Faith Hunter: Raven Cursed

Mike squinted into the sun glare on the river, his lined face drawing tight, one hand adjusting the red scarf he wore like a do-rag. Voice booming, he said, “We’ll pass the word.”

I started the climb back up the riverbank, still looking for evidence of the creature I believed had attacked Itty Bitty and her boyfriend. At the top of the short rise, I stopped, a fresh scent reaching me. My sense of smell is a lot better than most humans, likely because of the decades I spent in Beast-form, before I found my human shape again and reentered the human world. I flipped my hip-length braid out of the way and dropped to hands and knees in the brush.

The dead-fishy smell was here too, but this time it overlay another familiar scent, the scent I had expected to find after seeing the pics of the injured. With one hand, I pushed aside the sharp-edged grass, not touching the ground beneath or disturbing the roots, but exposing a partial paw print. I had found my evidence and I didn’t know whether to be pleased with myself or even more worried. “Werewolf,” I said, louder.

The cop jostled closer to get a better view.

I pressed more grass aside, revealing more paw prints. They were as large as my hand, the nonretractable claws leaving long indentations in the damp soil. One forepaw had been bloody, the smell of dried blood, rank and old. Not much of a leap to assume it was Itty Bitty’s blood. I bent and sniffed. Witch blood. Itty Bitty was from a witch family. I motioned to Molly to take photos of the prints while I crawled forward, pressing the long, sharp grass to either side of the wolf tracks.

I bent lower, letting my nose tell me what my eyes couldn’t, the musky scent rising to fill my head. And I shivered in the heat. I knew these wolves. I’d fought them. I put it together fast, dread leaping back onto me. I had helped to kill off all the members of the Lupus Pack of werewolves, except for two wolves who had been in jail during the raid. I had forgotten about them, until now. They had made bail, tracked me down, and that one forgetful mistake was coming back to bite me on the butt. I had gotten sloppy. Directly or indirectly, they were here because of me. “Two wolves, at least,” I said, keeping my head low so they couldn’t read my face, pretending that it was visual clues giving me the information. “I may know them. Contact Jodi Richoux at New Orleans PD for names and mug shots.”

The cop cursed and reached for his cell phone. “I gotta tell the sheriff ’bout this, ’n secure the area. Get me some backup. Crime scene.”

“Good idea,” I said. Crime scene techs would have been a better idea this morning, before several hundred tourists had access to the area, and before the powerhouse released thousands of cubic feet of water, but who was I to point out someone else’s mistake.

While Emmett pushed back the guides and gawkers and called the sheriff, I followed the tracks on my hands and knees across a gravel parking area to the small, two-lane road. The scent of shifter magic filled my nostrils where the wolves had changed back to human form. Yeah. I knew them. And I knew it was no coincidence that they were here. The attack, here, now, so close to Stirling Mountain, so close to the parley of vamps I was guarding, wasn’t an accident. It was a personal challenge and a private threat, issued on the body of innocents.

A growl vibrated through me—Beast, angry, thinking of the photographs. Yearling human. Not experienced kit. Her claws milked into my mind, piercing and withdrawing. Too young to fight off pack hunters. Hate pack hunters. Stealers of winter food. Thieves of meat.

I stood and brushed off my hands again, looking from the street back to the river and the bridge, envisioning the wolves waiting in the tall brush just downstream of the bridge, slinking into the water in the dark, attacking the young woman, Itty Bitty. The wolves dragging her—bleeding profusely, terrified, screaming—to shore and deliberately infecting her with the were-taint. In my mind’s eye, I saw her boyfriend leaping from his kayak, seeing indistinct shapes swarming in the night, hearing her cries, rushing in, swinging a sharp-bladed paddle, only to have the wolves turn on him, savaging him for interfering. Other predawn paddlers coming fast. The weres slipping away in the ruckus. Anger burned under my breastbone. This had happened because of me. The wolves were here because of my actions and decisions. My advice. My plans. Crap .

“The victims are both going to go furry at the next full moon, aren’t they?” Mike said. After the decades of shouting to be heard over rushing whitewater, the guy had a voice with little volume control, but this time, his words were muted with worry.

“Maybe not,” I said. “I have a few contacts with the vamps. They have some healers.”

Emmett snorted, not impressed with vamp healers. He muttered under his breath something insulting about suckheads, weres, and witches in his county. I glanced at Molly, an earth witch, who ignored him, so I ignored the comment too, thinking instead about the logistics of getting a Mercy Blade here to heal the injured couple. I didn’t know if there was a Mercy Blade in North Carolina or Tennessee, but I’d find one somewhere. I turned my attention to other logistics.

“How far”—I paused, uncertain, trying to recall the distance from a long-ago vacation—“is it from here to the Mississippi River?” The last time I saw a grindylow was on a bayou that emptied into the Mississippi, west of New

Orleans. And New Orleans was the birthplace of everything that had happened to me for the last six months, most of it bad. I wanted to know how the green-skinned, semiaquatic grindy got from there to here . Sure as heck not on a Harley.

“It’s four hundred miles from Knoxville to Memphis,” Dave said, his voice raspy and soft, in contrast to Mike’s booming volume. Memphis was a Mississippi port city, and the most direct route overland to the river, but the water-loving grindy hadn’t taken an overland route.

I indicated a group of playboat kayakers coasting in after a run on the Upper Pigeon. The small, human-teenager-sized grindy would likely need as much water as a playboat. “Is it possible to paddle from the Mississippi to here, if you only count water big enough to handle something that size, and you prefer cold water, rocks, and privacy?” I looked around at the numbers of boaters. “Usually.”

The guides both looked northwest, downstream. Dave squinted, shading his blue eyes with a hand, and said, “If you can jump dams and paddle a lot of miles of waterway, all upstream,” he paused to draw in air, and my eyes slid to the scars on his throat. They looked like the result of a down and dirty tracheotomy, though I’d never asked how he came by them. “Then yes. The Pigeon goes west to Knoxville, eventually joins into the French Broad and heads south into northern Alabama. It empties into the Tennessee River, which empties into the Miss.”

Mike added, “I know people who’ve paddled the distance downstream, but it’s a hell of a long paddle even moving with the current. I don’t know any one who’s paddled it up stream.”

I didn’t know what the grindy’s speed was, or if it could handle long distances, or upstream currents. Which might mean that the grindy had hitched a ride on boats, making it a once-mythical supernat who was comfy with modern transportation. I smiled sourly. I didn’t know much about grindys, and had been hoping to keep it that way. But the grindy wasn’t my problem. The wolves were.

I looked up and out, seeing the gorge where the rafting businesses were nestled in the little town of Hartford, Tennessee. Just in visual distance, there were thousands of square acres where wolves could run and hunt and never be seen by a human. If I was wolf-hunting in Beast form, it would take a long time to cover this much territory. Wolves liked to run long distances. Beast wasn’t fond of it, wasn’t built for it, and even with humans in danger, she would fight me every step of the way. Beast is not dog, she murmured into my mind, sounding sleepy. Do not hunt nose to ground. I scowled and walked from the water, its tinkling quickly muted by the sound of nearby Interstate 40, back toward Fang.