“You can’t smell the body spray?” Jeff snorted. “Lucky you.”
“The wendigo was killed about a half mile into the woods,” said Helen. “Whoever it was used a four-wheeler to get the body here. He drove east after that, but we lost him once he reached the road.”
The upper bar of the fence was dented toward the ground. Dark streaks of blood striped the rusted aluminum. About twenty feet down, hanging from the broken branches of a white spruce growing out of the near- vertical rock, hung the wendigo.
Imagination was part of what made me a good libriomancer: the ability to visualize the story, to make it so real in my mind that I could literally reach out and touch it.
Imagination could be a curse as well. I would be seeing the remains of that poor creature in my dreams for months to come. The broken limbs, the pain and fear frozen on its face, the bits of white fur, matted with blood.
I turned away. Ignoring Jeff and Helen’s worried whispers, I crossed the road and rested both hands against a fat birch. I sucked air into my lungs as my mind played out one scenario after another to explain the injuries the wendigo had suffered.
How the hell had a human being done this? The average wendigo could kill and devour a man in minutes.
Which made the man who had deliberately and methodically butchered this creature far more dangerous than any monster.
2
Grass whispered as Lena came to stand behind me. She said nothing, but rested her hand on my shoulder.
I needed to focus on the job at hand. I rooted through my book bag until I found a handheld infrared thermometer. I switched it on and pointed it at Smudge. The screen read 109 Fahrenheit, which was only a degree or two higher than normal for him.
In humans, core body temperature fell at about a half a degree per hour. For a wendigo, the calculation went in the opposite direction. Given a standard body temp of twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit, we should be able to get a rough window on the time of death. Although I had no idea how trauma and blood loss might affect things.
Lykanthropos anthropophagos was well-suited to life in the U.P. Wendigo blood worked as a kind of magical supercoolant. Even the marrow was cold as ice. Their fur literally froze the moisture from the air, forming a protective layer of frost and ice.
Like werewolves, wendigos were born human. But once the transformation took hold, they remained in their monstrous form until death. The Ojibwe legends I had studied described them as gluttonous, cannibalistic spirits. In one story, a wendigo’s mere presence caused the river to freeze and the trees to split from the cold.
A lone girl had set out to fight the wendigo, using a pair of sumac sticks with the bark peeled away. Until I met Lena, I had always found that a poor choice of weapon. But the girl defeated the wendigo, crushing its skull. The villagers chopped away the ice, eventually freeing the body of a man.
“Are you ready?” Lena asked.
I took a slow breath, then nodded. “I’m all right.”
“I know.”
We returned to the fence. Lena took the camera from Nidhi and tucked it into her pocket, then gripped the rail in both hands. The muscles in her arms tightened as she bent the fence lower to the ground. Keeping one hand on the rail, she stepped over and studied the drop-off. It wasn’t completely vertical, but nothing short of a mountain goat would be able to climb that slope. Moss clung to the dark brown stone. Roots poked through like the coils of sea serpents.
Lena blew Nidhi and me a kiss, took two steps, and dropped out of sight.
“Dammit, Lena!” I pressed closer to the fence and spotted her clinging with one hand to a clump of tree roots, about four feet to the left of the spruce tree holding the body. She pulled herself sideways and began to scale the spruce. Her fingers sank into the trunk of the tree, letting her climb as easily as a spider.
“She used to be more careful.” Nidhi’s unspoken message was louder than her actual words.
“Where’s the fun in that?” I said automatically. I leaned out and aimed the thermometer at the wendigo’s remains. Cold air swirled up past my arms, pimpling the skin. The body’s temperature read twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit, meaning death had occurred roughly eight hours ago, give or take. A core reading would have been more accurate, but wendigos maintained a fairly uniform temperature throughout their bodies.