Thunder Moon

by Lori Handeland

  “I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what that was like. To love someone, to have them love me, to lose them so horribly. I’d lost people, sure, Grandmother, Dad, but it was nothing compared to this.

  “She’s dead,” he said.

  “The Anada’duntaski killed her.”

  “No. I did.”

  Chapter 31

  “You can’t keep blaming yourself. The Anada’duntaski took her life.”

  “The first time.”

  I began to understand why his eyes were always haunted, why they probably always would be.

  “The instant I realized the truth, I—”

  “You don’t have to say it.”

  He’d cut off her head. He’d made sure she hurt no one else, and even though he knew the body that he’d destroyed had not held the woman he’d loved, what he’d done still tormented him.

  “When the body dies and the demon comes,” he whispered, “does the soul go to Heaven? She didn’t want to become what she did, so why do they say the soul of a vampire is damned?”

  He was agonizing over something he could never know the truth of. At least not in this life. What was I supposed to say but the only platitude I had?

  “You had to do it. They left you no choice.”

  “That doesn’t make the doing of it any easier.” He touched my face. “You love the people in this town very much.”

  “So?”

  “I’m going to have to kill one of them.”

  I straightened, and his hand fell away. I glanced out the window. Dawn hadn’t even begun to lighten the horizon, but when it did, we’d go back out and keep searching for the Raven Mocker.

  “Or I will,” I said.

  “Can you look at the Raven Mocker, perhaps see the face of someone you care about, and do what needs to be done?”

  “Yes.”

  “What if it’s Claire, Malachi, Cal, Jordan? What if it’s me?”

  “It isn’t.”

  “It could be anyone, Grace. Anyone at all. Once, it was my wife.” He touched my knee. “Let me finish this.”

  “We’ll do it together. The power of two is greater than the power of one.”

  His head sank between his shoulders. “I don’t know if I can bear it if you die because of me.”

  “Why would I die because of you?”

  “If I can’t figure this out. If I can’t find a way to destroy the witch—”

  I put my fingers against his lips. “You will. We will. Good versus evil. Us against them. We can do it. I know we can.”

  He just shook his head.

  “Come here.” I lay back and pulled him with me, flipping the covers over us both. “Hold me awhile.”

  But it was me who held him for what remained of the night.

  * * *

  I must have dozed, because I came awake with a start when someone knocked on the door. Ian wasn’t in bed and for a second I panicked, thinking he’d gone witch-hunting without me. Then I heard water running in the bathroom.

  I dug my brand-new robe out of a shopping bag and answered the door. Cal stood on the other side, and I got an extreme case of déjà vu. I nearly asked him how he’d found me, then remembered Jordan.

  “What’s Chuck Norris up to this morning?” I greeted.

  “There’s been another death,” he said, without sugarcoating it. “Just outside of town. The Browns’.”

  “But—” I stopped myself before I could blurt that we’d left a protective buzzard feather at the Browns’. Perhaps this death was just a death. I kept hoping.

  “Henry or Harriet?” I asked.

  “Neither. Their niece was visiting from Chicago.”

  “Was she sick?”

  He shook his head. “She’d come to help them pack and move north to live with their children. According to Harriet, the kid was healthy as a horse and strong as an ox.”

  Simile city. Sounded like Harriet.

  “Then they went to wake her for breakfast this morning and—” He spread his hands. “Dead in her bed.”

  “Anything strange?”

  “Besides a healthy eighteen-year-old woman dying in her sleep?”

  “Yeah, besides that.”

  Cal cut me a glance, but he knew his job. He’d asked questions.

  “Strange shrieking in the night, attributed to that weird increase in ravens we’ve had reported. I think we need to get the DNR in here to blast a few. That noise could scare the life out of a person unfamiliar with mountain living.”

  “You’re saying the Browns’ niece got scared to death?” I laughed a little, as if it were a joke, even though I knew it wasn’t.

  His eyebrows lowered until they nearly met in the middle. “She did look weird. I pulled the sheet over her face. I couldn’t stand to see her.”

  My hopes that this was an unaided death fizzled. The Raven Mocker was sticking to the new pattern—taking young, healthy people rather than old or ill ones.

  “Did you call Doc?”

  “I waited until he was on scene before I came here.”

  Doc would know what to do without my having to tell him.

  “You could have called me,” I said. “You didn’t have to track me down.”

  “This isn’t the kind of thing that should be told over the radio or even the phone. What the hell’s going on around here? You’ve got Doc doing autopsies on citizens who died by natural causes. You’re exhuming bodies and doing autopsies on them. We’ve got people dying for no reason all over the place. Maybe we should call the FBI.”

  “There isn’t a serial killer. It’s—”

  “A virus.” Ian stood in the bathroom doorway, a towel around his neck, chest bare, pants zipped but unbuttoned.

  Cal didn’t appreciate the view as much as I did. He scowled first at Ian, then at me. I felt like I’d been caught in the backseat of Daddy’s truck with a boy. Not that I ever had been, but I could imagine.

  “Is that true?” Cal asked.

  “So Doc says.” Or would.

  “I’ve had some experience with this.” Ian retrieved his shirt from the floor. “Grace called the CDC. Doc’s working with them. We need to let the experts do their jobs.”

  “And in the meantime, people die?”

  “I’m afraid so. It’s the nature of this beast.”

  I blinked at the dual meaning to the word but managed to keep my expression concerned when Cal turned to me.

  “Is it contagious? Is there something in the water? The air?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Should we evacuate?”

  “It’s too late for that. If it is contagious, we’d be spreading it across the country.”

  His face creased in frustration. “How close is Doc to figuring this out?”

  “Very close,” Ian answered. “Any day now.”

  God, I hoped so.

  Cal cracked his big knuckles, something he did when he didn’t feel totally in control of things. “What can I do?”

  “Keep it quiet,” I said. “Don’t even tell Jordan. We can’t afford a panic.”

  “Right.”

  “And if you could continue to handle things at the office for a few more days, that would free me up to help Doc.”

  Boy, the more I lied, the easier it got.

  “You can count on me.”

  I could, which only made me feel like scum for keeping the truth from him. When he left, I sat on the bed with a sigh.

  “You couldn’t tell him,” Ian said, and I glanced up in surprise at how easily he’d read my mind.

  The agony he’d revealed during the night was evident in the shadows beneath his eyes, but other than that, he seemed all right—rested, strong, ready to do his job.

  “What you’re thinking is all over your face. Your deputy’s a good guy, and you wanted to share everything.”

  “But he’s a good guy who wouldn’t understand. Either he’d lock us up for crazy people or his head would spin round and round until it exploded from the stress. I couldn�
�t do that to him.”

  “You made the right decision. He can take care of the real-world issues, which will leave you free to help me with the out-of-this-world troubles.” He paused. “What brought him here? What made him think you need the FBI, which, by the way, would be a waste of a phone call?”

  “Because?”

  “Stuff like this would be routed to the Jäger-Suchers, and since you already called them...”

  “Waste of a phone call. Got it. But don’t people become a little suspicious when they call the FBI and get a Jäger-Sucher?”

  “Not when they get the agent who’s also a Jäger-Sucher.”

  “There’s an FBI agent who works for Edward?”

  “There are agents of Edward all over the place. Saves time.”

  “Sometimes I think he’s as scary as the creatures he’s hunting.”

  “He is,” Ian said shortly. “Now, getting back to your deputy—”

  “He came to report another death.”

  “Who?”

  “The niece of some residents at a house we visited.”

  His gaze shot to mine.

  “One where we’d left a buzzard feather.”

  “Either the buzzard feather doesn’t work against Raven Mockers or it doesn’t work against this particular one, which appears to be growing stronger and changing the rules however it wants to.”

  “I hate it when that happens.”

  Ian coughed. I wasn’t sure if he was stifling a laugh, a sob, or maybe both.

  “I know of one other method to repel the witch,” he continued. “But it’s more elaborate. Not as easy to cart around and distribute as a feather.” He pulled his shoes out from under the bed. “I’ll need to find some sticks, a sharp knife, pick up my notebook for the spell.”

  Something tickled in my memory. I waited for it to tumble free.

  “Aren’t you going to get dressed? Not that I don’t like this robe and what’s under it.” Ian untied the sash. “Or rather not under it.”

  “Shh.” I held up my hand.

  Ian had the sense to go quiet.

  “Sharpened sticks. Set at the corners of a house. Point facing skyward.”

  “Right.” He smiled as if we were sharing a secret. “What we call old tobacco, a sacred blend used only for rituals, smoked just after dusk. Walk around the house, puffing the smoke in every direction, repeating the incantation. When the witch approaches, the stick will shoot into the air and come back down, fatally wounding the creature, be it in human or animal form. How did you know that?”

  “I saw it.”

  His smile faded. “Where?”

  “Quatie’s.”

  Chapter 32

  “If she knew how to repel a Raven Mocker, then she knows there is a Raven Mocker.” Ian held on to the dashboard as I took the winding roads to Quatie’s place faster than I should have.

  “That doesn’t mean she knows who it is,” I pointed out.

  “No. But we can ask.”

  And maybe we’d get lucky. Although I had to think that if Quatie knew the identity of the evil, shape-shifting witch, she would have told me.

  “Quatie isn’t a medicine woman,” I said. “She doesn’t know any of this stuff.”

  “Some of this stuff is common knowledge.”

  “I didn’t know it.”

  “Grace, I’m sorry to say so, but you don’t know much. What was your great-grandmother teaching you all those years?”

  My great-grandmother had tried and I had refused, for the most part, to listen. So we’d made do with what we were both comfortable with.

  “She spent time with me,” I said. “Talked to me. Walked with me. Showed me her things. Told me about my mother. I didn’t have many women in my life.” Except for Claire and Joyce, but as much as I loved them, they weren’t different, like me.

  “She didn’t tell you about your heritage?”

  “She spoke of the clans, specifically our clan. She showed me a few spells, taught me how to go to the water. She wanted to teach me the medicine, but I got freaked out.”

  “Why?”

  “She was...” I glanced at him, then back at the road. “Well, she did some things I couldn’t explain.”

  “Like what?”

  I’d never told anyone about this, because I’d known no one would believe me. There were times I’d convinced myself I’d imagined it, that I’d dreamed of Grandmother performing impossible feats, and as time passed I’d come to believe those feats had actually happened. But this was Ian, the man who could change his eyes to an eagle’s and back again. He’d believe me.

  “She was an old woman, but she never walked like one. She had this gait that reminded me of—” I lifted a shoulder. “A big cat. Once when we were out walking in the mountains, she tripped over a stone in the path. Instead of falling and breaking a hip, she did some fancy tuck and roll. She bounced back to her feet like a five-year-old. Wasn’t a mark on her.”

  “Spry.”

  “Very. Another time she saw some root or herb she needed. She got so excited she leaped onto a boulder. That rock had to have been seven feet high.”

  In my mind’s eye I saw her flying up, up, up, and landing on top. My brain added Six Million Dollar Man sound effects.

  The memory amused me now, but back then I’d insisted we go home, and I hadn’t returned for two weeks. Though I knew E-li-si had wanted to talk about it, I’d pretended nothing ever happened.

  “She could walk me into the ground any day of the week,” I continued. “One Saturday I showed up early and she wasn’t there. I waited on the porch and saw her running up the driveway. I’m not slow, but I never would have caught her. I don’t think a U.S. track-and-field star could have caught her.”

  Ian remained silent and waited for me to finish.

  “But the most interesting thing of all was when we ran into a bear after dusk one night. Usually bears run the other way, but this one had cubs. They sprinted right up to us. I didn’t think, I set my hand on one, and the mother came bellowing out of the trees. Grandmother put herself in front of me and—”

  “What?”

  “She snarled.” I heard again the sound she’d made—feral and furious. It had stopped that bear cold.

  “Like a panther?” he asked.

  I’d never heard a panther before that day, but after—I’d gone to the library, the Internet. I’d searched and searched until I found a recording; then I’d known the truth.

  “Yes. She snarled like a panther, and the bear and her cubs ran away.”

  “What did your great-grandmother say about it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “She didn’t teach you—?”

  “I didn’t want to hear about it then, and by the time I did, she was gone.”

  He shook his head, disappointed.

  “I was a kid. My father constantly told me that he’d put an end to my visiting her if I started to act weird. I needed to see her; I couldn’t take that chance, so I pretended nothing magical happened, and she let me.”

  “She could access her other nature like I can. That’s a gift not everyone has.”

  “I certainly don’t.” And I never would, because I’d been too cowardly to fight for what was important, and now it was gone forever.

  “Not necessarily,” Ian said. “How do you explain the animosity between Elise and you if there isn’t a little canine-versus-feline involved?”

  My hands clenched on the steering wheel as I turned into Quatie’s long, rutted drive. “Maybe we just don’t like each other. She is kind of a pain.”

  “And you’re not?”

  “Hey!”

  “You have to admit your social skills could use some work.”

  I wasn’t going to admit anything, even if he was right. “E-li-si told me we were connected to the panther in a way no one else could ever be.”

  “She was right.”

  “But she died without teaching me what to do.”

  “There might still be a way
, if you’re interested.”

  I bounced into Quatie’s yard and turned off the motor. “Would your spell work for me?”

  I wasn’t sure if I wanted it to or not. The thought of losing control of myself, of becoming something else, even partially, scared me.

  “No.”

  I caught my breath in relief, even as my stomach dipped in disappointment.

  “I haven’t translated all of Rose’s papers yet. But if I were your great-grandmother, I’d have left the secret there. You could choose to use it or not, but if she didn’t write it down, it’s gone forever.”

  I wondered momentarily if that secret was the reason she’d come over from the Darkening Land. I hadn’t seen the wolf in several days, which made me think whatever message she’d brought had been delivered. I just wished I knew for certain what the message had been.

  “I didn’t know her,” Ian continued, “but I can’t imagine she’d want such a huge part of your heritage to disappear.”

  I couldn’t, either, but I put aside that problem as the door to Quatie’s cabin opened and someone stepped out. Not Quatie but a much, much younger woman. The great-great-granddaughter whose existence I’d doubted had arrived.

  She was maybe an inch taller than Quatie, thinner, though not thin. Anyone lugging around D cups could not lay claim to that. But her waist was trim, and the legs revealed by her knee-length multi-colored skirt were shaped like a runner’s.

  The voluptuous curves of her body and the way she held herself, as if she knew how to use them, reminded me of Katrine—most likely because I’d seen her last night outside of Ian’s clinic. There really was very little that was similar between the two women beyond a huge rack—and even that wasn’t the same, since Katrine’s was bought and paid for, and this one appeared to be a gift, or perhaps a curse, from God.

  Her hair fell long and straight to the middle of her back, framing a wide, attractive face that spoke of very few white ancestors and a whole lot of Cherokee. The type of face one didn’t see often around here anymore.

  I got out of the car. “Hello. I’m Grace McDaniel.”

  The woman shaded her eyes against the bright morning sun. “Grandmother’s spoken of you so often I feel like I know you.”

  I couldn’t say the same for her. I hadn’t even known Quatie had children until she’d mentioned this relative.