Another field trip. Set after Proven Guilty.
"Ugh."
My apprentice stopped to scrape something off the bottom of her Converse sneaker. Not exactly the proper footwear for trudging through a field in the middle of the night. She looked more like she was on the way to a concert, in ripped jeans and a t-shirt with some indecipherable band logo on the front. She huddled into a worn, oversized gray cardigan. Mine, from the Beetle's trunk, though when I wore it I looked like homeless Mister Rogers instead of an emo kid.
"Ugh," she grumbled again. "Why couldn't Sergeant Murphy help you with this?"
"She's busy." Truth be told, I had already asked her, and when I had told her what I thought the problem was, Karrin had pretended to be driving through a tunnel and hung up on me — despite the fact that I had called her office landline. One little incident with a car-sized scorpion and a tiny bit of hospitalization and she refuses to get involved if there's the slightest possibility of oversized insects. "This way."
The property belonged to a friend of my own mentor's, another old codger who ran a sheep farm, near the Wisconsin border. Something had eaten its way through the contents of the barn where he stored all of the bales of wool. I had a feeling I knew what it was, but hadn't seen it yet.
"What are we even looking for, anyway? And why can't I have a light—"
My apprentice's complaint turned into a blood-curdling shriek as I turned toward her. Something gray swooped down from the moonless sky and grabbed her by the sweater — something with a ten-foot wingspan. It wasn't quite strong enough to carry her off.
... Almost, though. Her muddy high-tops flailed a few inches above the grass.
"Put her down, you bastard!" I called up a handful of fire and backed away, catching its attention with the blazing light. It let go of Molly and fluttered toward me, red eyes glowing malevolently. I pitched the fire at it. It let out a shriek of its own as it caught flame, wings curling away to ash like a burning sheet of paper. What was left on the ground couldn't have been identified without a forensic lab. I poked at it with my staff. "You alright?" I asked Molly, who was in a heap on the ground. She sat up.
"Mothman just tried to get fresh with me," she said in disgust, pulling at the loose threads of the shredded sweater. "So... no."
"That wasn't the real Mothman—"
"And it wasn't even the real Mothman," Molly sighed disappointedly as I helped her to her feet. She frowned at me. "Wait. You didn't drag me out here as bait, did you, Boss?"
"Of course not. The leòmainn only eat wool," I grinned. "Not Grasshoppers."
Next: Owl