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???
The voice over the cellphone subsided at some point, then the phone vibrated, over and over, a mirror to the anxious thump of my heart.
I couldn't stay in this cramped box, unable to defend myself if anything got through the window or door. When the world quieted and I felt the impulse to dare fate, I slipped out and retreated through the front entrance into the thin space between the garage wall and a thick screen of boxwood.
In a gust of dead wind appeared the wolf, a solitary black figure glossed in the neons of a local pizza parlor. He trotted beneath sign after sign, nose pressed tight along the ground, except for the occasional pause to track a sound or movement elsewhere on the streets. Gore adorned his maw.
I let him roam until he was within range of a soft whistle.
His head tilted when I emerged.
“Problem,” I announced.
The wolf nose me back into my hiding spot and walked inside. There was a violent series of snarls and loud crashes, then Caelan emerged to escort me.
We walked past the still-gnashing head of the werewolf. From the smear of oily blood on the ground, it appeared that Caelan had purposefully rolled the head away and into a corner, where its clouded eyes were of little use to Ingram Hayes and the wendigo.
I dragged the woman’s mangled body out of the way of her jeep's tires. I said a quiet prayer for the woman, which I hadn't done in years, closed her eyes and got into the driver's seat. Wincing, doused in blood and fur, Caelan joined me. The bones under his skin slithered into place as he rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck.
“You've good instinct, for a human civilian,” he panted, once we'd driven onto the street and made it several blocks. I didn't ask him what he meant as he sagged beside me in the passenger's seat and fished his phone out of the bag. “If you had fangs, I’d get you training and have you in the field with me.”
I put his hand on the quaking muscles of my thigh. “My legs are gonna crap out on me. You don’t want this in the field.”
Several police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances rushed past us as we turned onto the highway. He patted my knee and took back his hand. “Want me to drive?”
“Nah, I'm good.” Another lie. When he wasn't looking, I thumbed a tear off my cheek. “Find the binding spell. That wendigo is going back to hell in a handbasket, or whatever it takes to bring him there.”
???
A few hours and an arranged car exchange later (during which one of Caelan's deputies gave him fresh clothes and we split the books with trusted members of his team), the solution came through from the final third of a Latin text on Jorge’s search. He'd scanned the pages for key phrases: Spiritus. Anima. Evocatio. Nexum.
Caelan waited twenty minutes more to retrieve a translation of the instructions. While the information seemed accurate to him and Jorge, he asked someone with more knowledge of the dead language to confirm its meaning; the text was a match for other documents the CPA had access to and what results had been recorded were successful. However, there was not, unfortunately an expert to consult on the matter of the wendigo itself; it was a rarer spirit, and what we had seemed close, but not quite. As Caelan explained, similar monsters have always existed across continents and time; it was possible our prey was some type of southern variant.
“What's Jorge say?” I asked when his phone dinged again. Headlights illuminated the New York border.
“Good news, bad news: it’s simple, but, doesn’t specify wendigo, so even if Zakar was speaking as himself for one unadulterated minute, it might could prove as effective as spritzing a werewolf with your plant mister. ‘Course, I can’t kill a spirit, so our alternate plan, and what the Otherworld tasked me with doing, is playing whack-a-mole with the hosts. With Zakar off the board, the First Head has likely taken up residence with Ingram Hayes; he’s the one who’s been practicing on those poor women. Taking down the Second Head should quell the undead activity for another year or so while the First Head seeks a suitable replacement. You’d have a about year before he comes for you again,” he said, stroking his chin. “Wonder if it’s possible to convince the Otherworld to keep you in my department that long, seeing as you’re a target of the First Head. If we catch him, Stephen’s murder is pinned on Ingram Hayes, the investigation is considered closed even though we’re missing information, and after what’s happened on Pippin Lane and Nokhurst Crossing, you’ll be killed in a matter of days.”
“Lose, lose,” I mumbled. “What’s the containment looking like?”
“We’re creating a cursed necklace, transferring the spirit from the host to an object. True dark magic would be fixin’ to then use the locket for nefarious purposes, but we’ll lock it away in a secure location, provided of course this works.”
“How do we do it?”
He squinted at the screen in the darkness. “A mixture of your blood and the host’s blood, while it’s infected with the spirit, is to coat a black sapphire. There's words to be said over it, but my pronunciation mangles them.”
“Why’s it require my blood?” I asked.
“Or mine,” Caelan said. “According to the text, this allows control over the entity when you then wear the necklace, locket, ring, whatever you embed the stone into. Probably a release mechanism to keep the spirit from digging into the wearer’s body, allowing you the ability to take the blasted thing off when you’ve finished your ill deeds." He shrugged. “We could try without that element, but you might be boiling spaghetti without the water.”
“Where do we find a black sapphire?”
“Jeweler, specialty store? I’ll have Jali pick it up on her way. She recommends a necklace with a sturdy chain; if someone falls, it’d be easier for another to carry on; I’m inclined to agree.”
I nodded, and the realization hit me that Jali was very well referring to the least durable member of Caelan’s team. “I can’t sit this one out, can I?”
“You’re our best shot at capture. If you aren’t there, I’m certain the First and Second Heads will skip town in favor of hunting you and your sister down.” He paused. “Thing is, Marcy, whatever happens to the rest of us, the southern wendigo, demon, spirit, whatever it is: it’s got a plan for you. You’ll be able to close the distance with its host in a way none of us can, be it Ingram Hayes or someone new. And I can’t kill it, much as I might want to.” He looked particularly frustrated at the thought. “I can make its host bleed, whoever it shakes out to be, but you might be the only one left standing to finish the job.”
The sun blushed peach through swaths of cirrus clouds when we pulled into a motel off the New York interstate, about an hour south of our final destination: the Ozryn Zoo and Wildlife Reserve. While I preferred encountering the wendigo in the daylight, and argued against Caelan on that point, he was right about rest.
