps too much sometimes.

Pickersgill said, “Are you boys here to try your hand against Linc?” There was insult in the word boys, as thick as if he’d used the N-word. But it was threat in the tone that my guys reacted to, pulling weapons, the light gleaming on silvered blades, the smell of challenge rising.

“Hold,” I said. I stared at Mooney’s eyes, blue as her daughter’s, not vamped out, but in control. “I’m here to send the witch packing and Lincoln to Grégoire on his knees, quaking in shame and fear.”

Dacy smiled. “You’un Leo’s enforcer?” Her accent was pure Tennessee, probably poured on thick to keep from sounding like the threat she undoubtedly was, but the heavy accent sounded weird coming out of a vamp’s mouth. I didn’t reply. I had seen the term in a codicil of the Vampira Carta, and read over the language an enforcer used to establish control over vamps, but I hadn’t really studied it. I didn’t fully know what enforcer meant in vamp terms, and I didn’t want to get stuck with any nasty duties I hadn’t already signed up for, not unless agreeing kept my people safe. So I shrugged, which was universal for, Call it what you want.

“No need for violence, y’all,” she said. “If I’da wanted you’uns dead, you’da been hamburger sixty seconds ago. As it happens, however, my little girl says I can trust you, Jane Yellowrock, even if you do hunt my kind. And if you’re speaking the truth, then I’ll be happy to stand aside and let you”—she tapped her cheek as if thinking of the right phrase—“interfere with my master’s plans for the evening. He’s actin’ foolish, which ain’t like him a’tall, and is unworthy of us’ns.” She stood. Over her shoulder she said, “Try not to hurt him too much,” and winked. I laughed, letting Beast show in my eyes.

Pickersgill followed her to their table. It was easy to see who was heir and who was spare: Dacy was firmly in charge, with political savvy, brains, and power. Pickersgill was smart, but in the power department, he was her shadow. As they settled, the outer door opened, and Adelaide entered. She was dressed in slim casual clothes and a pair of Italian leather boots that likely cost more than my entire wardrobe. She cast a fast, evaluating look around the restaurant, met my eyes and let her lips curl up on one side. Then she walked to her mom’s table and slid in.

Derek was watching me. In the past, I would have pulled Beast back down and tried to pretend that nothing had happened when Dacy and I had our little dialogue, but lately I didn’t bother. I was getting tired of the angry, wary condemnation in his eyes each time I proved I wasn’t purely human. Or maybe the irritation was Beast, flexing her claws. Cats didn’t care who liked them, as long as everyone else knew their place—at the cat’s feet, under the cat’s claws. Derek sat forward, his body tensing. Before I could act on that subtle dare, my phone rang, Bruiser’s number on the display. I punched a button. “And?”

“When were you going to tell me you were leaving for good?” His voice was emotionless, empty as a vamp’s.

“When I made up my mind for good,” I said, stuffing guilt down deep and out of the way, “which I haven’t. What did you find?”

“Several things. Magnolia Sweets’ old trunk, open, the contents strewn, a locked weapons cabinet, and an empty velvet bag.” I closed my eyes. I had known Evangelina was a thief when I saw the red motes in her spell. She had stolen the pink diamond, the blood-diamond that carried the sacrificial power of hundreds of dead witch children, the black magic amulet or relic used by the Damours—witch-vamps. I had taken it off the Damours when I killed them, and researched it, learning its name and some of the myths that surrounded it. The blood-diamond. The weapon that was at the heart of the witch negotiations with the vamps in New Orleans.

“Hmmmm,” I said, thinking about Magnolia Sweets’ photocopied diary. I’d had her trunk for a while, and had never gotten around to digging into it. Once the werewolf had died, it didn’t seem like a good use of my time to take a blast to the past. I was betting Evil Evie had opened the trunk and sent the photocopy to Jodi at NOPD. “Thanks. I’ll get back to you. Lock up on your way out, would you?”

“Jane?”

“Yes?”

“I want you to come back to New Orleans. This time without a spell between us.”

“That’s problematic right now,” I said, “because Evangelina Everhart is using that spell on Lincoln Shaddock. And I’m getting ready to intervene.”

“Between a witch and a bespelled Mithran? Do you have a death wish?” He sounded pretty close to dumbfounded.

I chuckled and ended the call. I left the cell on the table, and tossed silver crosses to the men at the table. They caught them, the silver glowing. “Hope you boys are ready to play,” I said, letting my hands drop to the stakes in my boots as I stood. Ash wood, no silver, weapons for wounding not killing, unless I was very unlucky and hit Lincoln’s heart. In that event, I figured I’d be dead at Dacy’s fangs before he hit the floor. And she’d be the new vamp in the talks with Grégoire. I wondered which ending Grégoire would prefer. “Follow my lead, and I’ll leave you an immobilized vamp to restrain. Then I’ll take the witch.”

I moved ahead of my guys toward Lincoln, who was facing me, dancing with his eyes closed, leading Evangelina into a quarter turn. Beast poured her strength and speed into me. I flew across the floor. Hit the couple. Heard Evangelina’s breath grunt. The vamp and witch separated. Bodies moved back and away as my own rammed between them. The pinkish glow of the spell prickled over my skin, scattered. And now that I knew what it was, I smelled witc hblood and black magic, tart and burning, like fire, heavily banked but killing-hot.

Lincoln snarled, vamping out. Fangs dropping. I staked him fast, hitting him in the abdomen, low enough for the watching vamps to recognize a deliberately nonlethal strike. Trusting the men to handle him, I whirled on Evangelina.

She flailed for balance, feet scuffling. I followed her down, grabbing her arms. Pulling them wide, out from her body. Pushing her. Stepping over her, a leg to either side, riding her down. I let gravity do my dirty work, feeling her hit the floor, and the air whoosh out; I landed on her abdomen as if straddling a horse, my feet on her arms, my hands at her throat. “Hiya, Evie,” I said. “Let him go.” And I let Beast slam through me, eyes glowing golden, a growl low in my throat, “or I’ll kill you where you lie.”

“You won’t steal this from me,” she gasped. “I won’t let you.” She rocked hard, more power in her limbs than a human should ever have. The pink glow of the dark magic built beneath her skin.

But the I/we of Beast was coursing through me, and no witch could hope to win. “Yield,” I said, my voice the lower pitch of Beast. “Yield!” I showed her my teeth and she drew back against the floor, chin down as if to protect her throat in my hands. “Say it. Say you yield,” I said. I don’t know what she was seeing, but Evangelina went limp.

“I yield,” she whispered.

“Release him. Say the words.”

“Bíodh sé saor, le m’ordú agus le mo chumhacht.”

I had heard Molly speak Irish Gaelic and this sounded something like that, mellifluous, melodic, and full of poetry. I wasn’t sure what to do, until I heard Shaddock curse.

“To me! To me! Scions to me!” His power rippled over me like a blanket made of cactus thorns. And suddenly there were blood-slaves everywhere, and the snicksnicksnick of semiautomatic handguns readying for fire, followed by the familiar ratcheting sound of shotguns.

All thoughts of killing Evil Evie were pushed aside. I just wanted to get out alive and stop a small war. “Lincoln Shaddock and all his scions,” I shouted over the sudden silence, knowing I was about to get myself in trouble. Just knowing it. But we were on the brink of something deadly. “Bow to the enforcer of Leo Pellissier, Master of the City of New Orleans and Blood Master of the Southeastern United States. Bow or die!” I shouted, using the language from the codicil to the Vampira Carta. The lines sounded so Hollywood I wanted to laugh, but when I felt a knife blade stroke my neck just under my bun I stifled it and added more softly, “By the command of Leonard Pellissier’s enforcer, the Rogue Hunter, stand down!” The rogue hunter. Who was me. And man-oh-man, didn’t that sound weird, to command by my own title.

“Listen to her,” Adelaide said, pleading, commanding. “Lincoln, master, listen to her. She is here to help.”

“Hold, scions,” Shaddock snarled. That unnatural silence fell on the restaurant again. I captured Evangelina’s gaze and held it. She swallowed, suddenly seeming to realize that she was in a spot of trouble. She opened her mouth and I tilted my head in warning. Her lips sealed shut. The blade disappeared from my neck. A cold sweat prickled down my spine in belated reaction.

“Do not hurt her,” Shaddock demanded. “She is mine.”

Crap. He had claimed her? Like a blood-servant? I had only moments before I had to deal with Shaddock, and strangling his pet witch before his eyes was not the way to keep this parley moving forward. Killing Evangelina might tick Molly off too, once she came out of the spell, and if she survived its ending, but I really wanted to hurt the witch. I tightened my fists against her windpipe, lowered my face to Evangelina’s, and murmured against her ear, “You stole something that was entrusted to me.” Her body tensed, her fingers curling into protective fists, thumbs inside. Stupid move. She would break her thumbs if she hit me. “You’ve been using it, spelling your sisters, draining their power, making yourself prettier, younger, thinner. Drawing people to you. Making them feel and do what you want them to. You used it on Bruiser. You tried it on Leo. And now Lincoln Shaddock.”

“My ends justify the means,” she whispered. “I’ll kill you for interfering.”

“Get in line,” I said, my mouth a vibration on her cheek. I pulled back just enough to see her eyes. Strands of hair crossed her face, a red so intense and silken that it looked artificial, altered by the spell she had cast. Her eyes were bright and lovely, her skin so perfect it glowed. “Black magic,” I said, softly, “powered by the blood of witch children.”

Evangelina’s face flushed a florid, almost painful red. She sucked in a breath to speak a spell. I raised up and came down hard, butt on her belly, boots on her forearms. She gagged with pain and I smelled stomach acid and acrid sweat. “Stop fighting. I know what you’ve been doing, but for the safety of your sisters, we’ll deal with that problem and for the return of my property later.”

“Not yours,” she said instantly, though it was more a reflex than actual thought. “But, deal.” I stepped off her arms and stood up. Evangelina rolled over, to hands and knees, and was out the door nearly vamp-fast. So much for taking the witch with me.

I whirled to Shaddock. Only moments had passed, but the vamp looked older and weaker, oddly withered. He had a wooden stake buried in his middle, and three humans in black jeans and tees holding him down. He wasn’t fighting. His scions stood around him empty-handed. “I yield,” he said tiredly. “I yield.”

“You will call Grégoire, Leo’s emissary,” I said, “and offer apologies.” I pulled every formal word I could think of and said, “You will grovel at his feet in shame and fear, in dishonor and ignominy. And this once, I’ll back you, by telling Grégoire that you were under attack by enemies of the parley. This once. After that, I’ll slit your throat, cut off your head, and toss your body to the human protestors. And hope Dacy is better prepared to resist a pretty face. You’ll be true-dead. Do you understand?”

“I do.” He looked at me, his fangs clicked back, his eyes human, or nearly so. Confusion flooded through him, so strong I could smell it. “What happened? What did I do?”

Crap. He really didn’t know what he had done. “You let a witch spell you. And I’ve saved you the one and only time.”

I followed Lincoln back to the hotel, where I guided him to Grégoire’s suite, his elbow firmly in my grip. Inside the suite, he fell on his face, prostrate, and begged the forgiveness of Grégoire and Grégoire’s master in language so flowery and archaic, I didn’t even bother to try to understand it. The delicate elegant vamp looked at me in utter surprise. I managed a small smile and tilted my head, suggesting with body language that Grégoire accept the apology. He stood, snapped down on his vest points, bent at the waist, and pulled the taller, heavier vamp to his feet as if he weighed two pounds. Grégoire was an elder master, and size was no indication of might in an old vampire. He looked at me.

“He was attacked,” I said, trying to think how I could make this part sound as formal and fancy as I needed, to maybe save the negotiations and Shaddock’s butt. “He was spelled by a witch, with an amulet created by Renee and Tristan Damours and their brother. It’s black magic powerful enough to cloud the mind of a master vam—Mithran. The . . . culprit”—yeah, that was a good word—“will be dealt with.”

“Is this so?” Grégoire asked Shaddock.

The tall, craggy-faced vamp looked at me in surprise. In spite of my promise, he hadn’t been expecting me to defend him. “Yes.”

Grégoire focused on me, his eyes slowly bleeding black in scarlet sclera. “I charge you—when this parley is over, you will find this culprit and bring her to me.”

A cold chill I had been fighting all evening shot through me. I was so screwed. And Evangelina was so dead. But if I disagreed, Derek would be given the job; Derek would bring him Evil Evie without a qualm, and when she died, the spell she had snared her sisters in would implode. Molly might die. By agreeing, I was sealing my own fate and destroying my friendship with Molly forever. She had forgiven a lot over the years, but turning her sister over to the vamps for punishment would be the last straw. Already trying to find a way out, I nodded.

Grégoire stared me down—quite a feat for a vamp a foot shorter than me, and I realized he was waiting for me to do something. Like bow? I narrowed my eyes at him. No way am I going to—

“You may set your minions on the financial search,” he said. His words were clipped but there was an amused twist to his lips, as if he knew what I was thinking. Maybe he did. I texted Evangelina’s particulars to Reach, my research guy when I could afford him, with a vamp request to provide a financial background on her. With what Reach charged vamps for info, he could plan a trip to the Caymans on the proceeds from this one job.

The rest of the night I watched the proceedings in Grégoire’s hotel suite, dressed in jeans and boots and drinking tea by the potful to stay awake. The remnant of the hurricane crashed outside the windows. The hired help was jumpy, sliding their eyes away each time one met my gaze, obviously remembering everything I had done in the last twenty-four hours that a human couldn’t. It was sad, and likely to be a problem in the future, but there was nothing I could do about it. I wasn’t human. I never had been, despite the times I had tried to deny it to myself. I was having to deal with it, so Derek and his men could too. A much bigger worry was how I could convince Molly that her eldest sister was doing black magic, when Evie had a coven master’s rights over her. I wasn’t certain about any of the particulars. I knew only one thing. Evangelina had to be dealt with. Somehow.

By dawn, I was beyond exhausted. Back in my room, I showered, dressed in a pair of boy-shorts undies and a tank, and curled into the mattress, pulling the thick comforter over me. Rain pounded at the window. Wind pulsed like the cold breath of the devil.

I was about to close my eyes on the world when I remembered to check the Weather Channel so I could adjust security considerations for the rain. Instead, the TV came on with local a.m. news. A pretty young announcer was saying, “. . . claims he found a campsite deep in the Pisgah National Forest that had been attacked by predators. The teenaged hiker claimed that the site was an old one with the remains of at least two people, located in a deep declivity with a narrow feeder creek at the bottom. This description matches the previous attack sites enough that the sheriff department and park service has sent out searchers. So far, however, park rangers have not found the site, and some are calling the claim into question, wondering if the allegation was something the teenager dreamed up for attention.”

The shot changed to a sign for the Pisgah National Forest, rain slamming down, making a spray with its force. The voice-over said, “This latest mauling and gruesome death is said to be older than the previously discovered campsites, but isn’t far from the campsite at Paint Rock. In each of these cases, the campers were all killed.”

Adrenaline tried to spurt into my system, but instead of increased heart rate, I felt only dispirited apprehension, the anxiety like a sore tooth rather than a raging fight or flight response.

The TV camera shot expanded to reveal the entrance to the park, and focused in on a group of drenched backpackers, who were clearly leaving. The shot changed again to a close-up of three twenty-somethings, the rain-soaked man in the middle speaking for them all. “You expect some element of danger any time you camp, man, but this is worse than anything I ever faced out west, and I used to camp in grizzly territory.”

The girl said, “Yeah, we’re outta here. My parents said if I didn’t leave, they’d come up here and drag me home.”

The announcer came back on and said, “Park and county officials have suggested that campers leave, and are making sure that every camper who stays understands the risks. They had already instituted a check-in system for every hiker and camper, every day, and the numbers of new campers have dwindled to nothing. Until the marauding creatures are trapped and destroyed, the tourist dollars in Buncombe and surrounding counties will dry up to nothing.”

I muted the TV. Groaning, I rolled out of bed and to my feet. So much for sleep today. As I dressed, rain and wind beat at the windows. Oh goody. A hunt in the middle of a hurricane. I didn’t have that misery even when I lived in New Orleans. This was sooo gonna suck.

It didn’t take much to obtain Grizzard’s permission to join the hunt. The sheriff looked worn and wan and beaten, his body odor telling me that he was running on adrenaline, caffeine, and not much else. He’d have given me permission to join if I’d shown up dressed in a chicken suit, he was that tired and that worried. He gave me his personal cell phone number and a GPS unit and waved me off just as the downpour increased intensity.

I ignored the teenaged hiker’s directions and started down the mountain at a different incline from where the other searchers were working. The kid had gotten confused getting back to the park path, but the stench of his fear and the putrid scent of old blood and rotten meat led me down at the proper angle. I hadn’t expected to be hiking in the rain on this gig and hadn’t sent my water-resistant clothing ahead to the hotel. Torrents of water cascaded from the sky, aiming directly down my collar. I was soaked to the skin in minutes, grousing under my breath. This is Leo’s fault. Totally Leo’s fault. And Bruiser’s. Yeah. His fault too.

It took me an hour to backtrack through the woods and mud and laurel thickets until I hit werewolf scent. It overlay the reek of fetid, disintegrating bodies and took me directly to the campsite. There was a lot of gore and parts of three bodies. Maybe four. The camp was so strewn it was hard to tell what was what. The tent was in shreds; scavengers had been at the site, dragging things around; belongings were scattered. I moved back uphill until I found a cell signal and called Grizzard, giving him the coordinates before returning to the kill-site.

The rain made it hard to make sense of anything, and not just because the ground was mushy and the downpour was spilling down my neck. Not just because the cold front was pushing in fast on top of the dying hurricane, changing temps into early fall. The storm had washed all the scents downhill to meet the feeder creek the campers had pitched their tents beside. The creek was now a rushing torrent clogged with trash, brush, and body parts, the roar a violent white noise that drowned out every other sound.

I had seen a lot of gore in my day. I’d made a lot too. But this was beyond anything I had seen, a sensory overload, further complicated by the scent pattern. The wolves had been here more than once, their newer scent overlaying the older one like open wounds, infected and dying. And, of course, the grindylow had paid the place a visit, leaving his fishy trace. I learned one important thing—the woman killed here had been a witch, like Itty Bitty. No coincidence.

I crossed my arms and hunched my back against the cold, but, despite my faster metabolism, the dropping temps were seeping into my bones along with the wet. Standing under the partial protection of a big-leafed Royal Paulownia tree, I studied the site. I didn’t know what was driving the wolves beyond revenge and sickness. The level of violence here made no sense at all. The wolves had rampaged, killing all the campers, even the one woman, in an attack that appeared frenzied and irrational, even for werewolves. I looked out over the campsite, trying to see it from the viewpoint of whacked-out wolf. Rampage. Violence. Bloodlust.

Beast huffed and sent me an image of a spotted kit chasing her tail. There was mild insult in the image, and I chuckled, despite my misery. Moon madness, she thought at me. First shift after losing pack. No purpose but bloodlust.

That made sense, so I worked the timeline backward. Jail, the loss of their pack, then the full moon, had made the wolves unstable, uncontrolled. This site, though new to me, was the first attack site, made soon after the wolves got to the mountains. The attack site with the dead couple on the bank of the French Broad had been the second. The pieces began to click together like dominoes falling into a pattern. When the wolves finished with the campers on the river, they had gained control, and bit the squatter at the abandoned house, leaving him alive. The attack on Itty Bitty, the first site I’d seen, had been the fourth attack, and the place where the three women had all been bitten but left alive, was the last and most recent wolf attack. There had been none since, which might just mean that the wolves had gotten smarter.

If the wolves had made any mistake, it was here, when they weren’t thinking at all. I needed to track them back to where they had shifted to wolf and then back to human. I needed to understand it fully. Shivering with the dropping temps and immobility, I moved up under the laurel, against a rock face, protected from the rain, and found werewolf tracks. By the smell and the number of tracks, they had slept here in wolf form in the last few days. It was evidence. I moved out again and, for another hour, growing colder, wetter, and more frustrated, I stood in the increasing cold, under the unreliable protection of the Royal Paulownia, waiting for the searchers to find my GPS location. I was spinning my wheels, getting nowhere. With the rain, I wasn’t going to be able to track on this one, not without a better nose than I had in human form. And I wasn’t going to shift in front of humans. That left very few options.

Looking over my shoulder, I spotted the searchers sliding down a steep incline, led by the sheriff. I smelled coffee and cigarette smoke and sweat from the group behind him. Grizzard was not gonna like this. Not at all. “Hey, sheriff,” I called out. “You like cats?”

“You mean like the big-cat that walked all over my crime scene yesterday?”

Oh crap. I’d forgotten about the Beast prints. “Um, not exactly,” I said. After that, my day went into the toilet.