CHAPTER 7

He couldn’t help wishing his time in the woods had a different purpose, but at least he got to actually spend time in them. As he made his way back to the area where he’d picked up Rosemary, Eli remembered how much he’d been looking forward to the end of his shift on Saturday for that very reason.

He’d worked a lot of doubles and a lot of overtime in the last few weeks while half of his staff—the human half—dropped like flies from this year’s merciless strain of flu. Saturday, he’d finally had enough coverage to give himself the night off, and he’d intended to spend it furry. In lion form, ghosting through the forests and hillsides on the outskirts of town. Unfortunately, he’d barely managed to shift before he’d caught the scent of blood and ended up following his nose right to Rosemary.

Eli stopped three feet from the base of the tree where he’d found her. To the naked eye, there was little indication that anything unusual had happened here. There was no huge pool of blood, no chalk outline, but he didn’t need those to know he’d found the right spot. He could smell it. He could smell the blood that had soaked into the soil beneath the litter of pine needles, twigs, and fallen leaves. He could smell Rosemary’s scent, now that he recognized it, and he could smell the lingering odor of something else. Faint and fading, it barely registered as a whisper among the aromas of the forest, but Eli could smell the last think traces of it. It smelled almost... human.

Eyes narrowing, he dropped into a crouch and ran a sharp gaze over the spot where Rosemary had lain. The disturbance in the forest carpet showed him precisely where it had been. Only a very talented and highly trained tracker could pick out those kind of signs, but Eli was both. And he was Other. Tracks had a damn hard time hiding from him.

He scanned the area to the north, and within a few seconds he saw the first of Rosemary’s tracks. Or rather the last of them, the last staggering steps she’d taken before she’d fallen and lain still beneath the massive fir.

She had run to this spot, then. The shooting had happened elsewhere. Eli would find out exactly where.

He stood, but kept his eyes on the ground. Moving silently more out of habit than intent, he began to follow the trail of paw prints leading away to the north. It was slow going. There hadn’t been rain since early last week, so while moist, the soil hadn’t formed the kind of mud that captured prints as perfectly as photographs. The tracks Eli followed had more to do with broken sticks, a drop of blood on the fronds of a fern, or small spots where a fast-moving paw had kicked away the loose debris and left a bare patch of dirt exposed to the world.

He walked for several yards, making note of the way the Lupine’s gait had grown gradually slower and more uneven. She’d started out running, he could see, but she’d been getting weaker toward the end. Her strides looked to be longer the farther he went from the site where she’d fallen.

Moving deeper into the woods, he could feel the temperature dropping. The cover grew denser here, and less light penetrated all the way to the ground. On the plus side, less breeze penetrated, too, so when Eli lost sight of the Lupine’s trail, he could turn to his nose to keep him pointed in the right direction. He could still smell Rosemary fairly clearly, but the faint whiffs of the other person he’d caught before still came and went, maddeningly elusive.

A few more feet and he halted, head jerking up. The smell of blood was stronger here, and with it Eli detected a sharp bite of fear. He’d bet money that this was where the bullet had struck. Picturing Rosemary in his mind, he estimated the height of her flank and trained his gaze on that level before he began carefully examining the surrounding fauna. Finally, after five tense minutes, he turned to face northwest and he saw what he was looking for—a rough-barked hemlock tree, thick around with age, with faint, dark speckles along the eastern face.

He hunkered down beside the broad trunk and inhaled deeply. The scent of the wood and the leaves nearly overwhelmed the trace of copper, but Eli caught it anyway. The tiny spots on the coarse lumpy bark were blood. Rosemary’s blood.

Bracing his forearms across his thighs, he crouched down near the height of the Lupine’s back and looked back in the direction he’d come. He could see which way Rosemary had been heading, and he’d found the spatter that marked the place where she’d been standing when the bullet hit her. Since the shot had only grazed her, that meant the bullet should still be out here somewhere. The question was whether Eli could find it.

He spent a frustrating forty minutes searching. He pawed through mulch, shifted leaves, and ran his fingers over more bark than a troop full of Boy Scouts, all to no avail. If that bullet was out here, it was hiding from him very effectively. If he really wanted to get his hands on it, he’d just have to come back with a metal detector.

A quick brush of his hands dislodged the remains of the last hole he’d scraped in the forest carpet. Since he hadn’t found the bullet, his next step would be to look for a casing, which meant calculating the most likely spot where the shooter had stood when he’d aimed his rifle at a lone Lupine and pulled the trigger.

Growing up Feline in the middle of the Rocky Mountains had taught Eli a thing or two about rifles, bullets, and trajectories, but more than that, it had taught him about hunters. While he might have preferred to take down game the old-fashioned way—with teeth and claws and a breathless, adrenaline-surging chase through the trees—most of the human hunters he’d met had liked what Eli privately referred to as the La-Z-Boy School of Depredation.

Adherents of the La-Z-Boy method went out into the woods days in advance of their planned hunting trip, toting with them heavy tool kits, camouflage paints, and thermoses of coffee laced with alcohol. They then spent the better part of several days scouting out the perfect location to build a hunter’s blind. Sometimes on the ground, sometimes partway up a tree, LZBs picked their spot and them commenced complicated construction projects wherein they harvested saplings and fallen branches and wove or nailed the suckers together to erect “natural” screens that they could use for cover on the day when they eventually started “hunting.”

Even Eli had to admit that some of the things ended up as works or art. In the same way that abstract smears of paint thrown randomly onto a blank canvas counted as art. The blinds themselves occasionally involved paint, as the LZB would dab on a touch of black here, some olive there, a bit of dark green on the other, all so that on hunting day he could park his ass behind it and wait for the animal of his choosing to wander unsuspectingly into the sights of his.50-caliber rifle.

Call him old-fashioned, but Eli just didn’t think that kind of thing was very sporting. But then, neither was shooting at a single gray wolf at least sixty miles from the nearest sheep herd, and more than that from the closest dairy farm. In a state where the animals had never made their way off the endangered species list. Could the shot have been a mistake? Eli would like to think so—that the hunter had been after deer, or even elk, although the season for them was still a couple of weeks off. He’d certainly rather deal with an overeager elk hunter with bad aim than someone who’d come out specifically to bag a wolf.

With that in mind, Eli began scanning the tree line looking for the telltale signs of a blind.

He had to admit, this hunter had done a better-than-average job. It took almost an hour before Eli spotted it, set off from the path Rosemary had taken by nearly a hundred feet and set back amid a tangle of thorn and mountain ash. It owed less to construction than most of the structures he’d seen and more to rearrangement and strategic accentuation. The hunter had used the profusion of the nearby bushes and supplemented their concealment with dozens of thin branches from other plants in the area, some of which still bore foliage for additional concealment. Nothing looked like it had been trucked in from outside the forest, and no canvas or paint had been added to create one of the little huts that occasionally sprang up. This blind appeared to be entirely utilitarian, constructed solely for the purpose of concealing a shooter without standing out from the environment in any way. To a passerby—or an unsuspecting deer—it looked like just a particularly overgrown thicket in a forest full of them. No wonder it had taken Eli so long to find it.

Circling around behind the irregular five-foot wall of vegetation, he found himself in what felt like an alcove in the forest. The screen of the blind curved around in a rough semicircle to provide nearly 270 degrees of concealment. The shade cast made the interior noticeably cooler than the surrounding woods, but the cleverly tangled and woven branches left plenty of small gaps through which to monitor the path outside. Eli imagined a hunter sitting or kneeling here, probably dressed in full camouflage, and—if the expertly constructed blind was any indication—knowing enough about game to keep still or to make any movements slow and smooth. Such a man, he realized, would have a nearly perfect opportunity for a kill.

His mouth compressed into a straight line, Eli stepped forward and peered more closely at the front of the screen where it faced the blood-spattered hemlock. Depending on the hunter’s position, there were several spots that would have served as decent peepholes, but only one, he judged, would be at the right level and position for the path of the gun barrel. Matte-finished, he imagined, so that light wouldn’t catch on the metal and create a glint to alert the prey.

Gods, he thought, disgusted. This wasn’t hunting. It was fishing with bullets. How could anyone possibly find it entertaining? Where was the challenge? The excitement?

Eli supposed that just went to show that he’d never really understand humans. They simply baffled him.

Stepping back toward the entrance of the blind, he lowered himself into a crouch and began to quarter off the enclosed area of ground in his head. If the hunter had left anything behind, he intended to find it.

The space wasn’t large, maybe six feet in diameter, but Eli worked slowly and methodically. He searched with his eyes and nose first, then followed up with his hands, running his fingers through the soil and organic detritus for anything his other senses may have missed.

The first thing he noticed was the smell of the hunter, that elusive scent that had been teasing him all morning. It had coalesced here, in the spot where the hunter had sat and waited, perhaps for hours, until his quarry wandered into the trap. It smelled human; Eli was certain of that. But it didn’t seem as strong as it should for being less than forty-eight hours old. Instead it smelled as if it had gotten all muddled up with the smells of pine and oak and dirt and moss. He could smell all of those things, could even smell the musky, meaty scent of rabbit and the old and musty smell of owl. He could smell the mice that scurried through the underbrush and the bitter tang of metal and gun oil, and all of them smelled stronger to him than the living breathing man who had sat here and taken aim at one of the citizens under Eli’s protection.

You know, that kind of pissed him off. How the hell had the bastard managed it, first of all. And second, if he could disguise his scent enough to nearly hide from Eli here, would he be able to slip by undetected if they met each other on the street? The thought made the sheriff want to scream his frustration, but he just clenched his teeth and continued to pore over the ground cover.

He had nearly reached the end of his search without a single clue—which wasn’t doing much for his mood—when his fingers bumped into something foreign wedged half under the root of an ash bush that made up part of the natural screen. Freezing, he moved his hand again and felt something cool and slick, like glass. He ducked his head to look, but the plants blocked his vision too well. Closing his fingers around his find, he tugged gently and emerged with a dirty lump about the size of a large peach pit.

Eli frowned at the dirt-encrusted lump and brushed the soil away with his thumbs. The dappled light coming through the screen glinted off a small glass vial that was topped with a ring and seal of silver foil. It looked like the kind of thing doctors stuck needles into to draw out the doses of vaccine they used before sticking you in the arm. Or the ass.

What the hell was it doing here?

He barely had time to think the question before the radio he habitually more clipped to his belt shattered the quiet with a crackle of static.

“Patrol unit, this is dispatch, 10–49 to Pine Street, number Seventeen. We have a... an 11–12. Or a 203. Ah, a-a-a... 240. Oh, shit, is that a 597? Oh, hell! Jimmy, just get over there! Do you copy?”

Eli didn’t wait to hear if Jimmy copied or not. He was already sprinting to his Jeep, heart pounding. Seventeen Pine Street was the address of Josie’s clinic, and 203 and 240 were the dispatch codes for mayhem and assault. It was no wonder Cindy had sounded so confused. Those weren’t the kind of codes they heard much in Stone Creek.

And if someone was assaulting Josie, Eli knew he’d probably never hear them again. The town probably wouldn’t want to keep a sheriff who’d just committed a bare-handed murder.

Exp. 10-1017.03

Log 03-00130

The largest challenge facing this project remains the difficulty in locating competent technicians to carry out the necessary tasks. Obtaining radio equipment has become of paramount importance as techs seem unable to effectively track test subjects once dosages have been administered. This makes it impossible to accurately observe and record the effects of the newest version of the product.

Extrapolations can be made from data existing re: source materials and from observations of early in vitro and in vivo studies, however this cannot substitute for firsthand data.

Will send techs out to attempt to locate and gather data beginning tomorrow. However, will begin tapping contacts for discreet source of radio tracking tags, preferably nanotech for easy concealment.

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