Thunder Moon (Nightcreature 8)

“Although...” Doc paused. “For an alien, this corpse is behaving pretty human.”

“Whatever he is,” I said, “he’s here.” Which took care of any vampire, zombie, ghoul theories, not that I’d been all that wild about them. “Now what?”

“Now I open him up and see what made him tick, unless he didn’t tick, which seems to be the case with everyone I’ve opened up lately.”

Doc lifted hand, and I turned. A hearse bounced toward us over the rutted dirt path.

“What’s that for?”

“You didn’t think I was going to crack his chest right here in front of God and the cemetery guy, did you?”

I hadn’t really thought of it at all.

I was trying not to.

Chapter 22

After making Doc promise to call me as soon as he had news, as if he wouldn’t, I left him to deal with the hearse and the body. I went to meet Claire and Mal.

As I drove back to Lake Bluff, I considered Doc’s “alien” theory. I didn’t buy it; however, if it were true, then these people had to have become “other” sometime in their lifetime. They couldn’t have been born that way.

Lack of a heart would have been revealed, if not when they were babies, then somewhere along the line. People didn’t go through an entire lifetime without having a chest X-ray.

Well, one person might, but not several. At some point, they must have had bronchitis, pneumonia, or—

Ms. G. must have had a chest X-ray. Since she’d been diagnosed with congestive heart failure, she’d definitely had a heart to congest somewhere along the line. So when had the thing gone poof?

I pulled up in front of town hall and hailed Joyce, who was just leaving, as I got out of the squad. “You’ve lived here since the dawn of time, right?”

She lifted her black eyebrows. “Do you want me to smack you?”

My lips twitched. Joyce always cracked me up. “Anyone in town strike you as different?”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know, just weird. Not like everyone else.”

“No one’s like anyone else.”

“Okay, let’s try it this way. Did anyone leave Lake Bluff and come back later acting strangely? Or maybe disappear without a word for a few days and come back without ever saying where they’d gone?”

“Do you have a fever?” She reached over before I could stop her and placed a palm against my forehead.

“Stop that!” I stepped out of her reach.

Joyce narrowed her eyes. “The only one acting weird is you. What’s going on around here this time?”

We’d kept what had happened last summer under wraps. The only people who knew the truth were me, Mal, Claire, and Doc, but Joyce wasn’t dumb. She knew something bizarre had gone down, but so far we’d been able to put her off the scent by ignoring her questions.

As long as we stuck together, she’d never find out, because the Jäger-Suchers had, as usual, done a bang-up job of lying their asses off to explain away any out-of-the-ordinary weirdness.

“We got another rabid wolf in the woods?” she asked.

J-S doublespeak for werewolf.

“Not this time.”

“Then what?”