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Who knew?
Would the werewolves remain in the yard, barring anyone from leaving the house? Except … didn’t werewolves only troll around after dark? Gina hoped so. Being trapped in here with only one silver-filled rifle would be bad.
She paused outside her room. Where had Isaac gotten silver bullets? She doubted the local gunsmith sold them.
Maybe Isaac had made them. He was pretty good with his hands. Whenever anything broke in the tack room, Isaac was the one who fixed it. In which case …
Gina went into her room, not bothering to turn on the light. The moon had begun to fall and was now framed in the large windows set in the opposite wall. Everything looked cast in pewter.
Gina owned a lot of silver jewelry. This was the Southwest after all. Sure, a lot of it was her mother’s, but—
Gina lifted the lid of her jewelry box. She’d save those pieces for last.
Inside lay a jumble of stuff she didn’t wear. Things that flitted around, caught the light, made a noise—like earrings, bracelets, even necklaces—could spook a horse.
Gina considered the pile. If Isaac melted it down he might get a few bullets out of it but … probably not enough to matter.
She shut the lid with a snap and turned toward the door.
Someone stood in the shadows, just past the reach of the moonlight, watching her.
* * *
“I dunno how he got out,” Isaac said.
Whoever was on the other end spoke. Matt considered asking Isaac to put him on speakerphone, then saw the apparatus was so ancient it was one step above a rotary dial.
“I’m gonna let you talk to the guy who was there when it happened,” Isaac continued. “He’s some kind of Aztec expert.” Isaac held out the receiver to Matt. “I wanna keep an eye on those wolves.”
“Who’d you call?” Matt asked.
“Name’s Edward Mandenauer. We met in the war.”
Matt frowned. “War?”
“WW Two. Did a lot of scouting in Germany.” His mouth twisted. “They always sent the Injuns scouting.” Isaac lifted the phone higher. “Ran into this guy in the Black Forest. He was some sort of double agent.”
“A spy?” Matt frowned. What good would that do them?
Isaac pressed the phone into Matt’s hand. “Edward’s spent a lifetime studying ancient, supernatural legends. Tell him what you saw, what you know. I gotta go back.”
Matt put the phone to his ear, but before he could even introduce himself Edward Mandenauer, his accent still quite German despite the intervening years, snapped, “Tell me everything.”
So Matt did—or almost everything. He left out the parts that were too crazy for words. The instant he said “Nahual,” the old man interrupted. “Ah! This is a word that I know.”
“An Aztec guardian angel in animal form. Kind of like the Native American spirit animal.”
“Not quite. The stories of the Nahual that I have heard deal with a being referred to as ‘lo que es mi vestidura o piel.’”
“‘Something that is my cloth or my skin,’” Matt translated. “I’ve only seen that translation for the Nahualli, protectors of Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god of war and sacrifice.”
Sacrifice. War. Changing of the skin like a cloth. All of these tales circled around to the same damn thing. Whether they called it Tangwaci Cin-au’-ao or a superwarrior or a Nahual, all the legends described what they had here.
“The two beings are as close as the words used to describe them,” Mandenauer said. “The Nahualli a protector of the god, the Nahual a being very like a god.”
“Like a god?” Matt echoed.
“What else would ancient peoples think when they saw a werewolf but that they had encountered a god?”
