also had a bowie knife with silver inlay. The bone handle was worn. His father had told him it had belonged to
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’d gone 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 inside 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 like 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 like they had a tail raised behind them. The gleam in their eyes, like 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, 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 come 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, smacking knuckles with rulers and all. 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? 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 watching 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 couple 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 10:00 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 only carry 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 himself until then, at the full moon he would be forced to come out. Then Cormac would have him.
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.
He returned to the rattrap motel to try to get some sleep, and to come up with the next plan.
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 he could almost set his clock by the change in light. But right now, before then, the night was dark, cold, clammy; 3:00 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, run-down 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.
