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I was pretty full of myself as I made my way back to Dorothy. Not only had I cashed the biggest paycheck I’d ever seen, I’d actually earned it. The wendigo was dead. I had his severed head in my duffel bag to prove it. I am wizard, hear me roar. Never mind that I could barely walk straight or that my shoulder was dislocated. As I strolled out of the woods, I felt like a god.

The wind was knocked out of my bloated air bag when I got back to the parking lot. In the back of my head, I was worried about a park ranger ticketing Dorothy. The idea of cops or a tow truck showing up at this time of night was outlandish, but possible. But what I saw there had not even occurred to me as a remote outside chance.

Dorothy had been murdered. No other word came close to describing what had transpired. All four tires were not just flat, but shredded. The windows were covered in sheets of ice; the front windshield had collapsed under the weight. The rear driver’s side door had been torn off the hinges. Deep sets of four parallel lines gouged the metal in a helter-skelter fashion, looking like the claw marks of a dog digging in wet mud. Dorothy’s hood and trunk were crumpled like discarded paper and tossed several yards away from her corpse. Both bore a crescent ring of small holes that reminded me of a very large dental impression. The engine was a tangle of torn wires and hoses; it didn’t take a mechanical genius to see that not all of the parts were there anymore. Her heart, or the engineering equivalent, had been ripped out. Car-cide, plain and simple.

I circled the damage five or six times, trying to convince myself there was some hope of salvage. There wasn’t, not even if I summoned a horde of gremlins.

As the shock faded, anger rose to replace it. I wanted to resurrect the wendigo just so I could kill it again, very, very slowly. Failing that, I...

“Hey, Colin? I appreciate the sudden surge of homicidal intent, but...”

“But what?”

“Not all those claw marks look the same size. And those bite marks…its mouth didn’t look nearly that large.”

I walked towards the front end, avoiding the dark puddles of gasoline, oil, and anti-freeze as best I could. I didn’t have to look hard to confirm my fears. The marks appeared in three different widths—medium, large, and not-quite-Godzilla size. If there had been only two sets, I might have tried to justify it as the difference between front and rear claws. But three... I held up my hand for comparison to each grouping. I was fairly certain the one I killed had claws close to the large set, but well below the giant set.

I stumbled backward and crashed down on my butt. My balance was usually pretty good, but this was more than I could handle as rage mingled with fright. There were two more wendigoes out there, at least. One of them had claws that spanned well wider than the one I had barely, luckily, managed to kill. I didn’t know much about canine paw-to-body size ratio, but I suspected that meant at least another fifty to a hundred pounds of total body weight. Looking at the way the Detroit steel had been shredded, I decided most of that extra mass was muscle.

Why had only one attacked me? If all of them had worked as a pack, I would have been dead meat, sanctuary or no sanctuary. The one I killed must have found me first, but why didn’t the others pounce while I was finishing him off? I turned my attention to the smallest indentations. They were shallow, more insult than injury. If the biggest one was a hundred pounds heavier, the smallest could be fifty pounds lighter, barely more than a large puppy.

I processed the facts and found them unpleasant but satisfactory: the increased rate of attacks, the supernatural heavyweight scared off by a half-assed shield spell, the varying claw sizes. I didn’t like it, but they added up. The smaller marks belonged to a baby, a newborn wendigo out on its first hunt with mom and dad. The wendigoes...

“God, how I hate that plural.”

The wendigoes had been feeding more often to support the pregnant mother. When she ran from me at the store, it wasn’t because my magic was a threat to her…but it might have been a danger to the thing in her womb.

So what had I killed? It was male, a fact I had learned while digging my dagger free from its belly. Typically, in Earth nature, males are physically larger than the females. But I didn’t know if that applied to Shadowlands biology. Still, I leaned towards father rather than an older child. Baby or no, a mother would have rushed in at me to avenge her child’s death. But a father might be expendable. She wouldn’t want to risk her newborn to fight me in my sanctuary.

“Of course, we aren’t in the sanctuary right now.”

That got me back on my feet and moving. I loaded up what I could out of Dorothy’s remains, though a lot of my library was little more than papier-mâché now. I had unpacked some things into the hotel room earlier, but I was still going to have to leave a lot behind. Not wanting the cops to find my vehicle here, mauled and half-frozen, I removed her identifying marks. The license plate had been torn off and partially shredded, but the VIN number on the dash required a little effort with my Swiss army knife.

There was enough gasoline pooled around her for a funeral pyre, but my lighter was gone. I fumbled around in my pockets.

“This is taking too long, Colin.”

“Yeah, I know. She could be back any second. She’s probably taking the baby back to the den and then coming for me with a vengeance.”

Looking at the ruins of my Dorothy, that sounded all right; millennia-old nursing mother or not, the bitch was going to pay for this.

“Not if we die first. Here, let me speed this up.”

I felt my right hand wave, watched it happen more as a spectator than an actor. A surge of power went out through my palm. The puddles under the car began to spit out black smoke as pale green flames appeared at the edges. The energy expenditure made me feel dizzy, light-headed, but I was still aware of the growing heat as the flames rapidly spread.

“Can’t pass out on me yet. We’ve got to get out of here.”

I had a vague sensation of walking, stumbling, as my battered body moved away from Dorothy’s pyre. Then the pain and exhaustion caught up with me and everything went black.