I stood up, grabbed the pad I’d been sitting on, and crunched across the snow, back to the car. I noted Aya had gotten in the driver’s seat, not the passenger seat. I had the fob, so if he’d intended to take the car and leave me, he couldn’t.
“This time when you leave the car, bring the machete,” I said. “You’ll be hacking a way through, and sniffing out where they entered the land. I want to know how they and the vampire trailing them got through to the church compound.”
“Certainly. I accept my new job description.” There was a hint of amusement and sarcasm in the tone.
I chuckled. I’d heard Daddy use the same tone when his wives ganged up on him.
SEVENTEEN
It was easier going than I had expected. FireWind narrated the blood trace as he hacked and sniffed with his human nose, asking questions, which I didn’t answer, and saying things, which I didn’t reply to, and ending up in a running monologue that included things like: “How did the dogs get up the tree? When the vampire jumped up there too, he left behind a blood trail.” Hack, hack, sniff, sniff. “A great deal of blood here. All vampire.” My underdressed boss-boss pressed a hand to a tree, and his eyes followed the blood up, into the branches. “He climbed the tree, following the dogs, but either he was injured by a fall or the tree hurt him. Did the tree put out vines with thorns?”
I didn’t reply. FireWind, who was not usually so talky-talk, kept talking, hacking a path through the trees for us, and sniffing.
“Here’s a hole where the vampire landed. More blood trace. But why does it smell like more blood is underground?” He knelt at the depression on the ground, a place where snow and mud and leaves and broken branches were all mixed together. He looked up at me, a frown firmly back in place.
“You are growing leaves in your hair, Ingram.”
I made a soft sound, trying to figure out how I was going to get my half brother and his last remaining friend somewhere safe.
Still kneeling, FireWind went back to examining the site and expounding on his discoveries. “Dogs dropped from the tree and landed at the spring just there, drank water, rested a bit. Ah. This explains how they climbed the trees. They have both handprints and back paw prints. They’re both dog and human, like the hybrid forms my sister can make. They climbed back up there, on that tree. The vampire stopped here.” He indicated thedepressed area where the ground had been disturbed. “I think he had a machete too. Look at this cut on this young tree.”
It was bleeding red sap. I said, “The fence is just ahead. The church installed one at the top of the hill, after the last group of people just dropped straight down. That means climbing.”
“Or.” He looked up at the sky through the bare branches. “We can go over like your brother did.” He pointed up, into the limbs of a vampire tree, where bloody thorns suggested how the boys had gotten over, though not how they had managed the cliff on the other side of the fence. Vampires could handle the fall. Boys not so much, not even ingwyllgiform.
I pulled the rope out of my pack, released it, and slipped the carabiner through the loop at the end, ready to tie it to the tree. I said, “Boost me up. I’ll go over first and you follow.”
Without response, the boss-boss boosted me up so I was sitting astride a wide limb with no snow or ice but signs of blood on some thorn tips that fell off as I watched. I secured the biner to the rope and tied a loop in the other end for my foot. I patted the tree. “Thanks for the way over. You can close up the way through now.”
To FireWind I said, “Come on up.” The boss stepped back, took a flying leap, and swung up into the tree like a kid on monkey bars, to land straddling the limb behind me. It looked a lot like the Wild West way of mounting a horse, and from the softness on his face I figured he thought about that too.
“We can do this one of two ways,” I said, facing forward so I could tie two loops in the rope—one at the bottom, one about five and a half feet above, give or take. Girls in the church weren’t taught rope tying except for gardening knots, but I had been a farmer with John. I knew my knots. “You think you can let me down with my foot in the loop? Without letting me fall or bang against the cliff wall too much?”
“I’ll let you down,” he said, “and then shift to wolf and get down my way.”
“You’ll be real hungry. Try not to eat too many people.”
The boss-boss snorted.
A shape-shifting creature on church land. Three of them, counting the boys under the Nicholson house. Lordy mercy.I just nodded, pulled on my gloves, grabbed the upper loop with one hand, and put my left booted foot in the loop at the bottom.FireWind eased me off and down, and the cliff went by at a steady rate as he lowered me hand over hand. Skinwalker strength.
When I was on the ground, he dropped the rope and I coiled it around one shoulder. Checked my weapon. Wished I had a tranquilizer gun. I didn’t want to kill a devil dog. Not even one who had been the result of Mama being punished. My half brother had never done a single thing wrong in his whole life. He deserved a chance to live. If he could control himself and not eat people. I thought about his human-shaped hands. That had to be a hard form to achieve, so maybe the boys had learned some control the hard way—by running from enemies who wanted them dead.
Noises came from the cliff wall, and I stepped away to avoid being hit by rocks, boulders, or dead tree limbs that FireWind might knock loose. Shortly, my boss scrambled down the cliff, leaping from one tiny outcropping to another, and landed in wolf form near me, black against the snow that was still on the ground here.
I dug three protein bars from my bag, opened them, and tossed them to FireWind, one at a time. Doglike, he snapped them from the air, fangs flashing. I gave him some water from a bottle, which was messy, but he grunted what might have been thanks. No longer starving, he nosed the ground and began a systematic sniff-search for where the boys had likely landed.
I followed him as he found and trailed the devil dog scent. The fleeing boys had kept to the back of the houses, and under oversized greenery, leaving few tracks, and since we took the same route, no one noticed the humongous wolf and me. Yet.
On the heels of that thought, I saw Balthazar Jenkins and two other men walking away from the general direction of the Nicholson house. I grabbed a handful of FireWind’s ruff and he stopped, looked up at me, and then followed my eyes. Jenkins was part of the Jackson clan and he had never been fond of me. He was among the faction that had wanted me dead when I was twelve. They moved out of sight.
When we got to the root cellar entrance at the Nicholson house, FireWind sat and stared at the entrance to the root cellar and then at the wood door that led to the underside of the house’s foundation. With his right front paw he tapped the ground.
“Two boys?” I asked.
He nodded.
“In dog form?”
