I stopped suddenly, feeling the chill of death under my feet. I was on the side of the house, and I had just crossed over the rogues’ trail. They had come and gone this way. I looked at the front door. It was undamaged, so that meant they had been invited in or that the door had been unlocked. I didn’t know if the old myth about vamps not being able to enter a house uninvited was true or not, but the door hadn’t been knocked down.
I followed the path around the house and to the back of the grassy lot. There was a playset with a slide, swings, a teeter-totter, and monkey bars. I walked to it and stood there, seeing what the dead had done. They had played here. After they killed the children and parents, they had come by here, in the gray predawn, and played on the swings. “Have your crime people dusted this?”
“The swing set?” Brax said, surprised.
I nodded and moved on, into the edge of the woods. There was no trail. Just woods, deep and thick with rhododendrons, green leaves and sinuous limbs and straighter tree trunks blocking the way, a canopy of oak and maple arching overhead. I looked up, into the trees, still green, untouched as yet by the fresh chill in the air. I bent down and spotted an animal trail, the ground faintly marked with a narrow, bare path about three inches wide. There was a mostly clear area about two feet high, branches to the side. Some were broken off. A bit of cloth hung on one broken branch. “They came through here,” I said. Brax knelt beside me. I pointed. “See that? I think it’s from the shirt the blood-master was wearing.”
“I’ll bring the dogs. Get them started on the trail,” he said, standing. “Thank you, Molly. I know this was hard on you.”
I looked at Jane. She inclined her head slightly, agreeing. The dogs might get through the brush and brambles, but no dog handler was going to make it. Jane, however… Jane might be able to do something with this. But she would need a blood scent to follow. I thought about the house. No way could I go back in there, not even to hunt for a smear of vampire blood or other body fluid. But the bit of cloth stuck in the underbrush might have blood on it. If Jane could get to it before Brax did… . I looked from Jane to the scrap of cloth and back again, a question in my eyes. She smiled that humorless half-smile and inclined her head again. Message sent and received.
I stood and faced the house. “I want to walk around the house,” I said to Brax. “And you might want to call the crime scene back. When the vampires played on the swings, they had the family pets. The dog was still alive for part of it.” I registered Brax’s grimace as I walked away. He followed. Jane didn’t. I began to describe the crime scene to him, little things he could use to track the vamps. Things he could use in court, not that the vamps would ever make it to a courtroom. They would have to be staked and beheaded where he found them. But it kept Brax occupied, entering notes into his wireless notebook, so Jane could retrieve the scrap of cloth, and, hopefully the vampire’s scent.
Jane was waiting in the drive when I finished describing what I had sensed and “seen” in the house to Brax, her long legs straddling her small, used Yamaha. I had never seen her drive a car. She was a motorbike girl, and lusted after a classic Harley, which she had promised to buy for herself when she got the money. She tilted her head to me, and I knew she had the cloth and the scent. Brax, who caught the exchange, looked quizzically between us, but when neither of us explained he shrugged and opened the car door for me.
The vampire attack made the regional news, and I spent the rest of the day hiding from the TV. I played with the kids, fed them supper, made a few batches of dried herbal mixtures to sell in my sisters’ herb shop in town, and counted my blessings, trying to get the images of the McCarleys’ horror and pain out of my mind. I knew I’d not sleep well tonight. Sometimes not even an earth witch can defeat the power of evil over dreams.
Just after dusk, with a cold front blowing through and the temperatures dropping, Jane rode up on her bike and parked it. Carrying my digital video camera, I met her in the front garden, and, without speaking, we walked together to the backyard and the boulder-piled herb garden beside my gardening house and the playhouse. Jane dropped ten pounds of raw steak on the ground while I set up my camera and tripod. She handed me the scrap of cloth retrieved from the woods. It was stiff with blood, and I was sure it wasn’t all the vampire’s.
Unashamedly, Jane stripped, while I looked away, giving her the privacy I would have wanted had it been me taking off my clothes. Anyone who happened look this way with a telescope, as I had no neighbors close by, would surely think the witch and friend were going sky-clad for a ceremony, but I wasn’t a Wiccan or a goddess worshipper, and I didn’t dance around naked. Especially in the unseasonable cold.
When she was ready, her travel pack strapped around her neck, along with the gold nugget necklace she never removed, Jane climbed to the top of the rock garden, avoiding my herbs with careful footsteps, and sat. She was holding a fetish necklace in her hands, made from teeth, claws, and bones.
She looked at me, standing shivering in the falling light. “Can your camera record this dark?” When I nodded, my teeth chattering, she said. “Okay. I’ll do my thing. You try to get it on film, and then you can drive me over. You got a blanket in the backseat in case we get stopped?” I nodded again and she grinned, not the half-smile I usually got from her, but a real grin, full of happiness. We had talked about me filming her, so she could see what happened from the outside, but this was the first time we had actually tried. I was intensely curious about the procedure.
“It’ll take about ten minutes,” she said, “for me to get mentally ready. When I finish, don’t be standing between me and the steaks, okay?” When I nodded again, she laughed, a low, smooth sound, that made me think of whiskey and wood smoke. “What’s the matter?” she said. “Cat got your tongue?”
I laughed with her then, for several reasons, only one of which was that Jane’s rare laugh was contagious. I said, “Good luck.” She inclined her head, blew out a breath, and went silent. Nearly ten minutes later, even in the night that had fallen around us, I could tell that something odd was happening. I hit the record button on the camera and watched as gray light gathered around my friend.
If clouds were made of light instead of water vapor, they would look like this, all sparkly silver, thrust through with motes of blackness that danced and whorled. It coalesced, thickened, and eddied around her. Beautiful. And then Jane… shifted. Changed. Her body seemed to bend and flow like water, or like hot wax, a viscous, glutinous liquid, full of gray light. The bones beneath her flesh popped and cracked. She grunted, as if with pain. Her breathing changed. The light grew brighter, the dark motes darker.
Both began to dissipate.
On the top of the boulders where Jane had been sat a mountain lion, its eyes golden, with human-shaped pupils. Puma concolor, the big-cat of the Western hemisphere, sat in my garden looking me over, Jane’s travel pack around her neck making a strange lump on her back. The cat was darker than I remembered, tawny on back, shoulders, and hips, pelt darkening down her legs, around her face and ears. The tail, long and stubby, was dark at the tip. She huffed a breath. I saw teeth.
My shivers worsened, even though I knew this was Jane. Or had been Jane. She had assured me, not long ago, that she still had vestiges of her own personality even in cat form and wouldn’t eat me. Easy to say when the big-cat isn’t around. Then she yawned, snorted, and stood to her four feet. Incredibly graceful, long sinews and muscles pulling, she leaped to the ground and approached the raw steaks she had dumped earlier. She sniffed and made a distinctly disgusted sound.