“Disappeared how?” Eli asked.
“Disappeared as in vanished from their beds overnight. Signs of struggle, some blood in the house, and they were never seen or heard from again.”
“Oh.” I had seen a house like that. The witches had been taken by vamps and were nearly dead by the time I had found them.
“What about liminal thresholds?” the Kid asked. Beside me, Eli’s eyebrows twitched slightly in what might have been surprise at his brother’s question.
“Liminal thresholds are different buggers entirely, son. They run in three curving lines across the earth,” Sarge said, “but only one matters here. It starts in southwestern Mexico, curves across the Gulf of Mexico to Chauvin. Then it follows the Appalachians east and north.” His hand made a curving shape up and down, like what the trade winds might make, but bigger and smoother. “It curves up through New York and Nova Scotia, across the North Atlantic, and back down toward the U.K. There it intersects some ancient sites including Stonehenge, follows the map through middle Europe and down Greece into the Mediterranean, through Saudi Arabia and into the Indian Ocean.”
I didn’t know what liminal thresholds were, and I no longer had a witch best friend to ask. Fortunately the taciturn man who hadn’t even spoken on land was voluble and verbose in the air. “Liminal thresholds are sites and places where the fabric of reality is thin, where one reality can bleed into another. Like physicists tell us, the universes are likely piled one atop another like a stack of coins. You ever hear of that?”
Alex nodded.
“Well, at certain places along the liminal thresholds, some beings can push through from one reality to another, and sometimes they end up here. Near Chauvin. And then there’s the vertices,” he added, and I figured he was now pulling our collective legs.
“Okay, fine,” I said. “But we’re interested in the crime scenes and the dog sightings.”
“Werewolves,” Sarge spat.
He said it with such certainty that I didn’t bother to disagree. I’d seen the photos. He was right. “Fine. Show us those.” The plane banked again and took us along Highway 56, back south to Chauvin.
The sites were all over the place, one close to 56, one near the end of 55, one off a canal on a spit of land that could be reached only by boat or plane. One was in downtown Chauvin. The others were scattered here and there, with no apparent relation to one another. Nine deaths in three months, here, and more, older ones, scattered along roads heading north. If this had been a mystery story, we would have been able to draw lines from site to site and determine the murderer’s home at the site where the lines intersected, but that didn’t work. Not here. The only thing the sites had in common was that there was always water nearby, but in Chauvin, there literally was water, water everywhere, on all sides as far as the eye could see.
And then I began to notice another similar feature of the earth and water below us. “Can you graph the sites,” I asked the Kid, “and tie them to the biggest ancient canal? The one with two lanes that goes so many miles? And then maybe put them in order along access from that one canal, with little numbers beside each one, so we can get a timeline based on the canal? I know the ones in town—”
“The two closest to town were the first and second ones,” the Kid interrupted, seeing where I was going. “Like they were hungry when they got to Chauvin. All the following ones were on the water. And yeah. All on the smaller canals that look like neighborhoods.” He traced them with his fingers. “And all related to and accessible from the big canal.”
I stared down and down, trying to memorize the world from above and hoping that I’d be able to put this view together with the Kid’s tablets and then the actual, ground-and-water-level sites.
“You want to see the sites?” Sarge asked. His tone was without inflection, and he didn’t take his eyes from the sky and the horizon line, but I could detect a scent from his pores that said he was disturbed, and far too interested in the answer to his unruffled question.
“How close can you get us?” Eli asked into the silence.
Sarge took the tablet from Alex and studied it for a moment. “I can land near some of ’em. Get you to within a few feet of shore. I keep a self-inflating, two-person raft packed in back.” He jabbed a thumb to the back of the cabin, and I figured that the twine-wrapped plastic was the raft.
“Let’s do it,” Eli said. “Which site first?”