He watched the nauseating shape of Valentina duck under thepolice tape. He rose with a groan and followed. He had to stay close or lose her. The tape cordoned off a large metal fire ring surrounded by three bright blue camp chairs. They looked new and smelled like a sporting goods store. Green thought of that same camping gear smell lingering in his own car.
The wind shifted and the police tape billowed, changing the oblong perimeter into a fat bean shape.
Valentina knelt by one of the camp chairs and did…something. Green could hear a scraping noise like a fingernail scratching at nylon.
The scene was too clean. What had been there when the police arrived? Were there empty beer cans beside the toppled bodies? A Bluetooth speaker? A half-eaten bag of Doritos? Marshmallows? A cooler full of hot dogs and melting ice sold to them by Alf? How much of it was sitting in a cluttered evidence room?
He stood at the edge of the ring and thought about friends sitting around a cheerful fire. It was a happy image, the sort of idyllic vignette he carried with him as he drove toward the Catskills. It was the hopeful future he clung to as the acorn chased him out of his old life, a classic campout with friends, an endless summer vacation. Except, it all went wrong. For him and for them.
Something came here and it went wrong. As wrong as it could go.
Something.
That’s what Valentina would want him to think.
But it wasn’tsomething. It was the horned wolf. The monster.
She wasn’t there. She didn’t see it.
He didn’t want to get any closer than he needed to in order to keep track of his teacher. He didn’t know what to look for. All he could do was contaminate the scene or be in the way. He shifted his focus to a nearby patch of grass and found a dead robin gaping up at him with sightless eyes like black beads.
Nowhere is safe to look.
Valentina moved about like a minnow flashing in a mountain stream, glimpsed then gone, glimpsed then gone.
He didn’t like the silence, so he tossed words at it.
“Can you see anything?”
“Still searching,” Valentina said. “They took most everything, of course. I’m confounded as to why they didn’t take the chairs. Not that I’m an expert on modern policing.”
Green tried to think of something useful to add.
“I saw the girl’s body in the van. She had dark patches on her skin. Dark like the horned wolf’s body. Is that important?”
His voice was flat.
“We have far too little data to make any educated guesses yet.”
He tried to allow for Valentina’s wisdom and experience, but all he could see was that sharp-toothed skull pressing in on him. What would have happened if he had reached out and touched that black, pooling flesh? Would they have found him lifeless in his car with ink-stained fingertips? Perhaps he was still destined to take a ride in that beat-up van.
It wasn’t data, but it felt true. True and hateful. That huge nightmare creature pouncing from the dark trees with unearthly grace. They wouldn’t even see it, would they? A world they couldn’t touch, but it could touch them just fine. More than touch.
Valentina might be experienced and wise, but Green thought he had something that she didn’t—a healthy connection to instinctual human fear.
There was a kind of wisdom in that, too, wasn’t there? Did Blobert do his job too well? It was possible to be too detached and analytical. Wasn’t that a kind of gap in her awareness?
Green thought of the young man in the Ohio University hoodie back at the Count and Countess station. He pictured him being slid into a metal drawer. What was he studying? Why wasn’theable to see the threat lurking out of the dark trees?
His brain floated back to his own college days, a drunken span of years in which poetry and coffee shop politics seemed like the only path leading up and out of the bullshit.
What had Tennyson called nature?
“Red in tooth and claw.”
“Hmm?”
He had accidentally spoken aloud.
