“Actually, yes,” I said, nodding. “Which is why I’m here, actually. Is Rocke awake?”
“I don’t believe so,” Ellera said, shaking her head. “But visiting hours are over, so I couldn’t let you see him anyway. And before you say anything,” she said, one finger coming up in front of her as she narrowed her eyes at me, “that same policy is what kept the sheriff from bothering him about an hour ago, so don’t make waves about it, okay?”
“Fair enough,” I said, nodding. “Sheriff Hanks came by again?”
“Yeah, wanted to go in and ‘question his suspect,’ then told us that Mr. Rocke would need to go with him for questioning if he couldn’t do it here.”
“Did he say why?”
She shook her head. “Not past his being a ‘suspect in the official investigation into the disappearance of David Jefferson.’” I grimaced as the words left her mouth. So it was official now. Great. That was just what I needed to be dealing with.
“Did he mention how official the investigation was?” I asked.
“He said he was going to have a warrant soon,” Ellera said with a slightly bemused expression. “Past that, I think most of it was hot air.”
“I hope so,” I said, shaking my head. “With everything that’s going on, the last thing I need is to be arrested because someone doesn’t like Unusuals.”
“I don’t even understand that one,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve never seen him act like this before. At this rate he’s going to get himself banned from the hospital, and I don’t even want to think about the repercussions of that.”
Her statement struck me as odd. “Why?” I asked. “Is he in here a lot?”
“Oh, right. Out-of-towner,” she said, nodding. “His granddaughter has health problems, and she’s here quite a bit. He always stops by and visits her when she is, but if he gets himself banned from the premises …” I nodded. I didn’t have family of my own except my parents, but I’d seen them head to the hospital more than once. Silver Dreams General was the only hospital in the county. It wouldn’t be wise to tick them off.
“Well, he probably won’t push it then,” I said, hoping I was right. “Anyway, thanks for letting me know. I’ll steer clear of him if I can help it. Will Rocke be able to check himself out tomorrow?”
“Ah, one second,” Ellera said, stretching her arms over her head and leaning back to reach the file cabinets behind her. I did my best to keep my attention fixed elsewhere until she snapped back towards me, a file in her hand.
“Probably around ten or eleven tomorrow,” she said, looking up from the paper and giving me a wide smile. “Depends on when he feels like leaving.”
“Then I’ll show up around ten,” I said, nodding. “He’s not going to wait any longer than necessary.”
“I don’t need to take your word for it,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’ve heard stories from the nurses already. He would have walked out this morning if we’d let him.”
“Yeah,” I said, chuckling as I pictured the scene. “That sounds like him. He can’t stand hospitals.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It’s his gift. Makes it a less-than-pleasant experience. Did he say anything about getting rid of that ghost before he left?”
“No he— What ghost?” Ellera said, eyes widening.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, shrugging and trying to look at ease. “It’s not a big deal. You guys didn’t even know you had it.” She gave me a look that said she wasn’t entirely convinced.
“He probably already talked with it,” I said, holding up both hands. “Free of charge, too. You guys should be grateful. He’d charge me.”
“We had a ghost?” Ellera asked again, her eyes even wider. “And we didn’t even know it?”
“Just a minor one,” I said. “Look, forget I said anything about it, all right? It wasn’t a big—”
“What kind of ghost?”
Ellera’s question caught me by surprise. “Excuse me?”
“Did he say what kind of ghost it was? Free-range? Bound? Poltergeist?” she asked, her voice rising in excitement with each type of ghost she named. “Specter? Banshee?”
“I don’t know,” I said, pulling back in surprise. “I guess, maybe bound?” I said, stabbing out at a name that seemed most likely. “Sounds like you know more about it than I do. Ghosts aren’t exactly my area of expertise.”
She laughed, a rich, thick sound that caught me by surprise. It was like audible chocolate.
“Well, I’ve always been a little fascinated by it,” she said, giving me a wide smile. “It’s just neat, you know?”
“Ghosts?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Unusuals, magic, the whole thing. And we still know almost nothing about how any of it works!”
“Hey, as long as it works,” I said. “Like my cell phone. If it works, then it works.”
“I suppose that’s one way to look at it,” she said, cocking an eyebrow at me. “So, since you can’t see your friend, what are you going to do tonight?”
“I think I’m going to go get some dinner,” I said, picking up my staff. “Then head back to my motel room and go over what I collected today.”
Ellera nodded. “Dinner sounds nice. I don’t think I ate enough before I went on shift. I’d come with you, but …” She shrugged. “I’ll have to raid one of the vending machines here soon, grab a quick snack on my break. See you some other time, then?”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “Some other time.” She gave me one last little wave before I turned and headed for the door, my mind busily sorting through the torrents of information I’d amassed that afternoon. It wasn’t until I was buckled into my car and halfway out of the parking lot that my overtaxed mind caught up with what had just happened.
“Wait a minute,” I said out loud, my car coming to a quick stop. “Was she asking me out?”
* * *
“All right,” I said to myself as I pulled my map from my pocket and began unfolding it across the bed. “Let’s take a look at this.” I spread the map out to its full size, giving me a complete view of Silver Dreams and the surrounding valley. The town was dotted with small, colored circles, and I could already see that certain “sets” of colors were clustered together. They weren’t tight clusters—I could see outliers in each case—but they were clusters all the same.
I pulled the room’s only chair up to the side of the bed and took a seat, eyeing the map. I hadn’t had time to finish the last year I’d been looking at, so the brown circles I’d used to mark it looked the most abnormal compared to the nice, neat arcs that made up the other years.
Wait a minute, I thought, narrowing my eyes as I leaned forward. Arcs? I’d been so busy finding and marking addresses that I hadn’t even looked to see whether there was an actual pattern to the attacks. But there it was, plain as day. Each color—except for the last, half-finished one—followed a clear, crescent-shaped arc, with the lowest point facing south.
Now that’s odd, I thought as I stared down at the map. Even odder, the dates on the attacks followed a similar pattern. The newer the year, the further south the attacks. Now that I could see it, I couldn’t unsee it. It was like a small staircase of “U” shapes making its way further south every few years. None of the arcs were perfect, of course; there were plenty of outliers scattered across the city. But I could see the arcs clearly now that I’d spotted them.
Why would it be doing that? I wondered. I leaned back in my chair for a moment, feeling a faint throb in the back of my head as I stared up at the ceiling. I’d definitely spent too much time staring at text today, and my head was starting to remind me of it.
Consecutive arcs, I thought, not willing to give up just yet. Moving further south every year. Like they’re—I sat up as something clicked. Like they’re moving with the edge of the city!
I bent over the map once more, looking at the clusters of colored circles and checking them against the nearest chunks of land the mi
ne had sold back to the city. It was an almost perfect match. For almost every chunk of land sold back by the mining company, there was a matching arc of colors, and I was willing to bet that each and every one of them would match up with the southern borders of the town at that time.
Just like the current attacks, I thought, looking at the four houses I’d circled days earlier. There wasn’t really an arc to it yet, but that was easy enough to explain by the relatively low number of attacks so far. If the previous years were anything to go by, we had at least six or seven more attacks to go before the chupacabra decided it was done for another decade, assuming that the high blood value of its targets so far wasn’t enough for it to quit early.
I reached over and grabbed one of the newspapers I’d “purchased,” flipping it to page seven. Just as I’d suspected, there were multiple cases of missing animals. One German Shepherd, two cats, and a chicken. I plotted out each address—tossing two of them out since they were in the north end of the town—and made small dots on my map.
Bingo. It wasn’t a perfect match, but the two marks I’d made with my pen were more than close enough to Rocke’s cases to be considered a solid connection. I wasn’t sure what to do about the other two. I didn’t want a lot of outliers crowding my map, and I wasn’t even positive they were related. Besides, one of them was the missing German Shepherd, and while I could picture a chupacabra taking down someone’s cat, the dog was out of the question. I left those two items off my map and grabbed the next paper.
There was another missing dog in this one and reprints about the animals that had gone missing the week before. Again, the missing dog was from the north side of the city, so I left it off the map. I set the paper aside and stared at my creation, idly rubbing the back of my head with one hand. What else was there to do?
Then my eyes snapped to the dates I’d carefully written on the sides of each circle. Of course, I thought. It wouldn’t hurt to check.
I started with the oldest cases, the ones I hadn’t been able to finish. I pulled out the marker I’d been using and carefully numbered each of the circles, giving the first a one and moving on until I had reached four. From there, I went to the next most recent set. Again, the same pattern appeared. With a few closely positioned exceptions—and ignoring the outliers, which still seemed to completely lack rhyme or reason—each set of attacks followed an east to west movement, making their way from one side of the city to the other, the last attack always being the western-most one.
But that didn’t line up with what I knew about the current attacks. Between what Mrs. Salas and Felix had told me, the attacks were fairly spread out, hitting different locations on different days in opposition to the previous pattern.
Unless there is more than one chupacabra, I thought, glancing down at the four circles denoting the latest attacks. I played the tip of my pen across each one, trying to remember exactly when each attack had happened. If there were two separate chupacabras, that could account for the variance from the prior attacks. Then again, it could simply be that my prior data wasn’t accurate. I had no idea how exact the newspaper dates had been, even though I didn’t have much reason to assume that they were inaccurate, aside from the seeming disagreement with the latest string.
Then again, the current situation was already odd. None of the previous cases had ever had animals as large as cows being attacked, but as far as timing went …
Occam’s Razor, I thought, leaning back and scrunching my eyes shut. The simplest explanation is often the best. Which meant that the most likely option was the one I had already come upon: all the attacks moved in an east to west progression, and the attacks were strange now due to some new factor, possibly multiple chupacabras out hunting.
My skepticism sated for the moment, I turned my attention to the outliers, the one part of my diagram that didn’t make sense. Some of them were inside the city. Some were on the edges. Some were on the north end. The timing was off, too, each one breaking the pattern I’d found. Worse, I couldn’t simply say they were unrelated, since the newspaper had reported each as a chupacabra attack. So either the paper was wrong in every case—something I doubted given the pictures that had accompanied some of the articles—or my theory had some serious holes in it.
I tried tapping out a timeline between the outliers, looking for a pattern similar to the one I’d already found, but it quickly became apparent that there wasn’t one. Not that lined up with my east-to-west theory, in any case. I tried working backwards, but I couldn’t find any sense there, either. I even used the side of my pen as a ruler and checked the distance from attacks both before and after each outlier, checking the distances between them for a common trait.
Nothing.
Frustrated and with the pain in my head growing more pronounced, I dropped my pen down on the paper and sat back with a sigh. The outliers stared up at me, the dots scattered across the paper like shotgun spread. Even at a distance, I couldn’t see any common ground between them. Color, date, distance … Nothing I thought of matched.
I closed my eyes, letting my head hang over the back of my chair. Maybe the outliers are just that, I thought, the back of my head letting out another wave of protest. Outliers. Maybe they’re from something else completely, something like … I shifted in my seat, eyes still closed. Maybe someone scared them off. Or the chupacabras were using the old mineshafts to get around and just got lost. But that doesn’t explain how they got so far up north, I thought with a frown.
A yawn rolled up from behind my throat, coaxing its way out of my lips and erupting with a wide rush of air as I arched my back against the chair. I could feel my headache growing with each thump of my heart, and I rubbed at the base of my skull with one hand, massaging it back and forth with my fingers.
Another yawn clawed its way to the surface, and I decided that maybe, just maybe, it was late enough to get some sleep. After the day I’d had yesterday and the general pattern of sleep I’d been leading, getting some shuteye two hours—my eye caught the clock, and I mentally corrected—one hour earlier wouldn’t hurt. I folded up my map, deliberately ignoring the scattered circles that still taunted me. Maybe Rocke would see something I hadn’t when I showed them to him tomorrow.
Once my bed was clear and all my “tools” put away, I wandered over to the small sink to brush my teeth, dropping spent clothes from my frame as I did so. My mind was already trying to paint a picture of how I’d spend tomorrow, starting with meeting Rocke at the hospital at ten. From there, he’d probably want to hit each of his client’s homes and renew the runes before they burned out completely. Past that … I shook my head, not wanting to speculate that far ahead yet. This was Rocke’s case, not mine. I was just along for the ride.
Besides, I didn’t actually want to be calling the shots; I was technically still on vacation. I’d been making all the decisions for a few days, and now all I had to show for it was a headache. I could let Rocke take over for a while.
I rinsed my mouth, the last bits of toothpaste swirling away down the drain. That’s it, I thought as I moved back towards my bed and pulled the covers back. I’ll just let Rocke take over. I hit the lights with my free hand and wormed my way under the covers. Maybe then I can get back to the vacation part of this trip.
A quick prayer later, and I was out like a light, my world exchanged for one of dreams.
* * *
I awoke to a faint buzzing sound that tugged at the edges of my consciousness before fading away. Then it was back again, a buzz that rose and fell as if some giant insect were flying past my face. No, not my face. My right ear. Why my right ear?
I pulled one arm out from underneath my covers and waved it past my ear, managing less of a solid wave and more of a weak flop as my muscles responded with all the persistence of weak jelly. The buzzing sound started up again and I cracked my eyes, squinting even in the low light of my room.
The buzz came again, and my mind finally cleared enough to identify it. What I was hearing wasn’t a
giant bug. It was … It was … I let out a groan as it started again.
I squeezed my eyes shut as the familiar sound came again. A cell phone! It was my cell phone, vibrating against the night table where I’d set it the night before.
It took me a moment to make my body obey my commands, but I finally rolled over and convinced my arm to flop across the mattress. It landed roughly near my phone, and my fingers scrabbled against the wooden surface, searching for the cool plastic that would indicate I’d found my target.
The phone vibrated again, its small screen coming alive with a blinding brilliance in the dimness of the room. My fingers closed around it just as the vibration halted, and I lifted it just in time to see the display flash a message at me.
“1 MISSED CALL - 1 UNREAD MESSAGE.” I blinked my eyes, trying to chase away the gritty texture they always seemed to have when I’d been woken up earlier than I’d planned. I could see faint glimmers of light through the closed window blinds, but they were faded and pinkish. Sunrise, then. I checked the phones face again.
Six-twenty. Wonderful. It was a good thing I’d gone to bed early the night before.
I checked the missed call first, but it was a number I didn’t have saved in my phone and that I didn’t recognize. I shifted under the sheets, trying to get comfortable on my side as I clicked away from the call. I could call them back if I got up. If being the key word.
I tapped the screen over to my messages and saw another number I didn’t know. It was the same area code as the number that had called me, but the rest of the digits didn’t match. The timestamp said it had come in about four minutes before the phone call. I opened it.
“Hawke,” the message read. “This is Eve. I’ve got one for you, just happened last night. You owe me twenty bucks.” Below that was an address presumably somewhere in the city.
I sat up, thoughts of sleep rushing from my mind. Another attack? So soon?
I guess it’s been a couple of days since Rocke put his runes up, I thought as I swung my legs over the side of the bed and grabbed my map. The chupacabra’s got to be getting pretty hungry by now if it wants to feed every week. The map crackled as I quickly unfolded it, propping it up against my sheets and running a searching eye across the tiny street names.
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