Rick waggled his eyebrows at me. “Baby, I’m always up.”
I rolled my eyes and keyed on Fang. Together we roared out of the hospital parking lot.
I was pushing Beast, like baiting a lion in her den, but so far, nothing had drawn her out. Beast was silent even as I strapped in to the helo and the engine’s whine rose in pitch. I hated the flimsy contraptions, but I had things to do in a limited amount of time and the helicopter would make it all possible. Brandon—or maybe it was Brian, it was hard to tell with the com-gear on—gave me a thumbs-up and the bird lifted off. Rick was having a ball, the two men up front, talking back and forth on the com-channel. I was sitting in back, beside the shrink-wrapped steer carcass that smelled of old cold blood and maybe brine, and had my com-gear turned off, wearing it only to mute the noise.
I stared out over the city of Asheville as the bird rose and careened toward the hills. Everything looked closer together up here, the folds of the earth that made travel so time-consuming becoming inconsequential. I could get used to this. I could. If I was going to remain in Leo Pellissier’s employ.
I had stuff to do. Decisions to make. Places to be. And still so many things unfinished, hanging over me like Death’s sickle. A sense of dislocation hammered at me. I literally had no home now. No one to call family. Molly had talked to me once on the phone, but she was grieving for her sister, and her sister’s killer was difficult to be around, especially with the funeral in the works, law enforcement combing through Evangelina’s home, and so much media attention focused on the Everharts and the Truebloods. All because of me.
The fact that Evangelina was a murderer and a blood-witch, spelling her coven, and keeping horrible secrets that would have come to a dangerous and deadly climax with or without me didn’t make Molly’s grief any less real or any less intense. Grief isn’t logical. I understood, but it hurt. Life hurt. Angie Baby and I talked on the phone every day, often about her angel, but I hadn’t been allowed to see her. Big Evan had asked me, politely, to stay away.
My belongings were packed in the back of an SUV here in Asheville and in my freebie house in Louisiana. But I had no place to send them. And . . . Beast was still silent. Even with me in a helo again, the rotor noise like an animal’s roar.
The twins had reconnoitered the GPS location we were going to and found a landing site in a field nearby, but we flew over the cleft in the hills first. It looked different from the sky, flatter, muddier. The dammed up pond was gone, the logs and debris scattered downstream. But I got a glimpse of the cave, and the pile of bones, crows and buzzards on the limbs of trees in far greater numbers than before. At the helo’s noisy approach, the birds scattered, flying low. The B-twin hovered over the site and Rick unstrapped, joining me in the back. Together, we slid open the helo door and braced ourselves against the sides. Rick held up three fingers, lips saying, “On three.” His head jerked down three times, counting, and on three, we pushed. The steer carcass slid across the helo in its plastic wrap and tumbled out. The helo wobbled with the weight distribution and updrafts, before it stabilized and we stuck our heads out the open door.
I felt, more than saw, Rick laugh when the carcass hit the ground and bounced, right in front of the grindy’s lair. Rick pulled me back, shutting the door as the helo banked and soared away, to the clearing we intended to use as a landing site. After that it was a strenuous hike back, requiring a lot of sweat, some blood from scraped knuckles, a ton of mud, and way longer than a helo. The value of speed wasn’t lost on me. But Beast didn’t comment.
We stood between the pile of bones and the cave mouth, the reek of death suffocating in the heat of the September day. I had smelled some bad things in my time, but the charnel-house/abattoir stench was beyond awful. The bear was foul, slimy, maggoty, even though the bones had been stripped of most of the flesh. Gack, eww, ick.
The buzzards and crows had come back to their stinky feast quickly, and one brave buzzard hopped to the top of the pile and spread its wings, claiming it and warning us away. “Don’t worry,” I told the bird. “It’s all yours.”
Rick chuckled and took my hand, pulling me inside the cave. The dark and coolness of the grindy’s lair was a welcome relief. It smelled better inside, an air current I hadn’t noticed moving from deeper underground, from the back of the cave and out the mouth, as if the mountain breathed through the opening. The grindylow was awake, sitting on the ledge, her legs hanging down from her nest swinging, oddly like a child. She was wearing clothes, wrinkled and none-too-clean, but she was covered, the clothing making her look less like an animal. Peeking out from the leaves and limbs of the nest were four, little, green-furred faces—her children.