“There’s another body. Another guy’s been killed, I saw it, I saw what did it. I need to talk to Olson. To Detective Hardin. Somebody. Let me talk to somebody!”
It wasn’t their job to listen to him; they were dumb brute enforcers. But the walls were closing in around him. All he really wanted to do was scream.
Another inmate was already screaming. The newest body had been discovered.
* * *
The cell in administrative confinement—solitary—had a solid door with a wire mesh—reinforced glass window at face height, a single bed, a toilet and sink, and no room to pace. This was what he’d been so desperate to avoid. They’d put him in smaller and smaller boxes until he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Only thing left to do now was lie on the bunk and sleep. Escape to that meadow, breathe deep and imagine he smelled pines and snowmelt.
No. This had all started with her, that thing, lost spirit or demon, whatever she was. Everything had been fine until she appeared and started scraping the inside of his skull. His head ached. The walls were collapsing.
He leaned on the wall opposite the bunk, refusing to even lie down. His jaw ached in a couple of places. Bruises bloomed. In a strange way the fight had felt good, and the bruises felt real. It had felt good to finally hit something. To strike back. He hadn’t had a chance to strike at anything in so long. He could take his gun to the range, unload a couple boxes of ammo. Feel a hot gun in his hand. That cleansing noise.
Put the gun against his own skull next and make it all stop.
He paced. Three steps one way, three steps the other. Stopped, sat down against the wall. He had to pull his knees up to keep from hitting them on the edge of the bunk. But he wouldn’t lie down. He couldn’t.
He couldn’t tell the difference between exhaustion and the pain of insanity gnawing at him. But he’d beat this thing. Beat it to a bloody pulp.
He closed his eyes.
* * *
A storm rode over the mountains and into the valley.
He didn’t want to be here—it meant he was weak. He’d let his guard down, and now she’d found him, battering at him with wind and thunder—that rattling of the bars again, even though there weren’t bars anymore. On a slope, he ducked toward a tree at the edge of the valley with his arms over his head, trying to wait it out.
Her shouts were the wind. “Let me in, damn you! I must speak with you! You stubborn fool, let me in! I will speak!”
It was a cosmic wail. He, who could wait out statues, couldn’t stay silent against it.
“I can’t help you!” He turned to the sky, screaming a year’s worth of frustration. Maybe a lifetime’s. “Leave me alone!”
“Let me speak!” She was a ghost, a stuck record, a moment in time. She was drawing him into her loop, driving him mad. He would never again leave this room or crawl outside his mind.
“No.” The only word he could throw at her, his voice faltering to a whisper. The blowing wind made him deaf.
“Listen, just listen to me! What must I do to make you listen!” she howled. The wind blasted through the forest; trees groaned.
“Try asking!” he shouted to the sky.
Then, like a whisper through pine boughs, a breath against his cheek, “Please talk to me. Please.”
His legs gave out, bringing him heavily to the ground, sitting on grass that was damp with rain. This was all in his mind. He shouldn’t feel the wet soaking into his jeans. He shouldn’t smell the clean, earthy damp in the air.
“Okay,” he said.
And she was there, standing a few paces away, clutching her hands together. Still poised, back straight and chin up, as if refusing to admit that saying “please” had cost her pride. Like she didn’t want him to see the pleading in her gaze. The wind-touched strands of her dark hair, curls fallen loose from her bun and resting on her shoulder. He might touch the curl and smooth it back into place.
He looked away from her and across the valley. The stream ran full, frothing over rocks. The green seemed even greener. It was high summer here, and he relaxed. Maybe because he could see her now he knew where she was, what she was doing. He could keep an eye on her.
She’d wanted so badly to talk, but she just stood there, like she was waiting for punishment. Waiting to be hanged. If she really was a ghost, if she really had been executed, she would have been hanged. He didn’t want to think about that.
“Well?” he said finally. “After all that, you going to say anything?”
She glanced at the hem of her skirt and wrung her fingers. “I’ve not engaged in conversation in a very long time, and even then I was not a paragon of courtesy. I’m sure I’m more than a little mad.”
That made two of them. “Amelia Parker,” he said. “You’re Amelia Parker. What the hell’s going on?”
She blinked at him. “You know my name? How?”
“I looked it up. You could have just told me, instead of this garbage you’ve been pulling. You want to explain?”
“It’s difficult,” she said, glancing behind her.
“Try me. I have a pretty open mind,” he said.
“Yes, I know. That’s how I found you. I needed an open mind.”
He glared at her. “For what? So you could break it into pieces?”
“No, so I could … so I could control it. I need a body, Mr. Bennett.”
“Let me guess: It’s harder than you thought it’d be.”
“Yes. Minds … they tend to twist up into knots in spite of my intentions.”
“You’ve tried this before?”
She didn’t answer.
“Jesus,” he muttered.
She swallowed, wetting her lips to speak—which made no sense, because she was a ghost. Cormac could almost smell the soap on her skin. The contradiction was making him dizzy.
“I was hanged for murdering a young woman, but I didn’t do it. I’m innocent. I know what did do it, and it’s here now. I hunted this thing a hundred years ago, Mr. Bennett, and while I’m not inclined to believe in an omnipotent God, I believe I have survived—or rather that this small part of me has survived—so that I can stop it now. But I need help.”
Put like that, it did seem like fate. How much did she know about him, besides his name? Had she done enough digging in his psyche to learn that he was also a hunter? That she couldn’t have picked a better body for her purpose?
He said, “Olson—the psychologist here—said this has happened before. Half a dozen bodies over the last hundred years or so, with their throats cut in locked cells. Just like the girl you were hanged for. You say you didn’t do it, but you seem to know a lot about it.”
“I hunted it. Tracked it to Lydia Harcourt, where they found me. Then it followed me here.”
“Why? Why you? You were supposed to be dead, why’d it stick around?”
“I know I can stop it—”
“Where’d it come from in the first place? Do you know?”
“—but I need hands, a voice. I’m so close—”
“I’m not giving you my body,” he said, turning away. “Why not tell me where this demon came from?”
Her brow furrowed, and she seemed to grapple with something. Guilt? Shame, even? “I suppose I ought to have taken it as a lesson not to meddle. Yet I keep on meddling, don’t I?” Her smile was pained.
“What happened?”
“A scene from a boys’ adventure novel. I’m sure you’ve had a few of your own. Something had been buried at a crossroads—imprisoned, rather. I should have heeded the warning carved into the headstone. But there was a promise of treasure.”
“This is all about a pot of gold?” he said, disbelieving.
“No. A Sumerian cuneiform tablet meant to be buried alongside. I thought I could secure the demon, prevent its escape, obtain the tablet that promised tremendous knowledge. I was wrong.”
“The tablet was bait, wasn’t it?” Cormac said. “It didn’t really exist.”
Bowing her head, she hi
d a sad smile. “The thing bound itself to me. Cursed me. It always stayed just out of reach. I could watch it kill and never stop it. Even now.”
He could almost feel sorry for her. He considered the saying about the road to hell.
She paced a few steps down the slope, across his field of vision, looking at the scene, his private valley. Hilltops emerged through misty, breaking clouds. The air was cool on his skin, a different kind of cool than a prison cell in winter. This felt like living rather than being in storage.
“You’ve gotten better at this,” she said, gazing around, squinting against the breeze and surveying the valley as if it were real. “What is this place? It’s somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, I should think.”
Don’t open the door, he thought. After a hesitation, he said, “My dad used to take me here when I was young.”
“What was he?”
“A hunter,” Cormac said, remembering, and flinching at the memory.
“And you?”
“Same,” he said.
“You were sent here for murder, yes?”
He considered his words. Picked at the grass, which felt real, waxy between his fingers. “I killed a skinwalker. She was a monster and needed to die.”
“Who are you to decide that?”
“She was trying to kill my friends.”
“Ah.” She paced a few more steps; her fingers were no longer wringing, but her expression had turned thoughtful, almost resigned. “The friends who come to visit you?”
“That’s none of your business,” he said.
“I’m sorry—it’s hard not to pry. I can tell they’re good people.”
“Don’t touch them.”
“I won’t,” she said and paced a few more steps. “So you hunt monsters.”
“Yes. I do.”
“Then you understand. You must let me in, you must let me do battle with this thing.”
“Do battle yourself,” he said.
“I need physical form to work my spells.”
“Then tell me what to do. I’ll do it, I’ll get rid of it.”
“I spent a decade learning what I know, I can’t just tell you.”
“Then I guess that’s it.”
“Is it because I’m female? You don’t think I’m capable?”
He chuckled. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Then why are you being so stubborn?”
She’d keep picking away at him, like a swarm of gnats. “Look. My mind, this place—it’s all I have in here. It’s all that’s left until I get out. You can’t have it.”
“You would sacrifice everyone here because of that?”
The situation wasn’t that bad. Couldn’t be that bad. Somebody would notice before the whole cell block was wiped out. Somebody would do something. Except for a tiny suspicion he had that maybe she was right.
He started awake. Aching from his shoulders to his hips, he straightened from where he’d slumped against the painted cinderblock wall and stretched out the kinks. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep. He hadn’t meant to even talk to her.
A wave of shouting echoed down the corridor. Hundreds of angry male voices raised in frustration, turned fierce, animal.
He was blind and stupid inside this box. He could look out the window—to the opposite wall, more institutional cinderblock. He couldn’t talk to anyone—he didn’t even know the time of day. His stomach told him it was late. Somebody should be bringing a meal soon. But the shouting told him that the whole place had been turned upside down. This wasn’t right.
Standing, he rammed his shoulder into the door, pounded it a couple of times, hit the intercom button, called for a guard. The shouting outside was like an ocean, like a war.
No one would come to his call. No one would be bringing food. Of all the things that could have happened here, of all the things that could make serving time harder than it already was, he hadn’t expected this. If it wasn’t a riot, it was close to it. A cold knot grew in his gut, something he thought he’d built walls against a long time ago, so he’d never have to feel it again. He hadn’t felt like this since his father died.
He was afraid.
* * *
His father taught Cormac as much as he could before he died, because that was what their family did. Cormac’s grandfather, his father, and his father, who’d fought in the Civil War and then come west, part of the great migration of fortune seekers. At least that far back. The family didn’t have any stories for how they’d learned about werewolves, vampires, and the rest of it. Maybe the line stretched farther back than that. Cormac had always known that monsters were real. When he was twelve, his father started taking him hunting. At first it was the normal kind, deer and elk, living off the land, all that crap. Then they’d tracked and killed a werewolf. His father trailed a wolf where there shouldn’t have been any—wild wolves had been hunted to extinction south of Montana fifty years before Cormac was born. More than that, the creature was bigger than any wolf had a right being. They’d tracked it, baited it, Douglas Bennett had shot it dead, and brought his son to watch the body transform. It turned into a naked, bloodied human as they watched, a scruffy guy maybe thirty years old, rangy and dangerous looking even as a corpse. They weren’t like us, Douglas had said, and it was us or them. That had been the order of the universe, laid out by the center of his universe.
When he was sixteen, they tracked another werewolf. This one turned the hunt back on them.
They’d gotten word a month before—wolf kill in Grand County, a couple of head slaughtered out of a herd of cattle. A lot of ranchers would have written off the loss and not thought about it again. Maybe set traps or poison. But too much about this didn’t sit right—the care with which the prey had been chosen specifically not to draw too much attention, stragglers that weren’t as likely to be missed. The fact that wolves hadn’t been seen in the area in seventy years. There’d been a light snow and the prints were clear in the damp earth. Douglas Bennett had a reputation for being able to handle problems like this.
Douglas and Cormac spent the week before the full moon checking the lay of the land, where the lycanthrope had struck last time, where it might be likely to strike this time. There was always a chance that it would head out for new hunting grounds before then and they wouldn’t find anything. But the creatures were territorial—it’d probably stick around. They asked the ranchers in the area to keep their cattle penned for the full moon and the nights on either side. Except for one fat cow, which they slaughtered as the sun was setting. Then they hunkered down to wait.
The blind, made up of deadwood and laid over with sap-drenched scrub oak, was twenty paces downwind from the carcass. Cormac’s father sat on a piece of decayed log, his rifle resting across his lap. His hand lay across the stock, the finger on the trigger guard. He could fire a shot in half a second from that position. Cormac copied him, sitting behind him and a little to the side. Studied the way he held his rifle and tried to do the same. Admired the quiet way he sat, not fidgeting even a little. He barely seemed to breathe. Cormac struggled to stay quiet, though his heart was racing. His breath fogged in the chill air. This prey wasn’t like any other, his father said over and over. It had the mind of a person under all that fur and monstrous instinct. You could see it, when you looked into its eyes. His father told him he could fire the killing shot this time. If he sat quietly.
The carcass smelled of blood and rot. The blood had poured out and soaked most of the clearing where it lay. The moon blazed down and painted it black and silver. Cormac caught himself bouncing his foot and stopped it, glancing at his father to see if he’d noticed. He hadn’t seemed to. Cormac blushed, wanting so badly not to make a mistake. He hunched inside his army surplus jacket, thankful for his layers of clothing. He adjusted the sleeves, pulling them over his bare hands. He didn’t wear gloves; neither did his father. Gloves interfered with the trigger.
A werewolf’s natural instinct was to hunt people. A smart werewolf might avoid attention by ke
eping away from people; but eventually he’d drift back to civilization. He might have a pack to keep a rein on him, but if that pack ever fell apart, then it would scatter and a dozen werewolves, without leadership, would wreak destruction. Best to get them before that happened.
Nobody knew about the threats that lurked not just in the wild, but in cities, everywhere. Wild and inhuman, all the old nightmare stories grew out of truths that most people had forgotten. Didn’t want to remember. Folk didn’t want to consider that there was something modern technology couldn’t solve. It was up to people like the Bennetts and all who’d come before them to protect, to stand guard, with silver bullets and wooden stakes, protecting humanity against evils they didn’t know they needed protecting from.
Cormac had learned all of this from his father, as his father had learned from his. He felt proud, part of an unbroken tradition. They were warriors, and no one even knew.
His father pointed with the barest movement of his left hand, no more than a finger lifted from the barrel of the rifle, replaced just as subtly. Cormac wouldn’t have seen the wolf as quickly. It didn’t make a sound—the clearing was as quiet as ever, but a huge beast, a furred canine as big as a Great Dane, two hundred pounds easy, stepped carefully from the trees across from them. Dark gray and silver, it might have been a shadow come to life. Its fur made it indistinct, its outline hard to see. A few paces from the cow, it paused, raised its head, its eyes sparking gold in the moonlight. Cormac couldn’t breathe.
His father’s hand had closed around his rifle stock, but he didn’t yet raise the weapon. This was going to be Cormac’s shot.
Cormac worked to keep his breathing steady. He had one shot, had to make it good. Couldn’t move too fast or the creature would see it. Best thing was to let it start in on the bait, distracting it. With silver bullets, they didn’t have to get a good target. They only had to break skin and the silver would poison it.