Raven Cursed: A Jane Yellowrock Novel (12 page)

Finally she thought at me, uncertain,
Bobcat. Male.

When?
I asked.

Last snow time. Maybe.

Last year. Winter. I stood still, bringing in the scents of the place, smelling rushing water rising on the breeze, deer, bear, rabbit, opossum and raccoon, numerous birds, the dry reek of snake musk, polecat, and skunk. No large cats. I moved on down the mountain, Beast alert and curious.
Hunting dead-fish-smell green thing?
she asked.

I laughed, the only human sound in the gorge. “Yes.”

Kill and eat it?

“No. Definitely not. It’s hunting the werewolves.”

Beast hissed, deep in my mind.
Kill and leave wolves to rot. Killers of winter food. Thieves of meat. Wasters of meat.
There were few more horrible insults from Beast than
wasters of meat
. She said nothing else, but I appreciated her focus. She often saw and smelled things that I missed or ignored because I didn’t know what they meant. Like the scat and the claw marks.

I reached bottom an hour after I left the sheriff, and stopped on the edge on the creek, straddling a downed tree. The movement of water was quiet here, where I sat on the bank in the sun, my feet shuffled beneath last fall’s leaves,
but I could hear the roar of water just ahead, where I thought the confluence should be, and from upstream, where it obviously took a drop. Hurricane Ivanna was sweeping slowly up the Mississippi River basin and dumping torrents of water to our west. Projections had it turning east, right for us, with forecasts of four to six inches of rain over two days. Soon this creek would be a raging torrent.

Lunch was protein bars, nuts, three brownies, and two bananas. It left me feeling full but not satisfied. I stored the paper and plastic, and tossed the peels high on the bank, knowing some veggie-loving animal would eat them despite the bitter taste. The pack much lighter, I headed downstream, watching the banks for grindy-sign. The sound of water on stone grew and the air was wetter with mist.

I spotted the three vertical claw marks just before I got to the confluence. They were slashed into solid granite, the fresh cuts still bright in the sun. I placed my fingers into the slash marks, finding the stone dry despite the heavy mist. I had just missed the grindy. “Dang,” I whispered. Below the slash marks were three-toed prints with claw marks deep in the soil.

I pushed on another twenty yards and stopped in the vapor, above the merging of two creeks. It wasn’t a peaceful marriage, more like a shotgun wedding, with noise and complaints roaring. The water formed a violent eddy, the water of the two currents hitting and rising in a foamy wall a foot high. The water churned so hard it flowed upstream for thirty feet in one place, a midsized beaver-gnawed log caught, swirling, and making no headway downstream. Other logs were trapped in rocks, held firm by the push of the water, making a sieve that collected and held everything solid carried by the water. Tires, two-by-fours, a torn mattress, buckets and paint cans, clothing, whole trees with leaves and roots were caught in the maelstrom.

The body of a deer was trapped on the pile farthest upstream, only the haunches and upper rear legs visible, flies buzzing, even in the wet mist. Downstream, the strainers were even worse, the bottom of the gorge filled with logs and human debris.

From my pack, I took a camera and snapped pictures, noting the GPS location. Sam was right. No one in his right
mind would navigate the creek, not with the sieves and strainers that clogged the waterway. I had missed the grindy. The only thing I had accomplished all day was to prove to myself that the wolves were responsible for the mauling and killing and that the grindy was on their trail. Which I had presumed from the markings and the attack at the Pigeon River. Disgruntled, I made my way back up the mountain to the SUV for the difficult drive back to a real road.
I could have taken the helo,
I thought. Beast hissed with displeasure.

I was nodding at the wheel by the time I made it back to Hartford, on the Tennessee side of the mountains, but I couldn’t stop for the day. Not yet. I called Dave and Mike and both were available for an early supper/coffee/beer, as long as I was buying. Leo had given me a company credit card, and I intended to use it.

The afternoon was hot and airless; the air-conditioning and dim lighting of the Bean Trees Café was welcome. Mike ordered appetizers—garlic cheese fries, homemade onion rings, sweet potato fries. Though Beast turned up her nose at cooked meat, we all ordered burgers, loaded. The guys got beer, microbrewery stuff that I really wanted to try, but knew might make me sleepier, even with my Beast-hyped metabolism. I ordered a double espresso so I could make it back to Asheville without falling asleep. I wasn’t a coffee lover, preferring tea, but caffeine was one drug that my skinwalker metabolism did respond to. I was more awake when the food came.

“Most of the creeks between here and Asheville in Buncombe County run east to west across the mountains,” Mike said, his voice carrying even over the busload of noisy tourists. “They’re confined to the French Broad River Basin and empty into the Tennessee River Basin, and then into Mississippi River Basin.”

Meaning that they were attached to the Pigeon River, burbling just outside the café. Got it. He pulled a creased map from his pocket while I wiped my hands on a pile of napkins, swallowing down the last mouthful of Black and Blue Burger. I drank some coffee. And while it was still going down, said, “Okay. So the grindylow can get to most anywhere without ever leaving the water, especially when
summer was so wet, and fall looking like it’ll follow the same path. Show me the locations of the grindy-marks the creekers and hikers have seen.”

Mike, wearing a red T-shirt, with a do-rag of the American flag on his head, unfolded the map with the grindy-signs that had been noted by the paddlers, hair-head creekers, and hikers. There were a lot of them. A
lot
of them. I counted the ones just on the Pigeon and the creeks nearby, and came up with over thirty sites. The grindy was claiming some major territory. I hadn’t seen anything like that in New Orleans. But then, there were no rocks there, and I hadn’t been looking for trees with slash marks. The guys had compiled the research, saving me time. I flipped open my cell and dialed Bruiser, Leo Pellissier’s right-hand blood-meal.

“What, Yellowrock?” He sounded irritated.

“Bruiser. Quick question. When the grindylow was swimming in the fountain at vamp HQ, did it leave any claw marks in the marble? Like the ones in its bedroom when it trashed the place?”

“No. Is that all?”

That was just weird. Why mark now, and not then? “No. The grindy’s searching for the wolves. I’m hiring some paddlers and hikers to help me search for the grindy, hoping it will work with me and lead me to the wolves. I’m paying the paddlers twice their going rate to take them away from their businesses. I’ll need Ernestine to deposit electronic checks into their accounts. I’ll e-mail the numbers to her.”

“Fine.”

I looked at the cell, thinking that Bruiser was awfully short-tempered for a guy who’d nearly had his way with me in the shower not so long ago. I put the phone back to my ear. “Thanks.” I closed the cell. “Okay. Money’s not a problem. Name and double your fee for the info you’re collecting. The vamps want the weres caught and handled.” I ate some sweet potato fries while studying the map and, with the other hand, pointed to three creeks, close to Asheville: Spring Creek, Big Laurel Creek, and Bushy Creek. “This is the farthest east the grindy marks have been seen, and there seem to be a lot of them here, too. Maybe more than up Stirling Mountain.”

“There may be more in other places, but they don’t get the traffic, even in the touron season,” a river guide said from over my shoulder. It was the guide with the silver stud in his tongue. At my curious look, he said, “Tourist? Moron? Touron.”

I gave him a small smile. I laid my cell on the table, the fancy one paid for by Leo, the one with all the bells and whistles, including a map-app and GPS tracking. “Here’s where I was this afternoon.” I pointed to the GPS coordinates. “Is this close to any of these creeks?”

Dave took over, aligning my coordinates with the ones on the map. “That’s a feeder creek not far from where Shelton Creek and Laurel merge to become Big Laurel Creek,” he said, his damaged voice soft but still carrying over the screams of the tourists’ children.

“So, here, here, and here”—I pointed to the places on the North Carolina side of the mountain range—“he’s marked several dozen times. And all three creeks are within hiking distance of the kill-site of last night’s attack. So maybe the weres have a hidey-hole somewhere in this area too.”

“There’s hundreds of rental and camping places, and thousands of empty, unused places where someone could squat for the summer,” Mike said, “and they’d never be noticed.”

“Mmm,” I murmured, considering the map, eating more sweet potato fries and licking my fingers free of grease between bites. I tilted my head to follow the overlay of streets and recognized the street where Molly lived. She was at the top of a mountain above one of the grindy-marked feeder creeks. All the blood left my face in a cold rush. A painful tingling started in my fingers. “Crap,” I whispered. Two of the smaller creeks were on either side of the mountain ridge where my best friend, her husband, and kids lived.

Beast woke up and rolled to her feet in my mind, a low growl vibrating through me.
Kits,
she thought, hunching as if preparing to leap.

Two of Molly’s sisters lived just down the mountain from her. Angie’s school wasn’t far away either. I stood up and turned the map again. The third creek was near a road that went right by my old apartment, the one I’d moved out of when I thought I’d be staying in New Orleans for a while.
If the grindy was hunting wolves, then the wolves were hunting me. I sat and dialed.

Angelina, Molly’s daughter, my godchild, answered. “Hey, Aunt Jane. You chasing the big doggies?”

The feeling of cold spread through me. “Angie Baby, have you seen some big doggies?”

Mike and Dave stopped midmotion and focused on me.

“Yep. Two of ’em. They standed up on two feets and looked in my window. I stuck-ted my tongue out at them and made some black light and they ran away.”

Black light.
Were’s had gotten through the wards on her house, and Angie had used her gift to chase them off, both of which were bad.
Crap
.
Crap, crap,
crap! In so many conflicting ways. Angie wasn’t supposed to be able to draw on her witch gift until puberty, but the little girl had the witch gene from both mother and father, and her gift had come upon her early. Even with her parents binding her gift down, she was scary strong. She knew things she shouldn’t far too often, as if the gift was searching out ways to express itself and had found an opening in prescience and in knowing what was happening to the people she loved. But when the wolves got close, she used the gift to protect herself and her family. Which was good. Wasn’t it? “Angie, let me talk to your mother, okay?”

“Okeydokey. Mama!” she screamed in my ear. I pulled the phone away. “Aunt Jane!”

“Big-Cat, what’s up?” Mol said a moment later.

“Hang up, Angie,” I said. I heard the click, though Angelina had ways of knowing what was going on other than eavesdropping. I swallowed, feeling my stomach contents rise. “Did Angie tell you about the dogs at her window?”

“Yeah,” Molly said, drawing out the word.

“Could have been werewolves.”

There was a long silence, and I could almost see Molly testing the wards on and around her home. “Hmmm,” she said, her voice dropping an octave. “We have them set to allow wildlife through. Looks like we need to change a few settings.”
Change a few settings
was Mol’s way of talking to me about magic. She knew I’d never understand if she used real magic vernacular.

“Mol. They’re looking to make mates. Human females
don’t survive the werewolf taint. Maybe they think a witch might have a better chance. Tell your sisters. Be careful.”

“I saw the mug shots on TV. They followed you here, didn’t they?”

Molly was smart. Sometimes too smart for my comfort level. “Could be,” I admitted.

“Big Evan will have a cow. So don’t tell him. I gotta go, Jane.”

She called me
Jane
. Which meant she wasn’t happy with me. “Bye, Mol,” I said, feeling properly rebuked. She hung up without saying good-bye. Great. I was putting the family of my best friend in the world in danger. Again. If Big Evan found out I was responsible for this latest situation, he’d skin me alive and I’d deserve it, totally.

Weary and sleepy, I tucked the cell into my pocket and ate the last of the sweet potato fries before heading to the parking lot where I climbed into the SUV and sat with the air-conditioning running, thinking. I could drive up the mountain and visit with Rick, but . . . Guilt and exhaustion in equal measure taunted me. Exhaustion won. I wheeled the heavy vehicle out of the Bean Trees lot and onto the interstate. Away from Rick. Chicken, yeah, that’s me. I’d rather fight an old rogue-vamp in my underwear, with my bare hands, than deal with relationship problems.

I motored back to Asheville along Highway 70. Along the way I crossed over Big Laurel and Spring Creek where Mike and Dave said there were multiple grindy marks. Because the summer had been so wet, they were running, but only enough to support smallmouth bass, not a boat. The rocks I could spot from the road were smaller than the boulders on Big Creek, the runs looked twisty but easy. But what did I know? Less and less the longer I lived.

Back at the hotel, I dropped off the vehicle with the valet and found my room by feel and smell. Way past exhausted, I showered off the sweat, fell onto my bed, and wrapped up in the sheets; I was asleep instantly.

And woke just as quickly.
Predator in my den,
Beast thought at me.
Human male. Stranger.

Someone was entering my room. Yeah, there had been knocking. My sleeping mind had ignored it, thinking it was
housekeeping. Thinking they’d see the DO NOT DISTURB sign and go away. He hadn’t seen the sign because he’d entered from the twins’ adjoining suite.