Raven Cursed

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN And if the Fangheads Kill Them?

I stopped at the herb shop and parked in the shadow of a massive flowering plant. The big leaves were elongated, heart-shaped, and, this time of year, the entire small tree was covered with odd flowers, dark fuchsia, sharp-pointed petals, with dark blue centers. Molly had told me its scientific name, but all I remembered was Japanese butterfly bush. Today, the long, limber branches were trailing the ground, heavy, bent by rain. I brushed a straggling branch and it sprang back like a kids’ weapon, nature’s squirt gun, scattering water all over me. I grimaced up at the dark sky. “Thanks. I needed another drenching.”

Before I went inside, I walked around the café and shop, sniffing. A wet breeze danced in the dark, lashing my face and body with overgrown shrubs while the muddy earth sucked at my footing and roots and vines tried to trip me. Around back, a small ditch funneled rainwater down the steep hill, gurgling. Rising on the breeze, I smelled werewolf. It wasn’t fresh tang, but the wolves had been here recently. I had been too distracted to notice when I came for breakfast, or I’d have caught the scent. The dang dogs were everywhere. I had smelled them at Molly’s, now here. Maybe it was more personal than targeting witches for mates. Maybe they were deliberately targeting my friends. In the electronic age, it wouldn’t have been too hard to discover who I cared about.

I went inside, to stand on the mat just within the shop, keeping my muddy feet off the floor. Regan and Amelia, the human Everharts, were working, Regan at the cash register ringing up a final sale, Amelia mopping up muddy footprints. They acknowledged me with matching grins. When the customer left, Amelia said, “We missed you at the café. It’s good to see you, Jane.”

Regan offered me a bakery treat and the last cup of a flavored tea. I pulled off my muddy boots to keep from messing up the clean floor, and sat at a table while the girls worked around me, closing up the shop, chattering about college and term papers and Amelia’s new boyfriend. I ate and drank and nodded. When I was finished with the mega-muffin—lemon-poppy seed, bigger than a softball and Oh My Gosh delicious—I told them about the wolves, concluding with, “They’re trying to rebuild their pack and trying to make mates. And even though you’re human, you smell like witches, females who might be able to survive the wolf bite.”

The girls, who had gathered closer as I spoke, looked at one another and got this look. I never had a sister, but I knew what silent, instantaneous, nonverbal communication looked like, and this was it. Almost as one, the girls swiveled and disappeared behind the front counter. They popped up with guns. Big honking guns. I started laughing.

Amelia was holding a perfectly legal 12-gauge shotgun, and Regan was holding two very different semiautomatics with matte black grips. Regan said, “The handguns are loaded, of course; this one”—she held up the H&K—“with silver nine mils for vamps, but I hear it works well on weres too. This one”—she held up the S&W—“is loaded with hollow points for humans and robbers.”

My brows went up. Hollow point rounds explode just after impact, and when they hit anything made of flesh, that explosion shreds everything in its expanding path. They are for killing, not stopping. And not something I ever expected an Everhart to own.

Amelia patted the shotgun, “Molly sent us to the guy who hand-loads your silvershot and this baby holds four of the silver fléchette rounds. That’s all we could afford.”

Regan said. “But we got plenty of regular ammo for robbers.”

“Rapists.”

“Kidnappers.”

“And drunken good ole boys.”

“We been robbed once,” Regan said, her eyes narrow. “Never again.”

Still laughing softly, I finished off the tea, debating whether to tell the humans about the predicament with their witch sisters. I decided against it for now, and stood, pulling on my boots. “Stay safe. Don’t shoot the good guys.” They turned the lock when I left the shop, and it fell with a clunky, defiant finality. Molly’s sisters were an interesting bunch. Dangerous as heck. But interesting. I was in the SUV, trying once again to get dry, when my cell beeped. I smiled when I saw Rick’s new number in it. “Hey there,” I said.

“You know where Henrii Thibodaux’s Bayou Queen is?”

“Yeah. I ate there once.”

“I have a gig playing here tonight. And I smell something familiar.”

I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. “What?”

“Werewolves. Get over here.”

I walked in to Henrii Thibodaux’s restaurant, just off Highway 25, in the middle of the dinner hour. I smelled wolf instantly, even over the delicious aroma of fried seafood and grilled meat. I walked around the dining room, sniffing, checking out the men’s room, sticking my head into the kitchen just in case a wolf might be working as busboy, then made my way to the parking lot, where I lost them, their slightly sick-smelling scent hidden under the wood smoke billowing up from the cooking vents. They had been here, but they had been gone for a while. Standing alone in the lot, I made a couple of calls and went back inside.

I placed an order, joined Rick at a table and dug into beef ribs with Texas Two-Step sauce from Henrii’s sauce bar. Rick had already finished boudin balls with Black Voodoo sauce and two beers—Cajun food in the mountains. Only in America. All I’d done all day was eat. If I didn’t shift and hunt soon, I was gonna start gaining weight. I was also bruised, sore, and banged up, but the healing of a shift would have to wait.

“So.” He picked up a half-empty beer bottle and sipped. “Last time I saw you, you were half cat, half human.”

I paused, a rib halfway to my mouth. Oh crap.

“Kem calls you a Qora, or a Bouda. A shape-changer. He says only the most powerful ones can do the half shift.”

I sighed and bit all the meat off the rib in neat little nips, thinking. When I was done, I wiped my fingers and said, “You don’t look weirded out about this.”

Rick laughed, an incredulous note mixed with the humor. “I’m plenty weirded out, Babe. But you reach the point where your ability to react emotionally to all the new shit being tossed at you is gone.”

I ate another rib, watching him as he drank a third beer. He didn’t look inebriated. His shape-changer nature had affected his metabolism. Rick would find it hard to get a buzz. “I’ve never done that half-change thing before. What did it look like?”

Rick shook his head and drained the beer. The waitress brought him another, which he opened and sipped. “It was . . . bizarre. Grotesque and beautiful all at once. Wild and feral. It looked painful. The movies don’t do it justice.”

I nodded and finished another rib. The silence between us was far more comfortable than maybe it should have been. I was waiting for the other shoe to fall.

“The bikes were riding off when I got here,” Rick said, returning to business, “and the place reeked of wolf. Could you smell them?”

I nodded and licked my fingers; he pushed his food basket away and leaned back in the booth, stretching. He was wearing a T-shirt I’d seen before, a thin black weave of silk knit that revealed as much as it hid, when the light hit it just right. My eyes were drawn to the mass of white, slightly ridged scars on his shoulder and swiped across his abdomen, and then to the long play of muscles down his side and the ripple of abs.

He was watching me, a small smile on his lips. I closed my mouth and remembered to chew. But, Oh. My. Gosh. Fortunately, before I could react beyond a sinking, spreading heat, he said, “They’re chasing you to get even, chasing me to finish killing me. What else?”

“Trying to rebuild a pack. But they aren’t smart enough to do it in any kind of order. They’d be easier to catch if they were smart. Stupid is harder to predict. Random instead of logical. And”—I swallowed—“I’m not sure how they knew to come to Asheville and the Pigeon River in the first place.” That thought seemed important, though I didn’t know why. Yet. We chatted for a bit, almost like a real date. Until Billy Chandler, Chief of Police, walked in with two cops trailing like sycophants or servants, which they might as well have been. “I called them,” I said at Rick’s surprised start. “How do you want to play this?”

“In bed would be nice, but not with cops present.” I grinned at that and he went on, “I’ll say I saw them on their way out.” Rick was the only one in town, besides Grégoire and me, who had actually seen the wolves in person and not just in mug shots, so his strategy would work. I drained my Coke and watched the cops approach. Chandler had a mean look on his face. Easy to tell I wasn’t his favorite person.

“Spill it Yellowrock,” he said. “I don’t have time for your shit.”

“Maybe you got time for mine, Billy.” Rick slid farther down in the bench seat, almost lounging, and his eyes were slit like a lazy cat’s, revealing only the lower half of dark irises and a slit of pupil. His tone held a warning, as if telling the chief to be polite. To me. A different kind of warmth filled me. No one had ever tried to protect me. Not ever. With my height and muscle build, most men figured I could take care of myself. Which I could, but still . . .

I hid a grin, stood, and went for a refill. When I got back, I heard the tail end of the conversation. Rick said, “Henrii has security cameras. The manager pulled the footage and burned a copy.” One hand went to his shoulder and the scars there, faintly visible beneath the thin fabric of his shirt. “Without a warrant,” he added slowly. “And you can thank Jane for that.” He smiled slightly, watching Chandler. “You owe her.”

This was news to me. And everything about that statement was sooo unlike Rick. It was the kind of taunt a cat might make to a dog. Crap. The full moon was growing closer and Rick’s new cat nature was peeking out. The chief turned to me, standing in the aisle. I smiled sweetly at him and nudged him aside to retake my seat. I lounged back too, my Beast automatically mimicking Rick’s insolent body language. Mine, Beast murmured, her eyes on Rick. She had liked him as a full human, but now that he was part big-cat, Beast seemed entranced. Billy’s frown deepened. I ate a cold fry and licked a drop of sauce off my index finger, and let my grin widen.

“Let’s see this security footage,” Billy said, voice gruff. It wasn’t a thank you, but it wasn’t an insult either. Rick and I unfolded ourselves from the seats and we all trooped upstairs into the small office. The manager had left the disc in the system, and Rick hit a button. I sent him a look questioning the readiness of the equipment and he shrugged slightly with one shoulder. I guessed that working as musical talent in a place like Henrii’s gave the help some leeway.

On the laptop we saw grainy images of two men entering the restaurant, shaved heads and faces, one in glasses. My heart thudded. It was the two wolves I had left unconscious and bound for the cops in the hotel room where the pack had held Rick prisoner. It was easy for my mountain lion self to accept their reality by scent alone, but my human half had a visceral reaction to the sight, electric, toxic. So did Rick, a faint reek of fear leaching from his pores, though his body posture didn’t tighten or appear to react. More and more like a cat.

I focused on the screen. One of the wolves was bigger than Big Evan and solid muscle. I’d nicknamed him Fire Truck. The other guy looked little next to him, but probably stood between five feet seven and five ten. It was hard to tell next to the mountain of Fire Truck. The smaller guy moved fast in the digital footage, seeming to jump through the intermittent progression of frames. He had squinty eyes and bulges under his hoodie that were likely weapons. He looked weaselly, which became his new name.

We watched Fire Truck and Weasel disappear inside, trailed later by a woman wearing a granny dress and old-fashioned boots, an open umbrella over her. Rick pressed a button and the digital footage again showed the woman leaving, her gait ungainly in the boots, followed by the two werewolves. The time stamp indicated that sixty-two minutes had passed. Another button showed us the parking area and the wolfmen helmeting up, starting bikes, and cruising out onto the street. An instant later, Rick entered, and the footage stopped.

“Again,” Billy said. When the bikes roared off, we got a glimpse of the license plates, enough to know they weren’t North Carolina plates. He looked at Rick. “You’re sure these two are the ones who kidnapped an undercover cop, held him prisoner, tortured him”—Billy’s eyes looked Rick over, as if searching for werewolf taint—“and tried to kill him.”

“Yes,” Rick said, not rising to the insult in the look.

“Before you go thinking Rick might turn into a werewolf and bite your men, you should know that the vamps’ Mercy Blade took care of any possibility of that,” I said. “He’s not a werewolf.” Rick laughed and the sound carried a bitter note. Yeah. No werewolf. Of course he might go big-cat-furry. And soon.

Billy frowned. “I’ll upgrade the BOLO on the bikers to include stills from this video, and list them as armed and dangerous, with orders to locate but not approach.” Chandler looked at me, unwillingness clear in his eyes. He didn’t want to be asking me anything. “If we find these guys, what are we supposed to do?”

“Call me,” I said. “I’ll bring the vamps.”

“And if the fangheads kill them instead of apprehending them?”

“You’ll have some paperwork to fill out,” I said, and pushed through the cops into the hallway and down the stairs. Outside, I sloshed through puddles to the SUV and roared out into the street. I had a lot to think about.

I do my best thinking when I’m not actively pursuing a thought. Ideas are like small prey, scuttling into corners when a cat tries to chase them, coming out to play when the cat sits silent and unmoving. Back in my room, I studied topo maps, maps of rivers and streams, and once again studied the map of the grindy sightings and the wolf attacks. I noticed a place I hadn’t hunted before, one that looked like promising terrain—not as steep as big-cats liked, but composed of shale too steep for human activity. While I packed a small backpack as a go-bag, I gave the security team instructions for the night, and orders to call Leo if the vamps resisted the plans. I texted Bruiser with two lines, telling him I’d be hunting and that the vamps were not to leave the hotel due to security concerns. He’d know to put Leo on if my guys called him.

I also discovered a recent voice message from Angie Baby. I punched in the code and listened to her soft voice say, “Aunt Jane. You got to come back to see me. Okay? Mommy’s not actin’ like she’s supposed to. You gotta come.”

Guilt wormed its way into me like a steel barb. It sounded as if Mol was still spelled. But Big Evan was on the job, and I had promised to give him time. “Soon, Angie Baby,” I murmured.

I set the cell Leo could use to track me on the table and left the hotel wearing clean jeans, running shoes, T-shirt, and a light jacket. I took off in the SUV I was coming to think of as mine. I bought a new throwaway cell at a strip mall and stopped at an Ingles for food supplies before driving up 70, a patch of road I was getting far too familiar with.

Almost everything about this gig seemed to point to the road between Asheville and Hot Springs: the wolves’ kill-sites, the grindy sightings, the wolf scent stalking Molly and her family, and even Lincoln Shaddock’s house and hunting territory. I didn’t believe in coincidences, and had seen little evidence to shake that faith. But there were a lot of them: Evangelina going to the dark side, Lincoln Shaddock under her spell, werewolves ending up in the area, to name a few. They had to be tied together, but how? I needed to try something new to shake things up, including my own thinking processes. Instead of hunting the wolves where they had killed and departed, I needed to hunt where they had hunted and not killed. In Beast form.

I parked down the mountain from Molly’s, in a little-used driveway just as rain started again. The chain guarding the drive was old, rusted, but solid. The lock holding it was rusted through and broke apart when I took a tire iron to it. I drove up the drive, weeds scraping the undercarriage, and parked around a bend where the SUV wouldn’t be seen come morning.

Sitting in the front seat, I stripped naked, rolling the clothes I’d been wearing around the throwaway cell and into my large travel bag. I packed light when I hunted as Beast, when I had territory that I/we claimed as ours. Or in summer. In New Orleans. Or when I was just hunting and could stay in Beast form if dawn caught us far from home. Tonight it was cold, with an unseasonably early frost warning. I had no idea where I’d end up by dawn. I might have to shift back to human someplace far off and hike to the nearest road. Maybe hike until my cell worked. I couldn’t stay in Beast form all day and do my job.

I wrapped a new fleece blanket around my shoulders. Someone had kindly replaced the small one I’d destroyed. Naked but for the miniblanket and a pair of cheap flops, carrying the go-bag and my mountain lion fetish necklace, I walked down the drive, the last of the hurricane’s sporadic rain pelting me. The path descended sharply before I came upon an old mountain house from the thirties or forties, roof caved in, asbestos-siding walls bulged out, burned windows like eyes into the underworld. It once had a view down the mountain, but saplings and scrub had grown over and obscured any vista. In the scrub, I found the rounded top of a boulder and cleaned a space around it, pulling vines and briars. I hurt my hands but the shift would fix that.

I scraped the boulder with the gold nugget I wore, to give me a way to home in on this location, and folded the blanket for a seat before sitting on the rounded stone. Cold stone can freeze a bare bottom fast. I put the backpack on around my neck and adjusted it to Beast-size, closed my eyes and breathed in, held it, and let it out, slowly. Again. And again. Tension I hadn’t known was there flowed from me like the rain. I relaxed and stretched my shoulders. The fetish necklace in my hands was comforting, a known in the midst of the unknowns of this job. I slowed my heart rate, breathing, letting my mind calm. And I thought of Beast.

Jane was gone. I lay still, smelling, listening. Water from sky, water running on ground, water falling from leaves was scent/see/taste/feel-on-skin. Scent of roebuck, skunk, lizards, and snake was strong. Mice and rats lived in ruined man house. Many-more-than-five birds and squirrels, smelling wet and cold, in tree-nests, asleep. Tasty but hard to catch. One mouthful crunch. Not worth the hunt. Twitched ear tabs. Heard waddling pads of raccoon moving down the mountain. Smell of man nearby, the stinky breath of cars always on air, old smoke, sour wood, and rot from man-den. Beast-sight made everything clearer, brighter, sharper than Jane eyes. Mountain curved on both sides, into trees. Saw house far off, lights dim and flickering, like TV pictures. Saw car moving on distant road. Heard trucks far away.

I rose from rock and stretched, pulling at muscles, stretching out chest and spine and along legs. I picked up necklace and blanket in mouth and padded back to car. Ugly car. Liked Bitsa, bike with roaring voice and nose in wind. Hunger pulled at stomach. Ache of hunger times, like claws. Jane woke up, deep inside.

Crap. I forgot to get the steaks out of the car.

I chuffed, cat laughter. Set necklace and blanket on ground and braced on side of car. Curled out claws. Opened door. Good hunter. Will eat cold dead cow and then hunt for wolves. Eat deer or rabbit if I find them.

Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. When did you learn how to do that?

Beast is smart. Drew down flesh above eyes, thinking. Jane does not have monkey necklace. Jane laughed. I did not know why. I set necklace and blanket on seat and jumped inside. Took cow package in teeth and jumped out. Tore through plastic and ate cold dead cow, taste old and watery. Wanted to hunt and eat live cow, fresh blood and hot meat, sound of cow cries, in pain and fear.

You are not hunting cows. They belong to people.

Raised lip to show killing teeth. Beast is not owned. Even by Jane. She was silent.

Sat beside car and finished meat, cleaned paws and face with long tongue, raspy and coarse, pulling blood and meat bits off of jaws and paws. Stomach satisfied, I stood and closed car door. I moved down mountain, smelling for wolf.

Moon was high and small, bright against cloudy sky. Rain fell in spats. Man lights were few here, many stars filling black spaces of night. Trees were covered in moss, dark and green and silver in Beast-sight, leaves rustling with breath of earth. I jumped over small streams. Saw trout in one, sleeping under rock. Trout tasty. But water was cold. Heard animals move, sounds Jane could not hear in Jane-form, could not see in Jane-form. Jane was slower than Beast, yet Jane had killed many wolf. Jane was good hunter with man gun and man claws of steel. The I/we of Beast was better than Jane or big-cat alone. Good hunter. Threw back head and screamed challenge into night. Beast is here. This is Beast’s territory. Raced down hill. Found wolf scent on cool breeze. Wolf smell was fresh. I set nose to earth and sniffed, long scree of scent-taking. Beast brain not good for nose-to-ground-hunting. Beast brain not like dog brain, not like bloodhound Jane had once been. But Beast could hunt this way if hungry. Had learned in hunger times. Had lived when other cats had died. Nose to ground, I started to run.

Found wolf scent on road. Found wolf-kill of big buck. Old blood, old flesh. Ate from old kill, claiming it. Beast’s kill now. Licking muzzle clean, followed wolf scent again. Long time passed.

I/we smelled Molly. Smelled Angelina.