Kitty’s Greatest Hits (39 page)

“You’ve gotten better at this,” she said, gazing around, squinting against the breeze and surveying the valley as if it were real. “What is this place? It’s somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, I should think.”

Don’t open the door,
he thought. After a hesitation, he said, “My dad used to take me here when I was young.”

“What was he?”

“A hunter,” Cormac said, remembering, and flinching at the memory.

“And you?”

“Same,” he said.

“You were sent here for murder, yes?”

He considered his words. Picked at the grass, which felt real, waxy between his fingers. “I killed a skinwalker. She was a monster and needed to die.”

“Who are you to decide that?”

“She was trying to kill my friends.”

“Ah.” She paced a few more steps; her fingers were no longer wringing, but her expression had turned thoughtful, almost resigned. “The friends who come to visit you?”

“That’s none of your business,” he said.

“I’m sorry—it’s hard not to pry. I can tell they’re good people.”

“Don’t touch them.”

“I won’t,” she said and paced a few more steps. “So you hunt monsters.”

“Yes. I do.”

“Then you understand. You must let me in, you must let me do battle with this thing.”

“Do battle yourself,” he said.

“I need physical form to work my spells.”

“Then tell me what to do. I’ll do it, I’ll get rid of it.”

“I spent a decade learning what I know, I can’t just
tell
you.”

“Then I guess that’s it.”

“Is it because I’m female? You don’t think I’m capable?”

He chuckled. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Then why are you being so stubborn?”

She’d keep picking away at him, like a swarm of gnats. “Look. My mind, this place—it’s all I have in here. It’s all that’s left until I get out. You can’t have it.”

“You would sacrifice everyone here because of that?”

The situation wasn’t that bad. Couldn’t be that bad. Somebody would notice before the whole cell block was wiped out. Somebody would do something. Except for a tiny suspicion he had that maybe she was right.

He started awake. Aching from his shoulders to his hips, he straightened from where he’d slumped against the painted cinderblock wall and stretched out the kinks. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep. He hadn’t meant to even talk to her.

A wave of shouting echoed down the corridor. Hundreds of angry male voices raised in frustration, turned fierce, animal.

He was blind and stupid inside this box. He could look out the window—to the opposite wall, more institutional cinderblock. He couldn’t talk to anyone—he didn’t even know the time of day. His stomach told him it was late. Somebody should be bringing a meal soon. But the shouting told him that the whole place had been turned upside down. This wasn’t right.

Standing, he rammed his shoulder into the door, pounded it a couple of times, hit the intercom button, called for a guard. The shouting outside was like an ocean, like a war.

No one would come to his call. No one would be bringing food. Of all the things that could have happened here, of all the things that could make serving time harder than it already was, he hadn’t expected this. If it wasn’t a riot, it was close to it. A cold knot grew in his gut, something he thought he’d built walls against a long time ago, so he’d never have to feel it again. He hadn’t felt like this since his father died.

He was afraid.

*   *   *

His father taught Cormac as much as he could before he died, because that was what their family did. Cormac’s grandfather, his father, and his father, who’d fought in the Civil War and then come west, part of the great migration of fortune seekers. At least that far back. The family didn’t have any stories for how they’d learned about werewolves, vampires, and the rest of it. Maybe the line stretched farther back than that. Cormac had always known that monsters were real. When he was twelve, his father started taking him hunting. At first it was the normal kind, deer and elk, living off the land, all that crap. Then they’d tracked and killed a werewolf. His father trailed a wolf where there shouldn’t have been any—wild wolves had been hunted to extinction south of Montana fifty years before Cormac was born. More than that, the creature was bigger than any wolf had a right being. They’d tracked it, baited it, Douglas Bennett had shot it dead, and brought his son to watch the body transform. It turned into a naked, bloodied human as they watched, a scruffy guy maybe thirty years old, rangy and dangerous looking even as a corpse. They weren’t like us, Douglas had said, and it was us or them. That had been the order of the universe, laid out by the center of his universe.

When he was sixteen, they tracked another werewolf. This one turned the hunt back on them.

They’d gotten word a month before—wolf kill in Grand County, a couple of head slaughtered out of a herd of cattle. A lot of ranchers would have written off the loss and not thought about it again. Maybe set traps or poison. But too much about this didn’t sit right—the care with which the prey had been chosen specifically not to draw too much attention, stragglers that weren’t as likely to be missed. The fact that wolves hadn’t been seen in the area in seventy years. There’d been a light snow and the prints were clear in the damp earth. Douglas Bennett had a reputation for being able to handle problems like this.

Douglas and Cormac spent the week before the full moon checking the lay of the land, where the lycanthrope had struck last time, where it might be likely to strike this time. There was always a chance that it would head out for new hunting grounds before then and they wouldn’t find anything. But the creatures were territorial—it’d probably stick around. They asked the ranchers in the area to keep their cattle penned for the full moon and the nights on either side. Except for one fat cow, which they slaughtered as the sun was setting. Then they hunkered down to wait.

The blind, made up of deadwood and laid over with sap-drenched scrub oak, was twenty paces downwind from the carcass. Cormac’s father sat on a piece of decayed log, his rifle resting across his lap. His hand lay across the stock, the finger on the trigger guard. He could fire a shot in half a second from that position. Cormac copied him, sitting behind him and a little to the side. Studied the way he held his rifle and tried to do the same. Admired the quiet way he sat, not fidgeting even a little. He barely seemed to breathe. Cormac struggled to stay quiet, though his heart was racing. His breath fogged in the chill air. This prey wasn’t like any other, his father said over and over. It had the mind of a person under all that fur and monstrous instinct. You could see it, when you looked into its eyes. His father told him he could fire the killing shot this time. If he sat quietly.

The carcass smelled of blood and rot. The blood had poured out and soaked most of the clearing where it lay. The moon blazed down and painted it black and silver. Cormac caught himself bouncing his foot and stopped it, glancing at his father to see if he’d noticed. He hadn’t seemed to. Cormac blushed, wanting so badly not to make a mistake. He hunched inside his army surplus jacket, thankful for his layers of clothing. He adjusted the sleeves, pulling them over his bare hands. He didn’t wear gloves; neither did his father. Gloves interfered with the trigger.

A werewolf’s natural instinct was to hunt people. A smart werewolf might avoid attention by keeping away from people; but eventually he’d drift back to civilization. He might have a pack to keep a rein on him, but if that pack ever fell apart, then it would scatter and a dozen werewolves, without leadership, would wreak destruction. Best to get them before that happened.

Nobody knew about the threats that lurked not just in the wild, but in cities, everywhere. Wild and inhuman, all the old nightmare stories grew out of truths that most people had forgotten. Didn’t want to remember. Folk didn’t want to consider that there was something modern technology couldn’t solve. It was up to people like the Bennetts and all who’d come before them to protect, to stand guard, with silver bullets and wooden stakes, protecting humanity against evils they didn’t know they needed protecting from.

Cormac had learned all of this from his father, as his father had learned from his. He felt proud, part of an unbroken tradition. They were warriors, and no one even knew.

His father pointed with the barest movement of his left hand, no more than a finger lifted from the barrel of the rifle, replaced just as subtly. Cormac wouldn’t have seen the wolf as quickly. It didn’t make a sound—the clearing was as quiet as ever, but a huge beast, a furred canine as big as a Great Dane, two hundred pounds easy, stepped carefully from the trees across from them. Dark gray and silver, it might have been a shadow come to life. Its fur made it indistinct, its outline hard to see. A few paces from the cow, it paused, raised its head, its eyes sparking gold in the moonlight. Cormac couldn’t breathe.

His father’s hand had closed around his rifle stock, but he didn’t yet raise the weapon. This was going to be Cormac’s shot.

Cormac worked to keep his breathing steady. He had one shot, had to make it good. Couldn’t move too fast or the creature would see it. Best thing was to let it start in on the bait, distracting it. With silver bullets, they didn’t have to get a good target. They only had to break skin and the silver would poison it.

His father leaned out of the way, giving Cormac a clear shot. He watched the wolf, large and unnatural, pause, nose leading, searching the carcass. Any second now, he’d aim and shoot, all in a heartbeat. He could do this.

Then the wolf was gone.

Its coloring blended with the wooded clearing, but Cormac had been watching carefully, he’d followed the thing’s movements, he knew where it was. He imagined putting the bullet into it—a good clean shot that meant they wouldn’t have to track it. But it had just vanished.

“Where’d it go?” Cormac whispered in a panic.

“Hush,” his father breathed. He raised his rifle in a clean movement. Didn’t take aim yet; just looked out, waiting.

Somehow, it had sensed them. Maybe smelled them on the cow or noticed the knife cut in the animal’s throat, showing that its death wasn’t natural, that this was bait and not scavenging. Maybe it had simply backed up the way it had come and slipped into the woods, avoiding the hunters. Cormac started to feel disappointed.

Then his father hissed, “Get back, get back. Cormac—” Douglas threw his arm and hit Cormac, shoving him out of the way as the creature leapt.

His father was strong, and Cormac fell hard and rolled, reaching to stop himself while keeping hold of his rifle. Turning onto his belly, he scrambled to look.

Another thing that made werewolves and wild wolves different: A wild wolf would have run away from the hunters, disappearing into the trees, finding safety in speed. This one attacked.

The thing planted front paws on Douglas Bennett’s shoulders and shoved. Douglas fired, the mouth of his rifle flashing, but the shot did nothing, flying uselessly into air. The man screamed while the monster clawed and bit, shaking its head, ripping at flesh like this was an unfortunate rabbit. Douglas kicked and bucked, his hands on the wolf’s head, fingers digging at its eyes and twisting its ears. The wolf kept on, lips curled back from red-stained teeth. Emanating from deep in its throat, its snarls sounded like the revving of a broken engine. And still Cormac’s father screamed. Full-lunged, tortured, gasping screams.

“Dad!” It happened in a heartbeat. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t think. His scream was an echo of his father’s.

He raised his rifle, took half a second to aim. Fired. Later, he’d never know how he managed to hold the weapon steady, to exhale and squeeze the trigger rather than blasting off in a panic.

He got it. That perfect shot in the wolf’s head. The blast knocked the wolf away from Douglas, and it lay still.

“Dad?” He dropped the rifle and ran, sliding to the ground next to his father’s prone form. His voice sounded suddenly high-pitched and weak, no better than a child’s. He was five years old again. “Dad?”

His father reached, clutching at his son with bloody hands. Looking at him, Cormac’s gut jumped to his mouth, but he didn’t vomit.

Douglas’s face was gone, gory meat instead of nose, eyes, lips. His throat was gone, turned into frayed tubes and tendons and a hint of backbone, glistening in moonlight. A wheezing breath whistled and gurgled. Somehow, Douglas pulled another through the mangled windpipe, and his hand closed on Cormac’s arm, bunching his jacket in rigid fingers. He didn’t breathe again, and the fingers went slack a moment later.

Cormac knelt there for a long time, holding his father’s hand. A pool of blood was creeping under him, soaking into the ground. The air reeked. He’d never get that smell out of his nose.

A couple of feet away, a naked man sprawled on his side. He had stringy, shoulder-length hair, black going to gray. He was burly, powerful, the muscles on his arms and back well defined. He was weathered, older, maybe in his fifties. Blood and fragments covered his face.

“Dad?” He swallowed, trying to get his throat to open up. But his father didn’t move.

Cormac didn’t know what to do. The truck was a couple of miles away and had a CB he could use to call for help. He was pretty sure he had to get help, though he wasn’t sure what anyone would make of the situation when they saw this. He couldn’t tell them it was a werewolf.

He squeezed his father’s hand one more time, placed it gently on the body’s chest, found his rifle, checked it to make sure it was loaded and ready for another shot—just in case—and set out for the truck.

He radioed an emergency channel, told them where to go, then went back to wait with his father. To chase coyotes and ravens away from the body. A forest service ranger, county sheriff’s deputy, and EMTs arrived to find him standing guard, still holding the rifle, covered in blood.

*   *   *

Slumped against the front corner of the cell, he stared at his hands.

It wasn’t your fault.