But not looking dead on made it hard to fight. The bushes cut and scraped at me, and the beast itself immediately caught me in the chest—two sharp blows just above my breasts, like paddles to either side of my heart, only a helluva lot harder. I went down, my knife falling useless at my side.
Vaguely, I heard Sarah’s door open, and a cry of “Lacey!” and the sound of a shotgun going off. There were shadows and scuffling, and a second later, Sarah’s face appeared above me, her hair falling like rain all around.
“I found Joe’s shotgun. He even kept it loaded. You okay?”
I mumbled something I meant to be yes, though I wasn’t so sure, and she gave me a hand up. I went to sitting first, making sure nothing in my chest was broken before I tried standing. It hurt like hell but felt like bruising rather than a break. I thought I was okay, especially when Beau came up and nosed my hair, licking my cheek and catching the corner of my eye. Aside from us, the night was silent. No crying baby.
I looked down at myself to see two prints as clear as mud on my flannel. Cloven. Definitely not canid. The thing had kicked me in the chest, and I had fallen. If Sarah hadn’t come out with Joe’s shotgun, it probably would have torn me apart with those teeth next.
“What the hell was that thing?” I asked.
We all looked off into the night as though it held answers. “I was hoping you knew,” Sarah said.
I shook as I drove back up my drive with Beau curled protectively around himself in the backseat. He peed on his way into the house, but quickly—so much so that he never got his legs firmly set and went off balance before he was really finished, but it didn’t seem to matter.
He scooted inside like his tail was on fire, cutting me off and looking back with apologies. He didn’t pause for me to take his harness off. Or to offer his nightly minty chewstick.
He ran straight for the back of the house. At a guess, to leap onto the side of my bed he’d claimed as his own, to nose himself under the covers and hide out there as he did during thunderstorms—the only thing he was afraid of.
Until now.
I locked the front door, bolted it, checked the back door as well, and all the windows. Then I grabbed my laptop and brought the cordless phone into the bedroom in lieu of my cell, just in case… I knew I wasn’t going to sleep for a long, long while, but Beau preferred to have me next to him when he was scared, and if I didn’t show soon, he might go scratching at Luke’s door, and Luke slept like the dead.
The thought sent chills over me, and I slipped under the covers rather than settling over them to work. That could have been us tonight. Me and Beau—dead. He sidled next to me under the covers, settling his warmth against me. I stroked his head resting on my ‘guest’ pillow as I waited for my computer to boot up, telling him over and over that he was safe.
Once I had my browser up, I struggled with what to search. Big hyena that freezes people didn’t get me anywhere. I tried hyena with cloven feet, and that got me something really odd, a creature called a leukrokotta said to come from Ethiopia and written about by Greek and Roman historians. It had the body of a stag, a mane like a lion, cloven hooves and that sharp continuous ridge of teeth—er, tooth, in the upper and lower jaws.
My beast was nothing like a stag, but it was so close that I kept reading. Not because I believed it. I mean, this was crazy. A mythological beast written about by historians in first and second centuries A.D. and certainly not widely sighted since or I’d have heard about it!
But every fiction, fable, and fairy tale started with a kernel of truth, a point to the telling. I just had to find it. And ah ha— or sort of, anyway—the leukrokotta was related to another beast called the krokotta, or crocotta, which was a hyena-lion hybrid and maybe from Ethiopia or maybe from India, and either way, known to mimic human speech to lure victims, which explained the piteous sounds of the baby crying.
Oh, yeah, and if they looked at a person—generally thrice—the person was frozen in place, and if their shadow fell on a dog, they were struck dumb. Or a bit more, as we’d experienced.
In other words, they were apex predators. Everything about them was designed to lure, subdue, and savage prey. Maybe they weren’t reported because so few lived to tell the tale. If that was the case, and if this one had decided to move in on our territory, as Spirit and the other wolf-dogs’ agitation seemed to indicate, there was a good chance that this one would be back.
Despite Beau’s heat, chills ran up and down my body, and it was well into the night, edging toward morning before I fell into an exhausted sleep.
Part of my sleeplessness the night before was going round and round in my head about how to bring the subject up with Thompson without having him think me mad. But I had to put him on alert. And find out if he’d ever heard of such a creature or any way to trap or defeat it. I couldn’t have it coming for Sarah again. Or for me and Beau. Or Luke or Thompson or any of my volunteers.
I was fairly sure my wild wolves and all the others could fight for themselves, but what if they couldn’t? The folklore I’d read had said that the krokotta’s shadow struck dogs dumb, but instinct or something had frozen Beau in place, and most of my wolves were part dog. I didn’t know what would happen with the wolf side. Or coyote. Or fox.
Most people thought that because wolves and dogs were genetically similar enough to breed, they were the same, but they were so, so different, from when they begin to socialize to when certain genes turned on to the stronger reliance on scent. Coyotes and foxes were even farther afield. There was no telling what a krokotta would do to them until tested, and I’d be damned if I’d let things get that far. Not with my animals. Not on my watch.
So, I kept an eye out for Thompson’s truck, and when he arrived, I ambushed him right there in the parking lot.
He didn’t look at me like I was crazy, but then, he hadn’t yet heard what I had to say. As I was saying it, he started out looking deeply into my eyes, as though he could see straight through them into the inner workings of my mind. At a certain point in my story, I watched his eyes widen, and he gave up our staring contest to look me all over, checking for any damage I wasn’t reporting. Finally, those green eyes with the crinkles at the corners rolled skyward as though headed for a mental search bar to browse through any outlandish experiences he might have archived.
When his gaze met mine again, he only said, “Everyone thought the New Guinea Singing Dog was extinct until just recently. Maybe this is something like that. Some nearly-forgotten evolutionary offshoot—”
“That you and I have never heard of? One that stopped me and Beau in our tracks? That can sound like a crying baby?”
“The bobcat has been known to sound like a crying baby.”
“I thought that too, but this was no bobcat,” I said, trying not to get irritated. He was only going through the very same process I’d gone through myself. “They have short tails. This one was long. Lion-like. And it had hooves, not paws. Listen, I know how this sounds. Just be on guard, okay, especially around the other animals, because if this thing is in their territory, they’ll have their hackles up. I did some research last night and found an old, old reference that sounds a lot like what we saw. It’s mythological, but there’s often a little truth in fiction. I’ll text it to you, but if you see anything, or know anyone you can ask who won’t have you committed, let me know, okay?”