Frank stood by the bars in the corner to talk to him. “Found him where?”
“Dead, throat cut, blood everywhere. Right in his cell.”
“So Gus did it?”
Cormac listened, almost amused. Gus must have snapped. The guy was half Brewster’s size, but he could have managed it.
“No, that’s the thing, Gus’s pissing his pants. They don’t think he did it.”
That piqued Cormac’s attention.
“They were locked in together, what else could have happened?” Frank said.
“All I know is he got cut up, but they didn’t find a knife, and Gus is pissing himself. Says he didn’t even see what happened.”
Frank chuckled. “Yeah, that’s a good story. That’ll get him off the hook for sure.”
“It’s just like what happened with that serial killer, the one from the thirties, remember?”
“I thought that happened in the sixties,” Frank said.
“Maybe it was a vampire,” Cormac said. “Turned to mist, come in through the bars.”
Frank stared at him. He was young but worn down, a stout white guy with a dozen tattoos scattered piecemeal across his back and arms. He’d spent more of his adult life in prison than out of it.
From the other cell Moe said, “What’d he say?”
“You’re not serious,” Frank said. “Can they do that?”
One thing was for sure, the world had gotten a whole lot more interesting over the last year, since the NIH went public with data proving that vampires and lycanthropes were real. Cormac loved throwing out bombshells like that. He loved that people acknowledged the existence of monsters without knowing anything about them. It made terrifying them so easy.
“But it probably wasn’t that,” Cormac said. “Vampire wouldn’t have left all that blood lying around.”
“Jesus Christ,” Frank muttered. “Now how am I supposed to sleep?”
Cormac knew that vampires didn’t turn into mist. They moved quickly, with faster-than-the-eye reflexes, and that was probably how the mist stories started. They couldn’t break into a locked cell. But if Gus had nothing to do with the murder, then something had gotten in and killed Brewster.
It was just the rumor mill. He’d wait for more reliable information before drawing conclusions.
* * *
That night, Cormac woke up sweating, batting at a humming in his ear. The place had bugs. Rolling to his side, he settled his arm over his head, and tried to imagine he was outdoors, camping at the edge of his meadow, his father sleeping a few feet away, his rifle beside him. Any sign of trouble, Dad would take care of it.
Cormac hadn’t thought much of his father in years, until he ended up here. Here, he thought about everything. What would his father think of him now? Would he be surprised his kid ended up in prison?
The breathing and snores of the dozens of other men on the block echoed and kept Cormac rooted to this place. Best not to let his mind wander too much. Had to stay here. Pay attention. He shouldn’t have thought of his father.
A voice plucked deep in his mind, a buried place carefully covered over, where not even his dreaming self went. That place had lain quiet as a matter of survival.
What are you?
A shadow stirred, rustling, looking for the light. Cormac shut the door on it.
Olson would see him next week and ask, Anything troubling you? Anything you want to talk about? That shadow would start to rattle around the inside of his mind, but Cormac would just shake his head no. Nothing to talk about. Except that the inside of his skull itched. Again Olson would ask, What’s on your mind? And Cormac would say, Let me tell you about my father, who died when I was sixteen. Let me tell you how, and what I did to the monster that killed him.
The buzzing wasn’t a fly; the legs crawled on the interior surface of his skull. He suddenly wanted nothing more than to take the top of his head off and scratch.
It was just this place getting to him. Well, couldn’t let that happen. Had to hold on, stay sane. He had too many reasons to stay sane and get out of here in one piece. He never thought he’d say that. Never thought he’d have anything to live for except the next job, the next hunt.
He drifted off and again woke up sweating. This time it was light out, sun coming in through distant skylights. Cormac still felt like the bugs had gotten to him.
* * *
He thought of all the things that could slice up a man in a locked cell. A guy could do himself in like that if he put his mind to it, and it wasn’t too hard to think of how captivity could drive a man—the right kind of man—to it. That was the simplest explanation and the one the warden would probably settle on. Let the psychologists hash it out.
While Cormac had been joking about vampires turning to mist and coming in through the bars, other things could appear from nowhere, things that didn’t have physical bodies, demons with knifelike claws that fed on blood, curses laid from afar. Ghosts that tickled the inside of your mind. If he’d been in charge of an investigation and the physical evidence couldn’t explain it, that would be the first trail Cormac followed: Did Brewster know anyone who could work that kind of magic, who also had it in for him? Without seeing the body for himself, Cormac didn’t have much to go on. They’d probably find some reasonable, nonsupernatural explanation.
Two guards didn’t come to work the next day.
Yard time was cut short. Half the block didn’t get time at all, which set up an afternoon of trouble. Guys yelled from their cells, hassling guards during counts, which happened half a dozen times a day. The warden even added a count, which started up a rumor that somebody was missing and probably cut up the same as Brewster.
That couldn’t have been the case, because when a count turned up short the whole facility went into lockdown, and that hadn’t happened since the body was found. Lockdown then had only lasted a day, but that made two days now that the routine had been trashed. Without routine, inmates floundered.
At dinner, Cormac took his tray to his usual corner in the dining hall. A couple of tables over, his neighbor, Moe, was tugging on another guy’s arm. Big guy, bald, tattooed arms, glaring across the room with murder in his eyes. Cormac followed the gaze to a group of black men who seemed to be minding their own business. Moe was trying to get the guy to sit back down.
Cormac took his tray and moved another table down, farther away from them, and put his back to the wall. Sure enough, the shouting started, the big guy broke away from Moe’s grasp and lunged toward one of the black guys, who lunged right back at him. The fight turned into a full-blown melee in seconds, two gangs pounding into each other, surrounded by a ring of more men screaming them on.
This was what passed for entertainment around here.
Cormac kept quiet and wolfed down as much of his dinner as he could, because sure enough, guards swarmed into the place, clubs drawn to beat the crowd into submission and drag the worst offenders to the hole. They cleared the whole room. When a guard approached Cormac, he raised his hands, lowered his gaze, and went back to his cell without argument. The prison went into lockdown yet again, which mean a lot more staring at ceilings and grumbling.
“He said it was voodoo,” Moe said right after lights out, in a hissing voice that managed to carry down the row. The guy had somehow managed to extricate himself from the worst of the mess and got out of any kind of punishment. “Hal said that Carmell knew voodoo and made a voodoo doll of Brewster and ripped it to pieces. That’s what got Brewster.”
Somebody muttered at him to shut up.
“Voodoo doesn’t work like that,” Cormac said. He shouldn’t be encouraging the guy.
“It don’t work at all,” Frank said.
“You know so much about it, how does it work?” Moe said.
Cormac sighed. Maybe a scary enough story would shut him up—or make it worse. “That voodoo doll thing is Hollywood. Saturday morning cartoons. Real voodoo, you want something done you have to make a sacrifice. Usually a blood sacrif
ice for something big. You’d slaughter somebody in order to do the curse, not as the curse itself.”
Now there was a thought that halfway made sense. It wasn’t a murder, but a blood sacrifice. That still didn’t explain who or why.
The others shut up for at least half a minute.
“Christ, you’re worse than him,” Frank grumbled.
Moe perked up with what seemed to be a new theory. “Hey, if it wasn’t Carmell, maybe it was you. You seem to know all about this shit.”
“Forget I said anything,” Cormac said, rolling to his side and pulling his pillow over his head.
“Maybe it was Satanists. I heard this story about a cult of Satanists here like twenty years ago—”
* * *
In winter, the creek froze solid, but in spring it ran white and frothing with snowmelt, lace waterfalls tumbling over sheer boulders. He could watch it for hours and stay calm.
Elk came down into the meadow to graze early, an hour or so after dawn when the sun began to peek over the mountaintops. Dad would stake out the herd, choose his target, and fire. Never missed. This was where he’d taught Cormac to do the same. He didn’t bring his clients here. He’d run an outfitting service, worked as a private guide for hunting parties made up of folks with more money than sense. Got them their big stuffed trophy heads and stories for their fancy cocktail parties. But this place was different. This place was for family.
As Cormac watched, the elk vanished. Like someone turning off a TV.
A woman appeared before him, gray, ghostlike.
Terrifyingly out of place, she stood on the dewy grass, hands folded demurely before her, chin tipped up. Her clothing was old- fashioned: a dark skirt that draped to the ground, a high-collared neckline with tight little buttons going all the way up, lace around the wrists of her long sleeves. Her black hair was twisted at the base of her neck, and she wore a hat, a flat thing with a brim and a few feathers curling down the side.
Cormac had an urge to unwrap that hair to see how long it was.
She opened pale lips to speak. The inside of Cormac’s skull itched.
Shivering, he opened his eyes to darkness. Twisting, he looked over his shoulder through the bars, fully expecting to see the woman standing outside the cell. His instincts told him someone was standing there. But deep into night, the place was still. Nothing moved. No one stood there, the pressure at the back of his neck notwithstanding.
“Goddamn,” he whispered. He scratched his head, fingers scraping through his rough hair. The itching faded, but didn’t go away. The skin on his back crawled.
This place was doing its best to make him crazy, but he’d be damned if he let it.
* * *
Moe’s cellmate’s screaming woke the block in the morning, at dawn.
Cormac hadn’t slept well and was already awake. He jumped off the top bunk and pressed himself to the bars, trying to see next door. Frank was right beside him.
In the next cell over, Moe’s cellmate, Harlan, was throwing himself against the bars, reaching through them, lunging like he could push his way through. His breaths came in full-throated screams, over and over.
Cormac smelled blood, and the only way he could smell it from ten feet over was if there was a whole lot of it. Looking down, he saw a dark puddle pushing out, oozing on the floor from the cell to the walkway outside. Harlan must have been standing in it.
A pair of guards came, annoyed looks on their faces, as if they were fully prepared to beat the shit out of the guy. When they reached the cell, their expressions changed. They radioed the control room to open the door, and as soon as the bars slid away, Harlan fell out and ran smack against the railing opposite before the guards caught him and hauled him upright. He was gibbering, unable to stand on his feet. He kept looking back into the cell, eyes wide and horrified. His socks left bloody footprints on the concrete.
It had happened again.
* * *
Cormac thought they might move him and Frank to another cell while they investigated Moe’s death, but they didn’t. They didn’t have anywhere else to put them while the block was under lockdown. Harlan had been dragged to the infirmary.
Frank paced. The prison equivalent of cabin fever was getting to lots of them. Some of the guys were shouting about cruel and unusual punishment, that none of them should have to stay here until the warden figured out why men were dying. Someone had started an Ebola rumor—the disease had infected the prison and was now spreading. Or that the government was using the inmates in experiments. None of that was right. Cormac wondered if that ghostly woman carried a knife under her skirt.
He leaned against the bars, arms laced through, to watch as much of the investigation as he could. The lead investigator, a burly middle-aged guy in a blue Department of Corrections uniform, stepped carefully around the pool of blood. A photographer snapped his camera, recording the crime scene.
An hour or so later, the guards brought the body out on a stretcher. They didn’t cover it up at first, and Cormac got a pretty good look. Moe’s throat had been slit from ear to ear, torn maybe, though the edges weren’t clear through the blood. He didn’t seem injured or cut in any other way. Cormac was willing to bet the same thing had happened to Brewster.
The investigator noticed him watching. The guy had probably been around long enough to have seen a few wild crime scenes and was probably already cooking up some story about how Gus and Harlan had gone crazy and killed their cellmates in exactly the same way. He studied Cormac, taking in details, probably figuring he knew everything about him from those few seconds of looking. Gruff-looking thirty-something hanging on the bars of a prison cell. What else did he need to know?
“You see anything?” the investigator said. “Hear anything unusual from over here?”
Cormac made a shrugging motion with his hands. “I was laying on my bunk. I didn’t hear anything until Harlan screamed.”
The investigator smirked. “Does that mean you didn’t hear anything, or you ‘didn’t hear anything.’” He put up finger quotes the second time.
Why the hell did the guy bother asking if he wasn’t going to believe him? “I figure he must have woken up and seen Moe already like that.”
“Then who do you think killed Moe?”
“Don’t know. Bogeyman?”
Now the guy looked disgusted. “What are you in for?”
“Manslaughter.”
“So you killed somebody but you didn’t mean to?”
“Oh, I meant to all right. I’m here on a plea bargain.”
The investigator walked away in a huff.
“Christ, man.” Frank eased up against the bars next to Cormac. “It’s like I watch you trying so hard to stay out of folks’ way but you just can’t help aggravating them.”
“I just told the truth.”
“Yeah, right,” Frank said, laughing. The laughter sounded wrong and put Cormac even more on edge.
He wasn’t much surprised when a guard came for him and went through the process of pulling him out of the cell. Frank, standing facing the wall, hands on his head, was still laughing, quietly, like he thought Cormac had brought this on himself.
He expected to be put in a closet and worked over by the smug inspector, but the guard led him to Olson’s office. The doctor looked busy, gathering manila folders and setting them aside, indicating for Cormac to sit while he did. He slouched into the chair opposite the desk.
“Thank you for coming,” Olson said.
Cormac chuckled. “Seriously?”
Olson granted a thin smile. “That we’re sitting in a prison is no reason not to be polite.”
“I didn’t think I was up for another session yet,” Cormac said.
“You’re not, but I wanted to talk to you. What have you been hearing about recent events?” He had finished filing and now leaned forward, arms on his desk, his full attention on Cormac.
“My cell’s right next to Moe’s,” he said. “Kind of hard to avoid it.”
“Do you think his cellmate did it?”
“What—both his cellmate and Brewster’s, going batshit and turning killer in the same way? Neither one of them’s a killer.”
“But if they didn’t, what did?”
“‘What did?’ Not who?” Cormac said.
Olson paused, considering, gathering his words. “I’m sure you’re hearing more rumors than I am. People are saying what killed him couldn’t have been human. It was too brutal.”
For a prison full of medium- to high-security inmates, that was saying something. “So what else could it have been?” Cormac said, straight-faced, disingenuous. “Some kind of monster?”
“You’ve had a long association with monsters.”
Cormac wondered how much he’d have to say before he got a referral to the psychiatric ward. Deciding to play out a little line, he said, “Some of my best friends are werewolves.”
“Yes, so your file says.”
Nothing flustered this guy. Olson was starting to look less like prey.
Olson continued. “An autopsy on Brewster’s body showed no fingerprints, no fibers, no sign of a struggle. His throat seemed to have spontaneously opened, the cut reaching all the way to his backbone. Gus is in the infirmary, under sedation. He hasn’t been able to communicate since the guards found him with Brewster’s body. No weapon was found, and Gus didn’t have any blood on him. Because of that he’s not being considered a suspect. Now Harlan is in the same state. I suspect Moe’s autopsy will reveal the same set of mysteries.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Cormac said.
“I’m asking for your advice. Do you have any idea what could have done this?”
Cormac’s first impulse was to blow him off. Olson was part of the establishment that locked him in here. Bureaucrats like him didn’t have room for the bizarre, couldn’t understand that the woman he’d killed was a wizard, powerful and evil, and he’d had no choice but to destroy her. As Frank had observed, Cormac could piss people off just by sitting in one place and looking at them funny. Olson couldn’t force him to help. Why should Cormac volunteer?