Liz took a few shots of the clearest pawprint, and then put her hand above it and took another pic with her cell. The print was longer than her hand by about six inches. The claws were either non-retractable, or were simply extended from their claw-sheaths. They were a good two inches long, with sharp points like a cat’s. They looked nothing like a bird’s print, and they didn’t just appear and disappear, as if dropped from the sky. This thing walked upright on two legs, with a six foot stride. Long-legged bugger. She followed it back and forth, seeing something odd. The tracks didn’t go in a straight line. They meandered. Almost off balance. Its gait nearly a stagger, it ran up the hill and into the woods. Running upright, however erratically, and the print shape suggested it likely wasn’t a Snallygaster.

  There was a convertible Mercedes-Benz C-Class with a ragtop only twenty feet away, and it was undamaged. The prints were not particularly primate looking. The unharmed car and the weird prints tended to rule out the Devil Monkey.

  Which left the Dwayyo. Liz stood and followed the trail of blood-stained feathers, fourteen inch long critter-prints, and her own footprints back to the edge of the yard and the fancy chicken coop she had checked out when she first drove up.

  From the back porch a few yards away came soft sniffles, followed by wails, hiccups, and boohoos.

  Liz ignored the grief and tried to concentrate on the tracks and the bloody feathers that led from the chicken coop to the woods. The coop was silent, no clucks, no gurgles, no twitters, no sound at all. The mesh and chicken-wire in the door and one screened wall had been slashed and torn away, and the chickens inside had been killed.

  All of them. It had been fast, as the homeowners had slept through it all.

  Liz dropped into a squat again and studied the messy scene. There were bloody feathers, chicken parts, and the stench associated with all of the above. Liz was a country girl. She had seen the scene after coyotes got into a chicken coop. After an owl or hawk or raccoon or snake took a hen for a meal. This wasn’t caused by those predators. This killing scene didn’t look like anything she had seen or heard about before.

  The laying hens were expensive—silkies and some kind of fancy crested breed, chickens that were worth big bucks. They hadn’t been brought down with claws and fangs and devoured on site, nor had the leftovers been dragged away for a later dinner, as she might expect from a typical predator. This was chaotic. The coop had held fifteen chickens. Eleven chickens had been chewed on and discarded, leaving behind the bloody feathers, bodies ripped and munched. Three chickens had no bite marks at all. Their necks had been broken with a twisting motion, much like Liz’s grandmother used to do on the family farm. Pick up a chicken by the head and whirl it like a ball on a string. Of course Gramma had then cut off its head and hung it up by its feet to bleed out, the memories as fresh and horrifying as the first time Liz and her sister saw Gramma prepare fried chicken dinner “from scratch.”

  Her twin, Cia, was still a vegetarian. The memory was bad.

  Liz took several photos of the damage and the dead. Using a yard rake propped against the coop, she gently rearranged a few chicken parts to look underneath. There were a number of partial prints in the gore that matched the one clear print in the mud at the edge of the yard. Liz took more shots and secured her cell. She sniffed gently, trying to determine if there was some unexpected scent present, but her nose was human, and she had never attempted a magical working that might differentiate one scent from another. The complexity of such a working would be boggling.

  However, there was fresh blood on the torn screening, as if the attacker had hurt itself while ripping through the screen, and the double-layered metal screen had been ripped from a height of six feet, down to two feet above the ground. Big sucker. The blood was at a five foot height. She took a clean cloth out of a zippy bag and wiped the cloth over the bloody metal, before resealing it and sliding cloth and bag into her pocket.

  What she needed now was a … a paranormal creature with a really good tracking nose and the ability to understand English.

  When she was in half-form, Jane Yellowrock had a great nose, but smelling a bunch of dead chickens to determine cause and creature of death seemed a lot to ask the queen of the vampires. It surely was beneath her dignity and not the kind of job Jane took these days. These days, her responsibilities were more along the lines of killing rogue-vampires with royal titles, and upsetting the political stability of the entire paranormal world. She had a mouth on her and few social skills, so maybe that part was easy.

  That left Brute—a huge, monstrous, white werewolf trapped in wolf form after her elder sister Evie summoned that pesky demon. That demon had been eating the werewolf when Jane and the angel—like a real honest-to-God, from heaven, angel—got him free. The angel’s actions had left the werewolf permanently a wolf for reasons Liz and her magic didn’t understand.

  Brute might still hold a grudge against her sister, Evangelina. Liz’s feelings were certainly conflicted and she hadn’t been chewed on. But what if Brute’s unhappiness stretched to all the Everhart sisters? Would he refuse to help? She and the white werewolf had never spent a lot of time together, and she had no idea if he would help her. And even if he did help her, she had no idea how to kill a Dwayyo. Silver bullets? Garlic? Bug spray? Maybe waffles were terminal to them.

  Her best bet was to not take the job. That would save her from getting a bad review from the potential clients. Except they had money. Lots and lots of money. To track down and kill the creature who had killed the Mrs.’s pet chickens, Mr. Moneybags had promised Liz a check for a thousand dollars in addition to all expenses and her hourly rate.

  Liz stood and stared at the back porch and the woman who had called her. Felicity Hogg Drake was resting against her husband’s chest, weeping theatrically. She had been weeping since Liz got to the chicken coop. Loudly. Felicity was a drama queen, a tiny-waisted, double-D-breasted, bottle blonde, with the problem-solving IQ of a jar of mayo and the survival instincts of a cockroach. Mr. Moneybags was older and clearly doted on his wife.

  A thousand dollars over expenses and the hourly rate.

  Liz needed cash for next month’s rent. A grand would help meet that requirement.

  She put on a solemn expression, made her way across the yard, and placed a foot on the bottom step. This left her about ten feet from the couple. The wife wailed. The husband patted her shoulder.

  Gently she said, “The chickens appear to have died at the hands of a paranormal—or a previously mythical—creature.”

  Felicity wailed. “Can you bring them back to life?”

  “Ummm. No. Sorry.” I’m not Stephen King, she thought, trying to keep the expression that might say, “Idiot,” off her face. “The tracks lead into the woods and up the rocky hill behind your house.” She nodded to the security cameras and motion sensor lights. “Nothing on them?”

  “All the security was pointed toward the front of the house,” the man said. “This thing came in from the back, in the dark, on a hill that would tax most hikers in the daylight. Was it a mountain lion? A bear?”

  “No. Neither.” Which he already knew, or he’d have called a mundane tracker with dogs. Instead he’d called a witch who found lost things and lost people though her magic talent. Liz studied him, not sure why he set her teeth on edge. Maybe just the air of privilege and condescension. “It’s a paranormal predator of some kind.”

  “I saw the track. I assumed as much. We’ll have our security company do some upgrades so there won’t be a next time, but Felly and I want it dead so it can’t come back.”

  Liz made a ruminative sound. “Tracking and capturing most paranormal predators is within my skillset. But this isn’t a lost dog hunt or a werewolf hunt. It will take time, expertise, and tracking skills to pursue and eliminate the killer, assuming the killer isn’t sentient or some form of human-based shapeshifter. If the killer is sentient, I’ll be unable to kill it, and will have to capture it and hand it over to PsyLED. But honestly, I don’t think the Psychometric Law Enforcement Department of Homeland Security will have much interest in a chicken killer.”

  Mr. Moneybags winced.

  Felicity wailed again and fell against him.

  Liz shifted her attention to the husband. “I can try to track the creature and kill or capture it. My expenses alone are likely to be costly, and it will take a lot of man-hours. Certainly more expensive than the thousand offered for the job. Probably more expensive than repairing the coop, buying new chickens, and installing a good security system on the coop. And I didn’t get your name.”

  “Charles Drake,” he said as if that should mean something to her. “Money—to a certain degree—isn’t the issue. If my wife wants you to chase a ghost into the mountains, fine, chase it. I’ll pay for it, mainly because we have small dogs, including a male Cavalier King Charles Spaniel that placed Best Of Breed and Best In Show at the National specialty.”

  “My Sugar BooBoo,” Felicity said. And went back to wailing.

  Drake frowned. “This thing gets that dog? We’re out a lot of potential cash from sperm sales.”

  “Stud rights,” Felicity whispered.

  “I don’t give a shit what it’s called. It’s an investment. And not just an investment. Felicity’s distraught.” As an afterthought, he added, “And there are kids in the neighborhood too. So chase it down and kill it. I want its head mounted over the fireplace.”

  What a charmer, Liz thought. “I don’t kill paranormal creatures unless they’re previously proven to be non-sentient, and that is questionable at this point. I’ll have to bring in bigger guns, including a huge scent… hound. And the price goes up with all that. So it will be two thousand up front, nonrefundable, to hire the proper breed of paranormal hunting scent-dog, and his handler. An itemized bill, due upon delivery, will be hand delivered afterward, and there’s no thirty day grace time. I hand you a bill, you pay it. And the contract will stipulate what I can and can’t do legally.”

  “Fine.” He handed her a credit card and a business card. “Send the contract to my email on the card, I’ll print it, sign it, and bring it to the door. If you can’t kill the thing that killed Felly’s chickens, capture it. I’ll call a friend at the governor’s office if we need PsyLED to assist in removing the beast. Come on Felly. Let’s get you a cup of coffee and your blankie.” Drake turned away and led his weeping wife inside.

  Blankie?

  Liz took the VISA to her Subaru and ran it through her credit card system. Then she altered a contract and sent it to the email on the card. Four minutes later Drake opened the back door. Liz returned his card and accepted the contract, all properly signed and legal. Drake shut the door without a word. Liz, careful of possible cameras, kept her expression neutral until she was half a mile down the road. Then she pulled over and did what she had wanted to do from the beginning, and called Eli.

  Eli

  “Hey Lizzie girl.” Eli grinned into the warm fall sunlight, cell at his ear. She hated being called Lizzie, and ‘Lizzie girl’ made her grind her teeth, but for once she didn’t react.

  “Check your texts,” she ordered. “I just sent you some pics. And for reference, my hand from wrist line to the tip of my middle finger is six and a half inches.”

  Eli laughed softly, her words taking his mind into a direction he hoped she intended.

  “Mind out of the gutter, Captain America,” she said. He could hear the smile in her voice. Lizzie Girl knew him well. “That particular Marvel superhero does not have sex. The photos are because I might have a job for you and Brute. And/or maybe PsyLED and Rick LaFleur if it comes to it.”

  The mention of PsyLED grabbed his attention and took it off more pleasant images. He was Jane’s number one, and sometimes that meant keeping the peace between local paras. “Hang on.” He slid images around and found Lizzie’s photos. They were not what he had been hoping to see. The pic of her hand in the footprint suggested a creature with a fourteen-inch-long foot, sixteen counting the claws. And the scene at the chicken coop was bad enough that he would have expected a stronger emotional reaction from her. Her tone was unfazed and it shouldn’t have been so calm. This thing, whatever it was, was dangerous. And big. Lizzie was calm as if she was at a garden party. She was always a surprise. “Okay,” he said, paging through. “I see them. Use words. Start with, are you currently tracking this thing?”

  Lizzie ignored his question and told him about the tracks first. “The one prefect print wasn’t made by a guy in a chicken suit or fake monster shoes. The weight wasn’t concentrated in the back half or the front half, and the distribution wasn’t flat like a mold pressed into the earth. This showed weight transfer like a human foot but on a bigger scale.”

  Eli’s eyebrows went up. Lizzie knew tracker stuff. Guy stuff. He approved. “Agreed.”

  “If you widen the pic, you’ll see a strange place on the biggest knuckle of the little toe, like a large callus; one also visible on the ball of the foot. This looks like a real print, though the monster fakers are getting better with their tech and silicon molds, so I could be wrong. The chickens weren’t all killed by teeth and claws. At least a few had their necks broken, like the way my Gramma used to kill a chicken. She’d pick it up by the head and whip it around, breaking its neck.

  “It was fast. The family house is within forty feet and they slept through it. They have midsize yapper dogs inside and the dogs didn’t react either, so the chickens didn’t have time to make a ruckus before they were gathered up and killed. The creature didn’t take its dinner with it, just killed, ate, made a mess, and took off. Clients want me to track and, preferably, kill the predator, but have been made aware that I don’t kill sentients, so if I only have the option to capture it, I still get paid. It’s in the contract, which is signed.”

  “And you want me to help you chase a chicken killer.” He let a little humor into his words, because honest-to-god how else could he react to this? “Into the woods. At night. Like a camping trip, again. You remember what we went through the last time we went camping.”

  “Yes I do. And I want you to bring Brute, if he’s willing to come. Tell him it could be a Dwayyo, and read the specs to him. I may have a smear of its blood on a cloth, and— Aw damn it. I got its blood on my new jeans. Tell Brute he can get a scent. I’ll be at the Inn in forty minutes. Damn it. I really liked these jeans.” She ended the call.

  “Dwayyo?” Eli did a quick search on four different spellings before he called his brother and asked for intel on a mythical creature.

  “Got it, bro,” Alex said. “Think of sasquatch meets werewolf on meth and anabolic steroids, with claws and fangs, a bad hair day, and a sucky attitude. And it likes the taste of meat, any meat, but with a preference for dog, cattle, and pig.”

  “No pics?”

  “Not a one. An artist’s rendering from the early nineteen hundreds. Sending you a pic of that.”

  Eli stared at the sketch. “Fur. Fangs. Claws. Snout of a wolf. But it’s wearing pants.”

  “With a tail sticking out a rip.”

  “Shapeshifter? Werewolf?”

  “According to witnesses, it’s nine feet tall and muscular. So take Jane in half form, give her three feet in height and add a couple hundred pounds. Then take away her humanity. Even when she’s fully Beast, she doesn’t kill just to kill. This thing does.”

  “So, if it’s a human-based shapeshifter, and if he can’t take on mass from elsewhere like Janie does, then when he’s in human shape, he’s tall, and close to three hundred and fifty pounds. Linebacker? Sumo wrestler?”

  “Yup. But you’re assuming gender based on this drawing. You wanna tell me what’s going on, bro?”

  “Affirmative,” Eli said. He briefed his brother and hung up the phone. He had a woman to meet and an op to plan. And he wanted steak. Quickly, he arranged to pick up a meal, calculated the time and distance back to the Inn—the Winter Court of the Dark Queen—and began a mental list of supplies they might need. This time, he wouldn’t be caught on the wrong side of a hedge of thorns working. He’d have his weapons on him, and some would be magical in origin.

  Brute

  The stench whirled through the house the moment the front door opened.

  The growl started in his ass and vibrated out his snarling snout. The rumble reverberated like a generator. His ruff stood on end, his shoulders hunched high, his body crouched.

  His predatory reaction was all reflex, shit he was used to, having been stuck in wolf form for the last few years, but Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, this one was bad. The, “I’m fucked,” reaction started in his instinctive hind brain and came snarling out his mouth. And he couldn’t stop it.

  Footsteps headed his way. Eli. Liz Everhart. And the scent of a “thing that must die.”

  Alex swiveled in his chair. Carefully, the Kid said, “Brute? You okay?”

  Brute shook his head left to right once. He was salivating, drool dropping from his lips. It splattered against the wall.

  In an eyeblink, one of the damn grindylows popped into existence and landed on his head. It grabbed his ears and tugged. Hard. The steel claws of the were-creature killer extruded and cut into his ears. It chattered and snarled in anger.

  Brute’s reaction was instant. He sat and he whined. And when the supernatural neon green grindy didn’t stop cutting, he dropped to his stomach on the cold floor. The grindy cut deeper. He whimpered, carefully not shaking his head again.

  This is not a good day to die, he thought. There are no good days to die.

  Liz Everhart walked into Alex’s office and straight up to Brute. The stench of evil, of death and demons and the darkness of caves in the famine of winter ice sailed toward him as she moved. An ancient instinct from a time of glaciers and blizzards and never-forgotten hunger, long buried in his subconscious wolf memory.