I shook my head. “No, but it’s the first time someone like you has found out.”
“Like me?” he asked. There was an edge to his voice, and I realized how far we were from town. I don’t think he understood what that meant. Danger went both ways in our little camp.
“Don’t take offense, Jim. I mean someone who is under pressure to solve problems. Most of the people who seek out magic are just dilettantes, not really a threat to anyone except themselves. You can’t imagine how many newbie witches have blown off their fingers or set fire to their own hair. It’s more common than you might think.” I laughed, recalling a warlock from Connecticut who melted his hand to a pewter plate while attempting some hilarious form of alchemy. It took the efforts of three seriously talented witches to free his hand, but not before they took a picture of him pretending to be a Greek Olympian ready to hurl the discus. He’d quietly moved away and given up the art, which was an excellent decision considering the fact that he was likely to kill himself with a spell gone awry. Magic was not a part-time occupation. It was a lifetime at study, and a demanding one at that. I looked Dietrich over again, letting my senses roam a bit. “Not someone who relies on the skills of a soldier. That’s what you were, before?”
“You mean before I was an investigator? No, I was an investigator even when I was a soldier.” He smiled blandly, giving away nothing. “How did you know?”
“Call it a shared fondness for observation. Think of magic as a series of puzzles, but, in order to solve them, you have to identify, sort, and implement the pieces. What does the art of witchcraft begin with?” I asked.
He looked off into the cooling night air. “Observation.” His voice was low.
“Correct. And you, my friend, are a watcher of the first order. I don’t think you grew up in the forest, but you’re comfortable here. That tells me you can adapt on the fly, so to speak. Not many people can, and certainly not a pavement-pounding cop who never left his city. I think there’s quite a bit more to you than a simple detective.” I added two logs to the fire, then nudged one with my boot. Sparks chased merrily upward. They had places to go.
He finished his noodles in silence, then drank deeply of his canteen. For a moment, I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but he broke the silence at last. “You’re right, but . . . let me ask you something. About what’s out there.” He pointed to the dark with his canteen, and the water sloshed with a tinny ring.
“Go ahead. I sense you don’t mean deer and coyotes?”
“Those I understand. They’re animals. Despite the occasional anomaly, animals behave in a manner I can grasp. Now, the world of magic? I don’t understand it. And I find myself wondering, do the people who work with magic follow a logical order? Can you be trusted?” He licked his lips thoughtfully, before piercing me with a stare. “What’s out there that you haven’t told me about?”
I drew a breath, slowly. “I don’t know.” My fingers went to the necklace of their own volition, and the contact released a sense of uncertainty that had built in my thoughts as I considered the answer. “I’m not sure I can even imagine what is waiting for us. I can tell you some of the things that I’ve seen. Personally.” I shivered with memory. “There are monsters, Jim. And of course, there are ghosts. There are always ghosts.”
“Why? And why here?” he asked.
I waved vaguely at the entirety of our scene. “Ghosts are copies made under extreme circumstances. It takes a violent, or memorable, or even poignant death to create a ghost, and they tend to stick close to home, so to speak. Humans have been here for 10,000 years, so, yeah—there are ghosts. It’s just that some of them aren’t necessarily sane, nor are they welcoming of people who look like us.”
He thought about that, letting small nods slip past his implacable exterior.
“That isn’t the worst, though, is it?” he asked. I must have given something away in my eyes, because I’d kept my face an impassive mask.
I felt myself shrug. “No, not by a long shot. There are dead things, too. Or . . . they’re partially dead. Like halfway, stuck in limbo between life and the ever after. They’re almost always tormented, and vicious. Stars and Sky, can they be cruel.” I thought of things in Gran’s grimoir, and the chill of unseen fingers touched my spine. “They exist in shadows, mostly.”
“I know about shadows.” Dietrich gave me a wintry smile. “I’m only in the woods with you because I believe in the shadows.”
I cocked my head at him, as his voice was soft and flat. “What have you seen?”
He shook his head, a tiny gesture of denial for such a tall man. “It isn’t what I’ve seen. It’s what was missing.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Afghanistan. Fourteen years ago. The villages there, they build them like terraces, do you know what I mean?” he asked.
I nodded once, letting the night settle around us again in that quiet moment.
His confessional seemed to still the air. “At the base of this one village, the stones rolled down to form these slumping piles, all cut angles and glimmering edges. We scouted an entire valley and didn’t find a single sign of life, except for some fresh bones stuck haphazardly into those rock piles. To the man we were terrified; the air itself seemed to buzz with malignant energy. I didn’t spook easily, but the quiet in that valley was unnatural. There was no smell, either. Nothing. No cooking fires, no spices, no animal dung. Just this absence, like something had scrubbed the entire place of humanity.”
“Did you find anything?” I asked. I understood what he’d felt. It was something I knew well.
“Nah. Nothing. A few spilled coins in the dirt floor of one house. They winked at me in the gloom, so I scooped them up, dropped them into my pocket, and we walked out of the valley in complete silence. I don’t think any of us uttered a sound until well after dawn. We were too afraid. There were eyes on us the entire time. I could feel it.” He pulled at his canteen again, then swished the water in his mouth before swallowing. His forehead shined with the effort of concentration, and I let him refocus without any input from me. Sometimes, a story must be allowed to form at its own speed. “I looked at the coins in the sunlight. You know who was on them? Alexander the Great. And they were flecked with blood, and something charred. I lifted a coin to my nose and it smelled—it was awful. A horror show. Like roasted pork, and blood, and dust.”
“The scent of a human being?”
“No.” He was adamant.
“Were the coins silver? Tell me about them,” I directed him, but gently.
“Gold, and they were re-struck. I know that now. Someone had remade the coins at a later date, but Alexander was still on one side,” Dietrich explained.
“What shape of cross was on the reverse?” I asked.
Deitrich’s head snapped to me as his eyes flew open.
“Was it a regular cross, Jim? Or something more primitive?”
“How did you know what was on the coin?” His astonishment was palpable, like a physical thing. He didn’t bother to cover his surprise.
“That smell? Vampire. The villagers used the coins as a sort of covenant with the monster, I bet, but something went wrong and the beast took them. All of them,” I explained, then I watched him sift the memory of that silent valley, and knew that he was doing some uncomfortable math in his head. “How many homes?”
He looked at me, lips pressed into a thin line. “Maybe sixty or more. All filled with families. They were herdsman, I think, but a few of them farmed, too.” He spat in the fire before going on. “They made a deal with the devil?”
“It’s not uncommon. Vamps will move around until they find a place of relative security. For all of their elegant aspirations, they’re really just animals. It’s one of the reasons they do so well in the wilder places of the world. Think about where all of our vampire lore originates. Transylvania? Wallachia? Romania? All beautifully rugged, and filled with shadowed places to hide.”
Jim chuckled with resignation. “I had n
o idea. I mean, assuming I’d ever believed in the supernatural, I couldn’t picture a vampire anywhere except the heart of a city. A werewolf, maybe—hey, are those real, too?”
“They are, and they’re incredibly unpredictable. Lycanthropes are feast or famine in terms of how they fit in,” I stated, with some authority. “Shifters are a part of every community, even if they did tend to stay hidden. The distinction between lycanthropes and vampires was largely how they played with others. As far as the undead in general, don’t get me started. I’ve even met a mummy, and he was polite, smelly, and a bit too familiar with his hands.” I winced in memory. “It turned out he’d been born in France during one of the periods of sexual freedom, and his brain had been preserved in a permanently horny state. Aside from the cloud of spices that accompanied him everywhere, if you stayed out of arm’s reach, Claude had been a pretty nice guy. At last report, he was running an export company somewhere in the Caribbean. I don’t know how well mummies hold up under intense humidity, but something told me he might be getting kind of ripe after a couple years in the tropics.”
Dietrich snorted, stifling a laugh. “Every time you open your mouth, my world gets a little bigger. I had no idea.”
“Believe me, that’s how most of the supernatural world wants it. Lycanthropes are no different. Mostly.” I looked up at the growing stars. The Milky Way was a luminous belt pulsing overhead; it dared me to look away. We were a short distance from town, but it could have been anywhere in the deepest recesses of the park. A fox cried out in the distance, the jarring shriek dying away into the cool of night. The forest was still vibrantly alive, even though I could feel tiredness pulling at my eyelids. The day’s walk had been long, uphill, and intermittently hot.
“Let’s turn in. You’re sure about the wardstone?” Jim looked around suspiciously. His world was being turned inside out one magical fact at a time. All in all, I thought he was adjusting rather well. We both unrolled our sleeping bags and turned them toward the fire. It was a small, cozy camp, and even though the earth was hard, it was even.
I ran my fingers over my charm bracelet to reassure myself that our defenses were in place before slipping into my bag, boots off, and clothes on. Dietrich then climbed into his, granting me a wary smile as he closed his eyes and fell instantly asleep. There were only two kinds of people who could do that: new parents and soldiers. I made a note to quiz him a bit more about his employment history, and then I too fell asleep to the gentle hiss of our fire.
Chapter Twelve: The Filling Station
I opened my eyes to that first graying of dawn where the sky tricks you into thinking it isn’t changing. Dietrich’s sleeping bag was rolled up and the fire had been stoked. I thought I smelled coffee, but I wasn’t sure, which was odd since there was a cup less than two feet from my head, steaming in the pre-dawn chill. The wight must have really done a number on my sense of smell.
I pulled myself up with a modest groan to find Jim looking at me from a crouch, smiling, fully clothed, and disgustingly alert. He absolutely had to have been a career soldier, despite his supposed years as an investigator. “Ugh. Could you quit smiling, please? It’s offensive.”
His grin broadened. “Not as troubling as your hair. Did you fight an owl last night?”
I reached up to feel the springy locks of hair that had gone rogue. They were numerous, free of any pattern, and vaguely damp from the dew that settled on me in the night. I’d need a hat and some motor oil to slick them down; when my hair gets crazy, it becomes an alien life form that can threaten cities. Between humidity and sleeping, I can generate a nimbus of hair that makes me look like I’m one cowlick away from the loony bin. I didn’t waste time smoothing down the rebellion; instead, I merely slapped my hat on, took a long drink of scorching coffee, and began to reach for my boots.
Dietrich’s brows shot up in surprise. “My kind of camper. You’re army ready, Carlie.” He saluted me with his cup as I began to break our simple camp, then nature called and I mumbled as I stepped off into the woods.
And stopped dead. Before me were enormous paw prints at least an inch deep in the soft earth. They came from the forest, paused at the edge of our camp, and then vanished into some heavy cover that ran along the trail. The tracks were the size of dessert plates, and there were distinct claw marks ringing the edge of each imprint.
“Dietrich. Look.” My tone drew him to my side instantly, and he froze just as I had, his body tensing as his eyes snapped outward into the growing light of the day.
He knelt next to a print, spanning his hand across it. “That’s no bobcat.” He cocked his head, thinking, then took a picture of the print with his phone. “Just in case,” he explained. “I think I’d better stand watch you while you, ah . . .” he trailed off in embarrassment.
“If it’s just the same with you, I think I’ll go pee when I die,” I said drily.
Dietrich snorted, and we busied ourselves with clearing camp, one eye watching the trees at all times. There’s something chilling about an animal that big watching you sleep. Fingers of dread around my spine only began to loosen when we took our first steps away, Gran’s necklace lighting a path further into the depths of the park.
After an appropriately terrifying pee break, we spent the morning at a brisk pace, eating up the yards toward the next distinct peak. The tree cover was reaching a density I’d not seen before, lending the forest a brilliant depth that pushed civilization further from my mind with each soaring trunk. We snacked as we walked, breaking into that clean, hard sweat that is somewhere between liberation and punishment.
“Have you ever seen anything that could make tracks like those?” Dietrich asked. I knew which prints he was speaking of, though we’d been remarkably quiet, despite our companionable silence. The evidence of being watched was heavy on our minds.
I shook my head slowly. “A bear, yeah, but a cat? I’ve heard things, but never seen it myself.”
“Heard what?” He pounced at my pensive tone.
“About two years ago, there was a sighting. Some tourists said they saw a mountain lion about ten miles from here. I dismissed it, but then there was another sighting, and this time? It was a game warden. And then something else happened.”
“Another sighting, right?” he asked. His eyes were narrowed when I looked at him as we paused on a small rise. There were bees tracking across our path, and the ground cover was waist high and lush. This part of the park was no longer a park. This was wild.
“Mmm-hmm. And then another. Several more, some from locals up near Big Tupper Lake, a couple near Raquette. Every time, at night. Far from town,” I said. I’d never given the sightings a great deal of thought; growing up in the mountains means having nature foisted upon you whether you wish it or not. In the case of a large, stealthy cat, most people would opt for the latter.
“I’d say we have confirmation that some kind of big cat is here.” Jim sniffed thoughtfully. “I’ve seen bobcats, even a lynx, but that print was too large for them. I’m thinking that’s a cat over a 100 pounds. That narrows the field a bit.” He adjusted his step to let me keep up, and ran a hand over his neck. We were both in a heavy sweat now, and I waved for us to take a drink break.
We were tucking our canteens away when Jim kicked at a small stone, smiling oddly. “Well, I’ll be damned. Let’s get started, shall we?” His voice was flat and airless. When I stiffened, he said in a low tone, “We’re being followed.”
Taking his lead, I grinned cheerfully as we turned to surmount our next ridge, a moderate slope that terminated in a stone crotch between two small mounts to the northeast. “Where?” I asked quietly.
“Back on the last ridge. He’s still now, but he’ll start moving once we do.” Dietrich’s mouth barely moved as he spoke.
“How long have you known?” I asked him in a friendly murmur. I sensed that Dietrich wasn’t the type to sit on information unless he was uncertain. Our last stop gave us an excellent vantage point to examine the ridge. He mu
st have seen the movement there among the broken light under the canopy.
“Not long. I sort of felt him first. He’s keeping his distance. I think we should just follow your necklace for now. We can deal with him before we make camp.” His voice was deceptively light and carefree. I suppressed a shudder and didn’t break stride. I thought of my wardstone and those tracks, and then I did twitch slightly.
We began to step downward in a serpentine series of curves that led us through two meadows and a small, wild profusion of sunflowers that covered a rocky outcropping, and then took our lunch break on a promontory that was bare of trees. The ground and debris told us that a lightning strike, probably last year, had cleared the oval space. Left behind were shards of heartwood from a tree that was only a stump, and the ground was stilly oddly charred here and there. It must have been a serious bolt to leave evidence from one season to the next. We studiously avoided looking around with too much interest; Jim buried his nose in an envelope of trail mix, while I shook out my socks and wiggled my toes in the ashen dirt.
“Still with us?” I asked him with a flick of my brows. I didn’t look up from my task.
“Not right now. This place isn’t optimal for observation, so I’d expect that he’ll pick us back up when we skirt that point to the left. Is that where we’re going?” He looked at my necklace expectantly, squinting in the peak sun of early afternoon.
I looked down into the depths and saw the dancing light pushed gently to the northwest. “That’s the way. It looks like we’re going to do some trail breaking in order to actually get to that pass, but I don’t see anything we can’t handle.” In truth, it looked fairly simple, once we got past the initial drudgery of what appeared to be a broad, lush meadow bottom that spilled up the small valley before us. I’d taken my first step when my eyes plucked something unusual at the limits of my vision. Before I could point out the odd shape hidden in a copse of trees, Jim froze, his head cocked and nose lifted to the light wind that spilled up the valley slope into the woods.
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