Dead Silver

by Max Florschutz

  “Food!” they cried. “Food, food, food, food! Bring food!”

  Nope, not so different from other goats. Almost disappointingly so. I’d been hoping they’d be a little more rational, but as I came up to the edge of the pen, my disappointment only intensified as one of them stretched out its neck and attempted to nibble at my hand.

  “You food?” I heard it inquire, its tone almost put-out. I shook my head as it gave my hand a snort, then pulled my staff back as the goat switched its attention to that.

  “No food …” it announced with even more disappointment. One of the goats turned and trotted off, deciding instead to look for food elsewhere. The other two, however, stayed and watched, though I was able to tune out their frequent chants thanks to the practice I’d had working with raccoons. I decided not to tip my hand that I could understand them, mostly out of expectation that they wouldn’t exactly be the most useful to talk to.

  Instead, I pushed a little bit of life into my staff, watching as the faint whorls in the wood came to life with a soft, while glow. It was part of the reason I liked this staff so much. Not only was the wood good, hard, black cherry that could take a bit of a beating, but the rings and curls that had grown into it made some pleasant and eye-catching designs when I channeled my power through it. A lot of people assumed that I’d made the designs myself, but that was neither my style nor how my gift worked.

  I was sort of feeling my way, since I didn’t know much about spellrunes past the basics, but I was hoping that whatever rune Rocke had carved would react when my own power activated. For a moment there wasn’t any reaction at all, but then I smelled the faint, acrid tang of active magic and saw a small flash from one of the boards that made up the pen. At the same time, the goats began to panic, rushing to the side of the pen opposite the rune, bleating frantically.

  “Bad smell! Bad smell!”

  I frowned as the goats shoved themselves into the corner of the pen, as far back as they could get from the protective rune. Why were they running from the rune? It was the thing that was supposed to be keeping them alive.

  Then again, my knowledge of runes was so limited that I couldn’t even begin to guess how this one worked. I’d assumed that it was probably some sort of repelling barrier, but the way the goats were behaving made me wonder if it was something else entirely.

  I let my staff go dark and the rune died down almost immediately, though I could still see the faint marks where Rocke had scratched it into the wood. The acrid smell began to fade immediately, helped along by a gentle breeze. With it went the goats’ panicked urgency, as well.

  “Bad smell?” the bravest of the bunch asked, stepping forward and sniffing. I stared at it for a moment, waiting to see what it did next. “Bad smell gone?” it said, stepping forward again. Then it looked at me.

  “Food?”

  Yeah, it was back to normal, all right. Still, it was odd that they had reacted so negatively to the smell in the first place. Why would they have done that? It was possible that the ward was a double-barrier of some kind, one that kept them inside as well as keeping the chupacabra out. Maybe they’d associated the smell with it activating? They were goats, and goats were known to be stubborn. Maybe they’d tried a few times and learned from it.

  Then again, Mrs. Salas hadn’t mentioned anything about the little rune doing anything to keep the goats in or them testing it, so that probably wasn’t it. I shook my head, catching the attention of one of the goats as I let out a sigh. I wasn’t nearly as good at figuring stuff out as Rocke was. The guy had a mind for it. He was a spook; I wasn’t. But I was a shaman.

  “Hey, you there,” I said to the goat. I didn’t have to speak for my gift to work, but it made things easier, especially with skittish or unfocused animals. Technically, it wasn’t really my voice they heard. At least, I didn’t think it was. Somehow, in the same way that I could interpret their thoughts and emotions and build them into something similar to words, they were able to understand me. I didn’t know if they even interpreted it the same way that I did or if it was some kind of telepathy or what. My grandfather had described it as “letting life understand him.” Was he more right than I was? I had no clue.

  In any case, the effect on the goat was immediate. It spun towards me, its nostrils and eyes widening in confusion as it saw who had addressed it.

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’m talking.” For a moment the goat just stared at me. Then it hurried over to the pen’s edge and stuck its head through the slats.

  “Food out there?” it inquired. “Out?” Well, at least I had its attention.

  “No food,” I said, shaking my head. “Why bad smell?”

  “Bad smell?” the goat asked, confused.

  “Why is smell bad?” I asked, rephrasing my question. It was a bit like talking to a deer, but with a little less skittishness and a lot more hunger.

  “Smell bad,” the goat agreed.

  “Why?” I asked, hoping it understood me.

  “Bad smell kill,” the goat said, shivering. I could sense the deep-rooted fear in it. “Bad smell kill.”

  “How?” I asked the goat, kneeling down so I was at head level. “How?”

  “Bad smell kill,” the goat repeated, backing away. “Bad smell come, death. Bad smell kill.”

  “How many times has the bad smell come?” I asked. The goat gave me a puzzled reply that was less a word and more a total lack of understanding in thoughts and pictures. I shook my head and tried again. “Two bad smells? Two death?” Again, nothing but puzzlement. I might as well have been trying to explain tax math to a five-year-old.

  “One!” the goat said proudly. “One dead. Bad smell many!” I nodded as the goat nickered, shifting itself with excitement.

  “One death?” I confirmed.

  “One!” the goat said. “Not many. One!” I nodded again. If my understanding was correct, they’d had the smell more than once, but only once had a goat died. But Mrs. Salas had said more than one goat had died.

  “What about death without bad smell?” I asked.

  “Bad smell death!” the goat said.

  “No,” I said, trying again. “No smell, still death.”

  “Not food,” the goat said. “Bad smell death.” I gave up, tearing a small tuft of grass from the lawn and giving it to the goat as a way of saying thanks but letting go of my link before its frantic, joyful cries of “Food!” became too annoying.

  I checked over the rest of the barn but there wasn’t much there. Despite its clean outer appearance, the inside was filled with more tools and feed than livestock, although there were two empty pens. They didn’t appear to have been used recently, however, so I passed them by.

  I did however spend a moment extending my senses, looking for any other signs of life that might tell me something. Then I stopped, puzzled, as my senses came back … devoid was the best word to describe it. I might as well have been in a city. I could sense the trees, the faint ebb and flow of plant life, but aside from myself, the barn was empty. I pushed out further, my staff lighting up as I pulled on its storage of energy, and then let go as I reached my limit, perplexed. There was animal life nearby, but the barn was completely empty. Why? Had Rocke left another rune somewhere? If he had, my staff hadn’t set it off. There were birds and mice all around the property, but none in the barn.

  I left the barn and headed back towards the house, the bottom of my staff tapping against the hard earth as I walked. The door rang out under my knuckles, and I waited for Mrs. Salas’s cry before I let myself in.

  “You find anything?” she asked from the island counter. Half of the jam jars were gone now, presumably packed up somewhere. She was loading the rest of them into a cardboard box, her skill and practice at the motion evident in her inattention to the jars while she did it.

  “No, not really,” I said, shaking my head. “I had a question, though. You said you lost two goats?”

  “Si,” she said, nodding. “Two.”

  “Did
you lose one of them after Rocke put the rune up?” I asked.

  “Oh, you mean the defensive magic?” She shook her head. “No, we haven’t lost any since then. Why?”

  “Just checking. I was curious.” What she’d said didn’t really line up with what had disturbed the goats. Unless … “Was there a strange, acrid, smell around after any of your goats died?”

  “You mean the smell of magic?” she said, pausing in her work. She shook her head. “No, not that I remember. I didn’t even know it had a smell until Mr. Rocke put that symbol on the pen.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Just a thought. Also, has that barn ever had any wildlife in it?”

  “I think there’s an owl that sleeps up in the loft,” she said, shrugging. “He likes the mice that hide in the old caves out back. Why?”

  “Just making sure I have a picture of everything,” I said, deflecting the inquiry. “Is it far to the other two places there have been attacks? I’m going to go see if I can find Rocke at one of those.”

  “No, the Jefferson place is just down the road,” Mrs. Salas said. “I’ll draw you some directions.” A minute later, I was out the door with a simple, hastily scrawled map in my hand, a phone number for the Salas’s house in case I needed to contact her or her husband about anything, and a jar of jam “to enjoy my trip with.”

  Chapter 3

  The scent from the jar of jam made my stomach rumble as I rolled down the road, but the directions that Mrs. Salas had given me were in relation to her home. Since it was the only landmark on the map I knew, I decided to push past the hunger and visit the other sites of the attacks first.

  Mrs. Salas hadn’t been exaggerating. The attacks hadn’t happened far from her home. It only took me a few minutes to drive the mile or so to the next site, where a dog had been lost. The place looked lived in, but after a few minutes of knocking, no one came to the door. I performed the same check for local life I’d made at the Salas house, but when I found nothing out of the ordinary I headed for the next stop.

  Along the way, I started to put together a mental map of the area. It wasn’t perfect and I knew I’d need to get a road map—and an active internet connection—later, but it was a start. I knew from my research that chupacabras had an estimated active hunting range of thirty or forty square miles, maybe more. No one had ever caught a live one to find out, but from the few dead ones that had been dissected, they had quite the capacity for range. But I’d never heard of a chupacabra consuming so many animals’ worth of blood before.

  Which is why I needed a map, something tangible I could sketch out an area on. Rocke said he’d gotten a picture of the creature, which meant that he knew for certain it was a chupacabra. But what if it wasn’t a single chupacabra, but a pack?

  The problem was, short of catching one or getting a photograph, there was no way of knowing. Chupacabra research was one of the more active areas of Unusual research, but there just wasn’t much out there about the animal. We knew that they looked like a cross between an insect and a mammal, while actually being the latter, and that they probably hibernated when they weren’t awake and feeding. But aside from the strange biology, there was very little that wasn’t straight-up conjecture.

  Which made most of my theories pointless, I decided, until I had more to go off of or ran into Rocke and compared notes. I pulled up to the next house on the list, the one that had lost another two goats. This house was a lot smaller than either of the last two, as well as much closer to the road. Again, no one was home, and I didn’t feel like intruding on someone else’s property just quite yet.

  The last house on my list was another large one, with a huge workshop nearby and what looked like a decently sized barn past that. I could faintly smell manure as I drove up, but not strongly enough to have come from a full barn. Probably just a couple of cows, then, for meat or maybe just as a hobby.

  A dog started barking as I pulled the Rover to a stop, and a black-and-white border collie darted out of the workshop. I stepped out of my car slowly, letting the dog sniff my boots and decide whether or not I was a troublemaker before I pulled my staff out and closed the door.

  “It’s all right,” I told the dog. It—no, she—gave me a quizzical look as I spoke to her. “I’m just here to talk to your owner.”

  She looked at me for a moment later before giving a single, sharp yip and trotting back towards the workshop, her tail wagging. I followed along behind her, my staff clicking against the gravel drive.

  “Mercury, dow—” the man’s voice cut off as he ducked around the door of the workshop and saw me being led dutifully towards him. “Well, that’s odd. Usually she makes sure everyone new stays in their car until I can check ‘em out. She must like you, friend.” He crouched down, wiping his hands on a dirty rag and then giving the dog a quick scratch behind the ears.

  “Felix Bayou. Call me Felix,” he said, standing and extending the same hand towards me. He was a bit on the larger side, though still not as tall as me, with a deep, friendly voice and a head of hair that had long since migrated down to his face.

  “Hawke Decroux,” I said, taking his hand and feeling the firmness in his grip. This was a man who’d worked for a living. He was a little large, yes, but I could tell from the firmness of his grip that there was a lot of muscle buried under the unassuming exterior. “I’m a friend of Jacob Rocke’s.”

  Recognition flashed in his eyes, and he let go of my hand, his smile growing wider. “Yer’ the shaman he was talking about? No wonder Mercury here liked ya.” He glanced down at her, and she let out a sharp bark, standing up on her back legs.

  “Yeah,” I said with a nod and a grin of my own. “That might have something to do with it. Is Rocke around, by chance?”

  “Jacob?” Felix switched his attention back to me. “Nah, he ain’t. Haven’t seen him since yesterday afternoon when he came by to see what that blood-sucking bug had done to my cow.”

  “Did he come by before that?” I asked.

  “Well, of course,” Felix said, giving me a look that said I needed to catch up. “When it killed my first cow four days ago.” My eyes widened. Two cows? In just over a week?

  “I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head, “but are you saying that the chupacabra has killed two of your cows?”

  “Well yeah,” he said. “One four days ago, and one the other night. Didn’t he tell you?”

  “I just got here this afternoon,” I said. “I haven’t seen him yet. I was hoping I’d find him out here.”

  “Oh,” Felix said with an exaggerated nod that made his whole upper body move. “Well, I haven’t seen him at all today. Still, since yer’ here, I’m guessing you’ll want to take a look at it?”

  “You still have it?” I asked, surprised.

  “The second one,” he said, shrugging as he turned and motioned me towards the workshop. “I had to work at the mine yesterday, so I just shoved it into the cooler and called it good until I could take a look at it today.” He shook his head. “It’s a damn fine waste of a good animal, I tell ya.”

  “Really?” I asked as we stepped into the darkened interior of the workshop. “How so?”

  “Young animal,” Felix said. We moved past the first bit of the workshop, which looked more like a typical garage and toolshed mixed together, towards the back where I could see the limp body of a headless cow hanging from a winch by its rear legs. “If we could’ve let ‘er grow a bit more, she would’ve been worth a quite a bit. As is,” he said with a sigh, “I’ll take what I can get, but I’m not happy about it.”

  “How did she die?” I asked as we drew closer. When I’d been told that a cow had been killed by the chupacabras, I’d been expecting something full grown, but now that I was getting a better look at it, I estimated it was only about three-quarters the size of a full grown cow. Still much bigger than any of the goats that had gone missing, but not quite as large a takedown.

  “Bled out,” Felix said gruffly. “Incisions in the neck. I’m not sure how she
didn’t feel it, but—”

  “Numbing agents in the saliva,” I said, stepping up to the carcass and getting a better look at it. “A chupacabra finds a sleeping animal, licks it, bites, and then … well, you get the picture.” Mercury ran up to me as I crouched, her tail wagging as I examined the stump where the cow’s head had been. “Are the marks still visible anywhere?” I asked, hesitant to reach out and touch the cold, bloody stump.

  “Nah,” he said, shaking his head as he crouched down next to me. “I had to cut through them when I took the head off. Sorry. Your buddy took some pictures though, so he could show them to you. They were right about here, though,” he said, his finger hovering in the air where the cow’s neck would have been had the head still been attached. “Right on the artery. Pretty deep too.”

  “About how deep?” I asked.

  Felix shrugged. “Hard to say, but at least two inches. Maybe three.”

  “That’s pretty deep for a chupacabra,” I said, rising. “Were there any other signs of injury on the body?”

  “Nope,” Felix said, stepping over to a nearby bench and picking up a pair of gloves. “Aside from the wound on the neck, she was in fine condition. Well,” he said as he turned back towards me. “Aside from all the missing blood.”

  “And nobody heard anything?” I asked. He shook his head. “Was there anything odd or unusual about that night?” Again, another shake of his head.

  A thought occurred to me, and I switched tactics. “What about odd smells?” I asked. Felix’s brow furrowed.