Dark and Stormy Knights

GOD’S CREATURES by CARRIE VAUGHN

Cormac waited in the cab of his Jeep, watching each car that pulled into the rest area on I-25 north of Monument. So far, none of them looked like the one he was waiting for. A lot of truckers stopped here, with a few road trippers thrown in, all shapes and sizes. McNeill would stand out, when he made his appearance.

Forty-five minutes after he was due, the aggressively souped-up pickup truck veered off the freeway and came up the lane. It had oversize tires, lights on the rollbar, a gun rack—empty for now—in the back window, and a Confederate flag sticker on the bumper. McNeill was that kind of asshole.

Cormac stepped out of the Jeep; McNeill saw him and swerved to park a couple of spots down. The guy climbed out of his truck and dropped to the ground. He was tall and stocky, wearing worn jeans and a flannel shirt over a white tee. He shoved his hands in his pockets and pretended he wasn’t cold in the winter air, but he was shrugging and tense, trying to keep warm. Cormac waited for him.

“You’re supposed to be keeping your head down,” Cormac said flatly, prodding on purpose, knowing it would piss McNeill off.

“What? My head’s down.” He looked around, frowning, appearing smug because there weren’t any cops in sight. “What’s your problem?”

“Registration sticker on your plate’s expired. That’s like waving a flag at the cops,” Cormac said, nodding toward the back end of the truck.

“And I don’t give a fucking cent to an illegal government.” He pulled himself straighter, as if he were daring Cormac to make a big deal out of it.

Yeah, McNeill was one of those. Didn’t seem to care that the cops wouldn’t get you on the weapons stockpiles or the conspiracy charges. They nailed you on back taxes and traffic violations. You covered your ass on the little things as the price of doing business. But that was why McNeill was a go-between and Cormac did the heavy lifting.

“What’s the job?” Cormac said.

He’d gotten a call two days ago. A rancher he’d worked with before had some trouble—Cormac’s kind of trouble. They both knew McNeill, who spent a lot of time traveling around the state, so he sent McNeill with the details you didn’t talk about over the phone and the down payment. McNeill didn’t know what exactly Cormac did. He probably assumed he was some kind of hit man.

Which was mostly true.

McNeill went back to his truck and returned with a manila envelope, which he handed to Cormac. He took only a brief look inside, finding a page of description and a business-sized envelope, thick with cash. There’d be ten hundred-dollar bills. He wasn’t going to count it out in the open, but he did pull out a bill and hand it to McNeill for payment.

“Thanks,” McNeill said, shoving the hundred in his pocket. “Good luck, man.”

Cormac had already turned back to the Jeep.

He arrived at Joe Harrison’s ranch in Lamar early the next morning. The old man was waiting for him on the front porch of the ramshackle house. The two-story building was probably close to a hundred years old. It needed a new roof and a coat of paint at the very least. But with a place like this, any extra money the family earned went right back into the ranch. The barns and fencing would get repairs before the house did.

“Thanks for coming,” Harrison said as Cormac left the Jeep and walked down to shake his hand. The rancher was in his sixties, his face furrowed and weathered, tough as leather from spending his life raising cattle out here. The kind of guy who was more at home with barbed wire and baling twine than a comfortable chair and a TV set.

“Let’s take a look,” Cormac said.

Harrison opened a gate in the fence, and they rode in Cormac’s Jeep, straight across the prairie for about three miles. Harrison navigated by landmarks, pointing to show Cormac the way.

“There, it’s right there,” Harrison said finally, and Cormac stopped the Jeep.

Harrison led him to a spot where stands of scrub oak followed the contour of the hills, bordering the open plains. A carcass lay here, partly sheltered by the wind, flattening the grass. About a week old, Cormac guessed. The steer, a typical rust-and-cream-colored Hereford, had been savaged, its gut ripped open from sternum to tail, its face and tongue torn out, its throat flayed. Scavengers had been through since then—scraps of hair and bone radiated out from the remains. Most of what was left was leathery skin and hair over a rib cage and a leering, ragged skull.

“The second one’s about a mile that way,” Harrison said, pointing again. “And we had another one just last night.”

They returned to the Jeep and drove east a mile or so. Cormac didn’t need directions this time; he spotted the vultures circling overhead. When he pulled up near the spot, a pair of coyotes ran off, then hunkered down in the long grass, waiting to return to their meal in peace.

The other carcass had been dried out and picked over; it hadn’t smelled like anything. The rotten, bloody stink of this one hit Cormac as soon as he left the Jeep.

“The others looked just like this one?” Cormac asked Harrison, who nodded. The rancher winced, turning his face away from the stench.

This one had been gutted like the other. Savaged, but not eaten. Guts and organs spilled out, pink flesh glistened on bones. The scavengers had had a meal handed to them. The weather was too cold for flies, which would have been swarming.

This was why Harrison had called him. They weren’t dealing with a predator that killed because it needed to eat. This was a pure killer, and it was only a matter of time before it attacked someone. Cormac had seen this pattern before. A beast like this might start out with the best of intentions. It might flee to a distant wilderness, where it would kill a few rabbits or maybe a deer with no harm done. But then it would start to slide. It couldn’t stay away from civilization forever. It would still have the bloodlust, but it wouldn’t bother fleeing. Inhibitions would fail; it would struggle to keep from hurting anyone, but someday it would slip. It would attack livestock. Then it would finally give in to instinct and kill the human beings it hated because it was no longer one of them.

Cormac had to find the thing before that happened. Full moon was still a week off, but that didn’t matter when one of them went bad. They could change anytime they wanted and did mostly when they lost control.

“You have any idea who’s doing this? Anybody notice any strangers around here? Someone who might be camping out? Or has someone in town started acting funny?”

“If I had any idea who it was, I wouldn’t need to call you,” Harrison said, frowning.

Cormac stepped around the kill, looking for tracks, for the pattern of wolf pads as big as a man’s face, with the matching puncture marks of claws. The winter had been dry so far, and the ground was rock hard. He might not have seen anything among the carpet of dead grasses, but werewolf claws were sharp, and he found the little holes in the ground, as far apart as his spread hand. He threw his keys to Harrison. He’d left his rifles in the vehicle but had a semiautomatic handgun in a shoulder holster, hidden under his leather jacket. “I’ll meet you back at the house.”

“What did you find?”

“Give me the afternoon, I’ll let you know.”

Harrison drove off in the Jeep, and Cormac followed the tracks.

The wolf could have run for miles. Cormac might be hiking all day—or at least as long as he could keep following his quarry. But for the first couple of miles the trail was clear; he found prints from one stride to the next, and on. The thing was headed in a straight line. Straight for home.

He reached the edge of the property, where Harrison was waiting at the Jeep. Cormac waved at him and kept going. The immense wolf tracks followed the ranch’s dirt driveway, then paralleled the highway, back toward town.

So it was someone from town, not some recluse cut off from civilization. That made it worse. This was civilization gone amuck. A werewolf could only follow instinct, which would drive it back home, wherever that might be. A monster might kill its own family and not even know what it did. Cormac had to find it first.

Brick-dry prairie along the highway gave way to empty, weed-grown lots, dirt roads, then cracked pavement, then sidewalks. Weeds gave way to lawns and welcoming rows of houses with porches, screen doors, and family cars outside. This all gave Cormac a sense of foreboding, because he was still following the same tracks, sparse now but sure in their direction: the puncture marks of claws in garden soil, torn-up tufts of grass. He’d lose the trail on pavement but find it again after hunting along the margins of lawns. The trail was straight enough that he wondered if he’d find a man at the end of it, staring back at him with a wolf behind his eyes.

What he found, when the prints and claw marks ended, was an oblong of pressed earth against an old brick building—the kind of shape a person might have made if he’d curled up and gone to sleep right here. The building was big, three stories, probably built around the turn of the last century. It might have been a schoolhouse. Why had the wolf come here?

There were no human footprints to follow; the distinctive claw marks had disappeared. Finally, he lost the trail.

He expanded his search, took in the area. The tall brick building seemed to be the center of a complex. One of the other buildings was definitely a school, like the kind built in the 1960s—low, one story, a flat roof, a grid of windows. Construction paper artwork was hung on the windows in one classroom.

Across a lawn stood another antique building, this one with a high, peaked roof—a steeple with a cross on top. He went around to the front and read the stone marker there: Saint Catherine’s.

This was a Catholic church and school.

He preferred the jobs where the wolf was an outcast who fled to the wilderness—no witnesses.

At the end of this, he’d have to kill someone. There’d be a body, and the cops didn’t take “He needed killin’ ” as an excuse. He could try to tell them the thing was a werewolf, but the end result wouldn’t be much different. Prison, psych ward, same thing.

The fewer people saw him lurking around, the fewer people he talked to, the better. He needed to keep it so that the people who did spot him wouldn’t be able to point the cops at him. When the body turned up, Harrison wouldn’t turn him in. Harrison understood.

Cormac walked along the street, passing the school’s grounds and trying to get a feel for the place. He walked by only once, normal, as if he had someplace else to be. Several buildings made up the complex, including a couple of homey brick blocks that seemed to be dorms. Around back was a sports field, and a group of girls in matching gray sweatshirts and green sweatpants played soccer. Maybe aged fifteen to seventeen. So, girls’ boarding school, high school. It was a Saturday; they wouldn’t be in class. There looked to be a couple of adults out with them, women in sweatpants and jackets. During the week there’d be teachers as well and a priest and staff for the church. They’d live on campus, too. In fact, behind the church he spotted what must have been the rectory, a small, square clapboard house attached to a meeting hall.

The werewolf could be any of them. A hundred possibilities, at least. He didn’t know where to start.

When he was done with his quick survey, he cut back a couple of blocks, made his way to the highway again, and returned to Harrison’s ranch. Dusk was falling.

Joe Harrison must have seen him coming through a window and met him on the porch.

“You get it? Is it dead?” Harrison said.

Cormac didn’t nod or shake his head, didn’t say yes or no. “I’m working on it. Wondered if you could tell me anything about the Catholic school up the highway.”

“Saint Catherine’s? It’s a reform school. All girls. Full of troublemakers.”

“Really? I didn’t see any fences.”

Harrison chuckled. “Look around. Where are they going to run off to?”

“I tracked your killer there,” Cormac said.

“You think it’s one of them kids?” The rancher donned an eager, hungry look.

Cormac frowned, hoping it wasn’t. He didn’t want to have to go shooting a kid. “I guess I’ll have to find out.”

Harrison shook his head. “Wouldn’t that just figure?”

“You know about any rumors, any suspicions about anyone there? Hear about anything odd?”

“They’re Catholics,” he said with a huff, as though that explained everything. “You know somebody’s always talking about the priest there, if you want rumors.”

Cormac rubbed the back of his neck and looked to the distance, to the flat horizon. The sky was deep blue, turning black with the setting sun. “That’s not a lot of help.”

“I’m just telling you what you asked for. Hey, how long’s this thing going to take? When am I going to be able to let my herd graze again?”

“I’ll let you know when it’s done. By the full moon for sure.”

“That’s a week away.”

“Sure is. But I’ll finish when I finish.” He turned away.

“I wish Douglas was here working on this,” Harrison called after him.

Douglas was Cormac’s father. Harrison had known him—that was how he’d known to call Cormac.

Cormac didn’t slow down. “Yeah. Well. You got me instead.”

He kept watch on the ranch through the night; the werewolf might return to where it had found easy pickings before. Harrison had penned up the cattle since last night’s attack, and the animals crowded the corrals, milling and murmuring unhappily. Cormac kept walking the plains around the ranch house, covering half a dozen miles over the course of a couple of hours. He didn’t see anything. He didn’t even get that crawling feeling on his neck, as though something were watching him. It was just another cold night.

In the morning, he reclaimed his Jeep and found a ratty motel at the edge of town, where he talked the desk clerk into letting him have a room early. The clerk gave some bullshit about the rooms not being clean, but Cormac counted only three cars in the lot and at least two dozen rooms. Places like this didn’t have check-in times, he told the guy, and paid cash in advance.

He brought his weapons case into the room and looked over his collection one more time. A revolver, two semiautomatics, a shotgun, and a pair of rifles. The revolver was mostly to show off. He wore it when he needed to cop attitude, when a potential client expected the tough guy, the Old West gunslinger. And the boxes of ammunition for each of them: 9 mm silver rounds for the semis, silver filings in the shotgun shells, and so on. If he couldn’t take down the quarry with this, he likely couldn’t take it down at all. He’d never needed more than this. He also had a Bowie knife with silver inlay. The bone handle was worn. His father had told him it had belonged to his grandfather. His family had been doing this a long time, apparently.

He couldn’t be sure; his father hadn’t finished telling him all the stories when he’d died, when Cormac was sixteen. Harrison was right: it ought to be his father out here doing this.

After a quick shower and a change into some slightly less grungy clothes, Cormac went to church.

He hadn’t been to church—any kind of church—since he was in high school and living with his aunt and uncle. They were some flavor of born-again Christian, and services had involved sitting on hard metal folding chairs in a plain room—rented office space—listening to fire-and-brimstone lectures. He hadn’t been back since he went out on his own. He’d never been to a Catholic church at all. He used the tools, of course, holy water and crosses, when he had to. But they were just tools. Any God he believed in wasn’t like the one most preachers talked about.

The service had already started when he arrived. He stepped softly and found a seat on the bench in back. No one seemed to pay any attention to him. The church smelled of old wood, melted wax, and incense. The architecture was maybe a hundred years old, lots of dark wood, aged and smooth. The benches—pews—might have been mahogany, but there were pale scuff marks around the edges, where generations of bodies had banged into them. Pale stained glass decorated the tall windows along the walls.

He had a good view of the congregation: a hundred or so girls in front, identical in pressed uniforms; a bunch of plain folk from the town; the priest in a white cassock, standing in front, leading a prayer; and nuns, maybe a dozen, in prim black dresses, sitting in the rows with the girls. Their heads were bare—short and simple haircuts for the most part, no veils—which surprised him. He’d expected them to look the way they did in the movies, with the weird hats and veils.

There were altar girls instead of altar boys. Probably students from the school. Cormac didn’t know there was such a thing as altar girls.

During communion, everyone stood, filed down the central aisle, faced the priest with hands raised, accepted the host, and marched back to their seats. Cormac was able to look at nearly every person there. Sometimes he could spot a werewolf in human form just by looking. The way they moved, the body language—more canine than human, hunched over, glaring outward, walking as if they had a tail raised behind them. The gleam in their eyes, as if they’d kill you as soon as look at you. Ones who were losing control, like Harrison’s cattle killer, had a harder time hiding it.

He didn’t spot anyone who made him suspicious.

The service ended, and the priest and altar girls processed out as the congregation sang, accompanied by one of the nuns playing a piano that sounded tinny in the big space. The congregation followed, filtering down the central aisle and two aisles to the sides. Cormac made his escape as part of the crowd. He lingered at the corner of the church building, watching. He still wasn’t getting a sense off anyone. In his experience, werewolves didn’t do well in crowds. They sometimes lived in packs of their own kind but didn’t cope well around normal human beings. They saw people as prey. A werewolf wouldn’t go to church and be part of a crowd like this, unless his absence would be out of the ordinary and noted. He’d followed the tracks back to town—this wolf was trying to hang on to normal. Maybe he was here and hiding really well. Maybe Cormac would have to stir things up a bit to flush him.

But not right here. Not right now.

He was about to walk away, back to his Jeep and the next part of his plan, when he caught sight of someone coming toward him. One of the nuns. He felt a completely irrational moment of fear. Too many stories about nuns in the collective unconscious; he wasn’t even Catholic. It wasn’t a mistake—she’d broken from the lingering crowd and came toward him.

Tall, solid, with short gray hair and soft features, jowly almost. She might have been as old as the priest and had the air of an aunt rather than a grandmother. Stern, maybe, rather than kind. Someone who had spent a lifetime bullying girls at a reform school, rulers smacking knuckles and all. But he was letting stereotypes get the better of him again.

He supposed he could have just ignored her and walked away. What was she going to do, run after him? But the last thing he wanted to do was raise suspicions. It wouldn’t cost him anything to find out what she wanted.

“Good morning,” she said when she stopped in front of him, hands folded before her, pressed to her skirt.

“Hi,” he said, then waited for her to say what she wanted.

“We like to welcome visitors who might be new to the parish,” she said. “I wondered if I could answer any questions for you, about the parish or the town.”

He probably shouldn’t have been instantly suspicious of anyone who showed him the least bit of friendliness. Some people might accuse him of paranoia. But the woman wasn’t smiling.

“I’m just passing through, ma’am,” he said.

“Oh? Where are you headed?”

He couldn’t blame her for looking a little confused there. Lamar wasn’t really on the way to anywhere else.

“Denver, eventually,” he said.

“Ah. Well then. I hope your travels are safe.”

Cormac left. She continued to watch him; he could just about feel it.

Back at his motel room, he slept for a few hours, getting ready for another long night. He dreamed; he always dreamed, vague images and feelings, a sense of some treasure just out of reach or some danger just within reach. That if he was just a little faster, just a little smarter, he could make everything—his life, his past—better. He usually woke feeling nervous. He’d gotten used to it.

Later that afternoon, just before business closing time, he found a butcher shop in town and bought a few pounds of a low-grade cut of beef, bloody as he could get it. At an ancient Safeway, he picked up a five-pound bag of flour.

Around ten P.M., well after sunset, when most folk were heading to bed—when someone else might be trying to sneak out—he returned to the school. At the edge of the campus, along the trail of claw prints he’d followed back from the ranch, he staked out the bait.

A wind blew in from the prairie, almost constant in this part of the state, varying from a whisper of dry air to tornado-spawning storms. Tonight the breeze was occasional, average. Cormac marked it and moved across it, away from the meat he’d hung from a low branch on a cottonwood. The wind would carry only the meat’s scent, not his. The hunter scattered flour on the ground underneath the meat, forming a thin, subtle layer. If the wolf ran away, this would make it easy to track.

He went across the street and found a place near a dusty, unused garage, a hundred yards or so away, to hunker down. He let his gaze go soft, taking in the whole scene, keeping a watch on the bait and the paths leading to it.

Time passed. The moon rose, just a few days from full. However much the werewolf might resist the urge, might control itself until then, at the full moon it would be forced to come out. Then Cormac would have it.

Midnight came and went, and the wolf never showed up to take the bait. It must have satiated the bloodlust on the cattle. It was being careful, now.

After a couple more hours of waiting with no results, he dismantled the trap—took down the meat and brushed his boot across the flour until it was scattered and ground into the dust and lawn. Covering his own tracks.

The sky was black. It was that time of night when streetlights—and even this town had a few—seemed to dim, unable to hold back the dark. In just a couple of hours, the night would break, the sky would turn gray, and the sun would rise pink in the east. He’d stayed up and watched it happen enough nights that he could almost set his clock by the change in light. But right now, before then, the night was dark, cold, clammy. Three A.M. had a smell all its own.

He switched off the headlights as he slipped into a parking space in front of his room. The motel was a one-story, rundown strip, a refugee from 1950s glory days, with peeling white paint and a politically incorrect sign out front, showing a faded screaming Indian holding a tomahawk: the Apache. All lights were out, the place was dark, not a soul awake and walking around. No witnesses.

Cormac set foot on the asphalt and hesitated. He listened to instinct; when his gut poked him, he trusted it. Something wasn’t right. Something was out there. Slowly, he pulled the rifle from under the Jeep’s front seat.

There wasn’t anyplace to hide out here; the land around the motel was as flat as a skillet, with no trees, only a few buildings, and the motel itself. The two-lane highway stretched out in either direction straight and empty. Cormac didn’t hear footsteps, breathing, a humming engine, nothing. He didn’t see a flicker of movement except for grasses touched by a faint breeze. He had no sign that anything was out there, except for the tingling hairs on the back of his neck screaming at him that something inhuman was watching.

It thumped onto the roof of the Jeep, slamming the vinyl, rocking the whole vehicle. Cormac ducked, hitting asphalt, as the oversize wolf skittered across the roof and leapt to the ground in front of him.

The door to the Jeep was still open; Cormac jumped inside, scrambling backward, and slammed it shut as the wolf crashed into it on its next attack. Its front claws scraped against the window, digging against the slick surface, snapping at the glass with open jaws and spit-covered teeth.

The damn werewolf had tracked him. No—it hadn’t even needed to track him. The Apache was the cheapest motel in town. It just had to lie in wait.

It hadn’t made a sound, not a growl or a snarl. It had just pounced, ready to rip him apart. On its hind legs now, it was as tall as the Jeep, larger than a natural wild wolf, because it weighed as much as its human form—conservation of mass. A wild wolf might be around a hundred, hundred twenty pounds. A big werewolf would be close to two hundred. This one was maybe a hundred sixty, hundred eighty. However large it was, however shocking it was to see a wolf as tall as his Jeep, this wasn’t the largest he’d ever seen. Not a two hundred pounder. It was thin, rangy. It had speed rather than bulk. Its coat was mostly gray, edged with beige and black. Prairie colors.

The werewolf backed off a moment, then sprang at the Jeep again, crashing full force into the window. The glass cracked.

Cormac couldn’t stay in here forever. And he wasn’t going to get a better shot than this. He fired.

The rifle thundered in the closed space of the Jeep, rattling Cormac’s ears to numbness. The glass of the driver’s-side window frosted with a million cracks radiating from a quarter-sized hole in the middle. The wolf had vanished.

He couldn’t hear a damn thing, and he wasn’t willing to bet he’d blown the thing’s head off that easy; he couldn’t spot any blood. He looked around but couldn’t see much, lying back across the front seats, peering out the remaining windows, mostly into sky.

After rolling to his knees, he broke out the driver’s-side window with the muzzle of his rifle, dropping a rain of glass outside, and looked out. Shards of glass glittered across the asphalt. He didn’t see the wolf. Definitely didn’t see blood. Which meant it had ducked and run. Making his life harder.

He made a quick three sixty, looking out every window, hoping to see where it had fled. Werewolves were fast, but he should have seen something, a flash of movement, the low lupine form dashing madly to safety. Otherwise it was still here, hiding low and out of sight next to the Jeep. He wasn’t going to go outside until he knew.

Even if he did manage to kill the thing in a head-to-head fight, facing it down meant risking getting bitten or scratched, which was as good as dead as far as Cormac was concerned. No sense in taking stupid risks; that was the trick.

He started the engine and backed away. Right away he heard a thunk against the side and saw what he was hoping for—the wolf scrambling away from the vehicle, turning tail, and running across the parking lot.

The other trick was realizing werewolves didn’t generally take stupid risks, either. Instinct told them to flee when a hunt stopped being easy.

Cormac shoved open the door, stepped out, took aim with the rifle, and fired. The wolf disappeared around the side of the building.

“Damn,” he murmured. He’d have known right away if he’d even clipped the wolf. All he had to do was clip it. The silver in the bullet only had to touch the monster’s blood to poison it, killing it in a matter of moments. That wolf hadn’t slowed down. Cormac had just plain missed. He could kick himself. He didn’t miss very often, even when his target was running.

But he’d flushed the thing into the open. That was something. The game wasn’t over yet.

The engine on the Jeep was still running, and Cormac got in and headed back toward the Catholic school. Maybe he could run the thing down. Not to mention he didn’t want to be around when the cops arrived to investigate the gunfire. Assuming they did. He glanced in the rearview mirror, and the motel was still dark. No lights had turned on. He had to smile—small town on the plains, random gunfire in the middle of the night, and nobody bats an eye. They probably thought it was some kid out shooting street signs. Good enough.

He couldn’t hope to follow the wolf in the Jeep—the beast traveled overland, in a straight line. Cormac had to stick to streets. But that was okay. The sun had started to rise. Monday morning the school would be busy, just starting its day. Good. Easy for Cormac to tell who was missing then.

He was too close to identifying the wolf to worry much about his low profile. Parked in his Jeep, he watched the campus come to life, girls in their uniforms spilling from the dorms in clumps—packs, almost—hanging around on the lawns, filing into the classrooms.

Then came his turn. He kept the rifle under the seat, automatically felt for the handgun under his jacket, and headed toward the newer school building, where most of the activity was. He scanned the faces quickly, efficiently, recognizing many of them from the church service yesterday. His wolf was around a hundred and seventy pounds, and he searched his mental catalog for anyone he’d seen who fit that description. That ruled out most of the students. But a number of the adults were that size. It would all depend on who was missing, who was away, sleeping it off.

He entered the school and made his way down the main corridor, knowing he was out of place here; his skin crawled as people looked at him, stared at him, identified him as a stranger. Wasn’t anything he could do about that, so he concentrated on the job at hand. He walked up and down the hallway once, glancing through the windows in classroom doors, marking faces, noting rooms that didn’t have a teacher in them, making a mental checklist of other staff members he ought to be looking for—administrators, even janitors. He hadn’t seen anything definitive, nothing that worked on his gut feeling. In a sense, he was trying to prove a negative here, trying to prove an identity by its absence. He had to make sure. He couldn’t be wrong when he pulled the trigger.

The building had a lobby, and he waited there while the last of the morning crowd came in and made their way to their classes. A few of the nuns were also teachers—he noted them. Also noted that he didn’t see the nun who’d spoken to him yesterday. But maybe she wasn’t a teacher. He also hadn’t seen the priest. At least, not until he went back outside, where the man was waiting for him on the sidewalk out front.

Out of his cassock now, the man wore plain black trousers and a black shirt with a clerical collar. As Cormac left the building, the priest caught his gaze and started toward him. Cormac could have avoided him, turned around or just walked away. But he’d just as soon hear what the guy had to say. He looked to weigh about a hundred and seventy.

Cormac waited, and the priest stopped in front of him. “You must be the visitor Sister Hilda told me about. I’m Father Patrick.” He didn’t offer his hand. Neither did Cormac, who only nodded a greeting. The priest didn’t seem to mind that Cormac didn’t say his name. “You seem to be looking for something,” he said.

Cormac kept it straightforward. “There’s a wild animal been killing cattle out east of here. I tracked it here. You see anything? Hear anything?”

“And here I was, hoping you were looking for redemption.”

In spite of himself, Cormac chuckled. “No. Not yet, anyway.”

“Maybe someday, then.”

In fact, Cormac was pretty sure he wouldn’t make it that far. It didn’t bear thinking on. “So I take it you haven’t seen anything? If the thing’s bedding down around here, you ought to be worried. All these kids around.”

Father Patrick gave him a quizzical look. “It’s that dangerous?”

“Yeah, it is. I think it’ll kill anything in front of it.”

“You make it sound like a monster,” Father Patrick said.

“Yeah, that’s about right.”

“And why is it up to you to hunt it? You aren’t with the Department of Wildlife, I suspect.”

“No, sir. Look, I won’t take up any more of your time—”

“Not at all.” The priest made a calming gesture with a hand. Like a saint in a religious painting. “But I would ask you to consider letting this go. I’d hate to have to call the police about a trespassing violation.”

Cormac just smiled. He’d heard shit like this a hundred times before. “I’ll get out of your hair, then.” He started to turn away.

“Also consider, that even a monster is a creature of God, and God does take care of His own,” the priest said.

Cormac looked at him. “You believe in a God that creates monsters? Monsters who murder?”

“We don’t get to choose God. We don’t get to make God. God makes us.”

He knows, Cormac thought. Or maybe . . . But he couldn’t have been the werewolf; the timing was off. He wouldn’t have had enough time to shift back to human, to dress and appear so calm and put together. At least, Cormac was pretty sure he wouldn’t have had enough time.

“You know who it is,” Cormac said. “You know what it is. Then you know it’s a devil, a demon—”

“And we’re all God’s children,” Father Patrick said firmly. “I’m going to make that phone call now.”

Cormac walked away.

It could be the priest. If he’d been a werewolf a long time, if he had the experience, maybe he could shapeshift that quickly and appear so calm just an hour after attacking Cormac, after getting shot at. But Cormac wasn’t sure that made any sense.

Something screwy was going on here. Cormac didn’t care what the old man said, he had to take care of it. He had to make the kill soon, because the full moon was approaching and he had a feeling that would be too late. That monster this morning wasn’t a creature of God; it was a pure cold killer. A child of Satan. Didn’t matter what kind of fancy theology you dressed it up in.

Someone was lounging on the hood of his Jeep. One of the students—an honest-to-God Catholic schoolgirl in a knee-length plaid skirt, cardigan, crisp shirt, and maroon tie, the knot hanging loose, about halfway down her chest. Her black hair—dyed, probably—was in a ponytail, with loose wisps hanging around her face. She was looking away at something and seemed to be chewing gum.

This place was too damn crowded, and too many people had seen him already.

Cormac was practically in front of her when she decided to look at him.

He made the automatic assessment: she was older, maybe seventeen, and full-grown. “Big-boned” was the polite way of describing her sturdy frame. Not quite big enough to be the wolf from last night. But he had to acknowledge the rather predatory look to her. She definitely didn’t seem afraid of him.

“What’s your story?” he said, resting his hands on his hips.

“I was framed,” she said. “They weren’t my drugs.”

Chuckling, he looked away. “You out here scuffing up my Jeep for a reason?”

She gave the Jeep a long, pointed look. Pale mud caked the wheel wells, the paint job had gone from olive green to pale green over the years, and rust spots had broken out across the hood, where the paint had been dinged by rocks and hail. Not to mention the shot-out window.

“I heard you talking to Father Patrick. And . . . I don’t know. I shouldn’t even be here.” She slumped away from the Jeep and started to walk away.

“Hold on there,” Cormac said. “What have you seen?”

She glanced nervously toward the school and bit her lip—a physical expression of the tension he’d been feeling since he arrived. So it wasn’t just him. “The other kids tell ghost stories. They talk about hearing noises—howling, banging on the windows. When I first got here, I thought it was just the usual thing, they’re always trying to scare the new girl. But they don’t go out at night. This is my third boarding school, and I’ve never been to one where kids didn’t break curfew. But here, they don’t. They’re scared.”

“You know that for sure?”

“Yeah. And it’s not just them. No one goes out at night. It’s the kids who double-check the locks on the doors and windows. We’ve all heard the noises. The sisters say it’s bears or coyotes. But I don’t think that’s what it is.”

“And what do you think it is?”

She ducked her gaze. “It’s crazy.”

Cormac gave a wry smile. “People always say that to me. Something killed some cattle on a ranch ten miles or so out, and it wasn’t coyote or bear. I tracked the thing back here. I think it may be living around here, and I think it’s not going to stay happy just killing livestock.”

The fearful look in her eyes showed shock but not surprise. He had a feeling he could have said the word “werewolf” and she wouldn’t have been surprised.

“I’ll get it,” Cormac said. “Whatever it is.”

“Okay. Good,” she said. Her smile was nervous. “I should get back—”

“Hey,” he said before she could scurry away. He had a bad idea and hated himself for even thinking it. “Would you mind doing something for me?”

He’d asked the girl to walk across the campus at midnight. That was all. Back and forth between the dormitory and the old school building, across the longest stretch of lawn, slowly and leisurely. She’d looked at him as if he were crazy, and Cormac hadn’t wanted to defend himself. He wasn’t crazy, just driven. And he lived in a different world from that of most folks, a world where monsters like vampires and werewolves existed.

Which was, in fact, one definition of crazy.

But Cormac had promised he would be there, that he wouldn’t let anything happen to her. And that he would fix whatever the trouble was. He tried to tell himself that even if something did happen to her, it was a small price for getting rid of the werewolf. He didn’t ask for her name on purpose.

But he was nervous. He’d never worked with live bait before. Not intentionally.

He left the Jeep, plastic sheeting taped over the driver’s-side window, at the motel. It would be too hard to hide, and the werewolf would recognize it right off. Easier to sneak around on his own. But without the Jeep he didn’t have an escape route.

It was all in the setup. No reason he’d need an escape route, unless this went south. Really far south.

The open lawn separated the campus’s buildings from the street. A few trees, towering cottonwoods for the most part, with some maples scattered around and a few clumps of shrubs made up the landscaping. Not a lot of cover available. A long sidewalk led from the street to the church doors, and a couple of tall, well-trimmed shrubs served as a sort of gate at the end of the sidewalk. Cormac settled here with his rifle. The spot offered a view of the lawn and was downwind from most of the campus. The werewolf wouldn’t be able to smell him.

He arrived early and waited there for more than an hour. All the lights in all the buildings went off at ten P.M., except for a porch light over the door of the church. A faint light was visible within as well, over the altar, filtered through stained glass. Cormac supposed the door to the church was unlocked, if tradition held. Maybe that would be his escape route. Ironic.

Midnight came, and he didn’t see anything. The girl might have decided not to help him after all. He couldn’t blame her. He’d give it another half hour, then go looking for the monster himself. He had to be able to flush out the werewolf somehow. Quietly, he flexed his legs and arms, stretching in place to keep the blood flowing, to keep warm.

There she was. He recognized the dark figure by the shape of her ponytail. Out of the uniform, she wore torn jeans and hugged a short leather coat around herself, hunched over as if cold or fearful. She stomped down the walk aggressively, as though she had something to prove. Cormac might have wished for her to be more skittish—to move like a prey animal. But she was alone, obviously nervous. That would have to do to attract the wolf.

She made her way quickly across the open space, taking the concrete sidewalk from the dorms to the school building. She moved more quickly than he’d have preferred, just short of jogging, looking anxiously around her the whole time.

The werewolf wasn’t going to go for such obvious bait, Cormac decided. But he wondered. It was losing control, that much was clear. Killing livestock was the first step. Attacking people was the next. It had to know it was losing control, so why stay here? The town was rural, but this spot was full of tempting targets—a hundred kids, easy pickings. He had to conclude that the monster just didn’t care. Or the thing thought it could handle itself. And it was wrong.

Even if the werewolf was too smart to go after such an obvious target as the girl, Cormac was pretty sure the monster still had a bone to pick with him, so to speak. One way or another, the werewolf would make an appearance.

The girl was two-thirds of the way to the school building when he saw it, a shadow pouring across the lawn. It wasn’t stalking; it had already targeted her and was running, ready to strike. Wolves hunted by running, smashing into their prey, which they knocked over as they anchored their jaws and teeth in its flesh. The girl wouldn’t even see it happen. She might have enough time to scream.

No hesitation, Cormac stood, braced, aimed, and fired, all in the same motion, as reflexive as breathing.

The wolf fell and cried out.

Cormac walked toward it and fired again. The wolf flinched again. It rolled over itself in a chaos of fur, biting at its own flank, whining in pain.

The girl had stopped, frozen in fear or panic, hands to her face. Then she stepped forward, arm outstretched as if to comfort the monster.

“Get inside! Get inside right now!” Cormac yelled at her. She ran inside the dorm and slammed the door.

The silver ought to be traveling through the wolf’s veins, ought to be poisoning its heart and killing it in slow agony. The beast looked to the sound of Cormac’s voice and snarled, lips pulled away from gleaming teeth, hackles bristling. Then the wolf turned and ran.

A last burst of adrenaline, a final gasp before death. This thing wasn’t going to go down so easy after all. But it was only a matter of time.

Cormac jogged after it as it ran, trailing drops of blood, to the church.

The wolf had slowed to a stumbling trot, limping badly, to the front steps of the church, where Father Patrick was waiting for it.

Cormac watched dumbfounded as the priest guided the injured wolf inside and closed the door behind them. He ran up the steps and stopped himself against the door, rattling the handle. Locked, the son of a bitch.

On the plus side, it was an old lock on an old wooden door, a latch and not a dead bolt. He stood back, put his shoulder to it, and rammed hard, and again. The wood splintered. The third time, the latch ripped out of the wood and he was inside.

A shaded electric light illuminated the altar area of the church, at the far end of a long aisle. Father Patrick and the werewolf had made it about halfway there. A trail of blood dripped unevenly along the hardwood floor from them to the door. Cormac stepped around it, hesitating at the last pew.

The wolf was gone. Father Patrick held Sister Hilda’s body on his lap. Two bloody wounds were visible on her naked back, blackened from the poison. Dark streaks of silver-poisoned blood crawled up her back and down her legs, along the veins.

Cormac’s hands flexed, ready to raise the rifle and aim at Father Patrick.

“She smelled you. Sunday, after Mass. She knew what you were and told me. Told me to be careful.” His voice was stretched to breaking, but he held back the tears. He didn’t look at Cormac but kept his gaze on the woman. “She controlled it for forty years. She took orders to help her control it, and it worked. The routine, the structure of this life—it worked for so long. I helped her, helped take care of her. But she was losing the fight, she knew she was losing. I suppose I should thank you for doing this before she hurt anyone. She isn’t a killer. And she’s with God now. This wasn’t her fault.”

What a story. And of course it wasn’t her fault; it was never anyone’s fault, was it?

“This is just God playing tricks, is it?” Cormac said, his voice flat, his patience thin. He just wanted to get out of here.

“God sends us obstacles,” Father Patrick said. “It’s up to us to overcome them. Like she did.”

He’d killed a monster, Cormac reassured himself. He’d done the right thing, here. He knew it.

“I have to ask—are you infected, too? Has she ever bitten you?” Cormac asked. He’d shoot the man right here if he said yes, if he even hesitated, if he gave the slightest hint that the werewolf had bitten him.

The priest shook his head and murmured, “No.”

There were ways of telling for sure. Slice his skin with a regular knife and watch if it healed fast. Slice it with the silver-inlaid knife and watch if he died from it. But Father Patrick didn’t have the wolfish look in his eyes. He didn’t have the rage, the tension, as if he were holding something back. Cormac believed him and left him alone.

Cormac retreated from the school without saying anything to the girl. He’d already done a piss-poor job of covering his tracks; no need to make it worse. At dawn’s light, he checked out of the motel and showed up on Harrison’s doorstep.

He knocked on the front door and waited for Harrison to answer, which he did after a couple of minutes. His wife was looking over his shoulder, until he barked at her to leave them alone.

“Did you finally get it?” the rancher asked.

“Yeah, I got it.”

“Who was it?”

“It doesn’t matter. But you won’t have any more problems.”

“And where’s your proof that you got it?”

“Talk to Father Patrick over at the church. He’ll tell you.”

Harrison frowned, plainly not happy with that idea. “Just a minute, then.”

He went inside, leaving Cormac standing alone on the porch. Didn’t even invite him in for morning coffee. Mrs. Harrison would have invited him in, which was maybe why Mr. Harrison had ordered her away. Folks didn’t like having Cormac around much more than they liked having the monsters. Two sides of the same coin in some ways, Cormac supposed. Though Sister Hilda never killed anyone, did she? And Cormac had. Over and over.

Harrison returned with a fat envelope to round out the job. He didn’t hand it to Cormac so much as hold it out reluctantly, making Cormac take it from him.

“You can let your herd out now,” Cormac said, instead of thanking a man like Harrison.

“Well. I’m glad the bastard’s gone. I hope it died painful, I hope—”

“Shut up, Harrison,” Cormac said, exhausted on a couple of levels. “Just—just shut up.”

Tucking the blood money in his jacket, Cormac walked back to his Jeep, feeling the rancher’s gaze on his back the whole time.

He drove away from Lamar, away from the morning sun, as fast as he could.

Carrie Vaughn is the author of the New York Times bestselling series about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio advice show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. Recent volumes include Kitty Raises Hell and Kitty’s House of Horrors. Cormac is a recurring character in the series. Carrie’s first young adult novel, Voices of Dragons, the rock climbing, jet fighters, alternate history with dragons book, is due out in 2010. She lives in Boulder, Colorado, with a fearsome miniature American Eskimo dog named Lily. Visit her at http://www.carrievaughn.com/.