Ilona Andrews - Dark and Stormy Knights

In the morning, he reclaimed his Jeep and found a ratty motel at the edge of town, where he talked the desk clerk into letting him have a room early. The clerk gave some bullshit about the rooms not being clean, but Cormac counted only three cars in the lot and at least two dozen rooms. Places like this didn’t have check-in times, he told the guy, and paid cash in advance.

He brought his weapons case into the room and looked over his collection one more time. A revolver, two semiautomatics, a shotgun, and a pair of rifles. The revolver was mostly to show off. He wore it when he needed to cop attitude, when a potential client expected the tough guy, the Old West gunslinger. And the boxes of ammunition for each of them: 9 mm silver rounds for the semis, silver filings in the shotgun shells, and so on. If he couldn’t take down the quarry with this, he likely couldn’t take it down at all. He’d never needed more than this. He also had a Bowie knife with silver inlay. The bone handle was worn. His father had told him it had belonged to his grandfather. His family had been doing this a long time, apparently.

He couldn’t be sure; his father hadn’t finished telling him all the stories when he’d died, when Cormac was sixteen. Harrison was right: it ought to be his father out here doing this.

After a quick shower and a change into some slightly less grungy clothes, Cormac went to church.

He hadn’t been to church—any kind of church—since he was in high school and living with his aunt and uncle. They were some flavor of born-again Christian, and services had involved sitting on hard metal folding chairs in a plain room—rented office space—listening to fire-and-brimstone lectures. He hadn’t been back since he went out on his own. He’d never been to a Catholic church at all. He used the tools, of course, holy water and crosses, when he had to. But they were just tools. Any God he believed in wasn’t like the one most preachers talked about.

The service had already started when he arrived. He stepped softly and found a seat on the bench in back. No one seemed to pay any attention to him. The church smelled of old wood, melted wax, and incense. The architecture was maybe a hundred years old, lots of dark wood, aged and smooth. The benches—pews—might have been mahogany, but there were pale scuff marks around the edges, where generations of bodies had banged into them. Pale stained glass decorated the tall windows along the walls.

He had a good view of the congregation: a hundred or so girls in front, identical in pressed uniforms; a bunch of plain folk from the town; the priest in a white cassock, standing in front, leading a prayer; and nuns, maybe a dozen, in prim black dresses, sitting in the rows with the girls. Their heads were bare—short and simple haircuts for the most part, no veils—which surprised him. He’d expected them to look the way they did in the movies, with the weird hats and veils.

There were altar girls instead of altar boys. Probably students from the school. Cormac didn’t know there was such a thing as altar girls.

During communion, everyone stood, filed down the central aisle, faced the priest with hands raised, accepted the host, and marched back to their seats. Cormac was able to look at nearly every person there. Sometimes he could spot a werewolf in human form just by looking. The way they moved, the body language—more canine than human, hunched over, glaring outward, walking as if they had a tail raised behind them. The gleam in their eyes, as if they’d kill you as soon as look at you. Ones who were losing control, like Harrison’s cattle killer, had a harder time hiding it.

He didn’t spot anyone who made him suspicious.

The service ended, and the priest and altar girls processed out as the congregation sang, accompanied by one of the nuns playing a piano that sounded tinny in the big space. The congregation followed, filtering down the central aisle and two aisles to the sides. Cormac made his escape as part of the crowd. He lingered at the corner of the church building, watching. He still wasn’t getting a sense off anyone. In his experience, werewolves didn’t do well in crowds. They sometimes lived in packs of their own kind but didn’t cope well around normal human beings. They saw people as prey. A werewolf wouldn’t go to church and be part of a crowd like this, unless his absence would be out of the ordinary and noted. He’d followed the tracks back to town—this wolf was trying to hang on to normal. Maybe he was here and hiding really well. Maybe Cormac would have to stir things up a bit to flush him.

But not right here. Not right now.

He was about to walk away, back to his Jeep and the next part of his plan, when he caught sight of someone coming toward him. One of the nuns. He felt a completely irrational moment of fear. Too many stories about nuns in the collective unconscious; he wasn’t even Catholic. It wasn’t a mistake—she’d broken from the lingering crowd and came toward him.

Tall, solid, with short gray hair and soft features, jowly almost. She might have been as old as the priest and had the air of an aunt rather than a grandmother. Stern, maybe, rather than kind. Someone who had spent a lifetime bullying girls at a reform school, rulers smacking knuckles and all. But he was letting stereotypes get the better of him again.

He supposed he could have just ignored her and walked away. What was she going to do, run after him? But the last thing he wanted to do was raise suspicions. It wouldn’t cost him anything to find out what she wanted.

“Good morning,” she said when she stopped in front of him, hands folded before her, pressed to her skirt.

“Hi,” he said, then waited for her to say what she wanted.

“We like to welcome visitors who might be new to the parish,” she said. “I wondered if I could answer any questions for you, about the parish or the town.”

He probably shouldn’t have been instantly suspicious of anyone who showed him the least bit of friendliness. Some people might accuse him of paranoia. But the woman wasn’t smiling.

“I’m just passing through, ma’am,” he said.

“Oh? Where are you headed?”

He couldn’t blame her for looking a little confused there. Lamar wasn’t really on the way to anywhere else.

“Denver, eventually,” he said.

“Ah. Well then. I hope your travels are safe.”

Cormac left. She continued to watch him; he could just about feel it.

Back at his motel room, he slept for a few hours, getting ready for another long night. He dreamed; he always dreamed, vague images and feelings, a sense of some treasure just out of reach or some danger just within reach. That if he was just a little faster, just a little smarter, he could make everything—his life, his past—better. He usually woke feeling nervous. He’d gotten used to it.

Later that afternoon, just before business closing time, he found a butcher shop in town and bought a few pounds of a low-grade cut of beef, bloody as he could get it. At an ancient Safeway, he picked up a five-pound bag of flour.

Around ten P.M., well after sunset, when most folk were heading to bed—when someone else might be trying to sneak out—he returned to the school. At the edge of the campus, along the trail of claw prints he’d followed back from the ranch, he staked out the bait.

A wind blew in from the prairie, almost constant in this part of the state, varying from a whisper of dry air to tornado-spawning storms. Tonight the breeze was occasional, average. Cormac marked it and moved across it, away from the meat he’d hung from a low branch on a cottonwood. The wind would carry only the meat’s scent, not his. The hunter scattered flour on the ground underneath the meat, forming a thin, subtle layer. If the wolf ran away, this would make it easy to track.