Kitty Takes a Holiday (Kitty Norville 3)

“What’s the series of events?” I said. “John comes back from Phoenix and he’s different. A werewolf. We know how that can mess with someone. Then their oldest daughter, Joan, dies. Then Miriam disappears. They hire Cormac to hunt John.”

“It sounds like John coming back from Phoenix as a werewolf was the trigger. Everything else happened after that,” he said.

“What was it Tony said? A witch has to make a sacrifice to become a skinwalker. So Miriam cursed Joan, killed her, became a skinwalker.”

“But why? Why did she want to do that? And why at that moment?”

“She wanted John to have a pack,” I said softly. She didn’t want her brother to be alone. It actually made sense, from a twisted point of view. I knew how hard it was to be alone.

“Why didn’t she just let him bite her?” Ben said.

I thought about it a moment. Some people wanted to become lycanthropes. They sought it out, got themselves bitten. Why wouldn’t Miriam have been one of those?

“Control,” I said. “She wanted to be able to control it. She probably saw how it affected John. He wasn’t able to control it. She wanted the power without that weakness.”

He winced thoughtfully, his face lined with thought. “Thus begins their reign of terror. God, it almost makes sense. But we still can’t prove she was dangerous. We need proof that she killed her sister. No one’s willing to pursue the connection. Maybe they’re afraid she’d take revenge on them. Curse them, kill them—”

“But she’s dead. She can’t do anything now.”

“I’m not sure that changes anything in some people’s minds.”

Spirits lingered. Evil spirits continued to spread evil. If they—Louise, her family, Tony, others—believed that, I couldn’t argue.

Miriam’s immediate family may not have lived on a beautiful estate, but at least they had a house, a bit of land, an aura of normality.

Lawrence, on the other hand, lived in an honest-to-God shack, with weathered planks tied together for walls and a corrugated tin roof that seemed to just sit on top, without anything holding it down. It looked like he’d been living this way for years, because the place was actually several shacks attached to each other, as if he’d been adding rooms over the years whenever the mood struck him. The desert scrub around his place was covered with junked equipment, including several cars, or objects that had once been cars. The place was isolated, out on a dirt road, behind a hill, invisible from the town.

The question remained, did he live like this because he had to, or by choice?

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Ben said, staring at the desolate house.

“Let’s get it over with.” I left the car, and Ben slowly followed.

I was afraid to knock on the front door. It looked like a deep sigh would knock it in. I tried it, rapping gently. The walls around it shuddered, but nothing broke.

No one answered, which wasn’t entirely surprising.

This didn’t seem like the kind of place where people threw open the door and welcomed you with hugs. In fact, I kind of expected to hear rattlesnakes or yipping coyotes in the distance.

I knocked again, and waited for another minute of silence. “Well?”

“Nobody’s home?” Ben shrugged. “Maybe we can come back later.”

We didn’t have a whole lot of time to wait. We also didn’t have a whole lot of choice. What could we do, drive all over town asking random people where to find Lawrence?

“What do you want?” A man spoke with an accent, as if English wasn’t his first language.

We had turned to leave, when the man leaning against the farthest corner of the building spoke. He was shorter than me, thick without being heavyset. He was old, weathered like stone, rough and windblown. His hair hung in a long gray braid.

“What do you want?” he said again, the words clipped and careful.

Ben said, “Are you Lawrence Wilson? Miriam Wilson’s grandfather?”

He didn’t answer, but Ben stayed calm, and seemed ready to wait him out.

“Yes,” the old man said finally. For some reason the word was earth-shattering.

“I don’t know if the police have told you—Miriam’s been killed.”