11

What bothered me the most was how perfectly it all went down. Tia didn’t balk at the yellow and purple polka-dot beach umbrella I brought her in payment for her wendigo-baiting services. I got the feeling that either my fight with Hungry Winter or my conversation with the Eye of Winter had impressed her to the point that she wasn’t likely to try anything slick with me again.

No tourists or park rangers stumbled along at the wrong moment to discover a small army setting up on the hill. No random meteors crashed down out of the sky on Dora. There wasn’t a single pimple on Veruca’s face. I wished there would have been. It would have relieved me to know that not everything was going our way. As rough as it had been for me lately, I found it impossible to believe that fortune favored me completely.

Technically, Veruca and I should have been cruising down the road in Dora, possibly on the other side of Tulsa, heading toward the Missouri border. But while neither of us was clamoring for a spot on the front lines, we both wanted to be there in case something went horribly wrong. Besides, it was a Valente company picnic and we were Valente employees. Given all of the subsidiaries involved, I doubted anybody would notice we weren’t locals. We mingled and ate hot links, all the while keeping one ear open for the sound of gunfire. I had a digital thermometer and kept checking the ambient air temperature around me, but there were no unnatural dips, just the slow, steady progress of night.

Nothing happened. Around midnight, a pair of men tried to fight each other, but they were both far too drunk to be any good at it. One of the plainclothes I recognized from the setup meeting broke it up with little more than a flick of the wrist and a stiff arm. By one o’clock, it was down to just us and the plainclothes.

I walked up to the one who had played peacemaker. “I guess they decided not to show up. We go to all this trouble...”

He held up one hand, then placed the other over his ear wick. When the hand came back down, he said, “Actually, sir, we did. We killed one and wounded the other. The out team is following its blood trail to ground to finish the job.”

“What? When did they show up? Why weren’t we notified?” I had a sickened image of the female wendigo dragging around a wounded animal in its teeth to create a fake pathway of vitae. It was smart enough to plan an ambush of its own.

“Two hours ago, sir. And there was no need, sir. Your plan went over near-perfect. No injuries, no civilian encounters.”

I felt like stealing a line from Rambo, something about his men already being dead, but maybe I was just punch-drunk on paranoia. Before I could think of anything better to say, his hand returned to the ear wick.

“It’s over, sir. Out team called in. They’re both dead.”

I tried to smile for his benefit. To me, it still felt very far from over.