“Dolores,” George said without turning his head. “She said her name was Dolores.”
Joseph knew enough Spanish to know dolores meant pains. It didn’t strike him as particularly promising in this context. “Hey,” he said lightly, “did you talk to Valerie?”
George shook his head slightly and focused on Joseph. “Oh. Yeah, I did. She’s cute.”
“But did you ask her out?”
“I didn’t get a chance to,” George said. “Dolores butted into the conversation.” He turned and looked after the woman again.
Joseph didn’t like the way this was going. “Look, pard, let’s go home,” he said. “We’ve got an early start tomorrow.” Both men worked construction. This week, they were on a job in Evergreen, on the other side of the city from their trailer. “I’ll drive,” Joseph offered, holding out his hand for the keys to the truck.
That snapped George out of it. “Oh, no, you won’t,” he said. “What if you see a jackrabbit and decide to take off after it? I’ll drive.”
~~~
On the way home, George’s periodic sighing began to irritate Joseph. Finally, he said, “All right, tell me. What’s got you all worked up?”
“I think she’s in trouble.”
“Who? Valerie?”
George took his eyes off the road for a second to stare at him. “No. Dolores.”
“Oh?” Joseph tried to sound nonchalant. “What kind of trouble is she in?”
“It’s not her, exactly. It’s her brother. I guess he has a ranch out east of here.” George gestured vaguely toward his right. “She said he’s been having some trouble with his livestock.”
“What kind of trouble?”
George laughed self-consciously. “It’s gonna sound crazy, but she said a few of them have been turning up every morning dead. Drained of blood. With two puncture wounds in the neck.”
Joseph turned to him, one eyebrow raised. “And she thinks her brother has a vampire on his hands?” With a smirk, he added, “Maybe she’s the vampire.”
“No,” said George, as if he hadn’t heard the last part of Joseph’s comment. “Not a vampire. A chupacabra.”
Now it was Joseph’s turn to laugh. “Oh, come on! Chupacabras aren’t real! They’re mythical creatures!”
George turned to regard him with a serious expression. “So are you.”
Joseph had to concede the point. After a moment, he said, “Why did she bother to tell you all of this, though?”
“She wants us to help her catch the thing.”
“Us?”
“Yeah. Us. She specifically said, ‘you and your friend.’” He glanced over at Joseph again. “Think it’s a setup?”
“I know it’s a setup,” Joseph said, shuddering at the memory of the woman’s eyes. “The question is why.” He gazed out into the darkness. “I need to talk to Grandfather.”
“I don’t know much about the chupacabra,” Looks Far told them. The Ute shaman was cooking steaks for their dinner on a grill outside his wickiup, after the younger men had helped him conduct a sweat lodge ceremony for a group of tourists. Joseph and George had helped him with his business since they were teenagers, and the old man always made them dinner afterward. Payment for services rendered, he would say with a solemn wink.
“Well, what do you know?” Joseph asked.
Looks Far shrugged. He wore a corduroy jacket against the chill, but his long, gray hair flowed free in the breeze. “The creature is supposed to be four or five feet long, with leathery skin like a reptile and spikes along its spine. It makes puncture wounds in the neck — either two or three, depending on who’s telling the story — and sucks the animal’s blood out through them.”
“But it doesn’t eat the carcass,” George said.
“Not the way I heard it, no,” Looks Far said.
“Nice,” George said. Then his expression changed. “But we have to help her,” he said, a faraway tone in his voice.
Looks Far gave George a searching look. “What exactly does this woman want you boys to do?”
“She said she wants us to help her catch it.”
“And do what with it?”
George looked at the ground, the faraway look gone. “She didn’t say.”
Looks Far turned to Joseph for an explanation. “She’s not human, Grandfather,” Joseph said. “He’s been doing this ever since she touched him at the party. Snapping in and out like this.”
George looked at them in surprise. “I have?” His expression hardened.
“And her eyes were red,” Joseph went on, putting a hand on his friend’s shoulder.
Looks Far shrugged as he flipped the steaks. “That could have been a trick of the light.”
Joseph shook his head. “I don’t think so. I got the distinct feeling that she was something other than human. And what’s more, she knew I was, too.”
That brought the old man’s head up fast. “She knows you’re a skinwalker?”
“I don’t know that she knows that much,” Joseph said. “I just had a very strong feeling that she knew I wasn’t a normal guy.”
Looks Far glanced between his grandson and George. “And she asked for both of you to help her.”
George nodded grimly.
The old man looked sideways at his grandson. “And you’re going to rise to the bait, aren’t you?”
Joseph bristled inwardly. But he plastered a grin on his face and said, “Sure. After all, Grandfather, you always told me that the best defense is a good offense. I think those steaks are about done, don’t you?”
~~~
Joseph was still chafing at his grandfather’s question when he and George got back to their trailer that night. “I’m going to go for a run,” he said.
George hadn’t known the two of them, grandfather and grandson, for so many years for nothing. “He didn’t mean anything by it. You know that.”
“Right.”
“He thinks the world of you, Joseph. He’s always been proud of you.”
“Except for the shifting.”
“Well, yeah.”
“I’m going for a run,” Joseph said again.
George sighed. “All right. Just… be careful.”
Joseph’s brow lowered. “Now you sound like him. Don’t wait up for me.”
“Oh, there’s no danger of that, pard. I’m bushed. See you in the morning.” And he headed off down the hall to his bedroom.
As soon as Joseph heard George’s door shut, he stripped off his clothing and stepped outside into the cold night air. He shivered once, and then he shifted.
A moment later, Joseph Coyote bounded across the plains as fast as he could run.
For uncounted minutes, he reveled in unthinking movement. Shifting, for him, was both curse and coping mechanism; the call of his animal nature was always strongest when he was confused or upset. He didn’t actually think through his problems when he was in another form — he couldn’t, really. Tapping into his human nature while shifted was possible, but difficult; it took something away from his animal, so that it was impossible to be either one fully. But shifting usually cleared his head, allowing him to work out his emotional response in physical exertion, so that he could handle the situation rationally when he was human again.
By the time he had run a good ten miles and investigated all the prairie dog burrows in the neighborhood, he was starting to feel as if he could go home and sleep. But as he turned to begin the journey back, he felt the hairs rise along his spine. Something was moving in the tall grass to his left. He crouched low, resisting the urge to growl, and waited.
It didn’t take long.
The thing that rose slowly from the grass was big — bigger than he had been led to believe it would be. Its head, silhouetted against the rising moon, was shaped like a lizard’s. When it turned its head from side to side, tasting the air with its tongue, he could see spikes running along its backbone. But its throat looked vulnerable to Joseph Coyote. Still he waited. Better to hide and
fight another day, if need be.
Then the beast’s red-hot eyes found him. Emitting a hiss, it came down on all fours and galloped toward him with frightening speed.
Joseph waited until the thing was nearly on him. Then he sprang, opening his jaws wide and aiming for the throat.
He connected, but his teeth could not penetrate the scaly hide. His jaw muscles throbbing, he swerved and dodged the monster’s claws. Then he made a run for it.
Coyotes can run pretty fast when rested, but it was late in the day and he had already had a good run; now the thing was matching him, stride for stride. He felt himself tiring, and it scared him. He could think of only one way out. Dropping to his belly, he shifted once more.
A red-tailed hawk shot up from the place where the coyote had dropped.
A split second later, the monster pounced on the spot where it had seen the coyote go down.
Joseph circled the scene from a comfortable height to watch. At first, the beast bounced back in surprise when it came up empty-clawed. It threw its head back and uttered a bone-chilling wail of frustration. And then it saw him. Its eyes smoldered like live coals as it watched him ride the night air currents. Joseph realized belatedly that he was silhouetted against the moon; he flew some distance west, to put the monster between the moon and him, before alighting in a tree to watch the scene play out.
He could see the monster crouch, hiding in the grass again. But it couldn’t stay there forever; the sun would be up eventually, and this thing was clearly a creature of the night. So after a few minutes, it slunk away, heading east.
Joseph waited until he lost sight of it, alert to the possibility that it was circling to attack from another direction. Finally, satisfied he would be as safe as he ever was, he flew home. But he couldn’t get the creature’s fiery eyes — so like Dolores’s — out of his mind.
~~~
“The thing is definitely after me, Grandfather,” Joseph told the old man by phone during his coffee break the next day. He was having trouble staying focused on the job — it was nearly dawn when he got to bed, and then he couldn’t fall asleep because he kept reliving the attack on the plains. He described it now to Looks Far, and then said, “I’m sure that girl who approached George at the party has something to do with it.”
“How is George this morning?”
Joseph blew out a breath. “Back to normal. Whatever compulsion she put on him seems to be gone.” He realized, as he spoke, what that meant. The only thing she needed George for was to draw me into this.
The old man sighed, apparently coming to the same conclusion. “If it is truly after you, Joseph, then you have no choice. You must go after it.”
Joseph’s lip curled. Thanks for finally admitting I was right.
“When are you and George meeting this girl?” Looks Far asked.
“Tomorrow. George has the address. We’re supposed to drive out there in the afternoon and wait for it to show up.” He shuddered involuntarily. He was not looking forward to meeting the monster again.
“And how do you plan to capture it?”
Joseph had been thinking about it. “If it’s a shifter, then it must have only one alternate form — or it would have shifted again to try to catch me. So I have an advantage there. And I’ve seen what it can do. It’s fast, but I was tired last night by the time it spotted me. I think I can outrun it if I’m fresh. So I think I can lead it into a trap. Then we can drop a net over it, or get a rope on it, or something, and wait for it to change back.”
“You’ll have to protect George.”
“Of course. And the girl.”
Looks Far paused for a moment before he said. “Yes. Of course.”
Joseph knew what the pause meant. The memory of two pairs of red eyes had come back to him in a rush. “I know what you’re thinking, Grandfather, and I think you might be right.”
“Just make sure you’re not the one who ends up trapped,” the old man finally said.
~~~
“Man, this place is in the middle of nowhere,” George said.
“Yeah.” Joseph glanced at the passenger side mirror, in which the Rockies were rapidly growing smaller behind them. He asked himself again, for perhaps the hundredth time that day, why he was following through on this.
Joseph considered himself a good man, albeit with an unusual talent. But he’d had enough experience with the supernatural over the past twenty-five years to know that if such a creature found him, it would keep tracking him down until he met the challenge — and sometimes it meant a fight to the death.
He’d been lucky so far. He’d survived.
So far.
He mourned each life he ended, though, and he always asked the gods to be kind to their troubled spirits as they began their long journey to the next world. But he never talked about this aspect of his existence with anyone. How could he? He was an extraordinary creature who sometimes had to kill other extraordinary creatures. No mere human, he felt, would understand the necessity. And no mere human could understand the toll it took on him to end a life so unique — one so much like his own.
At his lowest — which didn’t happen often, but it did happen — he thought maybe it would be better just to let the next monster win.
But he had a powerful incentive to keep himself alive: he needed to track down White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman’s Indian savior. Looks Far had been a respected medicine man before he had had that vision; a lot of that respect disappeared with his insistence that it was true. Joseph intended to make sure his grandfather’s honor was restored. They thought they had found the girl about twenty years back, but then she fell off their radar. Joseph promised himself that when this skirmish was over, he would try again to find her.
Which meant he had to survive.
“How much farther?” he asked.
George glanced at the GPS on the dashboard. “Next exit. Then about fifteen miles.”
Joseph grunted. He kept from drumming his fingers on the door frame by forcing himself to inspect the landscape, scouring it for a natural feature they could use as a backstop for their makeshift corral: a rock outcropping, a pond, anything.
George glanced at him as he navigated the exit from I-70. “Seen anything we could use?”
“No,” Joseph said shortly. “You?”
“Not yet.” George paused. “What are we gonna do if we can’t find something?”
Joseph shrugged. “Farm’s gotta have a barn.”
“You think a barn will hold that thing?”
He met George’s eyes. “Maybe not. But if it’s all we’ve got, it’s all we’ve got.”
It was George’s turn to grunt. Joseph went back to sizing up the passing fields. Presently, he said, “What if we stack those hay bales?”
“With what? You know how heavy the round ones are.”
“I could shift. A bear could handle them, I bet.”
“And draw the thing right to us before we’re ready.”
Joseph glanced at his friend. “Damn it, I hate it when you’re right. Have you got a better idea?”
“I wish I did,” George said, signaling a left onto a dirt road, even though they hadn’t seen another vehicle since they left the interstate. “We’re here.”
Fields of withered cornstalks lined the bumpy track on either side. Joseph spotted a few trees up ahead, and glimpsed a house beyond. “Careful, pard,” he said.
“I see it.” George slowed the truck until they were creeping along.
The light was turning golden as they cleared the trees. A two-story farmhouse sat to one side of the track, barn and outbuildings to the other side, and a corral beyond, all in a state of extreme disrepair. The place looked as if it had been abandoned for years.
The men exchanged looks. “We should leave,” George said.
“We should,” Joseph said, tamping down his fear. “But I need to have it out with that thing.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to do it on your own turf?”
Joseph s
wung the door open. “This is my turf, pard,” he said with a bravado he didn’t feel. “As of right now.” He stepped down and slammed the truck door. Then he walked up to the house, yelling, “Hello! Anybody home? Dolores?” He heard George shut the driver’s side door and begin muttering to himself. He risked a glance back; George was unloading the bits and pieces of their snare from the truck bed: a tarp with weights tied to the corners, a coil of rope, and some miscellaneous tools.
It struck Joseph how ill-prepared they were. He nearly ran back to the truck. Instead, “Hello?” he called again. “Hey, Dolores! We’re here! Where are you? Where’s your brother?”
“He’ll be along,” a sultry voice said beside him.
Joseph turned, startled, to find the woman standing within arm’s reach. “There you are,” he said, knowing it sounded lame. He tried to recover by sweeping an arm out at the general decay. “I thought you told George he lived here.”
“He does.” She smiled, revealing very white, very pointy teeth. Apparently they hadn’t been part of the costume. “So do I. Want to see?”
Joseph blinked. Had she just come on to him? “Maybe later,” he hedged. “After we’ve wrapped up your little problem for you. Where have you been finding the dead livestock? That would probably be a good place to start.”
She pouted briefly, then gave him a sly smile. “In the barn,” she said. “This way.”
Joseph followed, his steps lagging.
As she passed George, she beckoned with a clawlike fingernail. “You come, too.”
George traded a look with Joseph as he fell into step beside him. “Did you see where she came from?” Joseph asked in a whisper.
“No,” George said quietly. “I looked up and she was standing next to you.”
Joseph thought for a second. “I want you to get back in the truck and get out of here.”
“And leave you behind? Not a chance, pard. Looks Far would kill me.”
“I can take care of myself, but it’ll be easier if I’m not trying to save you,” Joseph hissed. It was too late now, anyway, he realized; Dolores had pulled open the sagging barn door and was waiting for them. He cursed under his breath and told George, “Stay by the door.” Then he followed the woman into the barn.
13 Bites Volume I (13 Bites Anthology Series) Page 4