Zombie Raccoons & Killer Bunnies (18 page)

I’d arrived too late to keep Horn from praying or the dragon god from answering. But this time, the blessing had come at a price. The spirit had restored his ability to move around unaided, but it had stripped him of his humanity in the process.

Maybe Horn didn’t think it was such a heavy price. He’d already been inhuman on the inside.

I fired. Horn kept coming. I backpedaled and emptied the 12-gauge. He still kept coming.

By then, I’d retreated all the way back to the front door. I groped behind me, found the knob, and fumbled it open. At the same time, I dropped the Ithaca and pulled my pistol from its holster.

Horn raised his head, then struck at me like a rattler. The impact slammed me backward, out the door and off the stoop. I lost my grip on the Browning. Horn and I splashed down in the floodwater tangled together.

The bite he’d delivered to my stomach hurt. It didn’t kill or paralyze me, though, and when lightning flashed, giving me a better look at him, it revealed the reason why.

He hadn’t finished changing. His head was still a little bit human, and evidently his teeth were, too. They weren’t capable of injecting poison quite yet.

Unfortunately, he had another way of attacking. His body twisted around mine like a boa constrictor. I didn’t know if he could crush me, but he didn’t have to. He only had to hold my head underwater.

I jerked my right arm free before he could immobilize it and punched him repeatedly in the face. He faltered. I heaved and loosened his grip on the rest of my body. Grabbed him by the neck, rolled him underneath me, and held him below the surface.

He thrashed, and his tail pounded me. I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to hold on. But maybe the fear gave me strength, because I did.

Until he finally stopped struggling. I clutched him and kept my weight on him for a while longer, making sure he wasn’t playing possum. Then I floundered off him, flopped down on the stoop, and gasped for breath.

Tired and hurting as I was, the cleanup felt like almost as much of an ordeal as the events leading up to it. It had to be done, though. I found the Browning, picked up the Ithaca and the spent shells from inside the house, and wiped my footprints away. Then I dumped Horn in the trunk of the cruiser, drove to the center of a bridge, and dropped him into the rushing water below.

And basically, that was the end of it. Nobody questioned the story I made up to explain my injuries. It took more than a month for a neighbor to report that Horn had gone missing, and then no one connected it to me. So far as I know, no one ever pulled his body out of the river, although it’s certainly possible someone did. The finder wouldn’t call the cops if he couldn’t tell the remains were human.

It was time to put the whole thing behind me, but for some reason, I couldn’t. Instead, I did research, trying to find out just how often problems like Horn came along. Not situations involving reptiles, necessarily, but events that were horrible and unexplainable.

It turned out, more often than you’d think. And I supposed that if a person was smart and valued his life, he’d do his best to steer clear of them.

But what did my life amount to, anyway? Entry-level police work and choosing not to drink one day at a time. It wasn’t awful, but compared to what I’d lost, it was nothing to get excited about, either.

And that’s about as close as I can come to explaining why I did what I did next.

First, I educated myself. I got hold of some of Horn’s books, and reading them was a good start. And when I felt ready, I turned in my badge and went hunting.

One way or another, the new job pays the bills. It gives me nightmares, too, but there’s always a meeting somewhere when I find that I can’t sleep.

THE WHITE BULL OF TARA

T
he soft spring rains had come early to County Meath, causing a blush of pale green to spread across the fields and hills surrounding the royal palace at Tara.

Stretched out beside the low stone wall that separated the dozen kitchen plots from the more formal herb gardens, Brae Diardin of the Ulaidh Fianna lifted her face to the breeze, breathing in the fresh scents of newly turned earth and blossoming fruit trees with a sleepy smile. The late afternoon sun filtering through
her copper hair caused the outline of her otherworldly form, a white Sidhe hound with red ears, to shimmer about her shoulders. One ear twitched lazily at the high, musical call of a lark in a nearby copse of birch trees and the lowing of a cow in the distant, gray-washed pasture fields.

Brae yawned.

She and her company of twenty-eight warriors, including her three siblings, Isien, Tierney, and Cullen, had wintered at Ushnagh in County Westmeath, where the five great provinces of Ireland convened. With their legendary Captain, Fionn mac Cumhail, also in residence, it had been an eventful season, and the small community of Druids at Ushnagh had been relieved to see the back of them come spring.

The much larger community at High King Cormac mac Art’s Court of Learning at Tara were not particularly happy to receive them, but after obtaining Sub Captain Goll mac Morna’s promise that he would personally keep the rowdy band of hunters and warriors in check—especially the Sidhe hound children of Diardin—they had grudgingly made them welcome. Goll had made good on his promise, keeping Brae and her siblings busy in the surrounding forests patrolling and providing meat and game for the Court.

Brae gave an unimpressed sniff. They were only staying long enough to refit for their journey south to Drombeg in County Cork—a fortnight at most. How many druidic feathers could they possibly ruffle in that short a time?

A shriek of outrage shattering the afternoon tran quility answered her question.

“Brae, that blasted whelp of yours has been in my garden again!”

Brae opened one eye. Her new hound, Bala, a female brindle whelp just five months old, lay stretched out beside her, great, oversized paws covered in dirt and fine young shoots of . . . Brae squinted down at them . . . some plant or another. Tucking them surreptitiously out of sight, Brae raised herself up on one elbow, schooling her expression to one of purely innocent curiosity.

Moifinn, Senior Druid at Tara’s Court of Learning, was stumping towards them, brandishing her gnarled hawthorn walking stick in the air like a club.

Deciding at once that flight was the better part of valor, Brae scooped Bala up under one arm and vaulted over the wall, sprinting for the surrounding woods with the old woman’s shouted invectives snapping at her heels, dodging through the thick stands of oak, birch, and alder trees, barely encumbered by the ungainly dog in her arms. It was only when Moifinn’s voice faded that she paused for breath. Setting Bala onto her own paws, she threw herself down on the ground and, as the dog began to investigate a nearby stump covered in club moss, she gazed at her fondly.

“And how does she know it was you digging in her patch, anyway,” she said. “It could have been any hound, or hare, or deer . . .” She yawned again. “Or a really big Sidhe mouse for that matter. This close to the woods, she’s only asking for trouble. Druids: all about sacred and never about practical.”

Bala’s tail thumped in response as the whelp began to scratch at the soft earth by the stump, clods of moss and dead, rotting leaves flying out from between her back legs.

“Just as I thought,” Brae added with a nod. “It could have been anything. But just to be on the safe side, we better stay out of Moifinn’s way for an hour or two.”
Changing swiftly to hound form, she joined Bala at the tree stump, thrusting her nose into the pile of leaves with a joyful woof.

The two of them spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the woods, exploring and hunting, until the sun dropped below the spires and pennants of Tara. Then, they made their way home with a brace of coneys to mollify Moifinn.

 

An egregious frown met her the next morning.

“What?” she demanded. “Bala hasn’t been anywhere near your patch.”

“No, but something has.” Thrusting one finger out, Moifinn pointed at a trail of deep indentations, trampled plants, and large brown piles of manure on the carefully tended pebbled pathways that ringed her herb beds.

“That’s not hound, that’s . . .” Brae took a deep sniff. “Cow.”

“Not my cows.”

Keeping well out of reach of Moifinn’s walking stick, Duir mac Linne, the local farmer who tended to Tara’s herds as well as his own, shrugged deeply.

“No?” The sweet tone in the Druid’s voice was more of a warning than a question. “Then how do you account for that?” The finger thrust out again, this time towards a telltale break in the fence that separated the gardens from the nearby fields and the accusatory trail of hoof marks and broken bracken that wound over and through it.

The farmer rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Don’t,” he said after a moment.

“Try.”

“Well, it’s likely cows. But not my cows,” he added as
a vein in Moifinn’s left temple began to throb dangerously. “I moved all my cows to their spring pasture in the south fields three days ago.”

“Then whose cows are they?”

The farmer shook his head. “Don’t know.”

 

“Find out.”

Brae’s jaw dropped. “Why me?”

“Because your whelp trampled through my garden yesterday; because you trampled through my garden last year; because I need someone who can track them with nose to ground, because you and your worthless siblings were supposed to be guarding the northern perimeter and should have seen them coming. And because I said so!”

The last words were snarled so vehemently that Brae found herself backing up a step. Even Bala, who’d begun to growl at the Druid’s threatening tone, now slunk behind Brae, tail between her legs. Feeling much the same, Brae turned her attention to the trail of broken foliage.

“I’ll sniff around,” she promised.

“You do that.”

 

“Maybe it wasn’t cows.” Shifting fluidly from his hound form, Brae’s younger brother, Cullen, glanced up from the deep indentation in the center of a badly mangled juniper bush. “It’s got a strange scent.”

Brae shook her head. She’d enlisted the aid of her three siblings, and together they’d gone over every square inch of Moifinn’s herb garden, trying with little success not to cause more damage. “It was cows,” she stated, pausing a moment to sneeze as the heavy odor of crushed peppermint and catnip assaulted her nostrils. “The tracks are cow tracks, the dung is cow dung, and the smell is cow smell. The scent you’re getting is mashed juniper buds
along with it.” She growled in frustration. “The problem is,” she admitted reluctantly, “that I can’t figure out how they got here. I followed the trail, and it led to this little portal grave in the north field, and that was it.”

Her older brother, Tierney, snickered. “Faery cows?”

“Looks that way.”

His twin sister, Isien, frowned. “You’d better show us.”

 

As Brae had told them, the trail lead through the broken place in the fence and across the north field until it disappeared before an ancient, overgrown portal grave. The meadow grasses at the entrance had been badly trampled, clearly showing the effects of cows’ hooves; but, long since fallen in, the entrance was unnavigatable. The siblings, along with their four hounds, spent nearly an hour snuffling and digging around its entire perimeter until they threw themselves down on the ground in frustration.

“Now what?” Cullen demanded peevishly, pulling a burr from his hound, Chekres’, back leg.

“We wait, I suppose,” Brae answered, “to see if they come through again.”

“Then what?”

“Give them to Duir?”

“How? Have you ever herded cattle before?”

“No, but how hard can it be?”

“As hard as getting a horn up the arse,” Tierney supplied.

All four snickered.

“What if they don’t come through again?” he continued.

“Then it’s going to be a long wait without a horn up the arse.”

Cullen grimaced as his belly rumbled. “Wish we’d brought some lunch,” he complained.

“We still can,” Isien answered. “There’s no reason we all have to stay here all day. “You and Tierney head back to Tara and fetch some food. We’ll make a picnic of it. If no cows show up by nightfall, we’ll take it in turns to guard the entrance until dawn.”

“And if no cows show up by then?” Tierney demanded. “We can’t spend an entire fortnight here.”

“You tell Moifinn that.”

“Oh, no,” Tierney shook his head vehemently. “Brae tells Moifinn that. Because it was your hound that got us into this in the first place,” he added as Brae opened her mouth to protest.

“Oh.” Brae hunkered down with her back against the portal grave. “I still think it could have been anything in her patch,” she grumbled, fondling Bala’s ears absently. “She didn’t actually see you there, exactly.”

Beside her, Bala began to dig in the hard earth before the entrance, dislodging stones and plants in her fervor. As the strong scent of ravaged catnip wafted over them, Brae gave a resigned sneeze.

 

“That’s not a cow.”

“No.”

“That’s a bull. A young bull . . .” Brae twisted her head to get a better view between the distant animal’s back legs. “But still a bull.”

“Yes.”

The moon had risen high in the sky, casting a bright, clean light across the darkened field. Brae and Tierney had taken over the watch from Isien and Cullen nearly an hour before and had settled in with Bala and Tierney’s
hound, Tukre, a hundred yards from the entrance, listening as Tara’s main bell tolled three. One by one, lulled by the cool, spring breeze and the mating sounds of crickets and frogs, they’d fallen asleep.