Finally done with my non-fiction writing for work, so I should have more time for my WIPs.
By the time I gave up trying to sleep, the sky had begun to lighten with the overeager glimmer of false dawn. Still a late start compared to how early we would kick off the daily chores, back when I lived on the farm. I stuck with my own routine; built a small fire in the kitchen stove and while it heated to a usable temperature, went for a run before I was awake enough to remember how much running blows.
Fog clung to the surface of the creek, drifting over the pond behind the house and the low spots in the meadows. The treeline waited, dark and quiet. No bird calls or chirping frogs, nothing but the rhythm of my own ragged breathing and the thud of my shoes on the dirt road. It led from the farmhouse to the far edge of the property, little more than two tireworn tracks wandering between split-rail fences through the overgrown reaches of the so-called back forty — the most likely location for something to lurk. I stopped at the end of the road to lean on the metal gate that opened onto public land.
I hadn't seen a single fawn, fox or even a field mouse. No evidence of the creature we had heard the night before, either, or the one I had seen on the highway, though I was now convinced they were one and the same. I turned back, squinting against the dawn, eager to put some distance between myself and the woods. No place to go alone and unarmed without whatever the hell it was haunting the place.
Daylight painted the kitchen pink and gold as I let myself in, winded and soaked in sweat. I kicked off my dusty shoes and snuck through the house in socks, determined not to wake Murphy, who had probably slept as well as I had. I didn't really feel awake until I stood beneath the icy sluice of well water in the shower. That was something typically reserved for the end of the day on the farm, after doing whatever grimy jobs McCoy had in store for me — as if all the backbreaking work would also be mind-numbing enough to make me forget how I had ended up in his care.
I got dressed and stood by the kitchen stove to thaw. The bottle and glasses from the night before glinted on the table. I put the scotch away and got out the old-school coffee percolator and the can of dark roast from the shelf by the sink.
Motion outside the window caught my eye. All my sneaking around was for nothing; Murphy was already awake. She sat on the back porch, her legs crossed, her hands palm-up on her knees. Meditating. How many times had I sat in the same spot and done the same thing? I never made it look that easy.
… Or that interesting. She stood, moving through a series of increasingly difficult, fascinatingly bendy yoga poses, fluid and precise and—
"Impressive," said the woman sitting on the edge of the wooden countertop next to me.
"Empty freakin' night." I fumbled the pot, overflowing beneath the running tap. "I told you to leave me the hell alone," I hissed as I tipped out some water and shut off the faucet.
"You told me to stay out of your dreams," she teased, swinging her feet. Lasciel smiled radiantly and tucked a wayward strand of auburn hair behind her ear. She wore the same outfit; bike shorts and an old t-shirt. "You said nothing about the kitchen."
"It was implied." I gestured at her clothes with the coffee spoon and shoveled grounds into the percolator basket, whispering furiously. "And I specifically told you not to do that—"
"How is this worse than any of the things you have thought in the last sixty seconds?" she asked, feigning innocence. Lasciel was party to every stray thought my brain conjured; the good ones, the bad ones, the split-second fantasies I tried not to entertain. Not only that, but if she pushed the right buttons, she could look and sound like anyone, the implications of which were as horrifying as they were tempting. Or would have been tempting, if I was as pathetic as she wanted me to be. The last thing I needed was the actual factual demon in my brain weaponizing a stupid crush against me.
"It just is." She could use a taste of her own medicine. Lasciel looked down at her new outfit, a Little House on the Prairie dress in a hideous shade of yellow, complete with a billion tacky ruffles. The illusion only lasted a second, just long enough for her to shoot me a dirty look. She vanished as the door swung open.
"Hey," said Karrin, glancing up at me, startled. "Good run?"
"Yeah." Oh, boy. From the porch she must have had a great view of my unimpressive ass huffing and puffing down the dirt road. At least Thomas wasn't here to make me look even worse. I set the percolator on the stove. "You sleep at all?"
She wiggled one hand, so-so, then wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing one bare foot against the opposite calf. I'm not much of a poker player, but I know her tell when I see it: she was worried, conflicted, maybe even having second thoughts about coming here with me.
… Or maybe she had just remembered our little half-dressed foray into the Ozark night, and was waiting for me to make some snarky comment.
"Coffee?" I suggested.
"Please."
"Hungry?"
"Starving." Murphy sidestepped, headed for the stairs.
"Bacon?"
"Bacon," she agreed as she padded up the staircase, then down again, clutching a change of clothes and a bag of toiletries to her chest.
"Eggs? Toast?" I reached for the tin bread box. "Linen closet is under the stairs."
"No swan-shaped towels." She poked her head halfway around the door from the kitchen to the hall, all I could see was her eyes, crinkling with a hidden smile. "No champagne brunch. Do I have to collect the eggs myself?"
"The luxury amenities of this particular establishment end with the views," I reminded her. "As you're about to find out."
She made a face and disappeared around the corner. A few moments later I heard the creak of the pipes, the splash of water and a breathless curse on the other side of the wall. Instead of thinking about that, I grabbed a wire basket from a shelf and hurried outside to the chicken coop.
The sun climbed over the hills and brought the farm back to life with it; the breeze, the bugs, the animal sounds. The hens gathered around my boots, pecking at the grain I scattered in their pen. I scavenged a handful of eggs from their nests, gently nudging the birds aside with my feet to latch the gate. I knew I was stalling when I considered introducing myself to the skinny kid who rolled up on a dirt bike. Ebenezer must have told him I'd be around — he waved at me but didn't stop or take his headphones off. I waved back, irrationally annoyed that the hired help could saunter in well after dawn, but the unpaid magical intern always had to start working while the stars were still out. He parked by the big barn and immediately started turning the horses out into the nearby pen, and I went inside.
I threw some bacon in the big cast iron frying pan and made some toast, and tried not to think about how long it had been since I'd made breakfast for a woman. It wasn't as if this was out of the ordinary, right? Murphy and I had breakfast together once or twice a month, whether it was donuts in a squad car or the blue plate special at a greasy diner while we hashed out the gory details of the latest case.
"Christ on a cracker." She appeared around the corner, untucking her damp, curly hair from beneath her collar. She had dressed for the outdoors — hiking boots, jeans and a too-big, long-sleeved shirt in a shade of faded pink, unbuttoned over a white tank top. She shook the shirt out over the pistol holstered in a shoulder rig. "How the hell do you make yourself do that every day, Dresden?"
"Good old-fashioned masculine fortitude?" I answered. Her nose wrinkled in doubt as she twisted her hair up and pinned it with a clip. "I don't really have a choice." I pointed at the basket of freshly-washed eggs near the sink and held out my hand. "Did you change your mind about that pitcher of ice water?"
"I told you, it's too late for that to do me any good." She handed me one and I cracked it against the front of the stove, then into the pan. I tossed the shells into the open grate of the fire, rinse and repeat until the pan was full of crackling bacon and eggs frying sunny-side up in the grease. While they cooked, I pushed a cup of coffee into her chilly hands. By the time the bacon and eggs were done, she was on her second cup.
"So," Karrin said without preamble as I set a plate down on the table in front of her. "Not a fetch."
"I don't think so." I sat down across from her, digging into my own heap of food. Aside from the peace and quiet, that's what I missed most about farm living — the grub. "I think we would have seen it, if it was."
"You said you almost hit a dog, though."
"Looked like a dog." I described it to her in as much detail as I could recall as we ate. "Outside of town."
"You think it's the thing we heard last night?"
"Most likely. Could be a black dog."
She mopped at the egg yolk with a corner of toast. "An Of the Baskervilles type thing?"
"Could just be The Thing."
"If you believe any of that voodoo bullshit," she replied between bites. "This is really good, Harry."
"Needs hot sauce," I said, hiding behind my own mug. Just my luck that the woman who quotes eighties sci-fi movies and tolerates my sense of humor and my cooking wasn't down for anything more than a friendly monster-hunt. Not that I blamed her. Hell, if I was her, I'd probably pick the mysterious, good-looking assassin with the weapon collection and the insane bank account, too.
... Which was a terribly unfair thing to think, and not my opinion at all; Murphy isn't that shallow and I'm not that bitter. The prickle of annoyance wasnt mine, either.
Tryhard bitch, I thought loudly, picturing Lasciel behind a brick wall, until the annoyance turned sulky and faded altogether. I took our empty plates to the sink to be dealt with later. "Ready for the tour?"
Murphy joined me at the door. "Lead on."
We made a loop of the nearest pens and outbuildings, stopping to look at the horses in the pasture, the doe-eyed Jersey milk cow, the pen of a few dozen nervous Highland sheep with curling horns and little black faces. Karrin tagged along at my elbow, taking two steps for every one of mine, asking occasional questions and hiding a delighted grin when one of the lambs tried to nibble a button from her shirt.
"Do we have a crime scene to examine?"
"Even better." I took her arm to steer her around a low water trough. "We have victims. McCoy said the kid who takes care of the place left one or two of the sheep behind the old ice house for us to check out."
We found them right where he said, two lumpy shapes beneath a brown plastic tarp, on the shady side of the round stone building used to store ice and perishables in the days before commercial refrigeration. Nowadays — or at least for the past century or so — it housed the distillery.
I pulled back the corner of the tarp. The sheep beneath were rigored and rank, teeth bared in a rictus of wild-eyed terror, bodies next to a heap of offal and assorted limbs. The throat of the larger one had been torn out with enough force to snap the vertebrae visible through the wound. The edges seemed almost cauterized, black and crusted with burnt wool and dried blood. Even the flies didn't seem to want these two.
My breakfast threatened to make a sudden, violent reappearance. I took a step backward, swallowing hard.
"Whatever it was, it wasn't hungry." Murphy leaned down over the animals, studying the scene with practiced emotional distance. "This is just violence for violence's sake. Where did he find them?"
I nodded at the nearest wooden gate and the pasture beyond. We waded through a knee-deep field for fifty yards before we found the blood trail and followed it to a stand of young pine. She bent, looking at an imprint left in the hardened mud. I had to hunker down on my heels to get a good look at the paw print, as big as my hand. The mud wasn't just hardened, it was baked like a brick. The grass and wildflowers around it were brown and wilting, the pine needles crumbled to charcoal between my fingertips. "I'm no David Attenborough, but I'm pretty sure coyotes don't do that."
"Do you have a theory?"
"I thought it was spectral, but—"
"Spirits don't usually leave footprints."
"Sometimes. But not usually."
She stood as I did, dusting her hands. "What now?"
"We need to go into town, ask around, see if this is localized or not. And get some supplies."
"Food. Sunscreen. Bug spray—"
"Beer," I suggested. "More bacon."
"Priorities," Karrin agreed, her smile turning a shade strained as she took a last look at the treeline.
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