Paladin Prophecy 2: Alliance (7 page)

By noon of the following day, over three-quarters of the students and their families had left for the summer, emptying the campus. Almost making up for their absence were the state and local police, additional security, and even a few FBI who had poured in to assist with the manhunt for the missing Lyle Ogilvy.

They’d set up a command post on the ground floor of the medical center, and established a perimeter around the building that only something with wings could have penetrated. Additional campus security had been assigned to Greenwood Hall as well. Eloni walked Will and Ajay to lunch the next day. They asked him why, but Eloni wouldn’t tell them anything more. Will figured they were worried about Lyle coming back and attacking him again. Eloni was still waiting for them after lunch and as they walked through the quad, Will noticed a small blue and silver Center bus pulling up in front of Berkley Hall, the guest residence hall that parents and family members used for school visits.

The bus stopped, the doors opened, and five people walked off, all carrying their own identical black duffel bags. Three young men and two young women, slightly older than school age, wearing dark glasses and school blazers. All of them tall, athletic, and, each in their own way, striking in appearance. They carried themselves with confidence and self-possession, and none spoke a word to each other. Two security guards were waiting to meet them outside Berkley Hall and opened the doors for them.

“Who are those guys?” Will asked Eloni.

“Recent graduates,” said Eloni. “A group comes back every summer. They work as counselors at the school’s summer camp.”

“For middle-school kids who hope to go to the Center someday,” said Ajay. “I attended myself.”

“How recently did they graduate?” asked Will, watching the counselors file into the building.

“Last summer,” said Eloni.

One of the girls in the group, a tall, athletic-looking brunette, stopped at the door. She took off her dark glasses and looked right at Will. She smiled—a little aggressively, Will thought—showing big white teeth. She touched a boy in her group on the shoulder and pointed Will out.

Will turned away, glanced at Ajay, and knew they were thinking the same thing.

“Let’s find out who these guys are,” whispered Will.

“Agreed,” whispered Ajay.

“And we better find Lyle before he messes up our plan.”

“That’s your department,” whispered Ajay, looking alarmed.

Eloni took them to the door of Greenwood Hall, where Coach Ira Jericho was waiting, stark as an exclamation point in his trademark black sweats. He took Eloni aside and spoke quietly to him. Eloni nodded, then gestured for Ajay to follow him inside, while Jericho walked off with Will.

“Where are we going?” asked Will.

“Training.”

“I didn’t think they’d let me do that today.”

“They will if you’re with me.”

“Good,” said Will. “There’s someone we need to find.”

Jericho didn’t respond. Will walked alongside the tall, implacable man and realized they were walking toward the medical center.

“What do you know about these counselors who come back to school to work with the summer camp kids?” Will asked.

“No more than what you just said.”

“You coach any of ’em?”

“Probably. It’s a different group every year.”

Will waited until no one else was near them to speak again. Jericho’s eyes constantly scanned the horizon.
He already knows I want to find Lyle,
Will realized.

“Coach, you’re clear on what went down with Ogilvy last fall, right?” he asked, almost in a whisper. “Not the official version, but what I actually saw in that cave?”

Jericho didn’t even look at him and never changed expression. “I don’t live under a rock.”

“So, between us—just in case this might actually be the truth and not some crazy hallucination I had—what happens to somebody who’s attacked by a wendigo?”

Jericho glanced at him. “The legends say they die an excruciating death and their soul is condemned to eternal damnation.”

Will swallowed hard. “What happens if they
don’t
die?”

“Hypothetically? Don’t think that happens very often.”

“But what if it happened
this time
?” asked Will emphatically.

Jericho stopped; they were near where Lyle had made his leap out of the building. “The legend says that, over time, that person becomes a We-in-di-ko himself.”

Will swallowed harder. “Over how much time?”

“These are legends, Will, not bus schedules. They don’t come with timetables.”

“But how does it happen? I mean, if you could speculate for a second—and I know how much you hate to do that and how annoying all these questions are to you, but I’m asking as a favor, this one time—how would you
describe
what happened to him?”

Jericho turned to look at Will with unsettling steadiness. “I would say that … the We-in-di-ko took Lyle’s soul from him … and left something foul and dark in its place.”

Will felt a shiver run from his knees to his chest.

“Hey, you asked,” said Jericho.

“What did it leave in its place?”

“For all I know it left a Hello Kitty lunchbox. Was he injured in the fall?”

“You’d have to think so, right? Jumping through plate glass, dropping four stories?”

“So you were there,” said Jericho.

Will nodded. “I felt him more than saw anything. By the time I looked around the corner, he was gone. He was wearing a doctor’s coat. All I caught was a flash of white.”

“Which way did he go?” asked Jericho.

Will pointed toward the woods. Jericho started walking in that direction, waving for Will to follow him.

“Are you going to track him?” asked Will.

“Track him?” said Jericho.

“I mean, you can do that, right?”

“No, but you can,” said Jericho. “And you need to find him before he finds you.”

They followed a narrow path into the forest.

“Did you bring any weapons?” asked Jericho.

Will rummaged around and showed Jericho his Swiss Army knife. “I left the RPG launcher in my other pants.”

Jericho almost smiled.

“What did you bring?” asked Will.

Jericho held up a small stitched leather pouch.

“Great,” muttered Will. “Pixie dust.”

“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” said Jericho, putting it back in his pocket. “Pixie dust strong medicine.”

The air felt saturated with heat and humidity the deeper they ventured into the woods. A heavy blanket of decayed leaves underfoot muted their footsteps and muffled the air. After traveling less than a hundred yards, they’d lost all sight or sound of the campus.

“So how do we do this?” asked Will, scanning the ground as they trudged along. “Search for footprints, broken branches?”

“Do I look like I was born in a tepee?”

“I didn’t mean it
that
way—”

“Footprints aren’t where the action is. We’re after a hairy, ugly-ass freak in a white doctor’s coat who’s six foot nine. How hard could he be to find?”

As they walked past a tall silver birch, Jericho stopped and pointed to a smeared crimson stain on its bark at about shoulder level.

“Okay,” said Will. “As long as you’ve got a method.”

Jericho looked out and scanned the tree line. The forest grew steadily denser ahead of them, the ground rising and falling in small hillocks, in many directions leaving little space to move between the trees. Will waited for Jericho to tell him which way to go next.

“He went this way but you’re the only one who knows how to find him, Will,” said Jericho. “That is, if you
want
to.”

Will burned inside at the provocation in Coach’s voice, indignation turning to resolve.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” said Will.

He closed his eyes and called up his interior sensory Grid. That extra vision booted up in his mind’s eye and as he gazed out ahead of them the woods came alive with patterns and swirls of energy. The world around them went as quiet as a snow globe. He became aware of small animals scurrying and skittering around, emanating flares of nervous system heat. He heard every birdsong, pinging their locations on a three-dimensional, wraparound screen.

A disturbance in the Grid slowly revealed itself, a slightly glowing pathway took shape in the leaves on the ground, leading away from the birch. Will
felt
some quality or feeling lift off the path, and he realized it was as if Lyle had left some energetic trace of himself behind as he passed through—

Ravenous.

The word came into Will’s mind. He felt a cold chill.

“This way,” he said.

They continued on. Over the next small rise, they came upon the discarded head and chewed bones of what must have been a squirrel. Then, thirty yards on, the remains of a large crow, feathers scattered.

“He’s hungry,” said Jericho.

“Eating crow,” said Will. “Literally.”

“Not as much fun as it sounds,” said Jericho.

“Why didn’t he just head for a supermarket?”

Will was hoping for at least a smile, but Jericho didn’t respond. In fact, he looked a little worried, Will thought. Which probably means he’s a
lot
worried on the inside, which was not a warm and fuzzy feeling to have spring up in the middle of these woods. It was early afternoon on a hot sunny day in June, but in here it felt as dark and gloomy as Halloween.

Will heard the hollow keen of a hawk or falcon circling somewhere far overhead. Jericho heard it, too. They looked up—Will could barely see the sky through the trees—then at each other. Will’s hand reached for the stone falcon figurine in his pocket, and felt better as soon as his fingers gripped its familiar contours.

Jericho nodded at him. Will knew exactly what he was thinking:
Your spirit animal is nearby. We’re on the right path.

“If you say so,” said Will, under his breath.

Will led the way as they started walking along the “path” ahead of them. He picked up a strong heat signature, confirming that something massive had passed this way, the Grid growing ever more vivid in his mind. They mounted the next rise and discovered that the ground dropped steeply from there into a deep round hollow.

At its bottom, in a shaft of sunlight cutting through the trees, lay the body of a deer, an eight-point buck. On his Grid, Will saw ghostly patterns of movement, streaked and smudged. He realized it was the echo of what had happened here, the energy so powerful that it had imprinted on time-space. It was almost too fast to follow, but he could make out the buck bounding through the woods, spooked and panicked. It stopped for a moment only yards from where they were standing, then was ambushed and dragged down by a large indistinct form bursting toward it out of a thicket.

Sickened by the violence—a quick, savage evisceration—Will staggered against a tree, righting himself before nearly falling over. He didn’t want to see the rest of what lingered here, looking over at Jericho and shaking his head.

Will hung back, eyes averted as Jericho examined what was left of the deer’s carcass. Not much remained other than hooves and horns, the ground around it black with drying blood. On a nearby branch, Will found a torn patch of white cotton fabric, dyed a deep red.

“He’s working his way up the food chain,” said Will, breathing deeply to stay calm.

“Fast,” said Jericho.

“Still think this is a good idea, Coach?”

“It won’t be much farther.”

“What won’t?”

“Before we find him,” said Jericho.

“Or he finds us.”

“Why, are you worried we can’t handle him?”

“What do you mean ‘we’?” asked Will, then pointed behind them back toward school. “I’ll be the guy running
that
way.”

Fifty yards on they came to another short rise, the forest so thick around them now they were nearly in darkness. From the crest of this rise, the slope fell away into a rocky ravine, about twenty feet deep, carved by a thick slow-moving creek through its center. There, lying facedown half in the water, a still figure in a white coat stood out in the gloom like a patch of snow.

Will and his coach froze. He glanced at Jericho, hoping he’d know what to do, and whispered, “Is he’s trying to trick us? Playing possum?”

“Only one way to find out,” said Jericho.

Coach started down the ravine, holding on to roots pushing out of the slope to maintain his balance. Will didn’t follow until Jericho turned halfway down and shot him a withering look. “Coming, West?”

Coach waited for Will at the base of the incline and together they walked cautiously toward the body that still hadn’t moved. Will flicked open his knife and held it at his side as they neared.

“Is he dead?” asked Will.

“Well, I wouldn’t try to order a latte from him at the moment,” said Jericho.

Coach Jericho knelt down next to the body for a closer look. Will peered over his shoulder. Lyle’s eyes were open in a lifeless stare. He lay on his stomach, his head turned to the side. His face had taken on a canine cast, almost feral, with elongated incisors that extended past his lips and a starburst crack in his fixed open pupil.

Will’s breath caught in his chest. He’d never liked Lyle—in fact, he had every reason to loathe the kid who’d more than once tried to kill him—but the sight of him like this still filled him with pity and horror.

“What are you supposed to do to a dead wendigo?” asked Will, taking a step back.

“You mean to make sure it stays that way?”

“Yeah, I mean, there have to be rules, right? Hammer a stake through its heart or stuff wads of garlic in its mouth—”

“You kids and your damn vampires,” said Jericho. “How the hell should I know? I’ve never seen one of these things before either. And what makes you so sure it’s dead?”

“It sure
looks
dead,” said Will, pointing to the wet sludgy ground around the body. “With all those … fluids and stuff.”

“Only one way to find out,” said Jericho.

Jericho reached down and turned Lyle’s body over, and they realized this wasn’t exactly Lyle. More like what would be left of Lyle if you’d sliced him down the middle with a gigantic can opener. A rough flap or seam in his flesh ran the length of the body from his neck to his waist. With Lyle now lying on his back, his chest cavity and midsection looked deflated, as if he’d been flattened by a steamroller.