Liz and Eli Sitting
A JANE YELLOWROCK WORLD NOVELLA
Faith Hunter
ChapterOne
Liz
She staredat her cell screen, at Eli’s name and pic, her finger ready to tap the call.
It was an excuse. She knew that. She also knew Eli was heading to New Orleans for his friend’s wedding, and she hadn’t been invited along as his plus-one. That was a thing, being a plus one at a wedding, and this was the first big social event since they had started seeing one another again.
Eli didn’t talk a lot, no chitchat, no chain of consciousness patter, no gushy mushy stuff, so she seldom knew where she stood with him. Not that she needed that kind of emotional validation. Not her. Never. Or, she never had before she met Eli. It had never mattered what a man thought or felt about her until now. Maybe because she had never really been in love with a guy, not with that desperate, weak-in-the-knees, want to spend her life with him kind of love.
He’d be gone for weeks, a trip that also involved his political and security work for some kind of coronation involving Jane Yellowrock, the Dark Queen of the Mithrans, the Master of the City of New Orleans, the master of Clan Yellowrock, and more titles, on and on. Jane was a very important person in the world of paranormals, especially vampires, and she had done a lot of good for Liz’s kind too, bringing peace and providing protection for witches that they hadn’t enjoyed in hundreds of years. Jane was also Eli’s adopted sister and, so far as Liz could tell, his best friend.
Liz was just… his girlfriend? Lover? Friend with benefits?
Her mind circled back to the importance of that wedding Eli hadn’t invited her to. She knew that he would be working throughout the planning stages and during the wedding. She hoped the reason she hadn’t been invited was because he’d be working, and not because she and Jane had an uneasy relationship.
Uneasy.Hah. Jane had killed her sister. The fact that Evangelina had summoned a demon and tried to kill her own sisters, and therefore had been targeted with a “take-down” order didn’t help a lot. Evie was dead. Jane was still alive.
Those upcoming weeks when Eli would be gone were looming empty, like a black hole of boredom and loneliness. Calling him for something that might be nothing was just an excuse to talk to him, maybe see him.
Liz looked down at the tracks that had her hesitating.
She shouldn’t need an excuse.
She shouldn’t need to see him either. This was a weakness she hadn’t dealt with before. Ever.
“Gah,” she said. She hit the cell’s off button. She knelt on the ground and studied the paw prints. They were big. Bigger than black bear. But they were the wrong shape for bear.
There were a lot of creatures in the Appalachian mountains that had been explained away by the revelation of were-creatures, but there were a few that were still unaccounted for, the Virginia Devil Monkey, the Dwayyo, and the Snallygaster among the better known others, like Sasquatch.
The Devil Monkey was a dangerous, wild, part wolf, part monkey creature that terrorized vehicles driving through remote areas at night. Not the people inside. The vehicles themselves. The Devil Monkey had a thing about cars and trucks.
The Snallygaster had the head of an alligator, a massive bird beak, and a 25-foot wingspan. The name had Germanic origins from the 1730s, when German settlers called itSchneller Geist,which meant “quick spirit,” and it could have been a pterodactyl. Snallygasters were afraid of five pointed stars—pentagrams—and therefore witches, which suggested intellect. Pterodactyls were supposed to be extinct, but these days, who knew?
And the last was the Dwayyo, whichcouldhave also been Big Foot, for the size—nine feet tall—and the fact that it walked upright, except the Dwayyo had wolf components and a bad attitude. Sasquatch were peaceful, whereas Dwayyos were violent and willingly attacked dogs and other beasts. Local cattle mutilations had been attributed to the wolf/human-like creatures.
Liz took a few shots of the clearest pawprint, and then put her hand above it and took another pic with her cell. The print was longer than her hand by about six inches. The claws were either non-retractable, or were simply extended from their claw-sheaths. They were a good two inches long, with sharp points like a cat’s. They looked nothing like a bird’s print, and they didn’t just appear and disappear, as if dropped from the sky. This thing walked upright on two legs, with a six foot stride. Long-legged bugger. She followed it back and forth, seeing something odd. The tracks didn’t go in a straight line. They meandered. Almost off balance. Its gait nearly a stagger, it ran up the hill and into the woods. Running upright, however erratically, and the print shape suggested it likely wasn’t a Snallygaster.
There was a convertible Mercedes-Benz C-Class with a ragtop only twenty feet away, and it was undamaged. The prints were not particularly primate looking. The unharmed car and the weird prints tended to rule out the Devil Monkey.
Which left the Dwayyo. Liz stood and followed the trail of blood-stained feathers, fourteen inch long critter-prints, and her own footprints back to the edge of the yard and the fancy chicken coop she had checked out when she first drove up.
From the back porch a few yards away came soft sniffles, followed by wails, hiccups, and boohoos.
Liz ignored the grief and tried to concentrate on the tracks and the bloody feathers that led from the chicken coop to the woods. The coop was silent, no clucks, no gurgles, no twitters, no sound at all. The mesh and chicken-wire in the door and one screened wall had been slashed and torn away, and the chickens inside had been killed.
All of them. It had been fast, as the homeowners had slept through it all.
Liz dropped into a squat again and studied the messy scene. There were bloody feathers, chicken parts, and the stench associated with all of the above. Liz was a country girl. She had seen the scene after coyotes got into a chicken coop. After an owl or hawk or raccoon or snake took a hen for a meal. This wasn’t caused by those predators. This killing scene didn’t look like anything she had seen or heard about before.
The laying hens were expensive—silkies and some kind of fancy crested breed, chickens that were worth big bucks. They hadn’t been brought down with claws and fangs and devoured on site, nor had the leftovers been dragged away for a later dinner, as she might expect from a typical predator. This was chaotic. The coop had held fifteen chickens. Eleven chickens had been chewed on and discarded, leaving behind the bloody feathers, bodies ripped and munched. Three chickens had no bite marks at all. Their necks had been broken with a twisting motion, much like Liz’s grandmother used to do on the family farm. Pick up a chicken by the head and whirl it like a ball on a string. Of course Gramma had then cut off its head and hung it up by its feet to bleed out, the memories as fresh and horrifying as the first time Liz and her sister saw Gramma prepare fried chicken dinner “from scratch.”
Her twin, Cia, was still a vegetarian. The memory was bad.
