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Who was Iron Mike Sweeney?
There was something about the man.
Something very wrong.
Something weirdly wrong.
Although Marty had accepted the path of the darkness and the way of the knife, part of him was still an ordinary man. A pre–First Night man. He’d been raised in a Jewish household, but not a strict one, and over the years agnosticism had drawn him away from his faith and
his traditions. He was, however, always a very superstitious man, though he ascribed that to working in Hollywood. The movie business seemed to swing between the poles of very good or very bad luck. The superstitions that became part of him were in no way tied to his previous faith—or any faith. Luck was luck, and the world was always a little weird to him. The angels he sometimes prayed to never appeared in anyone’s holy books. Then or now.
As the reaper army marched on, he sat on his quad and rumbled down the center of the road behind Saint John, who was flanked by his personal guard, the Red Brotherhood.
Marty tried to shake his weird feeling and simply could not.
Finally he peeled off from the procession and signaled for four of the Red Brothers, and with them in tow he made a U-turn and headed back down the road to the place where the trade wagon had been ambushed. They reached the spot in less than thirty minutes. Marty pulled to a stop in the woods where he had a good view of the scene of slaughter. Most of the dead had risen and wandered off. A few—those with traumatic head wounds—lay where they’d fallen. The wagon stood there. Saint John had ordered the quartermasters of his army to take the uninjured horses and to slaughter the rest. The massive Percheron lay sprawled and dead beneath a crowd of vultures. Up the slope loomed the place where Iron Mike Sweeney had been executed by Saint John.
The two trees that had held him stood as silent as mourners. Ragged ends of rope hung from each, flapping weakly in the breeze.
But the man was gone.
Brother Marty sat immobile for a long moment. Then he signaled to one of the Red Brothers.
“Come on, guys. I want to know who cut him down and what happened to his body.”
The four Red Brothers dismounted and followed Marty up the slope. They stayed off the path to prevent any useful footprints from being obscured by their own shoes. When they reached the two trees, one of them—Brother Zeke—crept forward, knees bent, body bowed low to read the tale of the ground. Brother Marty followed close behind.
Zeke suddenly stopped, and from his posture it was clear there was something puzzling about the scene. He squatted down and poked at the ground, then picked up the pieces of rope that had been used to tie Mike Sweeney to the tree. Frowning, he turned to Marty.
“What is it?”
“Something’s weird about this, boss,” said Zeke.
“Don’t talk to me about weird,” said Marty. “We don’t want weird. We don’t like weird. This Iron Mike fellow is dead, and either he’s dead dead and some maniac body-snatched him, or he’s walking around dead-ish looking for a hot meal. That’s ordinary, that’s what I want to hear. So, tell me what I want to hear.”
The reaper’s expression was difficult to read beneath the flaring red of the hand tattooed across his face, but even so the lift of his eyebrow and the tilt of his head conveyed plenty of meaning. He held out the ropes. They were torn apart, shredded. It was clear even to Marty that it hadn’t been done with a knife, either.
The rope ends looked gnawed.
Zeke squatted down and touched the dirt at the base of the trees, where deep marks were cut into the ground. Footprints.
But they were not made by human feet.
Each print was huge, bare of shoes, with wide-splayed toes. The tip of each toe print was gouged deep into the dirt as if by a savage claw. The reaper placed one palm over the clearest of the prints. It was bigger than his whole hand.
“That ain’t no dog,” muttered Zeke. He looked genuinely frightened. Sweat beaded on the red ink tattooed across his face. “And it’s too big to be a wolf. Or . . . at least not any kind of wolf I ever want to see. Except . . .”
“What?” asked Brother Marty.
“I don’t know. Something my granddad told me once. Some old legends from the deep woods in Canada where I grew up.” He half smiled, then shook his head. “No, that’s stupid stuff. That’s fairy-tale crap. Forget I said anything.”
“No, I want you to tell me,” insisted Brother Marty. “What exactly are you saying here?”
Zeke looked at him for a long five count, then down at the prints, then off into the woods. Finally he shook his head.
“I’m not saying anything, brother,” he said in a wooden voice.
“Where’s the body? Who took it? What’d they do with it?”
