SHELLY CALLED me shortly after I got home that evening. It took me a moment to recognize the number on my phone, and I didn’t remember giving it to Shelly. I guess Talus had, which made sense—she was the one who could contact Karl, the wendigo we expected to give us whatever clues came next.
“Hi, Jason,” she greeted me. “How’s life?”
“A ticking time bomb; how’s yours?” I asked, and she laughed.
“About the same,” she admitted. “On top of all my normal workload for Talus, plus my other clients, I now get to worry about an impending war in which I would be acceptable collateral damage. My best holiday season ever.”
“The point is to avoid the war,” I reminded her. “Good to hear you’re in good cheer.”
“I’m a lawyer,” she told me. “If I can fake believing my client is innocent, I can fake good cheer.”
“You do criminal law?” I replied. She sighed over the phone.
“Not anymore,” she said. “And having to defend people I didn’t think were innocent is why I don’t.” She let that sit in the silence for a moment, and then continued, “I spoke to Karl today. He isn’t any happier about this than Talus said he would be. I had to remind him of his debt. And of the fact that if I revealed that he was eating bits of the bodies in his case to his employers, being fired would be the least of his worries.”
“He knows something?”
“He was evasive on the phone,” Shelly told me. “I think he was too upset to be called on his debt to not know something. He agreed to meet with you as Talus’s representative.”
“Where and when?” I asked.
“Tonight, at the morgue at the Foothills hospital,” she told me. “Six thirty.”
“Thanks Shelly,” I said. “I guess I’ll go call a taxi, I don’t have a lot of time.”
THANKFULLY, the cab took long enough to arrive that I could change into a fresh shirt and jeans. I hoped, vaguely, that a dark blue shirt and black jeans would somehow make me more intimidating. I wasn’t really sure what a wendigo even looked like, or what it would find scary.
The cab delivered me to the hospital ten minutes before I was supposed to meet Karl. I intended, for about twenty seconds, to try and sneak in unnoticed. Then I realized I had no idea where the morgue was, and headed for the reception desk.
“Hi, I’m supposed to meet a Karl Redding here,” I told her, emphasizing my slow Southern drawl, hopefully to make her take pity on the newcomer to the city. “He said to just come down to the morgue, but I don’t know where it is.”
“Trust Karl not to tell you half of what you need to know,” the petite blonde said with a laugh and a toss of her hair. “It’s not an easy place to find; I’ll call him up for you. What was your name?”
“Jason Kilkenny,” I told her.
She nodded, picked up the phone and dialed. “Karl? There’s a Mr. Kilkenny up here to see you. Can you come collect him?” She listened for a moment and then nodded. “Thanks, he’ll be waiting.”
The receptionist hung up the phone and turned back to me. “He’ll be up in a few minutes.”
“What did you mean by ‘trust Karl not to tell me’ things?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing much,” she said with another hair flick. “He’s just an odd one, always a little out of it. Most people find him pretty intimidating.”
I started to ask why and then spotted the man coming down the hall and let the question die unspoken.
Karl Redding wasn’t the tallest or largest man I’d ever met, but then, I’d known Tarvers Tenerim. He towered four inches or so over my own six feet and looked easily four feet across the shoulders. He was heavily built, muscles clearly visible even through his hospital scrubs, and his hair was done in pure white dreadlocks. His skin was deathly pale, and only when I met his eyes and saw the Native American cast to his face did it hit me: he was an albino.
“You’d be Kilkenny, then,” he said to me when he reached reception, his voice soft and warm, not at all what I was expecting from his imposing visage. “Come with me.” He glanced aside at the receptionist. “Thanks, Jenny, I’ll take care of him.”
With a grunt and a shoulder toss, he indicated that I should follow him. There weren’t many people that we passed in the hospital corridors in the evening hours, but all of the ones we passed quickly stepped aside for me and my human-iceberg guide.
He led me through various hallways and eventually down a set of stairs out of the normal way, to a clean and sterile concrete basement and a security door. A security badge emerged from the pocket of his white lab coat and he swiped in.
“Take a seat,” he instructed, gesturing to a glass-walled office in one corner of the chilly room with its rows of metal doors.
I obeyed, grabbing one of the chairs in the tiny room. A moment later, Karl joined me, carrying a steaming Tupperware. “Threw this in the microwave before I came to get you; timing was perfect,” he told me.”
The scent of stroganoff sauce wafted though the morgue office, though I realized that he’d closed all the doors, and a ventilation system in the corner whirred away. It was probably enough to keep the morgue outside sterile. Then I caught the scent of the meat in the microwaved dinner. Pork. And I remembered what wendigo ate.
“That’s human?” I asked, feeling slightly sick.
Karl grinned and nodded, taking a forkful of the pasta dish. “Want some?”
“No,” I said flatly, eyeing him as he continued to blithely eat. “Are you doing that to see if it bothers me?” I asked after a moment.
“No, I’m eating because it’s my dinnertime,” he replied. “Of course, I invited you here at my dinnertime to see if it would bother you,” he added.
“Of course,” I repeated, and pointedly turned away to look around the small office. A plain gray metal desk that was likely older than I was dominated the room, with filing cabinets taking up most of the rest of the space. A pair of plaques on the wall declared Karl Redding a certified morgue technician, and a Kacy Miller as an MD and certified forensic examiner.
“I was told,” I continued, looking back at Karl, “that you would be able to help us find the vampires in the city.”
The big albino Native sighed and took one last bite of his long-pig stroganoff before replacing the lid and sliding it to one side.
“So, you can wipe them out,” he said flatly. It wasn’t really a question, and I couldn’t argue the point with him, not really. “The fae’s response to feeders always tends towards extermination first. I’m only breathing because my Clan is long known to the Courts, and we have always lived on carrion.
“Do you think I have a choice?” he demanded suddenly. “Do you think I want to eat people?”
I thought about it for a long moment, taking a long look at the man and considering him. I couldn’t see someone choosing a diet that left them horrendously exposed in both the human and inhuman worlds.
“No,” I finally admitted.
“We don’t have a choice—feeders don’t have a choice,” Karl told me harshly. “Our bodies don’t process other foods properly—without our diet, we die. Do you somehow expect the vampires to just lie down and die?”
“They kill,” I said simply. “Whether it’s their choice or not isn’t really relevant—you don’t kill.”
“I have sixty years of cultural acclimation by my family, and a thousand years of tradition,” he told me. “I was born wendigo, and my family raised me to fight the urge—and part of me still thinks that fresh, live human would taste so much better than carrion. And I’ll never be rid of that urge, understand?”
The image his words conjured in my mind wasn’t pleasant. Wendigo were rare enough that Karl would have grown up with mostly humans, and every day, his body told him humans were food. It would be horrible.