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“Hi,” he said, then waited for her to say what she wanted.
“We like to welcome visitors who might be new to the parish,” she said. “I wondered if I could answer any questions for you, about the parish or the town.”
He probably shouldn’t have been instantly suspicious of anyone who showed him the least bit of friendliness. Some people might accuse him of paranoia. But the woman wasn’t smiling.
“I’m just passing through, ma’am,” he said.
“Oh? Where are you headed?”
He couldn’t blame her for looking a little confused there. Lamar wasn’t really on the way to anywhere else.
“Denver, eventually,” he said.
“Ah. Well then. I hope your travels are safe.”
Cormac left. She continued to watch him; he could just about feel it.
Back at his motel room, he slept for a few hours, getting ready for another long night. He dreamed; he always dreamed, vague images and feelings, a sense of some treasure just out of reach or some danger just within reach. That if he was just a little faster, just a little smarter, he could make everything—his life, his past—better. He usually woke feeling nervous. He’d gotten used to it.
Later that afternoon, just before business closing time, he found a butcher shop in town and bought a few pounds of a low-grade cut of beef, bloody as he could get it. At an ancient Safeway, he picked up a five-pound bag of flour.
Around ten P.M., well after sunset, when most folk were heading to bed—when someone else might be trying to sneak out—he returned to the school. At the edge of the campus, along the trail of claw prints he’d followed back from the ranch, he staked out the bait.
A wind blew in from the prairie, almost constant in this part of the state, varying from a whisper of dry air to tornado-spawning storms. Tonight the breeze was occasional, average. Cormac marked it and moved across it, away from the meat he’d hung from a low branch on a cottonwood. The wind would carry only the meat’s scent, not his. The hunter scattered flour on the ground underneath the meat, forming a thin, subtle layer. If the wolf ran away, this would make it easy to track.
He went across the street and found a place near a dusty, unused garage, a hundred yards or so away, to hunker down. He let his gaze go soft, taking in the whole scene, keeping a watch on the bait and the paths leading to it.
Time passed. The moon rose, just a few days from full. However much the werewolf might resist the urge, might control itself until then, at the full moon it would be forced to come out. Then Cormac would have it.
Midnight came and went, and the wolf never showed up to take the bait. It must have satiated the bloodlust on the cattle. It was being careful, now.
After a couple more hours of waiting with no results, he dismantled the trap—took down the meat and brushed his boot across the flour until it was scattered and ground into the dust and lawn. Covering his own tracks.
The sky was black. It was that time of night when streetlights—and even this town had a few—seemed to dim, unable to hold back the dark. In just a couple of hours, the night would break, the sky would turn gray, and the sun would rise pink in the east. He’d stayed up and watched it happen enough nights that he could almost set his clock by the change in light. But right now, before then, the night was dark, cold, clammy. Three A.M. had a smell all its own.
He switched off the headlights as he slipped into a parking space in front of his room. The motel was a one-story, rundown strip, a refugee from 1950s glory days, with peeling white paint and a politically incorrect sign out front, showing a faded screaming Indian holding a tomahawk: the Apache. All lights were out, the place was dark, not a soul awake and walking around. No witnesses.
Cormac set foot on the asphalt and hesitated. He listened to instinct; when his gut poked him, he trusted it. Something wasn’t right. Something was out there. Slowly, he pulled the rifle from under the Jeep’s front seat.
There wasn’t anyplace to hide out here; the land around the motel was as flat as a skillet, with no trees, only a few buildings, and the motel itself. The two-lane highway stretched out in either direction straight and empty. Cormac didn’t hear footsteps, breathing, a humming engine, nothing. He didn’t see a flicker of movement except for grasses touched by a faint breeze. He had no sign that anything was out there, except for the tingling hairs on the back of his neck screaming at him that something inhuman was watching.
It thumped onto the roof of the Jeep, slamming the vinyl, rocking the whole vehicle. Cormac ducked, hitting asphalt, as the oversize wolf skittered across the roof and leapt to the ground in front of him.
The door to the Jeep was still open; Cormac jumped inside, scrambling backward, and slammed it shut as the wolf crashed into it on its next attack. Its front claws scraped against the window, digging against the slick surface, snapping at the glass with open jaws and spit-covered teeth.
The damn werewolf had tracked him. No—it hadn’t even needed to track him. The Apache was the cheapest motel in town. It just had to lie in wait.
It hadn’t made a sound, not a growl or a snarl. It had just pounced, ready to rip him apart. On its hind legs now, it was as tall as the Jeep, larger than a natural wild wolf, because it weighed as much as its human form—conservation of mass. A wild wolf might be around a hundred, hundred twenty pounds. A big werewolf would be close to two hundred. This one was maybe a hundred sixty, hundred eighty. However large it was, however shocking it was to see a wolf as tall as his Jeep, this wasn’t the largest he’d ever seen. Not a two hundred pounder. It was thin, rangy. It had speed rather than bulk. Its coat was mostly gray, edged with beige and black. Prairie colors.
The werewolf backed off a moment, then sprang at the Jeep again, crashing full force into the window. The glass cracked.
Cormac couldn’t stay in here forever. And he wasn’t going to get a better shot than this. He fired.
The rifle thundered in the closed space of the Jeep, rattling Cormac’s ears to numbness. The glass of the driver’s-side window frosted with a million cracks radiating from a quarter-sized hole in the middle. The wolf had vanished.
He couldn’t hear a damn thing, and he wasn’t willing to bet he’d blown the thing’s head off that easy; he couldn’t spot any blood. He looked around but couldn’t see much, lying back across the front seats, peering out the remaining windows, mostly into sky.
After rolling to his knees, he broke out the driver’s-side window with the muzzle of his rifle, dropping a rain of glas
