“My daughter has called you warrior woman. Blood chases after you, rides you. You pounce on your enemy, like a big cat onto prey.” I looked up fast and found her smiling, white dentures like perfect pearls in her mouth. “Go. Fight the enemy. And come back to us.”
I left the house without speaking to Aggie, who had vanished from the doorway of her mother’s room. Sitting in the sun on the heated porch, I pulled on my boots and strapped on my weapons. My fingers shook and the cold still filled my body, remembered cold from the hunger times. The sun warmed me only slowly. I closed my eyes and tilted my face to it, letting its rays touch me as the old woman’s fingers had. Giving myself a moment, just a moment, to breathe. To remember.
The scent of the rogue was fading in the heat. I pushed to my feet and jogged around the house, scenting. The past could wait.
I followed the rogue’s scent into the piney woods, along the nearly invisible path, tracking him into the forest. The soil was heavy with his scent, though with my human nose it lacked the full vibrancy of Beast’s hunt. I passed the places where the elder’s dogs had fed it, their bodies decaying, bones scattered on the damp ground. I smelled the carcasses of four cats, numerous opossums, rodents, and other animals. It hunted here often. And it was always hungry.
I moved slowly. I wasn’t in danger from the rogue . . . providing he was indeed a rogue vamp. He couldn’t stand sunlight. What else could he be? But if he had a human servant, he or she would be near, and human servants had no problem with sunlight. I stopped often and sniffed, rotten meat overlaying the odor of hazelnut and sweetgrass. I dropped to my knees, crawling, nose at the ground. No one was around to notice. The compound, complex scent contained a faded hint of tomatoes, sage, rosemary, and even fainter things I couldn’t name. I circled back where I could push through the brush, and sniffed. Moved from the small path into the trees. It had been a long time since fire had come through, and the underbrush was too thick to go far.
Beast thought the path well trod. To my eyes it was little more than a ribbon of smooth earth. The path was the only way deeper into the woods. Trees and head-high brush closed in. Birdcalls went silent. The slow-moving breeze was saturated with pine sap smell. Mosquitoes found me, buzzing. Was I entering a trap? Beast hadn’t found one, but I wasn’t Beast.
The trees opened out into a clearing remembered from Beast’s hunt. I hunched down, waiting. Nothing moved. As Beast had done, I circled the clearing, but found nothing, no other paths, no trace of scent leaving the woods. Carefully, testing for traps, I moved into the clearing. The soil was rank with the scent of the rogue, heavy with the reek of old blood. The evolving scent had come through here, as if several different beings used the place. Yet I was pretty sure they all were the same being, one undergoing a peculiar metamorphosis that affected his scent in a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde revolutionary way. Not a skinwalker. He didn’t smell anything like me. Not a were, if such even existed. Elf? No. A vamp—a very sick, very wacky vamp.
After several minutes, I was satisfied that there was no trap hidden in the clearing. The liver-eater had come here. He hadn’t left here. I scuffed at the ground. Starting on the periphery, at the edge of the piney woods, I stomped on it, around and around, moving in a spiral, ever tighter, toward the interior. In the center of the clearing, the sound of the earth changed.
It rang hollow. Something was buried beneath the ground.
Cave, Beast thought. She was still awake, though sleepy. Its den. Its lair.
“Yeah,” I murmured. I squatted and brushed at pine needles, but they were stuck, glued to a door, set into the ground. Camouflage. I rocked back, resting on one knee and toe and the other foot. The wood of the door was brown, the same shade of the pine needles, weathered and worn, unexceptional looking, with raised panels and a brass knob, the metal pitted and darkened from weather and sun. It was something a middle-class homeowner might use as a front door. Sweat ran down my back and pooled under the mail collar. My breath was steady but too fast.
I swung the Benelli forward and palmed a stake. Reached for the handle. Not knowing what I would do if it was locked. It wasn’t. The door didn’t open as if hinged, but slid back, revealing a hole about three feet wide and five feet deep. A round tunnel moved from the hole north, like a rabbit’s burrow, but wider, big enough for a man to duck-walk. “Crap,” I whispered. I was going to have to go inside.
The walls of the tunnel were damp, roots sticking through and dangling. Mold smell and the decay of a freshly opened grave wafted out. Footsteps had smoothed and hardened the floor of the tunnel just below the opening. Odd-shaped prints dug into the ground just beyond, where the rogue had dropped to knees and hands, the toes of boots poking the ground. I studied the floor, making out only one set of prints. All boots. All the same. If the rogue had a human servant, it wasn’t here.