2 Blood Trail (13 page)

“Like this.” Peter shoved Cloud’s body around until it was aligned to the northwest. She endured the mauling but didn’t look thrilled.

Silver’s tracks had been coming from the south and the shot had spun her in an arc identical to Ebon’s.

The Conservation Area woods ran east of the small south field.

“I think we can safely assume it’s the same guy and he shot from the cover of the trees,” Vicki muttered, wishing for a city street and a clear line of sight. Trees shifted and moved about the way buildings never did and, from where Vicki stood, the woods looked like a solid wall of green and brown, with no way of knowing what they hid. A dribble of moisture rolled out of her hair and down the back of her neck. Someone could be watching now, raising the rifle, taking aim. . . .
You’re getting ridiculous. The killings have happened at night.
But she couldn’t stop a little voice from adding.
So far.

Her back to the trees and an itching she couldn’t control between her shoulder blades, she stood. “Come on.”

“Where?” Peter rose effortlessly. Vicki tried not to be annoyed.

“We’re going to have a look for the bullet that killed your aunt.”

“Why?” He fell into step beside her as Cloud bounded on ahead.

“We’re eliminating the possibility of two killers. So far, the pattern of both deaths are identical with only one exception.”

“The silver bullet?”

“That’s right. If the deaths match on all points, the odds are good there’s a single person responsible.”

“So if that’s the case, how do you find them?”

“You follow the pattern back.”

Peter frowned. “I don’t think I understand what you mean.”

“Common sense, Peter. That’s all.” She scrambled over another fence. “Everything connects to everything else. I just figure out how.”

“After Aunt Sylvia died, the pack went hunting for her killer but we couldn’t find any scents in the wood that didn’t belong.”

“What do you mean, didn’t belong?”

“Well, there’s a lot of scents in there. We were looking for a strange one.” He squirmed a little under Vicki’s frown and continued in a less condescending tone. “Anyway, after Uncle Jason was shot, Uncle Stuart wouldn’t let anyone go into the woods except Colin.”

Good way to lose Colin,
Vicki thought, amazed as she often was at the stupid things otherwise intelligent people could do, but all she said aloud was, “And what did Colin discover?”

“Well, not Barry’s scent, and I think that was mostly what he was looking for.”

Cloud was making tight circles, nose to the ground, in roughly the center of the field.

“Is that where it happened?”

“Uh huh.”

Teeth clenched, Vicki waited for the howl. It didn’t come. When she asked Peter why, he shrugged and said, “It happened weeks ago.”

“Don’t you miss her?”

“Of course we do, but . . .” He shrugged again, unable to explain. Everyone but Aunt Nadine had finished howling for Silver.

Cloud had found the bullet by the time they reached her and had dug it clear with more enthusiasm than efficiency. Her muzzle and paws had acquired a brown patina and the rest of her pelt was peppered with dirt.

“Good nose!” Vicki exclaimed, bending to pick up the slug.
And a good thing there wasn’t anything else to learn from the scene,
she added silently, surveying the excavation. A quick wipe on her shorts and she held the prize up in the sunlight. It certainly wasn’t lead.

Peter squinted at the metal. “So it’s just one guy?”

Vicki nodded, dropping the bullet into her bag. “Odds are good.” One marksman. Who killed at night with a single shot to the head. One executioner.

“And you can find him now?”

“I can start looking.”

“We should’ve found the dirtbag,” Peter growled, savagely ripped up a handful of grass. “I mean, we’re hunters!”

“Hunting for people is a specialized sort of a skill,” Vicki pointed out levelly. The last thing she wanted to do was inspire heroics. “You have to train for it, just like everything else. Now, then,” she squinted at the woods then looked back at the two young wer, “I want the both of you to return to the house. I’m going to go in there and have a look around.”

“Uh, Ms. Nelson, you don’t have much experience in woods, do you?” Rose asked tentatively.

“No. Not especially,” Vicki admitted, “but . . . Rose, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“It’s just that, you’re from the city and. . . .”

“That’s not what I meant!” She positioned herself between the woods and the girl. “You
know
someone is watching your family from those trees. Why are you changing? Why take such a stupid risk?”

Rose rubbed at the dirt on her face. “But there’s no one there now.”

“You can’t know that!” Why the whole damned county wasn’t in on the family secret, Vicki had no idea.

“Yes, I can.”

“How?”

“It’s upwind.”

“Upwind? The woods are upwind? You can smell that there’s no one there?”

“That’s right.”

Vicki reminded herself once again not to judge by human standards and decided to drop it. “I think you two should get home.”

“Maybe we should stay with you.”

“No.” Vicki shook her head. “If you’re with me, you’ll influence what I see.” She raised a hand to cut off Peter’s protest and added, “Even if you don’t intend to. Besides, it’s too dangerous.”

Peter shrugged. “It’s been safe enough since Ebon died.”

It took her a moment to understand. “You mean that two members of your family were shot out here and you’re still coming in range of the woods? At night?”

“We’ve been in pairs like Henry said,” he protested. “And we’ve had the wind.”

I don’t believe this
. . . . “From now on, until we know what’s going on,
no one
comes out to these fields.”

“But we have to keep on eye on the sheep.”

“Why?” Vicki snapped, waving a hand toward the flock. “Do they do something?”

“Besides eat and sleep? No, not really. But the reason there’s so few commercial sheep operations in Canada is a problem with predators.” Peter’s lips drew back off his teeth and under his hair, his ears went back. “We don’t
have
problems with predators.”

“But you’ve gotta keep a pretty constant eye out,” Rose continued, “so someone’s got to come out here.”

“Can’t you move the sheep closer to the house?”

“We rotate the pastures,” Peter explained. “It doesn’t quite work like that.”

“Bugger the pastures and bugger the sheep,” Vicki said, her tone, in direct contrast to her words, reminiscent of a lecture on basic street safety to a kindergarten class. “Your lives are more important. Either leave these sheep alone for a while or move them closer to the house.”

Rose and Peter exchanged worried glances.

“It’s not just the sheep . . .” Rose began.

“Then what?”

“Well, this is the border of our family’s territory. It has to be marked.”

“What do you mean, marked?” Vicki asked even though she had a pretty good idea.

Rose waved her hands, her palms were filthy. “You know, marked. Scent marked.”

“I would have thought that had been done already.”

“Well, yeah, but you’ve got to keep doing it.”

Vicki sighed. “So you’re willing to risk your life in order to pee on a post?”

“It’s not quite that simple.” Rose sighed as well. “But I guess not.”

“I guess we could talk to Uncle Stuart . . .” Peter offered.

“You do that,” Vicki told him agreeably. “But you do that back at the house. Now.”

“But. . . .”

“No.” Things had been a little strange for Vicki lately—her eyes, Henry, werewolves—but she was working now and, regardless of the circumstances, that put her back on firm ground. Two shots had been fired from those trees and somewhere in the woods would be the tiny bits of flotsam that even the most meticulous of criminals left behind, evidence that would lead her out of the woods and right down the bastard’s throat.

The twins heard the change in her voice, saw the change in her manner, and responded. Cloud stood and shook, surrounding herself for a moment in a nimbus of fine white hairs. Peter heaved himself to his feet, his hand on Cloud’s shoulder. He tucked his thumbs behind the waist band of his shorts, then paused. “Would you
mind?”
he asked, gesturing at her shoulder bag with his chin.

Vicki sighed, suddenly feeling old. The distance between thirty-one and seventeen stretched far wider than the distance between thirty-one and four hundred and fifty. “I assume your nose tells you it’s still safe?”

“Cross my heart and bite my tail.”

“Then give them here,” she said, holding out her hand.

He grinned, stripped them off, and tossed them to her. Peter stretched, then Storm stretched, then he and Cloud bounded back toward the house.

Vicki watched until they leapt the closer of the two fences, stuffed Peter’s shorts in her bag, and turned toward the woods. The underbrush appeared to reach up to meet the treetops reaching down, every leaf hanging still and sullen in the August heat. Who knew what was in there? She sure as hell didn’t.

At the edge of the field she stopped, squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and pushed forward into the wilderness. Somehow, she doubted this was going to be fun.

 

Barry Wu blinked a drop of sweat from his eye, squinted through his front sights, and brought the barrel of his .30-06 Springfield down a millimeter.

Normally, he preferred to shoot at good old-fashioned targets set at the greatest distance accuracy would allow but he’d just finished loading a number of low velocity rounds—the kind that reacted ballistically at one hundred yards the way a normal round would react at five—and he wanted to try them out. He’d been reloading his own cartridges since he was about fourteen, but lately he’d been getting into more exotic varieties and these were the first of this type he’d attempted.

A hundred yards away, the lead silhouette of the grizzly waited, scaled in the same five to one ratio as the rounds he planned to put into it.

The bullet slammed into the target with a satisfyingly solid sound and Barry felt a little of the tension drain from his neck and shoulders as the grizzly went down. He worked the bolt, expelling the spent cartridge and moving the next round into the chamber. Shooting had always calmed him. When it was good, and lately it always was, he and the rifle became part of a single unit, one the extension of the other. All the petty grievances of his life could be shot away with a simple pull of the trigger.

All right, not all,
he conceded as the moose and the mountain sheep fell in quick succession.
I’m going to have to do something about Colin Heerkens.
The trust necessary for them to do their job was in definite danger. Rising anger caused him to wing the elk, but the white-tailed deer he hit just behind the shoulder.

He centered the last target and squeezed the trigger.

A hundred yards away, the lead silhouette of the timber wolf slammed flat under the impact of the slug.

 

Vicki rubbed at a welt on her cheek and waved her other hand about in an ineffectual effort to discourage the swarms of mosquitoes that rose around her with every step. Fortunately, most of them appeared to be males.
Or dieting females,
she amended, trying not to inhale any significant number. Barely a hundred yards into the trees, the field and the sheep had disappeared and looking back the way she’d come, all she could see were more trees. It hadn’t been as hard a slog as she’d feared it would be but neither was it a stroll through the park. Fortunately, the sunlight blazed through to the forest floor in sufficient strength to be useful. The world was tinted green, but it was visible.

“Somebody should tidy this place up,” she muttered, unhooking her hair from a bit of dead branch. “Preferably with a flamethrower.”

She kept to as straight a path as she could, picking out a tree or a bush along the assumed line of fire and then struggling toward it. Somewhere in these woods, she knew she’d find a fixed place where their marksman had a clear line of sight. It hadn’t taken her long to realize that this place could only exist up off the forest floor. Which explained why the wer had found nothing; if they hunted like wolves, it was nose to the ground.

Trouble was, every tree she passed had so far been unclimbable. Trees large enough to bear an adult’s weight stretched relatively smooth and straight up toward the sun, not branching until there was a chance of some return for the effort.

“So, unless he brought in a ladder . . .” Vicki sighed and scrubbed a drop of sweat off her chin with the shoulder of her T-shirt. She could see what might be higher ground a little to the right of where she thought she should be heading and decided to make for it. Stepping over a fallen branch, she tripped as the smaller branches, hidden under a rotting layer of last year’s leaves, gave way under her foot.

“Parking lots.” Shoving her glasses back up her nose, she stood and scowled around her at Mother Nature in the height of her summer beauty. “I’m all in favor of parking lots. A couple of layers of asphalt would do wonders for this place.” Off to one side a cicada started to buzz. “Shut up,” she told it, trudging on.

The higher ground turned out to be the end of a low ridge of rock on which a massive pine had managed to gain, and maintain, a roothold. Brushing aside years of accumulated needles, Vicki sat down just outside the perimeter of its skirts and contemplated her scratched and bitten legs.

This was all Henry’s fault. She could have been at home, comfortably settled in front of her eighteen inch, three speed, oscillating fan, watching Saturday morning cartoons, and . . .