I glanced at him, though I wanted to stare. I still had to drive.
“Rogue wolf,” I said. “The one he wasn’t able to kill back in New Mexico?” I remembered he’d mentioned the sheep that had been killed. That there’d been two werewolves, and he’d only shot the one. “Why didn’t you say anything back there?”
“Because I couldn’t.” Ben’s voice was tight, almost angry. “Because that smell hit me and—and I wasn’t in my head anymore. Something else was. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t even think.”
My own anger drained out of me. “It’s the wolf. Certain smells, sometimes tastes, or if you’re scared or angry, all of that makes it stronger. Calls it up. You have to work extra hard to keep it locked away. If I’d known what we were going to see I would have warned you. Or kept you away.”
“I hate it,” he said, glaring out the side window. “I hate losing control like that.”
This was Ben, who stood in courtrooms telling off judges, who stared down cops, who didn’t pull punches. Probably couldn’t stand the idea of something else inside him running the show. I reached over, found his hand, and held it. I half expected him to pull away, but he didn’t. He squeezed back and kept staring out the window.
We returned to the cabin, but I didn’t go inside. I went out, into the trees, the direction I’d run the other night, chasing that thing. That nightmare. If I hadn’t just seen that slaughtered herd, I might have been able to convince myself that shadow had been a figment of my imagination.
Ben followed reluctantly. “Where are you going?”
“I’ve got to figure out what did that.”
“Clear your name?”
It wasn’t that. Marks couldn’t prove I’d done it, however much he wanted to. Rather, I’d gotten this feeling that things would only get worse until I stood up and did something. I was tired of waiting, cornered and shivering in the dark. That might have been okay for a lone wolf, but I had a pack to protect now.
Running away wasn’t an option because what if this thing up and followed me?
Ben said, “You think this is the thing you saw the other night?”
“I’m still not sure I saw anything.”
“And you think it’s the same thing Cormac was hunting.”
“What if it followed him here?” Whatever had been here, the signs were two days old now. Harder to find— and I hadn’t found anything in the first place. But if it was the same thing, I had a second point of contact now. I headed overland, as the crow flies or wolf runs, in the direction of the Baker ranch. “I’ll look around. I can cover this whole area between here and the ranch. You should stay here.”
“No. You’re not leaving me out of this. I’ll come with you. I’ll help.”
“Ben—”
“I don’t want to hear any more of that alpha wolf bullshit. Just let me help, please.”
I could have gotten angry and stood my ground on principle. That would have been the alpha thing to do. Alphas didn’t let new wolves argue with them. But it was just the two of us. I didn’t have anything to prove. Maybe we’d be better off together.
“Look for anything out of place. Any sign, any feeling.”
“Anything that smells like those cattle,” he said, his voice low.
“Yeah.”
Together, we hunted. I let a bit of that Wolf-sense bleed into my human self. Smell, sound, senses—the least movement of a squirrel became profound, I looked sharply at every rustling branch. Daylight wasn’t the time to be doing this. Too many distractions. Whatever had made that carnage had done so at night. This was a nighttime kind of evil.
I watched Ben, worried that he might let too much of his wolf out, wondering if he might lose control and shift. Mostly, he seemed introspective, looking around like the world was new, or like he was waking up after a dream. He was right to want to come along, I realized. Being out here, learning to look at the world again, was better than him staying holed up at home.
We rounded the hill at the edge of the Baker ranch, overlooking his land. A backhoe was dumping the last of the carcasses onto a truck, to be hauled away.
We’d found no sign of the creature, and somehow I wasn’t surprised. We turned around and went home.
That afternoon, I went online again, checking the usual weird Web sites and forums that might have the sort of data—or at worst, rumors and anecdotes—I wanted. I searched for livestock mutilations, particularly in the Southwest U.S. Sure enough, the hits I found included an inordinate number of UFOlogist sites. Kind of annoying. I tried to avoid knee-jerk skepticism, since lately I’d been forced to reassess a lot of my assumptions. About, like, the existence of werewolves for example. But I wasn’t quite willing to believe that a vastly superior extraterrestrial intelligence would travel all the way to Earth just to turn a few cows inside out.
But I found something. It wasn’t aliens, it wasn’t werewolves. On a few sites people talked about a sort of haunting. Not by the dead, but by a kind of evil. It left death and destruction in its wake. It originated in the Native American tribes of the Southwest, particularly the Navajo and Zuni. They talked about wit
ches laying curses that killed entire families, destroyed livelihoods, haunted entire communities. And about skinwalkers: witches who had the power to change themselves into animals. Like lycanthropes. They had red eyes.