Kitty Takes a Holiday

He turned away from the window, crossed his arms, stared across the kitchen. I got my first good look at him since he arrived. He looked gaunt, caved in and exhausted, with shadows under his eyes. He hadn't shaved in days and was developing a beard to go along with his mustache. Dried blood flaked off his hands and spotted his shirt. He smelled of dirt, sweat, and blood. He needed a shower, though somehow I doubted that I could talk him into it.

'There were two of them,' he said. 'I knew there were two of them. That's why I called Ben, so he could watch my back. But the whole thing was messed up, right from the start. They were killing flocks of sheep, but nobody ever heard anything. I saw a whole field covered with dead sheep, all of them torn to pieces, and the herders sitting in their trailer a hundred feet away didn't hear a thing. Their dogs didn't hear a thing.'

'How do you know werewolves did it?'

'Because the family hired me to kill the first one. They told me.'

1 shook my head. 'Whoa, what?'

'The parents, the kid's parents.'

'The wolf was a kid ?'

'No, he was twenty years old! This is all coming out wrong.'

'Then calm down. Start over.' I held my coffee mug to my face and breathed in the steam. I had to calm down as well, if I expected Cormac to be civil. He was right on the edge.

'They knew he'd gone wolf, knew he was killing sheep, and they were afraid he'd start in on people. Nobody could control him so they called me.'

'They just gave up on him? Their own son and they wanted him dead?'

'It's a different world there. Out in the desert, on the edge of Navajo Country. Shit like this happens and they look at it as evil. Pure evil, and the only thing to do with it is kill it. You've seen this kind of thing, you know they're right.'

1 had, and I did. I just hated to admit it. 'What happened?'

'I knew his territory, knew how to find him, because he was going after livestock. But 1 got out there and found two sets of tracks. Werewolves are tough, but one of them couldn't have done that much damage on his own. His family didn't know there were two of them.'

'Him, and the wolf who turned him?'

'Maybe. I don't know. They had no idea who the sec­ond one was. Or they wouldn't tell me. That was when I called Ben. The whole job was a mess, I should have just walked away. Too many details didn't fit—like the noise. These two had slaughtered three flocks by the time i got out there. Somebody should have heard something.'

'How did you find them?'

'I left Ben by the Jeep, with a gun. He was on the hood, keeping a look out while I went to set bait.'

I almost interrupted again. Bait? Is that how he hunted werewolves, with bait ? But I didn't want to stop him—he might not start the story again.

'I found them right away. One of them. I shouldn't have, it was too easy. And it still wasn't right—the wolf had red eyes. I've seen plenty of wolves, wild ones and lycanthropes, and none of them have red eyes. But this thing—if it wasn't a werewolf I don't know what it was. I sure as hell didn't like it. I aimed my rifle at it—and then I couldn't move. I tried to shout to Ben, and I couldn't move. I couldn't even breathe. I've stared down werewolves before. I've never frozen up like that.

'I'd be dead, I'm sure that thing would have ripped out my throat if Ben hadn't fired just then. Then it was like somebody flipped a switch and I could move. And there was Ben, on the hood of the Jeep, with a wolf on top of him. I don't know if he shot at the thing and missed, or if it was just too fast for him. But it got him. He didn't even scream.'

Sunlight covered the clearing outside my house, but Cormac, turned away from the window, was still gray with shadows.

'What did you do?' I whispered. I almost didn't dare breathe.

'I shot the wolf. It was a lucky shot, one in a million. I could have hit Ben instead.'

'Then what happened?'

'The other wolf—the one in front of me—screamed. Not howled, not barked. Screamed like a human. Like a woman. I turned back and was going to kill it next, but it was already running. I shot at the thing but it got away.'

'And the wolf you did hit?'

'It was the kid, the one I'd been hired to get. The shot knocked him right off the Jeep. When I got to him he was dying. 1 put a bullet in his head. He turned back to human. Just like he was supposed to.'

He was right to do it. A cold, rational part of myself knew that a werewolf who couldn't control himself, who killed indiscriminately, was too dangerous, impossible to control within the legal system. What are you going to do, call the cops and stick him in jail? Strangely enough, that rational part of myself included a little bit of the Wolf, who knew exacdy what to do when one of our kind got out of line. Only one thing to do. To my human side, to my gut emo­tional level, it still looked like murder. I couldn't reconcile the two views.

'And Ben?'

'I brought him here. That's the whole story.' He drew in a slow breath and let it out with a sigh. 'He's not cut out for this shit. He never was.'

'Then why did you drag him into it?' My voice was stiff with anger.

For the first time, Cormac looked at me. 'He's the only one in the world I trust.' He walked to the doorway to the bedroom, leaned on the frame, and stared in.

It wasn't true, that Ben was the only one he trusted. If that were true he wouldn't have brought Ben here. But I didn't say that.

Cormac straightened from the door. 'You mind if I crash out on the sofa?'

'Be my guest,' I said, trying to smile like a gracious hostess.

'I'll get my bedroll out of the Jeep.' He went to the front door and opened it.

Then he stopped. He stared for a long time, holding the knob, not moving.

'What?' I set down my coffee and went to look out the door.

There on the porch lay another dead rabbit, gutted like the first. I wasn't surprised when I looked at the outside of the door and found a cross made of smeared blood, fresh blood covering the stained outlines of the old cross. It hadn't been there when Cormac got here with Ben. They hadn't been here that long, maybe an hour. So this had hap­pened within the hour, and this time I hadn't heard a thing. Of course, I'd been a little preoccupied.

I groaned. 'Not again.'

Cormac glanced at me. 'Again? How many times have you been animal sacrifice central?'

I went outside, smelling the air, staring at the ground, looking for footprints, for anything that showed someone had been here, how this had happened. But the blood and guts might have appeared out of thin air, for all the evi­dence I saw. I stood on the porch, circling, studying the clearing, the house, everything, which even in the morn­ing light had taken on a sinister cast. The place didn't feel cozy anymore.

'I wanted Walden and got Evil Dead,' I grumbled. I faced Cormac. 'This is the second one. You have any idea what it means?'

The scene seemed to pull him out of his recent trauma-He sounded genuinely fascinated when he said, '1 don't know. If I had to guess I'd say you've been cursed.'

In more ways than I cared to count. I went back inside. 'I'm going to call the sheriff.'

He moved out to the porch, stepping carefully around the rabbit corpse, and said, 'Let me hide my guns some­place first.'

Cursed. Right. Cursed didn't begin to describe my life at the moment.

I had to explain Cormac to Sheriff Marks. 'He's a friend. Just visiting,' I said. Marks gave me that look, the judgmen­tal none of my business what folks do in the privacy of theirown homes look that left no doubt as to what he thought was going on in the privacy of my own home. For his part, Cormac stood on the porch, leaning against the wall of the house, watching the proceedings with an air of detached curiosity. He'd hidden his arsenal—three rifles, four hand­guns of various shapes and sizes, and a suitcase-sized lock box that held who knew what—under the bed. My bed.

Marks and Deputy Ted repeated their search and found just as little as they had the first time.

'Here's what I'll do. I'll post a deputy out here for a couple nights,' Marks said, after he'd wrapped up. 'I'll also put a call in to somebody I know in the Colorado Springs PD. He's a specialist in satanism and cult behav­ior. Maybe he'll know if any groups operate in this area.'

'If it were Satanists, wouldn't the cross be upside down or something?'

His expression of frowning disapproval turned even more disapproving.

'Sheriff, don't you think I'm being targeted because of who I am?' What 1 am, I should have said.

'That's a possibility. We'll have to take all the facts into account.'

Suddenly 1 felt like the bad guy. It was that part of being a victim that made a person ask, what did I do to bring this on myself?

'We'll start our stakeout tonight. Have a better morn­ing, ma'am.' Marks and Ted headed back to their car and drove away, leaving me with another mess on my porch.

Cormac nodded toward the departing car. 'Small-town cop like him don't know anything about this.'

'Do you?'

'It's blood magic.'

'Well, yeah. What kind? Who's doing it?'

'Who've you pissed off lately?' He had the gall to smile at me.

I leaned on the porch railing and sighed. 'I have no idea.'

'We'll figure it out. You got a shovel and garden hose? I'll take care of this.'

That was something, anyway. 'Thanks.'

When I looked in on Ben again, he'd rolled to his side and curled up, pulling the blankets tightly over his shoul­der. Color was coming back into his skin, and the scabs on his wounds were healing. I touched his forehead; he still had a fever. He was still shivering.

The room smelled strange. It was filled with the scents of sweat and illness, with Ben's own particular smell that included hints of the clothes he wore, his aftershave and toothpaste. And something else. His smell was changing, something wild and musky creeping into the mundane smells of civilization. I'd always thought of it as fur under the skin—the scent of another lycanthrope. Right here in the room with me. My lycanthropic self, my own Wolf, perked up, shifted within my senses, curious. She wanted the measure of him: friend, rival, enemy, alpha, samepack, different pack, who?

Friend. I hoped he was still a friend when he woke up.

I made him drink some water. With Cormac's help I lifted his shoulders, held his head up, and tipped a glass to his mouth. As much spilled out as went in, but his throat moved, and he drank a little. He didn't wake up, but he stirred, squeezing his eyes shut and groaning a little. 1 shushed him, hoping he stayed asleep. He needed to rest while his body sorted itself out.

Then I made Cormac eat something. He wouldn't tell me when he'd last eaten, when he'd last slept. It might have been days. I made bacon and eggs. I hadn't yet met a meat eater who could resist bacon and eggs. Whatever else he was, Cormac was a meat eater.

After breakfast, he spread his sleeping bag on the sofa and lay down. Broad daylight outside, and he rolled over on his side and fell asleep instantly, his breathing turning deep and regular. I