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“In Crete,” he continued, “seven victims have been found at the bottom of cliffs, with donkey tracks on the roads above.”
Kris rubbed her forehead. “I’m gonna need more than that.”
“There is a legend in those mountains of the Anaskelades, a donkey that wanders the hills offering free rides.”
“Offering? As in ‘Hey, pal, want a ride?’”
“Though I have often been amazed at the stupidity of humans, I do not think that anyone confronted with a talking donkey would decide that accepting a ride was a good idea.”
“You never know,” Kris muttered. Humans and stupidity did seem to go hand in hand, regardless of race, creed, or international borders.
“Touché,” Edward agreed. “However, the Anaskelades is not a talking donkey. It is a shape-shifting donkey.”
“Which is so much less weird.”
“It does not shape-shift until its victim climbs aboard. Then it grows to the size of the nearest mountain and tosses the unsuspecting traveler into the abyss.”
Kris couldn’t think of anything to say to that, except: “What else you got?”
“In Australia, over a dozen bodies have been found in remote areas without their heads. Investigation reveals they were followed for many miles by a human with very large feet.” Kris lifted her eyebrows, waiting for more. “The locals began to whisper of the Thardid Jimbo, a cannibalistic giant that tracks its favorite food—humans—and partakes of the delicacy of their heads.”
“Okay,” Kris said. She didn’t know what else to say.
“In Hudson Bay cairns have been discovered. Beneath them lay the corpses of five whose backs had been splayed and holes drilled through their bodies.”
“What kind of monster does something like that?” Kris asked.
Edward answered as if the question had not been rhetorical. “The Ikuutayuuq, an Inuit legend, which translates to ‘one who drills.’ The Ikuutayuuq hunt down any human in their territory and torture them to death, then build a cairn to mark the kill.”
Kris considered what he’d told her. She was still missing something. “Why do you think these incidents are similar? They’re all different places, different legends, different modes of death.”
“And they are all fake.”
“Fake legends?” Kris perked right up.
“Of course not. Haven’t you discovered by now that legends are real?”
Had she? Kris remembered plunging into the loch, the cold, the murk—
The monster.
“Maybe,” she allowed.
She wasn’t ready to tell anyone else what she’d seen while in the loch. She’d been scared, drowning, dying—not having a hallucination would have been strange. Certainly Kris was less inclined to dismiss Nessie as fiction, but she wasn’t willing to completely accept her as fact, either. Not until Kris saw the creature with her own eyes, in broad daylight or even beneath the moon. However—
“I don’t think Nessie is doing this.”
Mandenauer’s gaze sharpened. “Why not?”
Kris explained how she’d been attacked in her yard and again on the overhang above Loch Ness, finishing with: “The last victim had a silver knife stuck in her chest. Why drown and then suddenly stab? Why stab if you can drown? Besides, Nessie doesn’t have the opposable thumbs necessary to—” Kris made a stabbing motion.
“Unless she’s a shape-shifter,” Mandenauer said. “Then she could take human form, use the weapon, then become … whatever the monster is.”
“I thought shape-shifters couldn’t touch silver.”
“Most can’t. Some can.”
Fabulous, Kris thought
