“Could be a troll under the railway bridge.”
“Julia Martin wasn’t anywhere near the bridge,” Henry reminded him. “And a troll would never hunt that far from home. They’re creatures of habit.”
Grace Alton, the witness who’d spoken to Kevin Groves, lived out past Eighth Street where Main began to curve toward Cache Creek, three houses closer to town than the Martins’. Old enough to be part of the original settlement, the small, white frame house was set back from the road at the end of a long, gravel driveway.
Henry pulled in behind an aged Buick and parked. “There’s lights on in the front room. She’s still up.”
“It’s just ten. Why wouldn’t she be?” When Henry turned and lifted a red gold brow, Tony shrugged. “Right. Country.”
Standing on the front porch, Tony fingered the ball bearing that anchored his personal Notice-me-not and glanced back toward the car. Because he knew exactly where the BMW had been parked, he could almost see a shadowy outline—anyone else would have to bump into it to find it. Which was how he’d found it the first couple of times, although it had been more slam into it than bump. His right knee ached remembering.
“One heartbeat. She’s alone.”
“Does it matter?”
“Makes it simpler,” Henry said as he opened the door.
“The door’s not…Right. Country,” Tony said again as he followed Henry into the house. By the time he reached the living room, Henry was on one knee beside an ancient recliner holding the hand of an elderly woman who was staring at him like he was…something elderly women really got into. Tony had no idea of what that might be although from the décor, crocheted doilies and African violets figured prominently. The place smelled like cat piss and the fat black-and-white cat staring disdainfully at Henry from the sofa seemed the most likely culprit.
Unlike dogs, cats had no issues with vampires.
Or wizards, Tony noted as the cat turned that same unblinking green stare on him, and if there was a spell they deigned to acknowledge, he hadn’t found it yet.
“Just tell me what you saw,” Henry said softly, and by the way the old lady leaned toward him, Tony knew his eyes had gone dark and compelling.
“I was out back, wasn’t I, checking to see how the trellis at the end of the old summer kitchen had come through the winter. I have roses in the summer, pink ones; they climb right up to the roof. I saw something moving down by the river. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes.” Her upper lip curled. “I don’t care what that constable says. I can see at a distance as well as I ever could. All right, fine, up close maybe I should wear my glasses, but at a distance I know what I saw.”
“What did you see, Grace?”
She preened a little, an involuntary response to Henry’s attentions, which, given the visible as opposed to actual age difference, was kind of creeping Tony out. “It was passing between those two clumps of lilac bushes. They’re nothing much now, but you should see them in the spring. Lovely. And the smell. Snotty young pup from the Ministry wanted to tear them out. I tore him a new one, that’s what I did. Those lilacs are older than he is.”
Tony wasn’t without sympathy for the guy from the Ministry, whichever ministry it happened to be.
“What did you see passing between the lilacs, Grace?”
“I saw something bigger than a man but hunched over. And it had a big, hairy hump. The shape looked wrong. It looked…evil!” She drew out the final word with obvious enjoyment, and Tony, who’d seen some terrifying things over the last few years, suppressed a shudder. “It was moving fast but I saw, I saw clear as anything, that it was holding a child. I saw the leg kick and the poor little thing had on a red rubber boot. Julie Martin was wearing red rubber boots when she disappeared, you know. I yelled for it to stop but then it was gone, so I came inside and I called the Mounties and they didn’t believe me. Oh, they were polite enough, those young men, but they didn’t believe me not for one minute. ‘Are you sure the boot was red?’ they said. Like I couldn’t see a little red boot against a big, hairy creature. Not like a Sasquatch, I told them. They’re just misunderstood, poor dears. This was ungroomed, ratty. I don’t like to judge but it was clearly a creature of evil appetites come down out of the mountains to feed. He asked me what kind of creature, and I said how would I know; did I look like I knew creatures? And he said maybe the light was playing tricks so I said it was a lot better back when I saw it because they hadn’t exactly hustled to get here, you know. When they left, I said to Alexander”—she gestured toward the cat, who looked bored—“I said, we’ll involve the fifth estate, that’s what we’ll do, and I called the paper.”
A messy pile of tabloids, topped by a copy of the Western Star, had a place of prominence beside her chair. The only visible headline screamed, IT’S NOT A RACCOON! Tony rubbed at a healing bite on his calf. It had actually been a Pekinese with a really bad temper.
“The man at the paper, he believed me.”
“I believe you, Grace.”
She patted Henry’s cheek with her free hand. “I know, dear.”
As amusing as it was to see Henry Fitzroy, vampire, treated in such a way, Tony couldn’t see how this was getting them any closer to finding Julie Martin. They’d gotten as much information from Kevin.
Then Henry leaned closer. “What did you hear, Grace?”
Her eyes widened. “Hear?”
“What did you hear?”
She frowned, slightly, and cocked her head to one side. “I heard rustling through the bushes, but that might have been the wind. I heard the river, of course. I heard…” She looked surprised. “I heard a car door slam.”
“Werewolves drive.”
“Some of them,” Henry admitted as they crossed the backyard. “But not very well.”
“It’s been a long winter and kids are easier to hunt than elk. Maybe they’re taking food back to the pack.”
“It’s possible but unlikely that there’d be enough rogue were around to form a pack.”
“You just don’t want it to be were,” Tony muttered, staring into the gap between the lilac bushes. The gap was only minimally less dark than the bushes themselves. The sky had clouded over and he could barely see his hand in front of his face. “You’ll have to guide me through to the other side. I don’t want to risk a light until I’m blocked from the road. There’s only so much a Notice-me-not can cover.
“Guide me,” he repeated a moment later as Henry set him down. “Not carry me.”
“This was faster. You need to put more work into that Nightsight spell.”
“Yeah.” Tony snapped on his flashlight, beam pointed carefully at the ground. “I’ll get right on that in my copious amount of spare time between working and saving the world. You got anything?”
Crouched, Henry brushed a palm over the crushed grass. “Unfortunately, the police believed Grace enough to check this out. There’s no scent here now but theirs.”
The tracks—the mess the police had made visible even to Tony—followed a path behind the lilacs probably created by deer or some other non-small-child-eating animal. The police appeared to have reached a set of tire tracks that lead up between two houses and back to the road and stopped their search.
“Do you think Ms. Alton told the Mounties about the car door?”
“No. She didn’t remember it until I asked her specifically what she heard. I think because this”—Henry indicated the tracks—“is the obvious place for a car but the tracks just as obviously haven’t been used this spring, the police assumed Grace was…”
“Making things up to get attention?” Tony offered diplomatically.
“Possibly. And you can’t exactly blame them; there’d be no reason to bring an abducted child down here unless you had a car and this”—he waved at the unused tracks again—“this says there was no car. But because we know there was a car involved we need to find another place you can bring in a vehicle. Wait here.”
“Why—”
“Bec
ause I’ll be moving quickly and I don’t want you to fall in the river.”
Tony sighed and turned off the flashlight. He couldn’t see the river, about three meters away and down a steep bank, but the sound of rushing water filled the night, drowning out every other sound.
Five minutes. The scar on his left palm itched and he thought about conjuring a Wizard lamp. Ten minutes. When he got his first decent job in Vancouver, he’d bought a cheap watch with a luminescent dial, tired of spending unacknowledged time in the dark. Fifteen minutes. He yawned and nearly swallowed his tongue as Henry’s pale face appeared suddenly out of the shadows.
“Just past those cedars, it’s all bare rock. It wouldn’t be impossible to get something with four-wheel drive and a high clearance along the edge of the river and then back up to Highway Twelve right at the bridge.”
“Just because it ‘wouldn’t be impossible’ doesn’t mean there was a car there,” Tony pointed out as they headed for Grace Alton’s driveway and the car. “I doubt Ms. Alton heard anything over the sound of the river, Henry. That track’s likely got nothing to do with—”
Henry held up a small red boot.
Boot in one hand, laptop balanced on his knees, Tony scrolled through his spell directory. “Here it is. Pairbonding: joining two halves back into a whole. I cast the spell on the boot and it acts like a compass leading us to its mate.” He pulled a black marker from the pack between his feet and slowly drew a rune on the instep of the boot.
“Whatever has the child reeks of old blood, old kills,” Henry growled, driving up onto the bridge. “The stench hides its nature.”
“If it isn’t rogue were, there’s nothing that says some of the smaller giants couldn’t drive. I mean, as long as the car was big enough.” Rummaging in the pack, Tony pulled out a plastic grocery bag of herbs, removed a spray of small red berries almost the same color as the rubber, and dropped it in the boot. “Belladonna,” he explained. “To clear the way. I’m working the sympathetic magic angle. It’s a diuretic, makes you piss, and that’s clearing that way anyway.”
“I didn’t ask.”
Boot balanced on his palm, Tony reached for power and carefully read the words of the spell.
The boot slammed against the middle of the inside of the windshield.
Henry’s nostril’s flared.
Tony sighed, powered down the laptop, and performed a quick Clean Cantrip. “Yes, I pissed myself,” he muttered defensively, cheeks burning. “Like I said, it’s a diuretic but at least the boot didn’t blow up. Or melt. Or break your windshield.”
“But you’re still using too much power.”
“Am not. New spells always need a bit of fine-tuning.”
“Fine-tuning? My car—”
“Is clean. Fresh. All taken care of.” He slouched down in the seat. “Whether they believed Ms. Alton or not, the cops had to have searched the riverbank. How come they didn’t find the boot?”
“I found it by scent down deep within a crack in the rock. The RCMP would have needed to go over the riverbank with a fine-tooth comb to find it, and I doubt they have sufficient manpower even for this given the foolishness of the recent budget cuts.”
“You sound like Vicki. Only with less profanity.”
Although she hadn’t been a police officer for some years before Henry changed her, Vicki continued to take government underfunding of law enforcement personally.
“Speaking of Vicki”—because speaking of the boot or the child or the thing that had taken her would only feed his anger and that would make it dangerous for Tony to remain enclosed with him in the car—“do you think she’d like one of those purple plants?”
“Purple plants?”
“Like all those plants Grace owns.”
“Would Vicki like an African violet? For Christ’s sake, Henry, she’s turning forty, not eighty.”
Reaching across the front seat, Henry smacked him on the back of the head. “Don’t blaspheme.”
Just before the sign for the Nohomeen Reserve, a gravel road led off to the east, into the mountains. The boot swung around so quickly to the passenger window, it nearly smacked Tony in the head. As Henry turned off the highway, it centered itself on the windshield again, bouncing a time or two for emphasis.
“Not exactly a BMW kind of road,” Tony pointed out as a pothole nearly slammed his teeth through his tongue.
“We’ll manage.”
The road ran nearly due north, past the east edge of the Keetlecut Reserve and farther up into the wild. They passed a clear-cut on the right—the scar on the mountainside appallingly visible even by moon and starlight—then three kilometers later the boot slid hard to the left, the rubber sole squeaking against the glass.
Leaning out past Henry, Tony stared into the darkness. “I don’t see a road.”
“There’s a forestry track.”
“Yeah.” Tony clutched at the seat as the car bounced through ruts. “Remember what you said earlier about a high road clearance and four-wheel drive? And hey!” he nearly shrieked as they lost even the dubious help from the headlights. “Lights!”
“We don’t want them to see us coming.”
“You don’t think the engine roar will give us away? Or the sound of my teeth slamming together?”
A moment later, Tony was wishing he hadn’t said that as Henry stopped the car. Except that he didn’t want the engine to give them away. He didn’t want to walk for miles up a mountain through the woods in the dark either but then again Julie Martin hadn’t wanted to be snatched out of her backyard so, in comparison, he really had nothing he could justify complaining about.
He crammed handfuls of herbs into an outside pocket on his backpack and wrestled the red rubber boot into the plastic bag. When he held the handles, it was like a red rubber divining rod…bag, pulling with enough force that it seemed safest to wrap the handles around his wrist. As he leaned back into the front seat for his backpack, it started to rain. “Wonderful,” he muttered, straightening and carefully closing the door. “Welcome to March in British Columbia. Henry, it’s almost one and sunrise is at six oh six. Unless you want to spend the day wrapped in a blackout curtain and locked in your trunk, we need to be back at the car by three. Do we have time…”
“Yes.”
That single syllable held almost five hundred years of certainty. Tony sighed. “I don’t want to leave her out here either but…”
“We have time.”
The flash of teeth, too white in the darkness, suggested Tony stop arguing. That was fine with him except he wasn’t the one who spontaneously combusted in sunlight or bitched and complained for months after he spent the day wrapped around his spare tire and jack. And it wasn’t like camping out was an option. He skipped the Brokeback Vampire reference in favor of suggesting Henry head for his sanctuary and he go on alone. “I’m not entirely helpless, you know.”
“You’re wasting time,” Henry snarled.
The evil that had taken the child was close. The drumming of the rain kept him from hearing heartbeats—if these things had hearts—and the sheets of water had washed away any chance of a scent trail, but Henry knew they were close nevertheless. Vicki would have called it a hunch and followed it for no reason she could articulate so he would do the same.
For twenty minutes they moved up the forestry track, his hand around Tony’s elbow both to hurry his pace and to keep him from the worst of the trail invisible to mortal eyes in the dark and the rain. The white bag pulled straight out from Tony’s outstretched arm, a bloodhound made of boot and belladonna. A step farther and the bag pulled so hard to the right Tony stumbled and would have fallen had Henry’s grip not kept him on his feet.
The track became two lines in the grass that led to a light just visible through the trees. Not an electric light, but not fire either. A lantern. Behind a window.
“Were build shelters,” Tony muttered, ducking under a sodden evergreen branch. “Or the pack could be squatting in a hunting cabin.”
“I hear nothing that says these are were.” But also nothing that said they weren’t. The rain continued to mask sound and scent but its tone and timbre changed as they drew closer to the building and a pair of large, black SUVs. The cabin, crudely built and listing to the left, did not match the cars.
Lips drawn back off his teeth, Henry plucked a bit of sodden fur from where it had been caught in one of the doors. “Dog. And the stink of old death I caught by the river lingers still.”
“It was wearing dog? Okay.” A moment while Tony assimilated that. “Still could be giants then. These things”—a nod toward the SUVs—“are fucking huge. Hang on.” Releasing one handle, Tony reached into the bag and used the ball of his thumb to smudge out the rune. With the boot now no more than a reminder that a child’s life hung in the balance, he wrapped the plastic tight and shoved it into his jacket pocket. “I’ll likely need both hands.”
The rune in his left hand throbbed with the beat of his heart.
As they stepped under the eaves of the roof and out of the pounding distraction of the rain, Henry felt something die. Not the child—he could hear her heartbeat now, too slow but steady, probably drugged—but an animal who had died terrified and in great pain. Growling deep in his throat, he looked in through the filthy window.
Half a dozen kerosene lanterns hung from the rafters of the single room. One lantern alone made shadows, mystery. Six together threw a light that was almost clinical.
There were two men, middle-aged and well-fed, standing at each end of a wooden table stained with blood. Henry saw nails and a hammer and didn’t need to see any more. Over the centuries he had seen enough torture to recognize it in the set of a torturer’s shoulders, in the glitter in the eye. Both these men were smiling, breathing heavily, and gazing down on their work with satisfaction.
He had seen their expressions on priests of the Inquisition.
They might have started by accident, inflicting pain on a hunting trophy wounded but not killed. Over time, they had come to need more reaction than an animal could provide, and to answer that need Julie Martin lay curled in the corner of an overstuffed sofa wearing one red rubber boot and one filthy pink sock. Her face was dirty but she seemed unharmed. From what he knew of men like these, Henry suspected the drugs that had kept her quiet had kept her safe. There was no point in inflicting pain on the unaware.
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