Otherworld Nights (22 page)

We didn’t have an address for Eaton, but it was easy enough to get. I just took Noah with me into the post office and asked, saying we needed to drop off a present.

The middle-aged clerk dismissed Noah with a glance. She took slightly longer with me. Trying to tell if I looked like I was from “around here” or the city. It makes a difference in small towns. I’m forty-one, though I look more like early thirties. Five foot ten. Slender, Jeremy would say. Skinny, I’d say, though having the twins had helped me develop some semblance of curves. An athletic build, I suppose. I was dressed in worn jeans, a ski jacket, and hiking boots. No makeup. White-blond hair tied in a ponytail.

It didn’t take long for me to pass her “not a city girl” test. Just a woman and a teenage boy, maybe a nephew or stepson. Neither remotely intimidating. She gave us the address and directions. Even sketched a map on an envelope and wished us a Merry Christmas.

It took a while to get to Eaton’s place. As the postal clerk said, his house was “out with the cottages.” In other words, in the woods.

The region up here can be divided into cottage country and non-cottage country. There are plenty of cottages
in
non-cottage country, of course, but they’re the kind of places owned by average folks, passed down through the generations. Places you lend to your buddies and their families, and get a bottle of rye whiskey in return. In other words, not the million-dollar summer homes surrounding every lake. There were no lakes in this area, not good ones anyway. Just cottages in the woods. And these cottages weren’t winterized, meaning the roads to them had big signs warning Not Maintained in Winter.

Luckily, we’d brought the 4×4. Jeremy’s truck. It’s an SUV, but Clay and I call it “the truck.” We’re not really minivan/SUV people. Jeremy isn’t, either, but we live in a northern climate and since two-thirds of our household is too damned stubborn to drive anything but a car, the job of being a responsible adult falls to Jeremy.

Contrary to what some 4×4 owners think—as evidenced by the sheer number of them in the ditch after every snowstorm—they aren’t invincible winter tanks. It was slow going to Eaton’s place. We had to follow twin rutted tracks through three feet of snow. More than once it looked like we’d need to get out and push.

“Are Nick and Antonio getting you out for much winter driving practice?” Clay asked as he maneuvered through another drift. “I know you weren’t driving when you lived in Alaska.”

“We’ve done some, but there isn’t snow like this at their place.”

“I’ll take you out when you come back after Christmas.”

I twisted in the front seat. “If you want a real challenge, have him take you in
his
car.”

Noah’s smile said he wouldn’t mind that at all. Clay drives a BMW M3. Convertible, no less. Jeremy learned decades ago that cars are the one indulgence he can lavish on Clay without objections. Pre-kids, Clay’s tastes leaned toward Porsches, but with the
children he needs a four-seater, and he started paying attention to things like safety ratings.

Clay spent the rest of the trip passing on winter-driving tips. If Noah had heard them already, he gave no sign of it, just leaned forward, nodding and asking questions. When he had Clay’s attention, he liked to keep it. Fortunately, it wasn’t hard to get—Clay’s a natural teacher.

“That it?” Clay pointed at a blue metal flag poking from the snow. A six-digit numeral gave the lot’s “911 number.” Out here, the mail was general delivery, so you needed that number—along with the street name—to give to 911 in the event of an emergency.

“That’s it.”

It was a short driveway, shoveled nearly down to the dirt, and empty. At the end stood a small cottage. All the windows were dark.

“Doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” Noah said. “What do you do now?”

“Break in,” Clay said.

I looked over the seat at Noah. “We’ll search for basic information on Eaton, for both the investigation and my dossiers.”

“Right, because you wouldn’t find any evidence of man-eating inside,” Noah said. “The guy’s not going to leave body parts in the freezer.”

I was going to agree and leave it at that, but Clay beat me to a reply. “We’ve never found any in the freezer. With man-eaters, it’s not about developing a taste for eating people. There are two ways a werewolf ends up chowing down on humans. One, he’s young, like you. New to the Changes. Lets himself get too close to people. Maybe he’s hungry. Maybe he’s feverish. Maybe he just sees someone running and instinct takes over, and that instinct doesn’t distinguish between humans and deer. It’s all prey.”

“Which is why I only Change on the buddy system.”

“Right. In a year or so, we’ll start having you Change in places where you can smell humans. Then in places where there
are
humans.
You’ll learn control. Even then, if you let yourself Change when you’re hungry and you stumble on someone who runs? Takes a helluva lot of willpower to keep from chasing him. Even experienced werewolves have been known to screw up.”

“And if that happens with a mutt? What do you guys do about it?”

“Same thing we’d do if it was a new kid. Beat the crap out of him. Let him know we’re watching. That’s usually enough. Mutts are going to mess up. Their support system isn’t good enough. It’s the second kind of man-eater we’re worried about—the ones who don’t bother learning control because they like the chase. That’s what drives them. They eat their prey because they catch it. But they don’t chase to eat. They chase for fun. That’s not wolf. That’s human. They’re nothing more than killers.”

“Serial killers.”

“Right. So they don’t leave parts in the freezer, but we do find stuff lying around. Sometimes trophies. Sometimes whole bodies. Sometimes only—”

“Time to knock on the door,” I said. “If he’s home, he’s probably seen us sitting out here and bolted.”

“Nah. He bolts, we can track. He’d know better. He’s not here.”

Clay was right. Eaton wasn’t home.

“Now, the thing about breaking into a mutt’s place is, he’s going to know you were there,” Clay said to Noah as I peered through the windows.

“Because we’ll leave scent.”

Clay nodded. “So if you don’t want him knowing, you can’t go in. Most times, though, you go in because you’re okay with him knowing. Trespassing on his turf is a challenge. In fact, sometimes even if we don’t want to search the place, we’ll break in. Otherwise, he’ll smell us at the door and think we didn’t enter because we’re afraid of him.”

“All clear inside,” I said. “We’ll—”

A howl cut me short. Noah’s head jerked up, following the sound. Another howl joined in. Then a third.

“Shit,” Noah whispered. “How many are there?”

“Probably about a dozen,” I said.

His eyes rounded.

“It’s a sled-dog team,” I said. “We passed a sign advertising excursions. Sounds like wolves, though, doesn’t it?”

“The pitch is different,” Clay said. “The rhythm is different, too, because they’re howling for a different reason. Loneliness. Boredom. If you hear one in the woods, howling for others, it’ll sound more like us, so you have to be careful.”

Noah nodded.

“Now, back to the break-in. We could search for a key. Could even pick the lock. If we
break
the lock, he has to fix it.” Clay opened the screen door and gave the knob a hard twist. It snapped. “Extra inconvenience for the mutt. Shows we’re not messing around.”

“But knowing how to use picks is a bonus,” I said. “Sometimes brute strength just doesn’t cut it. Karl will teach you how to pick locks and work with alarm systems.”

A hint of a smile. “And you’re okay with me learning that when I’ve got a juvie record?”

“Sure,” Clay said as he opened the cottage door. “You ever get into that shit again? Lotta trees behind Stonehaven. I’ll string you up from one.”

“And let the crows peck at my corpse?”

“Nah. Doesn’t hurt if you’re already dead.”

Noah only laughed. He didn’t doubt the punishment would be severe, but he seemed almost relieved with Clay’s honesty. With the absolutes. None of that wishy-washy, “If you screw up, we might get kinda upset.” You screw up, you’re in shit. It’s language wolves understand.

We stepped into the cottage.

“So,” Noah said. “How come
Karl
isn’t hanging by his thumbs from a tree somewhere? He’s a thief.”

“Karl’s special,” I said.

Clay muttered under his breath about exactly how
special
Karl was. That was the problem with recruiting experienced mutts—you take them as they are. Karl was a jewel thief. He was also a damned good addition to the Pack. A top-notch fighter, and a guy who came with a very valuable set of special skills. I’d known Karl for almost twenty years, long before he joined the Pack. He wasn’t the easiest member to deal with, but I could handle him.

“Karl knows what he’s doing,” I said. “He gets his own set of rules. Which means he’s allowed to steal, but if he ever gets caught …?”

“Tree time,” Clay said.

“Which you would enjoy
way
too much.”

“Only with Karl. Because he’s special.”

I shook my head and walked farther into the cabin. It was a decent size. Winterized, obviously. Well kept on the outside and surprisingly nice on the inside, looking more like an urban professional’s condo than a wilderness cabin. Two bedrooms, one with a bed, the other used as an office, with a large maple desk with a Mac laptop and neat stacks of paper. The bookcases held actual books. Leather sofa set. Big-screen TV. Well-equipped kitchen. Food in the fridge, none of it human body parts.

“If his scent wasn’t all over this place, I’d think we had the wrong address,” I said. “This is nice.”

After a quick tour to get the layout, we gave the place a closer inspection. Clay sniffed for “leftovers,” checking closets and looking for basement or attic hatches. I went into the office. I thought I’d caught a whiff of someone else in there.

There was a futon across from the desk. When I sniffed it, I picked up the second scent and knew why it’d been tough to separate.

“A relative,” I said to Noah, who’d been following me. “A
werewolf relative, which means the scent is similar to his. Eaton mentioned a brother. Smells like he slept here, but not last night.”

I waved Noah over to sniff for himself while I looked for signs that the brother was more than a casual visitor. I found it in the closet—clothing too small for Eaton. Not a lot, though.

“Is he living here?” I mused aloud for Noah’s benefit. “Or just leaving a few things for when he visits? Let’s check the bathroom. If he’s a semi-permanent resident, we’ll find his things in there.”

We didn’t. Not even a spare toothbrush. There was one of everything, all of it belonging to Eaton.

“So his brother only visits,” Noah said. “That could still make him the man-eater, right? Comes to see Douglas and kills that college guy while he’s here.”

“Could be. They’re both suspects now, meaning we need to dig up everything we can on both of them. We’re looking for two things in particular. First, the brother’s name and where he lives, so we can search for man-eating cases there. Second, whether Douglas Eaton has business elsewhere or seems to take a lot of trips, anything that might indicate where he could get away with indulging a man-eating habit.”

I
sent Noah to search the bedroom. Clay had the living area. I was taking the most likely source of information—Eaton’s office.

I figured out his occupation first. There was a shelf of medical books, mostly pharmaceutical. Pens and notepaper advertised the local drugstore. And, to confirm my hunch, a stack of business cards in a drawer said Eaton was the local pharmacist. Probably at work today, which was good to know. We’d need to talk to him, but it was better if we gathered everything we could first.

It was an odd occupation for a mutt. They’re a transient bunch. That’s our fault mostly. Traditionally, only Pack wolves can hold territory. Even Jeremy admits it’s an archaic system, and it had led to serious trouble years ago, when Karl decided he was tired of asking us for territory and joined a revolt against the Pack. I’ve argued it would be easier to track troublemakers if we
didn’t
keep them on the move. The problem is, like anything else, if you relax the rules, they don’t see a kinder, gentler Pack—they see a weak one. So we’ve been working on ways to grant temporary territory to mutts who’ve proven themselves worthy.

Historically, the Pack only concerns itself with mutts south of the border. There are just a handful in Canada, with no Pack of their own. I’ve been monitoring my country, though, so we do enforce our “no snacking on the humans” law in Canada. Not the territory one, though. Too much territory, too few mutts.

But it was a law we could call upon, if it suited our needs. Here,
it could be leverage to throw Eaton off balance when we interrogated him.

I checked Eaton’s laptop. It was password protected, which could mean something but probably didn’t. I’ve never met a mutt yet who blogged about his adventures in man-eating or exchanged support-group e-mails with others who had a taste for human flesh. Being a pharmacist, he probably had confidential patient information on it.