C.E. Murphy - Demon Hunts

In most ways, that was helpful. It meant I could shake off astonishment and take a look at the marked earth again. Or it would have if I was the kind of person who had her shit that much together, but I never had, still didn't, and probably never would. Gary came up beside me and said, "Jo?" as tentatively as I'd ever heard him speak.

"Later, okay? I…later."

"Arright." The big old cab driver put an arm around my shoulders, squeezed carefully, and let go again. "See anything out there?"

Every answer I wanted to give revolved around Sara Isaac, formerly Buchanan, and the one-up she'd just pulled on me. I thought I would've been pleased, honestly. If she and Lucas had just managed to end up together, I would've thought it was kind of cool. Finding out they'd never lost touch was manifestly not cool, and I pretty much wanted to bury myself in snow and let the cold numb me while I worked myself up to dealing with it.

If I'd learned anything in the last year, it was that the world very rarely put itself on pause to let people cope. "It's getting realer," I said quietly. "When I faced it in Olympia Park it made marks in the snow, and now, here…there's blood on the snow down there. I can still see where it left prints on the earth, but it's getting realer."

"What is?" Laurie Corvallis had disappeared for a few minutes, maybe chasing the false Feds down, but she was back, and had been long enough to hear my faltering explanation. "How can something not real be doing this?"

"Do you believe in God, lady?" Gary asked unexpectedly. Corvallis looked around like she thought he must be talking to someone else, then wrinkled her eyebrows at me. I shrugged and tipped my head, inviting her to answer. I certainly wasn't going to. "Angels?" Gary asked. "Demons?"

"I believe there are good people and bad people and that there's some of both in everybody. I believe the world's got a lot of power to fuck us up." It was the second time she'd sworn, and I glanced toward her camera guy to see if he was recording. The little green light blipped at me, but presumably the whole thing would be edited for PG viewing. "Are you saying this is a demon?" She sounded skeptical in a sell-me-the-story way: not like she unconditionally disbelieved, but like she wasn't going to accept wooden nickels.

Gary shook his head. "Nah. Just curious. Wondered if that reporter's mind of yours kept itself open or if you made up your mind before you went in."

I heard myself say, "It's a spirit," and wondered what exactly I thought I was going to accomplish by telling Laurie Corvallis our hypothesis. "A very angry, hungry spirit who's either being controlled by, or who is, someone powerful. I'm sure you know there's been no blood at any of the scenes. I'm afraid the thing has been feeding psychically, maybe trying to strengthen or create a physical body. The stronger it gets the more it takes on the ability to chow down mass in the real world, which is why this one's messier. I don't know how bad it'll get if we don't stop it."

Corvallis's gape became a sharp scowl. "No wonder Morrison doesn't want you talking to me." She climbed over the police tape and stomped through the snow toward the body, cameraman trailing behind her.

I pursed my lips, watching them go. "Next time I wonder why I don't just tell people the truth, remind me of this."

"Doll, I didn't know you ever wondered that."

"Not often, and now I know why." Coyote, Corvallis and the cameraman were being hustled away from the murder site, none of them looking happy about it. Given the increasing number of FBI agents and forensics experts appearing on the scene, I thought they should be grateful none of us had been arrested yet. Sara was glaring at me from the dip where the body had been found, like the reporter and the nosy Indian were my fault. I shrugged and slipped my way back down toward the road, waiting for them to catch up.

"They're not going to recognize it as the same killer," Coyote said as soon as he did. "I got close enough to look at the cusp marks. It's more like a wild animal. That, and there's blood this time, and pieces of torn flesh in the snow around the body. It's getting more savage."

Corvallis all but lit up and pulled a sleek phone from the pocket of her coat. "A copycat killer? We can call it mountain madness. Christmas killer? No, that's been done." She hurried ahead of us, shaking her phone like that would help her pick up a signal.

Gary chuckled in her wake. "Think she ever met a story she couldn't tackle?"

"I think she's going to if she stays out here." I stopped in the snow and Coyote knocked me into motion again. "Ow. Look, I don't know if you saw anything, Ro, but—"

"Do you have to do that?"

"You call me Jo, I get to call you Ro."

"I like Coyote better."

"You don't look so much like a coyote in the real world. Did you see anything?"

He bared his teeth at me, the expression surprisingly close to that of his coyote-form self, then shook it off in much the same way I'd seen him do on the astral plane. "Aside from a body that doesn't fit the physical signs of the other murders, no. It is the wendigo," he said, like I'd been going to argue. "There's no hint of soul left to the corpse at all. Like Mandy was." His mouth thinned, eyes gone grim. "But much too late to save her."

"I believe you. I think every time it feeds it's getting more distorted." I puffed my cheeks and followed Corvallis down the mountain listlessly. "The bite marks on Charlie Groleski were rounder than the ones on Karin Newcomb. If it had managed to take Mandy out, it might've looked like a different case, too. Wait, what are we doing?" I stopped following Corvallis and frowned. "We're going the wrong way. Its tracks went up the mountain. We should get them out of here, but we should stay."

Gary, in a low rumble, said, "'Should' is one of those funny words that don't mean what you think it means," and pointed behind us.

A shadow paced on the snow, clearly watching us. Tooth and claw and red raging eyes; the rest was white and translucent and almost impossible to see. The Sight snapped on, making it more visible, though I instantly wished it hadn't.

Rivulets of blood dripped and flowed from its teeth, never falling far enough to stain the snow. Its claws were tangled with shredded souls. The tatters could have been anything from cobweb to gauze, fragile against the beast's bulk, but the healer's magic within me knew I was seeing the last vestiges of what had once been human beings. It was all much, much more clear than it had been on the mountain yesterday morning. Clearer, even, than it had been on Mandy's rooftop the evening before. I had the gut-sinking feeling that having sized me up, it had decided it was time to get serious about manifesting in the real world.

It was still nominally manlike, in that it had arms and legs, but its shoulders and neck had disappeared into a massive head with a wide-gaping, grinning mouth. Even the humanoid features were stunted: the arms were short, the chest incredibly thick, the legs seeming too small to carry its weight.

It stank. From thirty yards away, it smelled of rotten meat and offal. It had smelled like roses yesterday, by comparison. The transition toward more real wasn't doing it any favors.

Very, very quietly, I said, "Gary, what do you see?"

He said, "A bear," in a way that let me understand how utterly inadequate, how completely wrong, the description was, and yet that it was the best he could do. It was no more bearlike than I was, but with its shifting, fluid white form almost impossible to focus on, I thought bear was as close as any non-magicallygifted person was going to get.

"Coyote?"

"…not a bear." He sounded like Gary did: unable to express what he saw any more clearly. "What do you see?"