Ilona Andrews - Dark and Stormy Knights

Cormac had to find the thing before that happened. Full moon was still a week off, but that didn’t matter when one of them went bad. They could change anytime they wanted and did mostly when they lost control.

“You have any idea who’s doing this? Anybody notice any strangers around here? Someone who might be camping out? Or has someone in town started acting funny?”

“If I had any idea who it was, I wouldn’t need to call you,” Harrison said, frowning.

Cormac stepped around the kill, looking for tracks, for the pattern of wolf pads as big as a man’s face, with the matching puncture marks of claws. The winter had been dry so far, and the ground was rock hard. He might not have seen anything among the carpet of dead grasses, but werewolf claws were sharp, and he found the little holes in the ground, as far apart as his spread hand. He threw his keys to Harrison. He’d left his rifles in the vehicle but had a semiautomatic handgun in a shoulder holster, hidden under his leather jacket. “I’ll meet you back at the house.”

“What did you find?”

“Give me the afternoon, I’ll let you know.”

Harrison drove off in the Jeep, and Cormac followed the tracks.

The wolf could have run for miles. Cormac might be hiking all day—or at least as long as he could keep following his quarry. But for the first couple of miles the trail was clear; he found prints from one stride to the next, and on. The thing was headed in a straight line. Straight for home.

He reached the edge of the property, where Harrison was waiting at the Jeep. Cormac waved at him and kept going. The immense wolf tracks followed the ranch’s dirt driveway, then paralleled the highway, back toward town.

So it was someone from town, not some recluse cut off from civilization. That made it worse. This was civilization gone amuck. A werewolf could only follow instinct, which would drive it back home, wherever that might be. A monster might kill its own family and not even know what it did. Cormac had to find it first.

Brick-dry prairie along the highway gave way to empty, weed-grown lots, dirt roads, then cracked pavement, then sidewalks. Weeds gave way to lawns and welcoming rows of houses with porches, screen doors, and family cars outside. This all gave Cormac a sense of foreboding, because he was still following the same tracks, sparse now but sure in their direction: the puncture marks of claws in garden soil, torn-up tufts of grass. He’d lose the trail on pavement but find it again after hunting along the margins of lawns. The trail was straight enough that he wondered if he’d find a man at the end of it, staring back at him with a wolf behind his eyes.

What he found, when the prints and claw marks ended, was an oblong of pressed earth against an old brick building—the kind of shape a person might have made if he’d curled up and gone to sleep right here. The building was big, three stories, probably built around the turn of the last century. It might have been a schoolhouse. Why had the wolf come here?

There were no human footprints to follow; the distinctive claw marks had disappeared. Finally, he lost the trail.

He expanded his search, took in the area. The tall brick building seemed to be the center of a complex. One of the other buildings was definitely a school, like the kind built in the 1960s—low, one story, a flat roof, a grid of windows. Construction paper artwork was hung on the windows in one classroom.

Across a lawn stood another antique building, this one with a high, peaked roof—a steeple with a cross on top. He went around to the front and read the stone marker there: Saint Catherine’s.

This was a Catholic church and school.

He preferred the jobs where the wolf was an outcast who fled to the wilderness—no witnesses.

At the end of this, he’d have to kill someone. There’d be a body, and the cops didn’t take “He needed killin’ ” as an excuse. He could try to tell them the thing was a werewolf, but the end result wouldn’t be much different. Prison, psych ward, same thing.

The fewer people saw him lurking around, the fewer people he talked to, the better. He needed to keep it so that the people who did spot him wouldn’t be able to point the cops at him. When the body turned up, Harrison wouldn’t turn him in. Harrison understood.

Cormac walked along the street, passing the school’s grounds and trying to get a feel for the place. He walked by only once, normal, as if he had someplace else to be. Several buildings made up the complex, including a couple of homey brick blocks that seemed to be dorms. Around back was a sports field, and a group of girls in matching gray sweatshirts and green sweatpants played soccer. Maybe aged fifteen to seventeen. So, girls’ boarding school, high school. It was a Saturday; they wouldn’t be in class. There looked to be a couple of adults out with them, women in sweatpants and jackets. During the week there’d be teachers as well and a priest and staff for the church. They’d live on campus, too. In fact, behind the church he spotted what must have been the rectory, a small, square clapboard house attached to a meeting hall.

The werewolf could be any of them. A hundred possibilities, at least. He didn’t know where to start.

When he was done with his quick survey, he cut back a couple of blocks, made his way to the highway again, and returned to Harrison’s ranch. Dusk was falling.

Joe Harrison must have seen him coming through a window and met him on the porch.

“You get it? Is it dead?” Harrison said.

Cormac didn’t nod or shake his head, didn’t say yes or no. “I’m working on it. Wondered if you could tell me anything about the Catholic school up the highway.”

“Saint Catherine’s? It’s a reform school. All girls. Full of troublemakers.”

“Really? I didn’t see any fences.”

Harrison chuckled. “Look around. Where are they going to run off to?”

“I tracked your killer there,” Cormac said.

“You think it’s one of them kids?” The rancher donned an eager, hungry look.

Cormac frowned, hoping it wasn’t. He didn’t want to have to go shooting a kid. “I guess I’ll have to find out.”

Harrison shook his head. “Wouldn’t that just figure?”

“You know about any rumors, any suspicions about anyone there? Hear about anything odd?”

“They’re Catholics,” he said with a huff, as though that explained everything. “You know somebody’s always talking about the priest there, if you want rumors.”

Cormac rubbed the back of his neck and looked to the distance, to the flat horizon. The sky was deep blue, turning black with the setting sun. “That’s not a lot of help.”

“I’m just telling you what you asked for. Hey, how long’s this thing going to take? When am I going to be able to let my herd graze again?”

“I’ll let you know when it’s done. By the full moon for sure.”

“That’s a week away.”

“Sure is. But I’ll finish when I finish.” He turned away.

“I wish Douglas was here working on this,” Harrison called after him.

Douglas was Cormac’s father. Harrison had known him—that was how he’d known to call Cormac.

Cormac didn’t slow down. “Yeah. Well. You got me instead.”

He kept watch on the ranch through the night; the werewolf might return to where it had found easy pickings before. Harrison had penned up the cattle since last night’s attack, and the animals crowded the corrals, milling and murmuring unhappily. Cormac kept walking the plains around the ranch house, covering half a dozen miles over the course of a couple of hours. He didn’t see anything. He didn’t even get that crawling feeling on his neck, as though something were watching him. It was just another cold night.