by Sam Witt
He followed the mastiffs into the forest, glad to be putting distance between himself and Rae’s home. He knew what she needed from him, a caring and softness that he couldn’t afford. Elsa had shown Al a grim vision of what the future held for him and he was terrified of what would happen if he let his guard down, even for Rae.
The pack led him into a thickly forested ravine. The wind shifted, and he smelled blood on the air. It was stale and cold, but there was no denying the rusty tang. The dogs growled with hunger, but there was an undercurrent of unease in their raised voices.
Despite his eagerness to get at more food for the pack, Al felt the heavy weight of dread settling in his gut. He prayed it was just a poacher’s sloppy butchery that had spilled the blood, or an animal wounded by a coyote leaving a crimson trail in its wake. He prayed, but he knew there was no god listening.
The blood from the kill was splattered in a rough circle, again. The carcass was cold and stiff, white patches of frost clinging to its hide, but the raccoon was mostly intact. Except for its heart and brain, and the bones from three of its legs.
He didn’t stop the dogs from tearing the dead animal apart and gnawing on its frozen flesh. While they ate, he kicked the tripod apart and buried the heart and brains in the snow. Al didn’t know who was behind the mess, but he knew they were up to no good. The circles and tripods had the reek of dark sacrifice about them.
As Al watched the dogs eat, he couldn’t shake the feeling there was something out there, something searching. He could feel it on the wind, a cold edge that cut deeper than the freezing winter temperatures. He lifted his head to catch some trace of another predator. He breathed deeply and caught the scent of blood once more.
Al led the pack on a zigzag course through the wilderness of Pitchfork County. They found squirrels and rabbits, field mice, and even a stray dog. The carcasses were in varying stages of decay, from one killed within the last day to another killed almost a week ago. Though Al couldn’t find them, he had a feeling there were a lot more ritual circles out there, covering a much longer span of time. Whoever was carving out the hearts and smashing out the brains of the local wildlife had been mutilating the animals of Pitchfork long enough to get efficient at the job. It bothered Al that he was only finding the kill now and made him more sure than ever that there was Left-Hand Path sorcery involved. He lifted his head, tried to get a whiff of who might be behind this mess.
But try as he might, Al couldn’t detect the interloper’s scent. He prowled around the edges of the kills, he shoved his head inside the wounds, but there was nothing to smell but blood and viscera. The killer had left behind fewer traces than a ghost; it was as if the animals had been slaughtered by the wind itself.
Al growled and headed toward civilization. He needed to talk to someone who might be able to shed a light on this weirdness. As much as he dreaded it, he needed to see Trevor.
4
Al didn’t have many friends, a fact he didn’t entirely blame on his life as a supernatural shapeshifter. Even before the Beast had become the stronger part of his personality, he’d preferred his own company to that of others. It was just easier to be alone or with the pack now, and with everything that was going on he didn’t have much time to develop or maintain friendships. Outside of his family, he had Rae, and he had Trevor, and that was enough.
Trevor lived in Ironton, which was a huge pain in the ass for Al. He’d been able to walk right up out of the wilderness and onto Rae’s front porch as the Beast, but to get to Trevor he had to cross through town. That meant changing outside of Ironton and making a cold, barefoot walk for at least a couple of miles. As he shivered into his clothes on the outskirts of town, Al wished he could just remain the Beast. It’d make thing so much simpler.
By the time he reached Trevor’s place, which his friend shared with his aunts, Nancy and Lizzie Woodhawk, Al’s feet were blocks of ice. He banged on the back door and waited, shivering in the cold.
Trevor got around to opening the door a few minutes later. He leaned against the door frame and smirked at Al’s obvious discomfort. “You could just come on in. Or do you need permission to enter a home these days?”
Al pushed past Trevor and lunged into the house, eager to be out of the cold. He kicked the door closed behind himself and gave Trevor a halfhearted shove. “I’m a shapeshifter, not a vampire. Vampires aren’t real.”
Trevor rolled his eyes and led the way to the basement, where he lived. Al followed him, careful not to trip over the piles of unwashed clothes scattered down the staircase and across the floor. “Do try to ignore the mess,” Trevor said with a terrible attempt at a posh English accent. “Maid won’t be in until tomorrow.”
Al wrinkled his nose against the basement’s stale odor. The combination of unwashed clothes, body odor, and marijuana smoke was enough to make his stomach lurch. “You live like an animal.”
Trevor flopped down on the edge of his bed and motioned to the beanbag on the floor. “I guess you’d know all about that, wild man. And stop whining about the smell. That’s just your super-sensitive schnoz talking.”
Al eased into the beanbag chair in the center of the floor and rubbed his freezing feet. As they warmed up, they filled with an annoying sting. “I’m ready for spring.”
Trevor picked up the Xbox controller and went back to killing digital terrorists. Al had to look away from the screen. The rattle of automatic weapons fire and splashing blood reminded him too much of the Ladue massacre. “Need to ask you about something,” he said, trying to get Trevor to pause the game again.
Trevor put a three-round burst through the face of an unfortunate guard. “So, shoot.”
Al leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. “I saw something out in the woods today. Someone’s been killing animals and then making, I don’t know, some kind of tripods with their legs.”
That got Trevor’s attention. He paused the game and tossed the plastic controller onto the bed next to him. “Hmm, that sounds interesting. Tell me more.”
“Whoever did it put the hearts under the tripods, and the brains on top of them.” Al tried to think of anything else to tell Trevor. “The whole mess, carcass and all, was inside a circle of blood.”
Trevor dug a battered laptop out from under the sheets on his bed. “Let’s just see.”
He tapped at the keyboard and fiddled with the trackpad for a few seconds. “Some kind of sympathetic magic is my guess. Very specific body parts. Hmm, that’s weird.”
Al leaned forward, but Trevor leaned back and kept the laptop’s screen hidden. “Hey, man, trade secrets.”
Al grunted and flopped back in the beanbag chair. “Fine, whatever. What’s weird?”
Trevor tapped a few more keys and furrowed his brow in concentration. Then he closed the laptop and hopped over to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that was his stock in trade. While most men in their early twenties were content to play Call of Duty and catfish girls on Facebook, Trevor spent his spare time amassing an impressive collection of old books on local legends and lore. He’d also worked with his tribal elders to transcribe a ton of oral Osage myths and wisdom that no one else had ever captured. He’d also managed to acquire a library of occult knowledge unrivaled in the Midwest. If you wanted to know about the supernatural in Pitchfork County or its surroundings, you wouldn’t find a much better source than Trevor.
He pulled a slim tome down from the top shelf with exaggerated care. It was black and red, the binding so old the leather was cracked and peeling away from the spine in feathery strips. “This looks promising. In 1887, north of here, people reported ‘bony pyramids surmounted by spheres of gray matter.’ Sound familiar?”
Al nodded and motioned for Trevor to continue. He didn’t want to spend the rest of the waning afternoon parked in the beanbag chair listening to his friend ramble, no matter how nice it was to have warm feet.
Trevor flipped through a few more pages, nose wrinkled with disgust. “It’s like people didn’t kno
w they were recording their lives for posterity. This guy’s handwriting was for shit. From what I can make out, this went on for a few weeks, then one of the local midwives went missing. Hmm. This isn’t good.”
Al sighed. Trevor tended toward the melodramatic and longwinded once he got started with his history lessons. “Aaaand?”
“They found this guy out in the woods. He was winding up some sort of hoodoo ritual with the midwife as the main course.”
Dark tendrils of dread trailed down Al’s back. “What, he was, like, a Night Marshal?”
Trevor returned the first book to its place on the high shelf and ran his index finger along the rows of books below it. “Here we go.”
He pried the book from where it was jammed between two larger tomes and riffled through the pages. Al knew Trevor had some sort of insane filing system that allowed him to quickly find what he was looking for, but to anyone else it looked like random grabbing and browsing. Trevor found what he was looking for in the second book and returned it to the shelf. After a few more moments of rummaging through the shelves, he held up plain brown book in triumph.
“That guy was a witch finder; not the same thing as a Night Marshal. The Marshals only take action against those who break the Night’s Law by committing supernatural crimes. Witch finders go after any witch they can get their hands on.” He flipped through a few pages in the brown book and presented a crude woodcut illustration to Al.
It was a clear match to the tripods he’d seen earlier that day, complete with gory bleeding heart and mangled brain in their respective places at the bottom and top of the structure. But this woodcut also showed a man cutting open a woman’s torso to reveal a glowing stone. “What the hell is that?”
Trevor flipped the book back around and read a few lines. “It’s a midnight bezoar, the source of a witch’s power. And those tripod things are called hag nets.”
Trevor read a bit more. “Yeah, this is definitely not good. The hag nets are used to locate witches. They’re like spiritual cell phone towers the finder uses to triangulate a witch’s lair.”
Al’s mouth went dry, and his heart began pounding. “What does he do once he finds a witch?”
Trevor rubbed his chin. “He, uh, hunts her down and hacks out her midnight bezoar. And then he eats it.”
5
Al didn’t wait to transform until he’d reached the outskirts of Ironton. He burst out of Trevor’s place at a dead run, fear eating at his guts like battery acid. The change hit him at the edge of the Trevor’s front yard, and he let it have its way with his flesh. Before he’d made it across the street, the Beast was in the driver’s seat, and his clothes were tattered rags on the ground behind him.
Night was coming, and he stuck to the back roads, but Al wasn’t sure he’d gone completely unnoticed. There was always someone watching in Pitchfork, and he had no doubt he’d hear about this little stunt when he returned home. He didn’t care. He needed to get to Rae’s, and he didn’t have time for another barefoot walk across Ironton.
He hurtled through the forest, frustrated that the pack wasn’t waiting for him. The dogs weren’t able to move cross- country as fast as Al, and he would have liked them to know what he was up to. If there really was a witch finder running around Pitchfork, the pack would be welcome muscle.
Al sucked air in through his nose, sifting the winter breeze for any trace of an intruder. The urge to get to Rae’s house, to make sure she wasn’t the witch finder’s target, was overwhelming. Without her eyes, as strong as she was, she would be in real trouble against anyone who meant her harm. If she was safe, she could alert he rest of the coven. Their combined strength would be enough to deal with any witch finder.
As Al raced to reach Rae, he couldn’t pick up any trace of a stranger in that isolated corner of Pitchfork. Even the scent of blood from the kills the pack had found were dwindling to nothing. He’d never experienced anything like it, and the fact that he couldn’t depend on the Beast’s senses to find his enemy disturbed Al at a primal level.
His heart pounded, and panic gnawed at his nerves. Despite what his nose told him, Al’s gut knew there was something dangerous out here, something dark and terrible waiting to strike at those he cared about. He ran into the night, his eyes smoldering amber sparks in the pale light of the February stars.
He was so lost in his concern for Rae, Al almost tripped over the first hound. It was sprawled across the snow in the shadow of a bent pine tree, almost invisible in the fading light. There was a foul stench hanging in the air around it, a clinging reek that leaked from the hound’s gaping maw. Al recoiled from the stench, a thick odor that combined the rich perfume of honey with the churning decay of a bog bottom. Poison.
Al laid his hand on the dog’s shoulder, and the animal whimpered at his touch. Its amber eyes flickered open, then shut, and it let out a long, weary sigh.
Other whimpers and sighs sounded from the gloom around Al. Now that he knew what to look for, it was easy to see the rest of his pack laid out, their bodies hidden in shadows or half-buried in the drifting snow where they’d sought shelter. He could feel their panic and confusion. The poison coursing through the dogs left them weak and paralyzed.
Al growled, furious at himself at missing something so obvious. The deer hadn’t been killed with a bullet or a bow, it had been laid low by poison and then torn apart while it lay helpless on the snow.
The dogs whimpered as Al went to each of them in turn, rubbing their fur, trying to reassure them. The poison wasn’t meant to kill, only to immobilize, or they’d already be dead. He dug out the snow below a wide-branched spruce tree, creating a shelter against the wind that would also hide the dogs. He carried each member of his pack to the shelter and nestled them in as best he could manage.
The moon was high overhead by the time Al had all the dogs resting in the shelter. He cursed the time it had taken and worried that his delay might have cost Rae dearly, but Al couldn’t have done things any differently. What kind of leader would he be if he not only let his packmates be poisoned, but also left them lying exposed in the snow?
Al took one last look at the shelter, then burst into a run, leaping over underbrush and ducking below tree limbs. He held out hope that he wasn’t too late, that he’d get to Rae before the witch finder.
He raced past his fallen clothes, rushing toward the witch’s darkened home. He slowed only when he reached its wide-open door. The storm door banged against its frame in the winter wind, the noise echoing through the empty house.
The air inside smelled dead and sterile. Al stepped across the threshold, his angry growling becoming an anxious whine deep in his chest. He saw the tin of balm still on the table where he’d left it in his hurry to leave. But the chairs around the table were thrown about the little room, tipped over and crashed into the corners. Acorn caps, cracked and splintered, were scattered across the table and floor.
The scene replayed in Al’s mind as he followed the wreckage through the house. The witch finder had kicked in the front door. He’d chased Rae from the table and into the kitchen. She’d stumbled against the counter in her panic, knocking the spice rack into the sink. She’d pushed away from him, and tried to find her way to safety. Her groping hands had skipped over the stove, sending the tea kettle crashing to the floor.
She’d stumbled out of the kitchen, slipping on the hot water from the kettle, then fallen into the hall leading to the back of the house. Al sniffed the air, but he could make out only the faintest scent of Rae, as if the intruder didn’t just lack scent but obliterated it in his wake.
Al stopped at the door to Rae’s bedroom. She’d been trying to reach her sanctum, the heart of her power. If she’d gotten through that doorway, she might’ve had a chance to save herself. Al reached out and put his hand against the door, felt the thrum of power it contained vibrating against his palm.
But Rae had never made it that far. There was a long smear of blood against the door frame.
Al leaned in
close and breathed deep of what was left of Rae’s scent in the blood. He didn’t know how badly the witch was injured, but he did know she’d never let an enemy drag her out of her own home if she were still able to fight. Al’s stomach clenched with a combination of fear and rage.
With no way to tell how badly Rae was injured, or how soon the witch finder planned to go to work on her, Al could only assume the worst.
It was time to hunt.
6
The witch finder didn’t leave a trail to follow, but the smear of blood on Rae’s bedroom door gave Al all he needed to track her. Whatever scent-masking bullshit the witch finder was using, it couldn’t hide the perfume of fresh blood from someone Al knew so well. If Rae bled, even a little, she’d leave a trail the Beast could follow.
Whatever tricks and strengths the witch finder might have, speed wasn’t on the list. The scattered drops of Rae’s blood outside her house were still warm and vibrant against the cold sterility of the snow. Al breathed deeply of their scent and knew they hadn’t been there long. He still had a chance to catch up to them.
From what he’d seen in Trevor’s book, the witch finder couldn’t just hack the midnight bezoar out of Rae on her kitchen table. There was some sort of ritual involved, which meant the witch finder had a hideout nearby, a place prepared for the slaughter. Al just had to run him to ground and free Rae before he made it to his hole and started cutting on her.
Which might not be too hard. The blood drops were closer together, and Al could make out other scents mingled with their rich, red aroma. Hints of Rae’s perfume, the sweet tang of her laundry soap. He was closing the gap.