2 Blood Trail

by Tanya Huff

  Peter laughed.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said I mate with sheep.”

  It hadn’t actually occurred to Vicki that the wer would have a language of their own although now she thought about it, it became obvious. It sounded a bit like Inuit—at least Inuit according to PBS specials on the Arctic; Vicki’d never been farther North than Thunder Bay. When she mentioned this to Peter, he kicked at a clump of yellowed grass.

  “I’ve never heard Inuit but we sure got the same problems. The more we integrate with humans the more we speak their language and lose ours. Grandfather and Grandmother spoke Dutch and English and wer. Father still speaks a little Dutch but only Aunt Sylvia bothered to learn any wer.” He sighed. “She taught me and I’m trying to teach Daniel but there’s still so much I don’t know. The dirt bag that killed her killed my best chance at keeping our language alive.”

  “You seem to be doing a good job.” Vicki waved a hand back toward the willow. “Daniel’s certainly using it. . . .” It might not be much comfort but it was all she had to offer so far.

  Peter brightened. “True. He’s like a little sponge, just soaks it right up. Cloud now,” he made a grab for his twin’s tail but she whisked it out of his way, “she learned to say Akaywo and gave up.”

  “Akaywo,” Vicki repeated. The word didn’t resonate the way it did when Peter said it but it was recognizable. Sort of. “What does it mean?”

  “Uh, good hunting mostly. But that means hello, good-bye, how’s tricks, long time no see.”

  “Like Aloha.”

  “Aloha. Alo-ha.” Peter lengthened the second syllable until it trembled on the edge of a howl. “Good word. But not one of ours. . . .”

  Suddenly, Cloud’s ears went up and she bounded off into the underbrush. A second later, Peter shoved his shorts into Vicki’s hands and took off after her.

  Vicki watched their tails disappear behind a barrier of bushes and weeds and slapped at one of the billions of mosquitoes their passage through the grass had stirred up. “Now what?” she wondered. From all the crashing about, they were still after it, whatever it was. “Hey,” she called, “I’ll just keep walking to the end of the lane. You can catch up with me there.” There was no response but to be honest she didn’t expect one.

  It was almost comfortable in the lane; a long way from cool but not nearly as hot as it would no doubt get later in the day. Vicki checked her watch. 8:40. “You can make those calls this morning if you like,” Nadine had said, “but you might be better off heading out to the fields and having a look at where it happened before it gets too hot. When it warms up in a couple of hours, no one around here’ll be awake to show you the place. Beside, Peter or Rose can tell you all about the three humans while you go. ” A good theory if only Peter and Rose, or Peter and Cloud, or even Storm and Cloud—whatever—had stuck around.

  She brushed aside a swarm of gnats, crushed another mosquito against her knee, and wondered if Henry was all right. The wer had apparently light-proofed a room for him, but at this point Vicki wasn’t entirely certain she’d trust their good intentions. Still, Henry had been here other times and obviously survived.

  Pushing her glasses up her nose, sweat having well lubricated the slope, she reached the end of the lane and paused, a little overwhelmed by the vast expanse of land now before her. Up above, the sky stretched on forever, hard-edged and blue. Down below, there was a fence and a field and another fence and a bigger field. There were sheep in both fields. In fact, there were three sheep not twenty feet away on the other side of the first fence.

  Two of them were eating, the third stared down the arch of its Roman profile at Vicki.

  Vicki had never heard that sheep were dangerous, but then, what did she know, she’d never been this close to a sheep before.

  “So,” leaning carefully against the fence, she picked a tuft of fleece off a rusty bit of wire and rolled it between her fingers, “I don’t suppose you saw anything the night that Jason Heerkens, aka Ebon, was murdered?”

  At the sound of her voice, the staring sheep rolled its eyes and danced backward while the other two, still chewing, peeled off to either side and trotted a few feet away.

  “So much for interviewing witnesses,” she muttered, turning back to look down the lane. “Where the hell are Cloud and Pe . . . Storm?”

  As if in answer to her summons, the two wer burst out of the bushes and bounded toward her, tongues lolling, tails waving. Cloud reached the fence first and without pausing sailed over it and came to a dead stop, flattened against the grass on the other side. Storm, only a heartbeat behind, changed in midair, and Peter landed beside his sister in a very human crouch. The sheep, obviously used to this sort of thing, barely bothered to glance up from their grazing.

  Vicki, less accustomed, tried to maintain an unruffled expression. Silently, she offered Peter his shorts.

  “Thanks.” He slid them on with practiced speed. “We almost had him that time.”

  “Had who?”

  “Old groundhog, lives under a pile of cedar rails alongside the lane. He’s fast and he’s smart, but this time he made it to his den with only about a hair between him and Cloud’s teeth.”

  “Couldn’t you just change and move the rails.”

  Peter shook his head, bits of bracken flying out of his hair. “That’d be cheating.”

  “It’s not like we’re hunting for food,” Rose put in, stretching out on the grass. “There’d be no fun in it if we used our hands.”

  Vicki decided not to point out that there probably wasn’t much fun in it for the groundhog either way. She slung her bag over the fence and followed a little more slowly. Rails she might have flag-jumped but wire offered no surface solid enough to push off from. Besides, if I try to keep up with a couple of teenage werewolves, I’ll probably strain something. Besides credibility.

  She pushed her glasses up her nose. “Where to now?”

  “Toward the far side of the big pasture.” Peter pointed. “Near the woods.”

  The woods offered sufficient cover for a whole army of assassins.

  Vicki picked up her bag. Time to start earning her money. “Who owns the woods?”

  “The government, it’s crown land.” Peter led the way along the fence, Cloud staying close by his side. “We won’t cut straight across ’cause these ewes are carrying late fall lambs and we don’t want to bother them any more than we have to. Our property ends at the trees,” he continued, “but we’re butted up against the Fanshawe Conservation Area.” He grinned. “We help maintain one of the best deer herds in the county.”

  “I’m sure. Let me guess, that’s how you met the game warden?”

  “Uh huh. He came on one of the pack’s kills, knew it hadn’t been dogs, thought he recognized the spoor as wolf but couldn’t figure out what the occasional bare human footprint was doing in there, and tracked us. He was really good. . . .”

  “And you, that is, the pack, wasn’t being as careful as it could have been.” In Vicki’s experience, complacency had exposed the majority of the world’s secrets.

  “Yeah. But Arthur turned out to be an okay guy.”

  “He could have turned out to be disaster,” Vicki pointed out.

  Peter shrugged. What was done was done as far as the pack was concerned. They’d taken steps to see it would never happen again and thought no more about it.

  “What about the doctor?” She watched Cloud snap at a grasshopper and wondered if the separate forms had separate taste buds.

  “Dr. Dixon’s ancient history.” Peter told her, snatched a high-leaping insect out of the air and popped it in his mouth.

  Vicki swallowed a rising wave of nausea. The crunch, crunch, swallow, gave the snack an immediacy the earlier episode with the rats hadn’t had. And while it was one thing to see Cloud do it. . . . Well, I guess that answers my question. Then she saw the look on Peter’s face. The little shit ate that on purpose to gross me out. She gave her glasses a push and two
steps later plucked a grasshopper off the front of her shorts—fortunately, it was a small one.

  A long time ago, on a survival course, an instructor had told Vicki that many insects were edible. She hoped he hadn’t been pulling her leg.

  Biting down wasn’t easy.

  Actually, it tastes a bit like a squishy peanut.

  The expression on Peter’s face made the whole thing worthwhile. The last time she’d impressed a young man to that extent, she’d been considerably younger herself and her mother had gone away for the weekend.

  Mike Celluci would maintain that she was insanely competitive. That wasn’t true. She merely liked to preserve the status quo and her position at the top of the heap. And no teenage anything was getting the better of her. . . .

  “Now, then,” she tongued something out of her tooth and swallowed it quickly—there were limits—“you were telling me about Dr. Dixon?”

  “Uh, yeah, well. . . .” He shot her a glance out of the corner of one eye but made an obvious decision not to comment. “When our grandparents emigrated from Holland after the war, Grandmother was pregnant with Aunt Sylvia and Aunt Nadine. They got as far as London when she went into labor. We don’t normally use doctors, the pack helps if it’s needed. I went out to the barn when Daniel was born but Rose watched.”

  Cloud looked up at the sound of her name. She’d run ahead and was urinating against a fence post.

  “Anyway,” Peter continued, nostrils flared as they passed the post, “there was this young doctor in the crowd and before Grandfather could carry Grandmother away, he’d hustled the both of them and Father, who was about five, into his office.” He snickered. “Boy, did he get a shock. As soon as they were alone, Grandfather changed and almost ripped his throat out. Lucky for the doctor, Aunt Sylvia was wrong—somehow, I don’t know—anyway, Dr. Dixon acted like a doctor and Grandfather let him live. He’s been taking care of all our doctor stuff ever since.”

  “Handy man to know.” The amount of “doctor stuff” necessary in Canada for government documents alone could be positively staggering. The wer were lucky they’d stumbled onto Dr. Dixon when they had. “So that leaves only Barry Wu.”

  “Yeah.” Peter sighed deeply and scratched at the patch of red hair in the center of his chest. “But you better talk to Colin about him.”

  “I intend to. But I’d also like to hear your opinion.”

  Peter shrugged. “I like him. I hope he didn’t do it. It’ll kill Colin if he did.”

  “Have they been partners long?”

  “Since the beginning. They went to police school together.” They’d reached the second fence. Cloud sailed over it, just as she had the first. Peter slipped his thumbs behind the waistband of his shorts, changed his mind, and started climbing. “Barry’s an okay guy. He reacted to us the same way you did . . .” Twisting his head at an impossible angle, he grinned back over his shoulder at her. “. . . kind of shell-shocked but accepting.”

  Cloud had run on ahead, nose to the ground. About three quarters of the way across the field, she stopped, sat back on her haunches, pointed her nose at the sky, and howled. The sound lifted every hair on Vicki’s body and brought a lump into her throat almost too big to swallow. From not very far away came an answer; two voices wrapping about each other in a fey harmony. Then Peter, still in human form, wove in his own song.

  The sheep had begun to look distinctly nervous by the time the howl trailed off.

  “Father and Uncle Stuart.” Peter broke the silence to explain the two additional voices. “They’re checking fences.” He turned a little red under his tan. “Well, it’s almost impossible not to join in. . . .”

  As Vicki had felt a faint desire—firmly squelched—to add in her own two cents worth, she nodded understandingly. “Is that where it happened?”

  “Yeah. Right here.”

  At first glance, “right here” looked no different than anywhere else in the field. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course, I’m sure. It hasn’t rained and the scent’s still strong. Besides,” one bare foot brushed lightly over the cropped timothy grass, “I was the first one to the body.” Cloud pushed up against his legs. He reached down and pulled gently on her ears. “Not something I’m likely to forget.”

  “No, probably not.” Maybe she should have told him that he’d forget in time but Vicki didn’t believe in lying if she could avoid it, even for comfort’s sake. The violent death of someone close should make a lasting impression. Given that, she gentled her voice to ask, “Are you going to be up to this?”

  “Hey, no problem.” His hand remained buried in the thick fur behind Cloud’s head.

  The wer touched a great deal, she realized, and it wasn’t just the youngsters. Last night around the kitchen table, the three adults had seldom been out of contact with each other. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spontaneously touched her mother. And why am I thinking about that now? She dug out her pad and a pencil. “Let’s get started, then.”

  Ebon had been traveling northeast across the field. The bullet had spun his body around so that the ruin of his head had pointed almost due north. Even without Peter’s description, there were enough rust brown stains remaining on the grass to show where what was left of Ebon’s head had come to rest. The shot had to have come from the south.

  Vicki sat back on her heels and stared south into the wood. Brilliant deduction, Sherlock. She stood, rubbing at the imprints of dried grass on her knees. “Where was your aunt shot?”

  Peter remained sitting, Cloud’s head in his lap. “In the small south field, just off that way.” He pointed. The small south field wrapped around a corner of the woods. “Ebon was coming from there.”

  “Similar shot?”

  “Yeah.”

  Head shots, at night, on moving targets. Whoever he was, he was good. “Which way was the body facing?”

  “Like this.” Peter shoved Cloud’s body around until it was aligned to the northwest. She endured the mauling but didn’t look thrilled.

  Silver’s tracks had been coming from the south and the shot had spun her in an arc identical to Ebon’s.

  The Conservation Area woods ran east of the small south field.

  “I think we can safely assume it’s the same guy and he shot from the cover of the trees,” Vicki muttered, wishing for a city street and a clear line of sight. Trees shifted and moved about the way buildings never did and, from where Vicki stood, the woods looked like a solid wall of green and brown, with no way of knowing what they hid. A dribble of moisture rolled out of her hair and down the back of her neck. Someone could be watching now, raising the rifle, taking aim. . . . You’re getting ridiculous. The killings have happened at night. But she couldn’t stop a little voice from adding. So far.

  Her back to the trees and an itching she couldn’t control between her shoulder blades, she stood. “Come on.”

  “Where?” Peter rose effortlessly. Vicki tried not to be annoyed.

  “We’re going to have a look for the bullet that killed your aunt.”

  “Why?” He fell into step beside her as Cloud bounded on ahead.

  “We’re eliminating the possibility of two killers. So far, the pattern of both deaths are identical with only one exception.”

  “The silver bullet?”

  “That’s right. If the deaths match on all points, the odds are good there’s a single person responsible.”

  “So if that’s the case, how do you find them?”

  “You follow the pattern back.”

  Peter frowned. “I don’t think I understand what you mean.”

  “Common sense, Peter. That’s all.” She scrambled over another fence. “Everything connects to everything else. I just figure out how.”

  “After Aunt Sylvia died, the pack went hunting for her killer but we couldn’t find any scents in the wood that didn’t belong.”

  “What do you mean, didn’t belong?”

  “Well, there’s a lot of scents in ther
e. We were looking for a strange one.” He squirmed a little under Vicki’s frown and continued in a less condescending tone. “Anyway, after Uncle Jason was shot, Uncle Stuart wouldn’t let anyone go into the woods except Colin.”

  Good way to lose Colin, Vicki thought, amazed as she often was at the stupid things otherwise intelligent people could do, but all she said aloud was, “And what did Colin discover?”

  “Well, not Barry’s scent, and I think that was mostly what he was looking for.”

  Cloud was making tight circles, nose to the ground, in roughly the center of the field.

  “Is that where it happened?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Teeth clenched, Vicki waited for the howl. It didn’t come. When she asked Peter why, he shrugged and said, “It happened weeks ago.”

  “Don’t you miss her?”

  “Of course we do, but . . .” He shrugged again, unable to explain. Everyone but Aunt Nadine had finished howling for Silver.

  Cloud had found the bullet by the time they reached her and had dug it clear with more enthusiasm than efficiency. Her muzzle and paws had acquired a brown patina and the rest of her pelt was peppered with dirt.

  “Good nose!” Vicki exclaimed, bending to pick up the slug. And a good thing there wasn’t anything else to learn from the scene, she added silently, surveying the excavation. A quick wipe on her shorts and she held the prize up in the sunlight. It certainly wasn’t lead.

  Peter squinted at the metal. “So it’s just one guy?”

  Vicki nodded, dropping the bullet into her bag. “Odds are good.” One marksman. Who killed at night with a single shot to the head. One executioner.

  “And you can find him now?”

  “I can start looking.”

  “We should’ve found the dirtbag,” Peter growled, savagely ripped up a handful of grass. “I mean, we’re hunters!”

  “Hunting for people is a specialized sort of a skill,” Vicki pointed out levelly. The last thing she wanted to do was inspire heroics. “You have to train for it, just like everything else. Now, then,” she squinted at the woods then looked back at the two young wer, “I want the both of you to return to the house. I’m going to go in there and have a look around.”