I scanned the parking lot. Pratt was already gone, dammit. “Do you know where the stable is?” I asked.
“I know how to find it.” She took out a cellphone, dialed 411, and got the address from the operator. “There’s only one in the area,” she said. “Shit. I wish they hadn’t stolen my cell.”
“What’s that in your hand?”
“The bartender’s. He loaned it to me, without realizing he was loaning it to me. But I can’t use it to file a supplemental report. The number would turn up on his phone bill.”
I was feeling keyed up. “I’m sorry,” I said. “The answer we needed was sitting right next to me, and I didn’t realize it.”
“Don’t worry about it. That’s my job, not yours. Not that I found out a damn thing. All those boys wanted to talk about was the festival tomorrow. They’re worried that it may be canceled after ‘what happened today.’ I wasn’t sure how much they really knew, but they were being careful.”
I wondered what the festival would be like. If we destroyed the predator tonight—and did it quickly and cleanly—the town could have Christmas in peace: no more killings, no more people going crazy, no more burning buildings. Maybe there would be something nice I could pick up for Aunt Theresa and Uncle Karl. And maybe I could find a gift for Catherine, if—
“God, I hope we can finish this tonight,” she said. “I want to spend Christmas with my family. Was that man in the tan coat who I think?”
“That’s Pratt. He didn’t want to talk to you at all.”
She seemed to understand right away. “They’re like that. A lot of them. They live a couple of hundred years, and everything they knew about the world gets turned on its head. They see a black woman alone at a bar, talking to men she doesn’t know, and they immediately think prostitute. They’re old-fashioned, squared. Some of them even talk about the good old days before the Terror.”
I didn’t know what “the Terror” was, but I got the point. “Do you know anything about him?”
“One of the other investigators said Pratt likes killing people, which doesn’t exactly set him apart from the crowd. He should have talked to me. Now I can’t even get a new report to him.” She sighed. “So, we’re going to check out the stables, right?”
“Oh, yeah.”
She started the car and we rode through the dark town. I wondered how late the stables would be open, and if we’d have to break in.
We headed toward the fairgrounds but reached the turnoff well before the festival banner appeared. There was a split-rail fence, a gate, and a sign that said CONNER STABLES. The gate was bolted and padlocked. I cut the padlock, opened the gate, let Catherine drive through, and closed it again.
She drove down the long path with the headlights off. Our plan was simple: Sneak in as close as we could without being spotted, just like the Wilbur estate. Locate the sapphire dog. Use the ghost knife on it, preferably from ambush.
Catherine wondered if we could use bright light to trap or stun it, but I didn’t trust that idea. Sunlight hadn’t bothered it at all, as far as I could tell. I suggested that its cage might have had special bulbs in it, and we agreed that we should have stolen a couple when we had the chance.
“Are you sure you want to come with me for this?” I asked. She gave me a look.
There were no turnoffs from the main drive where we could stash the car, so Catherine pulled all the way into the stable’s parking lot and backed into a spot. There were three other cars already there.
I was getting a lot of practice closing car doors quietly. We walked toward the gate as if we belonged there. I was keyed up and jittery, and Catherine seemed to feel the same.
The muddy lot was ringed with trees and heavy scrub. Ahead was a wooden rail that looked just like the one at the edge of the property. It could have been part of a set in a cowboy movie except that the gate attached to it was made of welded aluminum pipes and locked with another Yale padlock.
There were two fenced-in areas for the horses to ride in; one was a muddy circle about twenty-five feet wide with a tall fence made of more welded aluminum. A second, larger area was bordered with low wooden rails to make an oval about seventy-five feet long. Cedar chips had been spread over the ground, and obstacles—long window planters without plants and uprights with crossbars that formed an X—had been left out. There was a Porta Potti and an overturned wheelbarrow to the left, but they couldn’t have been the only source of the odor that made us wrinkle our noses. This place must have been stink heaven on hot summer afternoons.
Farther left there was a cluster of big, windowless wooden buildings decorated with pennants. I guessed those must be the stables.
I hopped the fence. Catherine climbed over it more slowly, but that was what I wanted. I had the tattoos and should be in the lead. I made my way toward the nearest stable. No one shouted a challenge at us. No waving flashlights came out of the darkness, no little squares of window light appeared in the distance. No one knew we were there.
There was a low, echoing rumble of thunder from somewhere nearby. It seemed to rebound against the mountains around us, coming from every direction and muffled by all the trees and brush nearby. Rain was coming.
I walked along the building. A lamp was shining on the other side of the stables, and we made our way by indirect light. The wind hissed through the branches, but aside from our footsteps, there was no other sound.
At the corner of the building I peeked out. There were three more buildings, all four set two by two facing an open area about thirty feet wide. A single light glowed above the open door across the way. I peered into the darkness, searching for a human silhouette. I didn’t see anything.
I stepped out of hiding. All four of the stable doors were open. Was that normal on a chilly winter night? I had no idea.
Catherine followed me into the yard as the mist thickened into a light drizzle. The stable beside us was dark and quiet. Then we heard steps from the stable across the yard. A horse slowly stepped out of the darkness.
I grabbed Catherine’s arm. “It has a white mark on its face.”
“Lots of horses have that.”
This mark was completely off center, starting on the left side of its nose and passing under its left eye. “But can they be all crooked like that?”
“Maybe it’s a paint,” she said, which I didn’t understand.
It stared at us. God, it was big. I heard Catherine back away. I was about to ask if we should just walk by it when she said: “Is it bleeding?”
I looked again; its ear was ragged and its mouth was bloody. It also had open wounds on its shoulder.
It lowered its head.
Catherine’s voice was a low whisper in my ear. “Is that mud on its hoof?”
The horse stamped its foot. Something coated the hoof, but it looked too red to be mud. I raised my hands to clap. “Horses run from danger, right?”
Then it charged at us.
Catherine cursed and fled into the open stable behind us. I backpedaled after her, keeping the protected part of my chest toward the horse.
Christ, it was fast. Catherine yelped in pain and fear, but I couldn’t turn to see why because the animal was already next to me.
It tried to bite me but missed. Even its mouth seemed huge. I ducked to the side, raising my arms to protect my face. My heel struck something and I nearly fell; in that same moment, the horse reared and kicked.
It caught me full in the chest. Already off balance, I tumbled back, feet flying over my head. I landed on my shoulder in the corner, my legs hitting the wall above me. The shin I’d bashed against the water trough flared with pain again. I fell with dirty straw in my face and long-handled wooden tools clattering around me.
I was exposed. A kick would cave in my skull, and—
Catherine screamed.
I rolled to my knees, shrugging off whatever had fallen on me. The stench of horse shit filled my nose, but I’d worry about that later. My hand fell on a thick wooden handle, and I grabbed at it like a lifeline.
The horse snorted and stamped. I jumped to my feet and raised my hands. I was holding a push broom.
That wasn’t going to do me any good. Catherine cried out again, a sound more of fright than pain. I threw the broom underhand, hard, like I was throwing a shovel into the back of a truck. It struck the horse’s hind legs, startling it. The horse jumped and kicked a little, turning its huge body toward me.
I reached back down into the straw, unwilling to look away from the animal. My hand fell on something thin and metal, and I dragged it out of the straw. It was a pitchfork.
The horse moved toward me. I backed toward the corner. There was a narrow pen in front of me to the right, and a second at my right elbow. Close on my left was the wall, and there was no back door. I was trapped.
I held the pitchfork high so the light would fall on it. Could the horse see what I was holding? I could. Would it understand and back away?
Apparently not, because it kept coming toward me, stamping its feet and snorting angrily. I yelled “Yah!” at it, just like a movie cowboy. It didn’t have any effect. I pretended to jab at it, shouting “Hah!” each time.
I really, truly did not want to stab this animal. The thought of this dirty metal entering its flesh made me nauseous.
But it wouldn’t back away. It was coming more slowly, more cautiously, but it wouldn’t stop coming and I was running out of space. Soon it would have me pinned against the wall, the pitchfork would be useless, and it could kick my skull in.
“Yah!” I shouted again, half hoping that, even if the horse wouldn’t back off, someone who worked here would suddenly show up and take control of the animal. There wasn’t time for that, though. The horse reared back and kicked with its right hoof. I tried to pull the sharp tines away, but it struck the side of the fork and I nearly dropped it.
My nausea knotted into naked fear. To hell with this. I wasn’t going to be killed just because I wasn’t willing to defend myself. I jabbed with the pitchfork, just barely striking the horse’s shoulder as I yelled “Back!” It wasn’t enough to do real damage, I hoped, but it would break the skin and sting a little. Whether the horse could see well in the dark or not, it knew what I was holding now.
It suddenly made a high, hair-raising shriek and lunged at me, kicking with both front hooves. I jumped back and felt the pitchfork wrench upward, shivering, as a hoof nearly knocked it out of my hands. God, the sound the horse was making …
I tossed the pitchfork high, making the animal flinch and step back. I lunged to the right, into the pen. Running away from a horse was a lunatic idea, but if I stood my ground, I was going to have to kill it.
The horse followed—I could hear and feel it just behind me. I leaped up, grabbing the top of the wall between the enclosures. Adrenaline gave me the strength and speed I needed to practically throw myself into the next pen. I felt something snag my pants cuff—was the horse trying to bite me again?—but my momentum pulled it free.
The room suddenly darkened—not completely, but something big moved to block the light from across the yard.
I got my feet under me just in time, then jumped for the wall of this second pen. I didn’t have the same quickness that comes from having a huge, hostile animal at my back, but I still had plenty of fear.
And I could hear the horse backing out. It didn’t have room to turn around quickly, but I still didn’t have a lot of time.
I dropped down on the other side of the wall, my weight pitching forward and my hands landing on something huge, soft, and cool right in front of me. It was another horse, this one dead and lying almost against the wall.
One of the front doors had been closed, and the other was scraping shut, cutting off my light and means of escape. I stumbled over the dead horse, half running, half falling toward the exit. I didn’t look back. If those hooves were coming toward me, I didn’t want to see it. I slipped through the doorway and sprawled in the mud just as Catherine slammed it shut.
The doors banged and jolted as the horse tried to kick them open. Catherine was knocked several inches away from them, then threw her shoulder against them again.
“Get something!” she yelled at me, and I jumped to my feet.
There was no way I could see to lock both doors—no bolt, no bar, no padlock. There was only a wooden catch, which I closed, but it was worn and fragile. It might not have held up in a strong windstorm, let alone a couple more kicks.
I turned, scanning the yard. What I needed was a truck or tractor I could drive up to the doors and block them with, but there wasn’t one nearby, and I couldn’t have gotten any of the cars in the lot through the fence.
Instead, I ran to the aluminum pen and cut off two lengths of pipe. As I ran back to Catherine, I shaved one end of each into a point, then staked them into the ground at the base of the doors.
Catherine stepped back carefully, ready to throw her body against the doors again if the stakes didn’t hold. I stood next to her with the same thought.
The stakes held, but the doors still wobbled with every kick. And damn, it was loud.
“That’s not secure enough,” Catherine said, and I agreed.
I cut and shaved two more stakes from the aluminum fence. I had a twinge of guilt at destroying someone else’s property, but I figured it was minor compared with what had happened to their two horses. I tossed them both to Catherine.
The doorway across the yard was built the same way, with two doors on two hinges each. With my ghost knife, I cut through the hinges on one of them and let it fall across my shoulders. I carried it across the mud, dropped it on its side, and tipped it against the staked door. Catherine drove the two stakes into the mud at its base, bracing it in place.
The thump of the doors slamming together must have startled the horse inside, because the steady bang bang bang of its kicks halted. We stepped back and surveyed our work again. Catherine turned to me. “Better,” she said. She lifted her forearm and tenderly laid her hand against it. Was she injured?
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had a pitchfork in my hand, and maybe I could have stopped that horse without—”
“Ray, forget that shit. If you think I wanted you to kill that animal, you haven’t been paying attention.”
“No, I know that,” I said. “We would have been safer, though, if I’d been willing to go all out. If I hadn’t held back.”
“I’d rather be good than safe.”
With that, the conversation was over.
I crossed the yard and went into the stable the horse had come from. There was a trough filled with hay and two more dead animals. Both had their skulls crushed.
“A horse wouldn’t …” Catherine’s voice sounded tiny.
“Both of these have white marks, too.”
So, the sapphire dog fed on animals as well as people. Hopefully, no one kept any lions around.
We searched the other stables. We found three more dead horses and a dead woman. She was dressed in dirty coveralls, but she’d applied her makeup with extraordinary care. She’d even plucked her eyebrows and drawn them back on. Her neck was crooked—broken by a horse’s kick, maybe. And she had a white streak over her left ear.
Catherine searched her and produced a driver’s license. She was Lois Conner, just like the name above the entrance. She was forty-nine, and like me, she carried a single credit card. I stood watch in the doorway while Catherine finished. I didn’t have the stomach for another corpse. Instead, I stared at the braced stable door, watching it shudder under the trapped animal’s kicks. They were slowing and growing weaker as it tired.
“She’s been dead for hours,” Catherine said. Apparently, there was nothing else about her that mattered to us.
Beyond the last stable was a bungalow with an OFFICE sign over the door. Behind that was a house that looked like an uneven stack of wooden boxes. The office was locked up and dark. A single light shone in the house.
We searched the office first, just in case. I held my ghost knife ready, but we didn’t find anything.
The front door to the house was standing open. I entered first. We walked through the living room into a quiet little den with a sunken floor. The rooms were nicely furnished but filled with clutter: stacks of papers, pretty seashells, two dozen books all lying open and facedown on counters and coffee tables. Everything looked like it had been set in a random but convenient place and then forgotten.
Catherine got ahead of me and peeked into the hall. A light shone from a room at the far end, illuminating a body lying curled in the corner of the corridor floor. I caught her elbow and pulled her back. I was the one who was a little bit bulletproof. For once, she didn’t cringe at my touch.
I turned the body over. He had long, graying hair like a hippie cowboy. He’d been shot in the chest and had fallen with his face to the wall and died. If he had a white mark, I couldn’t see it.
“It isn’t a very efficient predator, is it?” Catherine asked.
Pratt had said something similar. “What do you mean?”
“Well, its prey drives off or kills other prey. It’s one thing if a cougar catches a sheep and the bleating frightens the rest of the herd, but in this case the sheep sticks around after it’s been eaten, driving away other potential meals. I don’t know why this thing hasn’t gone extinct yet.”
I remembered my idea that the sapphire dog might become Pet Emperor. “Maybe it’s starving. It’s been trapped for a couple of decades. Maybe it’s feeding hard.”
“Sure. Maybe.”
We stood. I led the way around the corner into the lighted room. It was the kitchen. A huge refrigerator was lying on its side, and a little old gray-haired lady was trapped beneath it.
But I didn’t notice that at first, because the little old lady was holding a big damn revolver, and I was looking right down the barrel. She had one eye squinted shut as she squeezed the trigger.
Click. It was empty. I stood in the doorway like a paper target at a pistol range. She let the end of the barrel fall onto the dirty tile floor.
“Damn,” she said. “Wasted too many shots.”
Catherine tried to step around me, but I held her back. I wasn’t convinced it was safe yet. “What did you waste them on?” I asked, hoping she would say “A blue dog.”
“Them,” she said, and coughed blood onto her chin.
There were two more dead bodies by the stove: both young, tall, and slim, with long dark hair and short, upturned noses. Each woman had been shot multiple times. They looked enough alike to be sisters. Was one of them Depressed Guy’s wife? I honestly didn’t want to know.
The old woman reached for a box of ammunition on the floor beneath a kitchen chair, but it was out of reach.
“Would you hand that to me, sonny?”
I stepped into the room, allowing Catherine to follow. “I don’t think so,” I said quietly.
“Well, fuck you then. Get out of my house! You can’t have him.”
Catherine walked around the old woman, taking in the scene without expression. I wished there was a mirror nearby so I could see if I had the same composure. I didn’t think I did.
The old woman looked very slender and frail, and her face was terribly pale. She had a streak across her forehead.
I felt very tired. “We should call an ambulance,” I said.
“Don’t you touch anything, you … burglars. Not even the phone. I forbid it.”
“We will,” Catherine said to me, ignoring the woman on the floor. “After we check the rest of the house.”
I nodded. There was a set of stairs going up. I led the way, stepping over the two young bodies to get to them.
I wondered how long it would take to get used to seeing corpses. Maybe it was callous of me, but I wanted it to be soon. I wanted to stop feeling sickened by the blood and the slack, empty faces. I wanted to not care about the smell. I wanted …
I wanted all sorts of things I wasn’t going to get. I took a deep breath and forced myself to focus on the job. The next old woman might not be holding an empty gun.
The upstairs had the same clutter, but there was no sapphire dog. I stopped in the bathroom to look in the mirror. I couldn’t see any horse shit on me, which seemed like a minor miracle. Then we checked the back bedroom.
The walls were covered with posters of horses, and there were toy horses everywhere. Some people couldn’t get enough, I guessed. Then I heard something scrape against the carpet. It was a tiny sound, but it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I stepped in front of Catherine and held my ghost knife ready.
“Come out!” My voice was harsh and low. I knew it wasn’t the sapphire dog—it had always fled, never hidden. “Come out right now!”
I heard a tiny, frightened gasp, then a little voice said: “I’m sorry!” The voice was choked with tears. “I’m sorry for hiding!” Behind me, Catherine gasped.
A girl slowly crawled from under the far side of the bed. She was about ten, thin as a rail, and she tried to make herself as small as possible. She also wouldn’t look at us, letting her hair cover her tear-streaked face. I couldn’t tell if she had a white mark.
“Are you alone?” I asked, but Catherine pushed by me before the kid could answer.
“Oh, honey,” she said, “what happened here?” Catherine went around the bed and took hold of the girl’s hands.
“My granma tried to kill me,” she said. I expected more sobs, but her voice seemed to hollow out and become steady. “That thing licked her and she went crazy.”
“You saw it?” I asked.
“Yeah, it walked right by me. I saw what it did to my mom and gran. Then they turned against me.” The girl’s voice cracked. “They hated me. I don’t know what I did, but they hated me so much.…”
“Oh, honey,” Catherine said, and gathered the girl into her arms. “You didn’t do a single little thing to deserve this. Not a single little thing.”
The girl began to cry. Catherine held her close. I stood in the doorway, weapon in hand, feeling useless.
“We have to take her away from here,” Catherine said.
“No!” the girl shouted. She broke Catherine’s embrace and retreated to the corner. “My granma is still out there, and so is that thing. It’s out there doing that to other people, and I don’t want to leave here I won’t go I won’t do it—”
Catherine pressed her fists against her chest. “It’s okay, honey. It’s okay. You don’t have to do anything scary.”
“We can’t bring her anyway,” I said. “We’re hunting.” I was surprised by the sound of my own voice; it sounded flat and miserable. I don’t rescue people. I kill predators.
The girl was willing to tell us her name, Shannon, but she absolutely refused to leave her room. Catherine promised to call emergency services for her. Shannon slid back under the bed, and we went into the hall.
“Oh my God, Ray,” Catherine whispered. “That little girl … I wasn’t ready for what happened to those horses, but that girl breaks my heart.”
“The sapphire dog didn’t feed on her,” I said, trying to think about something, anything else, “but it did feed on Little Mark. What do you think is the age break where people become food? Puberty?”
“For Christ’s sake, Ray.” Her voice was harsh but still low. “Didn’t you notice—”
I hissed at her to cut her off. It didn’t matter that she was right. At that moment, I couldn’t bear to be told that I wasn’t feeling enough.
My misery and adrenaline turned to anger. “I may not be trained for this, but I’m trying to focus on the job. Maybe you …” I almost said: should take care of your own people and let these people take care of themselves, but it would have been too much. I wasn’t going to turn something she’d told me in confidence into a weapon. I turned away.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said that.” Then she patted my hand briefly.
We went down the stairs into the basement. I led the way again, stepping around stacks of newspapers and old board games, trays full of glass candleholders, and other crap.
I switched on the light. The Conners kept their basement relatively clear, compared with the rest of the house. There was a leather saddle up on a stand and leather-working tools laid out on a workbench.
I remembered the rumble of thunder I’d heard outside. I hadn’t heard a second one. The thunderclouds might have passed, or maybe I’d heard a rock slide and didn’t recognize the sound. Still, something felt off about it.
My iron gate twinged. I knew that feeling, and I could feel where it was coming from. I turned toward the basement window behind me.
The sapphire dog was there, peering through the window at us from outside the house. It was lying on its stomach, its bright eyes almost pressing against the glass. Its star-shaped pupils seemed to be glowing.