announcer was saying, “. . . claims he found a campsite deep in the Pisgah National Forest that had been attacked by predators. The teenaged hiker claimed that the site was an old one with the remains of at least two people, located in a deep declivity with a narrow feeder creek at the bottom. This description matches the previous attack sites enough that the sheriff department and park service has sent out searchers. So far, however, park rangers have not found the site, and some are calling the claim into question, wondering if the allegation was something the teenager dreamed up for attention.”
The shot changed to a sign for the Pisgah National Forest, rain slamming down, making a spray with its force. The voice-over said, “This latest mauling and gruesome death is said to be older than the previously discovered campsites, but isn’t far from the campsite at Paint Rock. In each of these cases, the campers were all killed.”
Adrenaline tried to spurt into my system, but instead of increased heart rate, I felt only dispirited apprehension, the anxiety like a sore tooth rather than a raging fight or flight response.
The TV camera shot expanded to reveal the entrance to the park, and focused in on a group of drenched backpackers, who were clearly leaving. The shot changed again to a close-up of three twenty-somethings, the rain-soaked man in the middle speaking for them all. “You expect some element of danger any time you camp, man, but this is worse than anything I ever faced out west, and I used to camp in grizzly territory.”
The girl said, “Yeah, we’re outta here. My parents said if I didn’t leave, they’d come up here and drag me home.”
The announcer came back on and said, “Park and county officials have suggested that campers leave, and are making sure that every camper who stays understands the risks. They had already instituted a check-in system for every hiker and camper, every day, and the numbers of new campers have dwindled to nothing. Until the marauding creatures are trapped and destroyed, the tourist dollars in Buncombe and surrounding counties will dry up to nothing.”
I muted the TV. Groaning, I rolled out of bed and to my feet. So much for sleep today. As I dressed, rain and wind beat at the windows.
It didn’t take much to obtain Grizzard’s permission to join the hunt. The sheriff looked worn and wan and beaten, his body odor telling me that he was running on adrenaline, caffeine, and not much else. He’d have given me permission to join if I’d shown up dressed in a chicken suit, he was that tired and that worried. He gave me his personal cell phone number and a GPS unit and waved me off just as the downpour increased intensity.
I ignored the teenaged hiker’s directions and started down the mountain at a different incline from where the other searchers were working. The kid had gotten confused getting back to the park path, but the stench of his fear and the putrid scent of old blood and rotten meat led me down at the proper angle. I hadn’t expected to be hiking in the rain on this gig and hadn’t sent my water-resistant clothing ahead to the hotel. Torrents of water cascaded from the sky, aiming directly down my collar. I was soaked to the skin in minutes, grousing under my breath.
It took me an hour to backtrack through the woods and mud and laurel thickets until I hit werewolf scent. It overlay the reek of fetid, disintegrating bodies and took me directly to the campsite. There was a lot of gore and parts of three bodies. Maybe four. The camp was so strewn it was hard to tell what was what. The tent was in shreds; scavengers had been at the site, dragging things around; belongings were scattered. I moved back uphill until I found a cell signal and called Grizzard, giving him the coordinates before returning to the kill-site.
The rain made it hard to make sense of anything, and not just because the ground was mushy and the downpour was spilling down my neck. Not just because the cold front was pushing in fast on top of the dying hurricane, changing temps into early fall. The storm had washed all the scents downhill to meet the feeder creek the campers had pitched their tents beside. The creek was now a rushing torrent clogged with trash, brush, and body parts, the roar a violent white noise that drowned out every other sound.
I had seen a lot of gore in my day. I’d made a lot too. But this was beyond anything I had seen, a sensory overload, further complicated by the scent pattern. The wolves had been here more than once, their newer scent overlaying the older one like open wounds, infected and dying. And, of course, the grindylow had paid the place a visit, leaving his fishy trace. I learned one important thing—the woman killed here had been a witch, like Itty Bitty. No coincidence.
I crossed my arms and hunched my back against the cold, but, despite my faster metabolism, the dropping temps were seeping into my bones along with the wet. Standing under the partial protection of a big-leafed Royal Paulownia tree, I studied the site. I didn’t know what was driving the wolves beyond revenge and sickness. The level of violence here made no sense at all. The wolves had rampaged, killing all the campers, even the one woman, in an attack that appeared frenzied and irrational, even for werewolves. I looked out over the campsite, trying to see it from the viewpoint of whacked-out wolf. Rampage. Violence. Bloodlust.
Beast huffed and sent me an image of a spotted kit chasing her tail. There was mild insult in the image, and I chuckled, despite my misery.
That made sense, so I worked the timeline backward. Jail, the loss of their pack, then the full moon, had made the wolves unstable, uncontrolled. This site, though new to me, was the first attack site, made soon after the wolves got to the mountains. The attack site with the dead couple on the bank of the French Broad had been the second. The pieces began to click together like dominoes falling into a pattern. When the wolves finished with the campers on the river, they had gained control, and bit the squatter at the abandoned house, leaving him alive. The attack on Itty Bitty, the first site I’d seen, had been the fourth attack, and the place where the three women had all been bitten but left alive, was the last and most recent wolf attack. There had been none since, which might just mean that the wolves had gotten smarter.
If the wolves had made any mistake, it was here, when they weren’t thinking at all. I needed to track them back to where they had shifted to wolf and then back to human. I needed to understand it fully. Shivering with the dropping temps and immobility, I moved up under the laurel, against a rock face, protected from the rain, and found werewolf tracks. By the smell and the number of tracks, they had slept here in wolf form in the last few days. It was evidence. I moved out again and, for another hour, growing colder, wetter, and more frustrated, I stood in the increasing cold, under the unreliable protection of the Royal Paulownia, waiting for the searchers to find my GPS location. I was spinning my wheels, getting nowhere. With the rain, I wasn’t going to be able to track on this one, not without a better nose than I had in human form. And I wasn’t going to shift in front of humans. That left very few options.
Looking over my shoulder, I spotted the searchers sliding down a steep incline, led by the sheriff. I smelled coffee and cigarette smoke and sweat from the group behind him. Grizzard was not gonna like this. Not at all. “Hey, sheriff,” I called out. “You like cats?”
“You mean like the big-cat that walked all over my crime scene yesterday?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Be Polite to the Nice Pussycat
That the sheriff allowed me to bring in Kemnebi while we waited for the state crime scene techs to arrive and set up, proved he was reaching the end of his rope, but the fact that he agreed to allow the black were- leopard to hunt with us in big-cat form, showed just how stressed the county officials had become. All it had taken was my comment that the wolves had been back to the site recently, since the rain started. The fresh wolf tracks under the small ledge had been all the evidence Grizzard needed to consent. Even the park officials agreed that a tracker with claws and fangs of his own was a good idea, if I could keep him under control. I also knew that the officials would be making casts of any black were-leopard prints they found, to compare to the Beast prints. I figured that would clear Kemnebi from any possible suspicion in the killings, but it wouldn’t make the county and park powers-that-be any more satisfied.
Wet to the skin, chilled, I waited in my SUV at the access road, the heater running. I checked my e-mail,
