Kitty Takes a Holiday

think I did this.'

'Well?' he said.

'I assure you, I'm not in any way, shape, or form capa­ble of this. No single wolf, lycanthropic or otherwise, is capable of this.'

'That's what I told him,' Baker said, flickering a smile. My heart instantly went out to him.

'Thank you,' I said. 'I don't think I could bring down one cow on my own, much less a whole herd.'

'Something did this,' Marks said unhelpfully.

'We couldn't find any prints,' Baker said. 'My dogs didn't hear a thing, and they'll set up a racket at the drop of a hat. It's like something dropped on them out of the sky.'

'A werewolf isn't a normal wolf,' Marks said, unable to let it go. 'God knows what the hell you're capable of.'

1 took a deep breath, quelling the nausea brought on by the stench of death—not even Wolf could stomach this mess. I filtered out the smells I knew, looking for the one

I was afraid I'd find: the musky human/lupine mix that meant werewolves had been here.

I didn't smell it.

'This wasn't werewolves,' I murmured. What was weird, though: I didn't smell anything outside of what I expected. No predator, no intruder. Nothing that wasn't already here; no hint of what had been here. Just like around my cabin, when I chased after that intruder. Like Baker said, it was as if something dropped on them out of the sky.

'Kitty.' Low and strained, Ben's voice grated like sandpaper.

He stared at the scene with unmistakable hunger. And revulsion, the two sides of him, wolf and human, battling over what emotion he should feel. His wolf might very well look on this as a feast and claw its way to the surface. The smell of blood—so thick on the air—was like an invitation, and he wasn't used to dealing with it. He clenched his hands. Sweat had broken out on his hairline. He was losing it.

I grabbed his arm and turned him away.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and his breaths came quick. I whispered, 'Keep it together, okay? Don't think of the blood, think about something else. Keep it locked up inside, all curled up and harmless.'

He started to turn around, to look back over his shoul­der at the slaughter. Hand on his cheek, I made him look back at me. I held his face and pulled his head down closer to me. We touched foreheads, and I kept talking until I felt him nod, until I knew he heard me.

His breathing slowed, and some of the tension sagged out of him. Only then did I let go. 'Take a walk if you need to,' I said. 'Walk back to the car and don't think about it, okay?'

'Okay,' he said. Without looking up, he started back for the car, hunched in and unhappy looking.

'Weak stomach?' Baker asked.

'Something like that,' I said. 'Is there anything else I need to see here, or can we go back to the cars?'

We climbed back over the fence, and Baker replaced the top strand of wire. Ben was leaning on the hood of my car, arms crossed and head bowed. I wished Marks had given me some kind of warning, so I wouldn't have had to bring Ben into that. He wasn't ready to deal with that.

'We're having a hard time explaining what happened out there, Ms. Norville. Werewolves, though. That's a pretty interesting explanation,' Marks said.

'Yeah, but it's wrong,' I said. 'I didn't do it. I don't know what did.' I didn't tell him about the thing I saw outside my cabin. That thing I thought I saw. If I couldn't describe it, what was the point?

Marks clearly didn't believe me. He might as well have been holding a pair of handcuffs. Baker's expression was maddeningly neutral. Like he was happy to put it all in Marks's hands and get back to the business of ranching. Western reserve to the extreme.

'Look,' I started, growing flustered. 'It's easy enough to prove I didn't do it. Get somebody out here to take some samples, find the bite marks and get some saliva, test it. I'll give you a sample to compare—'

'You don't have to do that,' Ben said, looking up. 'Let him get a warrant first.'

Marks glanced at him. 'Who did you say you were?'

'Benjamin O'Farrell. Attorney-at-law.'

The sheriff didn't like that answer. He frowned. 'Well ain't that something.'

Ben sticking up for me settled me down. He was right; I didn't have to defend myself here. They had no proof. I said, 'You think about trying the UFO people? 1 hear they have a bead on this sort of thing.' Anything could have done this.

'This isn't a joke. This is a man's livelihood.' Marks gave Baker a nod.

'I'm not joking. Can we go now?'

Scowling, he went to the door of his car. 'Don't think about leaving town. Either one of you.'

Whatever. I opened my own car door and started to climb in.

Baker called out, 'If you come up with any ideas about what happened here, you'll let me know?'

I nodded. My only idea at the moment was that this whole town was cursed.

As soon as I left the driveway leading out of Baker's ranch, Ben said, 'Do you have your phone?'

'It's in my bag.' I gestured to the floor of the backseat.

Ben found it, then dialed a number.

He must have gotten voice mail. 'Cormac, it's me. There's been some cattle killed up here. Matches the MO of those flocks killed at Shiprock. Your rogue wolf may have found its way out here. I don't know where you've gone, but you might want to get back.'

He lowered the phone and switched it off.

I glanced at him, though I wanted to stare. I still had to drive.

'Rogue wolf,' I said. 'The one he wasn't able to kill back in New Mexico?' I remembered he'd mentioned the sheep that had been killed. That there'd been two were­wolves, and he'd only shot the one. 'Why didn't you say anything back there?'

'Because I couldn't.' Ben's voice was tight, almost angry. 'Because that smell hit me and—and I wasn't in my head anymore. Something else was. I couldn't talk, I couldn't even think.'

My own anger drained out of me. 'It's the wolf. Certain smells, sometimes tastes, or if you're scared or angry, all of that makes it stronger. Calls it up. You have to work extra hard to keep it locked away. If I'd known what we were going to see I would have warned you. Or kept you away.'

'I hate it,' he said, glaring out the side window. 'I hate losing control like that.'

This was Ben, who stood in courtrooms telling off judges, who stared down cops, who didn't pull punches. Probably couldn't stand the idea of something else inside him running the show. I reached over, found his hand, and held it. I half expected him to pull away, but he didn't. He squeezed back and kept staring out the window.

We returned to the cabin, but I didn't go inside. I went out, into the trees, the direction I'd run the other night, chasing that thing. That nightmare. If I hadn't just seen that slaughtered herd, I might have been able to con­vince myself that shadow had been a figment of my imagination.

Ben followed reluctantly. 'Where are you going?'

'I've got to figure out what did that.'

'Clear your name?'

It wasn't that. Marks couldn't prove I'd done it, how­ever much he wanted to. Rather, I'd gotten this feeling that things would only get worse until 1 stood up and did something. I was tired of waiting, cornered and shivering in the dark. That might have been okay for a lone wolf, but I had a pack to protect now.

Running away wasn't an option because what if this thing up and followed me?

Ben said, 'You think this is the thing you saw the other night?'

'I'm still not sure I saw anything.'

'And you think it's the same thing Cormac was hunting.'

'What if it followed him here?' Whatever had been here, the signs were two days old now. Harder to find— and I hadn't found anything in the first place. But if it was the same thing, I had a second point of contact now. I headed overland, as the crow flies or wolf runs, in the direction of the Baker ranch. 'I'll look around. 1 can cover this whole area between here and the ranch. You should stay here.'

'No. You're not leaving me out of this. I'll come with you. I'll help.'

'Ben—'

'I don't want to hear any more of that alpha wolf bullshit. Just let me help, please.'

I could have gotten angry and stood my ground on prin­ciple. That would have been the alpha thing to do. Alphas didn't let new wolves argue with them. But it was just the two of us. I didn't have anything to prove. Maybe we'd be better off together.

'Look for anything out of place. Any sign, any feeling.'

'Anything that smells like those cattle,' he said, his voice low.

'Yeah.'

Together, we hunted. I let a bit of that Wolf-sense bleed into my human self. Smell, sound, senses—the least move­ment of a squirrel became profound, I looked sharply at every rustling branch. Daylight wasn't the time to be doing this. Too many distractions. Whatever had made that carnage had done so at night. This was a nighttime kind of evil.

I watched Ben, worried that he might let too much of his wolf out, wondering if he might lose control and shift. Mostly, he seemed introspective, looking around tike the world was new, or like he was waking up after a dream. He was right to want to come along, I realized. Being out here, learning to look at the world again, was better than him staying holed up at home.

We rounded the hill at the edge of the Baker ranch, overlooking his land. A backhoe was dumping the last of the carcasses onto a truck, to be hauled away.

We'd found no sign of the creature, and somehow I wasn't surprised. We turned around and went home.

That afternoon, I went online again, checking the usual weird Web sites and forums that might have the sort of data—or at worst, rumors and anecdotes—I wanted. I searched for livestock mutilations, particularly in the Southwest U.S. Sure enough, the hits I found included an inordinate number of UFOlogist sites. Kind of annoying. I tried to avoid knee-jerk skepticism, since lately I'd been forced to reassess a lot of my assumptions. About, like, the existence of werewolves for example. But I wasn't quite willing to believe that a vastly superior extraterrestrial intelligence would travel all the way to Earth just to turn a few cows inside out.

But I found something. It wasn't aliens, it wasn't werewolves. On a few sites people talked about a sort of haunting. Not by the dead, but by a kind of evil. It left death and destruction in its wake. It originated in the Native American tribes of the Southwest, particularly the Navajo and Zuni. They talked about witches laying curses that killed entire families, destroyed livelihoods, haunted entire communities. And about skinwalkers: witches who had the power to change themselves into animals. Like lycanthropes. They had red eyes.