Otherworld Nights (20 page)

“And you don’t buy that.”

“No, darling, I don’t. He could have followed you to the truck and said a quick hello. Finding out where you’re staying? Coming after dark? Damned stupid move if he knows who I am, which makes me think he doesn’t.”

“He does,” I said. “Kate accidentally overheard. She says he’s lying. He knows who you are.”

“Huh.” He didn’t question Kate’s intuition. “Okay, then he’s a fucking idiot.”

True. Anyone who knew who Clay was—and it was pretty much a given that every werewolf on the continent did—knew that coming after me wouldn’t mean a quick, painless death. To protect Jeremy on his ascension to Alpha, Clay had once cut up a trespassing mutt, kept him alive as long as possible, then made sure a second mutt saw the result and distributed the tale, along with Polaroid pictures. Clay had been seventeen. That’s the story. The truth is a little more complicated. But … let’s just say Clay really hopes those photos have faded to blank frames before our kids are old enough to stumble on one.

Clay did what he thought he had to do. Together with the occasional reminder killing, it has meant that the Pack hasn’t had to worry about trespassing mutts for thirty years. It means, too, that when we’re away from home, most still steer clear. So why hadn’t this guy?

“He knew you were here,” I said. “There’s a second car in the driveway. Your scent is all over the place. Even if he missed that, he’d have smelled you when he came around the house. Plenty of time to realize his mistake. So why go through with it?”

“He wasn’t looking for a challenge, that’s for sure. Guy was so nervous I thought he was going to piss his pants.”

“Not just nervous. Kate said he was scared. Did he say anything else?”

“Small talk. Did we know anyone around here? Were we up for the holidays? Babbling. I shut him down and sent him on his way.”

“Getting answers. Finding out why we’re here. If he knows who we are, then he knows one damned good reason why we might be in his hometown.”

“Hunting a man-eater.”

I nodded. “I’ll check the local news archives. See if this place is known for folks walking into the forest and not walking out again.”

I
took my laptop and we settled into the living room with the kids. Kate was still annoyed with me. Not angry—no more glowers—but she wasn’t bouncing over to snuggle on the couch, either. They were both reading on the floor, Logan on his back, deep into the first Harry Potter book, Kate on her stomach, flipping through her illustrated children’s encyclopedia of myths and legends.

When I saw what she was reading, I’ll admit to a dart of panic—thinking she might be looking up werewolves—but she was just working her way through Norse myths. The book fascinated her, and I could say that was because she felt a subconscious recognition that her own family belonged in those pages. But there’s a more prosaic explanation for her interest—namely, a father who’s an anthropologist specializing in ancient religions, legends, and folklore. She’d heard stories of skin-walkers and Egyptian gods before “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”

Clay started the fire. I pulled out blankets from a box and laid them over the kids. Logan thanked me. Kate acknowledged hers with a nod, but didn’t look up from her book. Clay had brought a stack of anthropology journals he hadn’t gotten to yet. With one in hand, he nudged me from my corner of the sofa and plunked down, so I was sitting with my back against him instead. I opened my laptop and set to work researching.

These days, it’s easy to find news on the Internet, but I have access to better sources. I’m a freelance journalist. Being a Canadian living
in the States, I’ve made that my specialty—covering Canadian issues for American publications. I usually stick to small markets. Such magazines and news outlets don’t pay a lot, but they let me get away with writing pieces based mostly on research, phone calls, and e-mail.

In a place this small—the nearest town was barely a thousand people—you’d think it’d be easy to search for local missing persons. But that’s the problem. It’s
too
easy, meaning any man-eater living here would drive three hours south to Toronto to hunt. Yet if he’s a true man-eater, he’d have a hard time controlling himself—if he stumbled across someone in his own woods while he was in wolf form. That’s usually how we catch them.

I found five regional cases of missing persons in the past two years. One was a twenty-year-old hiker, found three days later in Algonquin, cold and hungry. Two were seniors who’d wandered away from their caretakers. One was found alive. The second wasn’t, but he’d died from exposure, no signs of animal attack. The last two were children.

My heart picked up speed as I read those reports, though I told myself they almost certainly had nothing to do with our resident werewolf. Man-eaters know a missing child raises too many alarms.

The first was a seven-year-old boy who’d wandered off from a campground. Like the hiker, he’d been found, cold and hungry. The second was a four-year-old girl who’d disappeared from her home at night. She hadn’t been reported missing for almost twenty-four-hours, because the girl’s mother woke up late, found the child’s room empty, and presumed her older daughter had taken her to the sitter. The sitter had been happy to have a day off and never called to check. It was dinnertime when the mother realized her little girl was gone. The police didn’t even have the time to launch a search before the girl’s father called to say she was with him and the case was written off as a custody dispute.

“Is that work?”

I looked up to see Kate standing in front of me. I shut the browser.

“Just a little research,” I said.

“You’re not supposed to be working. It’s family time.”

“Huh.” Clay folded his journal. “Well, then I guess we’re both in trouble, because I’m working, too. You’re reading. We’re reading. I don’t think it matters
what
we’re reading.”

“Yes, it does. You aren’t supposed to work on a vacation. You’re
always
working.”

Clay laughed and elbowed me. “She’s got a point, darling. We work at least fifteen hours a week.”

Kate nodded. “Too much.”

“He’s teasing you, Kate,” Logan said as he sat up. “Most people work a lot more.”

“Forty hours a week is normal,” I said.

“Uh-uh,” Kate said. “That’d be crazy.”

“You know Emily and Sarah at school?” Logan said. “That’s their babysitter who comes to pick them up, because their parents work all day.”

“Their parents just say that,” Kate said. “If I was their mommy, I’d make them go to a sitter, too.
All
the time.”

“I bet half the kids in your class have daycare in the afternoon,” I said. “Your parents are just very, very lucky that they can do most of their work at home. When Uncle Nick and Uncle Antonio come, ask how much they work. Uncle Nick works about forty hours a week. Uncle Antonio runs his own business, so he probably does sixty.”

“That’s crazy!” Kate said.

Clay leaned over and mock-whispered, “I agree.”

“When we have quiet time, your dad and I might do a little work. We like our jobs. But we’ll only do it when you’re busy. Okay?”

She nodded. I started to reopen my browser.

“I’m done reading,” she said. “Can we play a game now?”

Clay glanced at me. I wasn’t finished—I needed to go further back with missing-persons reports. But Kate was standing there, her expression wary, having not quite forgiven me. As much as I
wanted to reassure myself that we didn’t have a local man-eater, this
was
our vacation.

I closed the laptop and walked to the shelf of board games.

“Can we play—?” Logan began.

“Not Scrabble,” Kate said. “You always win. I want—”

“Not Sorry. You don’t even try to win. You just like sending other people back to the start.”

Kate smiled.

“How about card games?” I said, pulling a few off the shelf. “We have Uno, Pit—”

“Spoons!” they yelled in unison, and grabbed for the regular deck of cards.

“All right, but you know the rule.”

Clay slid down to the floor. “Game over at first blood.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Now go grab some spoons.”

Two hours and a dozen card games later, the kids were sound asleep in front of the fire, wearing hot chocolate mustaches, with shortbread cookie crumbs scattered like halos around their heads. We knew better than to move them. So I settled back on the couch with Clay and opened my laptop again.

“You know, you work
all the time
,” he said.

I laughed. “The worst of it? When she says something like that, I actually have two seconds of guilt before I slap myself upside the head. I think we
should
work forty-hour weeks for a while, so they see how good they have it.”

“Forty hours? That’s crazy.”

I laughed again and leaned back against him. Yes, we were both in the extremely lucky position of not needing to work. Living with Jeremy meant pooling our resources, and the lion’s share came from him—early years of very good investments, followed by a career as an artist whose work now commanded obscene sums of money.

In those dark years after the bite, when I’d been eager to see the worst in Clay, I’d been quick to accuse him of wasting his genius and an expensive PhD, dabbling in his field like an academic dilettante. The truth is that if we needed to work full-time, we’d be screwed. The Pack was our real job. Clay couldn’t hold down a tenured position and I couldn’t work in an office when we both might have to leave at any moment to investigate a potential man-killer or exposure threat. Between our two “jobs,” we still probably didn’t put in full-time hours, but it was like being a firefighter—we had to be ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice.

This particular fire—the mutt—seemed more smoke than flame. I searched missing persons. I searched murders. Nothing. Now I’d need to investigate him and his brother to write up a dossier for our files. Then later, if I noticed a rash of missing persons in Toronto, I’d know whose door to knock on. A minor inconvenience on our Christmas getaway, but it was a job I couldn’t take a vacation from.

I was about to tell Clay it’d be a research case when I did one last search. “Death by misadventure.” That’s when I found it.

Once I finished reading, I motioned Clay out of the room. I didn’t speak until we were in the kitchen with the door closed.

“There was a death here two weeks ago,” I said. “College student home for the holidays. He got drunk at a party, wandered into the woods, and fell down a ravine. Guy walking his dog found the body the next day.”

“Let me guess. The corpse wasn’t all there.”

I nodded. “Scavenged by canines. Dogs, they think. Or wolves. We’re close enough to Algonquin for wolves. It wasn’t a missing-person case because his parents figured he’d crashed at a friend’s place. It wasn’t a murder case because the police presumed he died in the fall.”

“Autopsy prove that?”

“I don’t think they did one. Small-town tragedy just before the holidays. No one’s looking too closely.”

“It’d explain why our mutt’s scared shitless. Chows down on a local kid and two weeks later we show up.”

“Do you think he’ll bolt?”

Clay shrugged. “Kinda hoping he does. Let us enjoy our holidays and then we can come back next month to take care of it.”

I paced across the kitchen. “Either way, we need to investigate. And we can’t do that with the kids here. Goddamn it!”

Clay came up behind me and touched my waist. “We’re not going to send the kids away, darling. This is our Christmas together. Just the four of us. Like you wanted.”

I turned. “I never said—”

“You don’t need to. Most times, you’re good with the extended-family thing. But Christmas …” He shrugged. “Christmas is different. You think I don’t realize that?”

He did. He had from the start, that my first Christmas with him, someone who might give me what I’d lost when I was five. A family.

The Pack hadn’t really celebrated Christmas before I came along. They did get together and feast and exchange gifts. Sometimes there was even a tree. But there were no gingerbread cookies or mistletoe or stockings by the fire.

When Clay realized I wanted a real Christmas, he’d done what he always did when faced with a human custom he didn’t fully understand: he researched it. Then he’d given me a perfect holiday.

“This is our Christmas,” he said. “Just the four of us. I know you want that and I know you’d never ask for it. So I set one up, and I’m not going to let some mutt spoil it.”

“But the kids—”

“—will be fine, because I’m calling Nick and getting him up here with Reese. We have three days left. They’ll babysit. We’ll investigate. It’ll be wrapped up by the twenty-fourth, and if it isn’t, the investigation can wait. The guys will go home and come back with Antonio and Noah on the twenty-sixth.”

I shook my head. “We can’t make them leave for two days. They’ll stay. We can do this another year—”

“No, we’re doing it this year. They’ll go home or find a hotel.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“Nick’s used to it. I’ll call him.”

One of the requirements for our Christmas getaway cottage had been a large master bedroom suite with a king-sized bed. Because, despite the fact that the place had five bedrooms, part of a perfect vacation for the twins meant sharing the parental bed, something that was strongly discouraged at home.

So, when I woke up to feel Clay’s fingers slide between my legs, I bolted upright.

“No kids,” he murmured, tugging me back down.

“What? Where—?”

“Do you really think I’d let them wander around a strange house alone, darling? Especially when we’ve got a mutt nearby?”

I blinked back sleep. “Right. Sorry. So …” More blinking. “Nick.”

“Mmm-hmm. A storm was rolling their way, so they decided to outrun it. Just got in.” He wrapped his fingers around my leg. “It’s not quite eight. So you can either go down with them or get a little more sleep.”

“Are those my only options?”

“They are.”

I smiled. “Sleep it is, then.”

“Good.”

He started tugging me down again. I resisted.