Dying Bites: The Bloodhound Files-1 (27 page)

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Bethel is in a region known as the Yukon Delta, a huge and mostly unpopulated area that’s mainly subarctic tundra and marshland. It’s flat and muddy, the riverbanks lined with scrubby black spruce and balsam poplar, with lots of ducks and geese paddling through the frigid water. The docks themselves are oddly deserted; I wonder where all the locals are. Charlie revs up the outboard, and the small village and its docks are very quickly out of sight.

I dig a parka out of our bags and put it on, along with some gloves and a toque. It helps a lot. Fortunately, the site is only about an hour away by boat—we should be able to make camp before nightfall. I would have preferred to take a helicopter, but this is actually faster—there’s no chopper in Bethel, and the closest one that’s available is five hours away. Hopefully we’ll be picked up by one when we’re ready to leave, but for now the quickest way to get there is by boat. Unless, of course, you can run on four legs.

It’s cold and desolate and mostly bare, not like the Alaskan forest I’d imagined at all. Of course, we’re right on the edge of the Bering Sea, home to polar bears, walruses, and killer whales; we’re about as far north as you can go and still be in the USA. Not quite the fifty-below temperatures of McMurdo, but still a barren and hostile environment.

The sun is low on the horizon, gleaming off the water as we motor down the river. I wonder how cold it’ll get once the sun sets.

And whether the locals prefer hunting during the day or the night. . . .

Eisfanger and Duvalier are waiting for us when we arrive at the site, an outcropping of rocky tundra covered with patchy gray-green moss, bordered on two sides by marsh and one by the river. Eisfanger is in half-were form, while Duvalier is still fully lupine.

Charlie brings the boat to a sputtering halt and beaches it. I jump out, already replacing my warm leather gloves with sterile latex ones.

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At first glance, I can’t tell if the vic is a thrope or a pire—what I see is a naked male body, lying on his back and wearing what seems to be an old-fashioned diving helmet, the kind that looks like a metal sphere with a window in the front. As I get closer, tugging paper booties over my own shoes, I see that’s exactly what it is. The helmet itself is a dull, tarnished gray, the glass of the faceplate tinted a deep red. A grid of four thin silver rods has been welded across the window, sealing it shut. A few feet away, a compact satellite dish sits on top of a wooden crate, broadcasting the Hokkaido killing to the world.

Eisfanger begins to sign as soon as he sees me, but he’s moving too quickly and using lots of words I don’t recognize. “Whoa, slow down.”

Sorry. Vic’s a thrope—cause of death is drowning. I think.

I frown and crouch beside the body. Up close, I can see little silver sparkles in the red of the glass—and then I realize it isn’t the glass that’s red.

I turn back to Eisfanger. Helmet’s iron, rods are silver. I think the liquid is—

“Blood,” I finish. “Laced with silver of some kind.” I examine the helmet critically, note that a heavy clasp and padlock has been used to seal it around the neck. “There’s no entry point for adding a liquid. The blood’s probably his own.”

Could be a variation on the silver maiden—silver blades that cut open an artery when the helmet closes.

I nod. “Doesn’t tell us how the silver was introduced, though. We’ll know more once we get it open.”

I’ll start setting up.

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Charlie’s already begun unloading the boat, and Duvalier changes into half-were form to help. I go over and examine the satellite dish cautiously, but it doesn’t seem to be booby-trapped. I turn it off.

Before too long we’ve got an enclosed tent structure around the body, though a stiff wind has sprung up and threatens to tumbleweed the whole thing across the tundra. Both Eisfanger and Duvalier have been very careful where they stepped, so the crime scene is relatively undisturbed. The wind is a problem—there’s no telling what evidence it’s already blown away—but there’s little I can do about that. We set up our own tents around the crime scene tent, managing to do so just before the last of the daylight slips away.

In the tent, under the harsh glare of the electric lights, the rising wind competes with the snapping of the fabric and the throaty purr of the generator. Eisfanger has his gear, both scientific and mystical, set up on two folding tables. You’d think there would be a clear delineation between them, but no—he has a feathered rattle right next to a bone saw, which magnifies the creepy element of both. The body is on another folding table.

He uses bolt cutters to shear off the padlock, and a bowl to catch the blood that spills out once the helmet’s seal has been cracked. The helmet may have started out as a piece of diving equipment, but it’s been heavily modified: as Eisfanger predicted, there are razor-sharp silver blades where it snugs against the neck, spring-loaded so they’ll slash the wearer’s throat once the helmet is in place.

The victim’s face is revealed, a man in his forties with a thick blond beard now dyed red with his own blood. The skin of his face is pocked with hundreds of small black dots with glittering centers, contact burns from tiny bits of silver flake.

“Look at the interior,” Eisfanger says. He runs a gloved finger against one curving red surface, and it comes away with a thick, silvery sludge tinged with red on it. “Some kind of paste—silver mixed with a gel, probably water soluble.”

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“Yeah. The helmet starts filling up with blood, he’s thrashing around in panic, the paste and blood mix together. Once it gets up past his nose, he has no choice but to breathe it in. That gets the silver into his lungs.”

“Which kills him, but not right away. Nasty way to go.”

“And not good for forensic magic, right?” I already know the answer.

“No. Too much silver, same as the Australian vic. But I might be able to get something from the surrounding terrain.”

“Like the Miyagi bloodstain?”

“Similar. The building she was killed in had too much psychic residue from its activity as a camp—like too many fingerprints smudging the one you want. Both the Australian and Arctic vics were in deserts—one hot, one cold, but both essentially lifeless in the immediate area around the body. This, though—this has lichens, and moss. I’m going to see if I can have a conversation.”

He says it’ll take a while; vegetation is usually friendly but doesn’t talk terribly fast. It’s not like I have anyplace else to go, so I huddle in a corner and take turns staring at Eisfanger and the corpse. Eisfanger’s mumbling and running his hands gently in circles over the ground, occasionally stopping to sprinkle something from a small pouch.

The corpse doesn’t do anything at all, for which I’m grateful. Not that it suddenly coming back to life would surprise me, but it’s been a long day and I really don’t feel like shooting my evidence in the head. Assuming that would work on zombies here—or even if they have zombies here. Maybe teenage punk thropes with a gangrene fetish are as close as they get.

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The quality of the wind-noise changes, in a way that’s hard to define. I wonder about it and get my answer a moment later as Charlie and Duvalier—now fully human again, and dressed—enter the tent, both of them flecked with white.

“Starting to snow,” Duvalier says. “Got this tent up just in time, I think.”

Charlie takes his fedora off, knocks it against his leg to remove the snow. “Be a long night,” he says. “I’ll take first watch.”

Duvalier shrugs. “Fine by me. Wake me up when you want to switch—”

“I’ve got something,” Eisfanger says.

He’s got my immediate attention. “What is it?”

“The moss remembers an incident from yesterday. Something large and heavy, rolling over the surface of the land. It stopped here, then left again.”

“Sounds like a vehicle,” Charlie says.

Duvalier frowns. “Nobody drives out here. Ground’s uneven, marshy in some spots and rocky in others. Four-wheel drive might make it, but I didn’t see any tracks.”

“I think I can answer that,” says Eisfanger. “The moss says it was ‘spring-fed’ afterward, which means artificially invigorated. I think a spell may have been used to repair any surface damage to the tundra and cover up tracks.”

“Can you—I don’t know—unspell it?”

“Not as such. But the spell was probably only used to affect the moss itself—the ground beneath it might still hold a pattern.” He gets up, goes over to his gear, and selects a
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bundle of dried herbs and a small flask. He returns to where he was squatting and sprinkles a few drops from the flask, then lights one end of the herb bundle. He douses the flame by waving the bundle briskly through the air, then makes intricate passes over the floor with the bundle. The smoke flows downward, creating a miniature fog bank hugging the ground, then slowly dissipates.

“Gotcha,” Eisfanger says with satisfaction.

The moss has turned perfectly transparent, like a delicate ice sculpture crafted by insects. Beneath it, pressed into the thin soil, is the clearly visible print of a tire tread.

“Find the other one,” I say. “It’ll give us a wheelbase to work with.”

“Well, there’s a problem with that—”

Duvalier is crouched down, studying the track. “You won’t find another one,” he says, straightening up.

“How did you know that?” Eisfanger asks. “That’s what the moss said, too.”

“What, now we’re after someone on a unicycle?” Visions of trained circus bears—white ones—wearing pointy hats and balancing on one-wheeled contraptions zip through my head. They’re juggling fish.

“Not one wheel—two,” Duvalier says. “One in front of the other, leaving a single track.”

“You recognize this?” I ask.

“I don’t recognize the tread itself, but I know what it is. It’s a blizzard bike—a motorcycle designed to operate in the winter. Wide, studded tires, powerful motor with an engine
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block heater and antifreeze system. It’s the only kind of vehicle that could get around out here, but I didn’t think there were any zerkers in the area.”

“Zerkers?” I say. “Like in . . . ‘zircus’?”

“No, like in ‘berserkers.’ You know the term?”

“Where I come from it referred to Vikings—Nordic raiders in longboats who spent most of their time pillaging, looting, and raping. They’d drive themselves into a battle frenzy beforehand, so they seemed more like beasts than men.”

Duvalier nods. “An apt description. Zerkers are thropes too wild to join a civilized pack, but not so wild they reject technology. Their bikes give them greater mobility and independence; they often carry everything they own with them. Subzero weather on a bike can produce temperatures of a hundred below, but they ride in half-were form and ignore it. They work as mercenaries, thieves, smugglers—whatever’s illegal and dangerous. And they wear homemade armor.”

I revise my opinion of the locals once again; not hillbillies with fangs, not street gangs with fur, but knight-Viking bikers. Better than those damn polar bears on unicycles, anyway.

“So what was one doing way out here?” Eisfanger asks.

“Could have been hunting,” Duvalier says. “Plenty caribou round here. Zerkers don’t give a damn about pack boundaries.”

“Or he could have been giving our killer a lift,” I say. “Stoker’s got plenty of criminal contacts—these zerkers sound exactly like the kind of people he’d be mixed up with.”

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“Forgive me for saying so,” Duvalier says, “but that’s hard to believe. The only use zerkers generally have for human beings is to eat them. Hell, they’ve been known to eat each other.”

I shake my head. “The guy we’re dealing with is no ordinary human. If anybody could forge an alliance with cannibalistic, Harley-riding lycanthropes, it’d be him.”

No ordinary human. The words are accurate, but as soon as they’re out of my mouth they’re replaced by a bad taste. It sounds like the kind of thing a thrope or a pire would say—not a member of the same species.

And then something odd happens; both Eisfanger and Duvalier snap their heads in the same direction, then freeze. It’d be funny if it weren’t for the intent, focused looks on their faces.

“Whoever this zerker is,” Duvalier says, “I believe he’s coming back.”

“Yeah,” says Eisfanger. “And this time he brought some friends along.”

And now my merely human ears can hear it, too: the rising, grinding roar of a number of motorcycle engines, getting closer.

“And here I thought first watch would be boring,” Charlie says.

There are five of them.

They roar out of the wind-whipped snow like lunatics, treating the bikes they’re riding more like motocross vehicles than anything designed to drive down a highway: doing wheelies, using boulders like ramps and launching themselves into the air, bouncing off
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the rocky ground like armored kangaroos when they touch down. The wheels on their bikes are wider than auto tires and spiked for extra traction.

“You’re the top dog around here, right?” Charlie asks Duvalier. The Sheriff nods, but his earlier good humor has vanished; I can feel deep apprehension behind his serious demeanor.