Chapter Twenty-Three
Michael hated leaving his pap in the hands of their enemies, but better one person get away than both get caught. Slipping between two men who were looking the wrong way at the wrong time, he dove into the Colorado, letting the dark water whisk him away.
The water was cold and fast, but Michael was a good swimmer. After a couple of minutes of riding the brisk current, he crawled out into a stand of willows, squeezed the worst of the water out of his clothing, and then crept back up to where the sheriff and his men held his pap.
Squatting in thick bushes that smelled like evergreen, Michael heard Gudmund Gudmundson confess to the murder. That seemed like good news for Diana, though she was apparently involved in the crime somehow. Or had the clay balls been simply hocus pocus?
Michael ground his teeth and bit back angry cries as the men attacked his father and beat him until he lay still.
“Do we just tie the farmer up at the Bloomers?” Sheriff Del Rose asked.
“The farmer runs the Tithe tonight,” Gudmund Gudmundson said. “Don’t worry, we’ll kill him at the arch, but there’s no power in it if he doesn’t run.”
When the men drove off, taking his pap with them, Michael crept out of the brush. He was cold and wet and shaken.
Michael picked up the fallen lantern. He didn’t have much time. The Blót was happening that night. And his pap was going to be an unwilling participant.
“We figured you’d come back,” a voice whispered from the darkness. That voice, Michael knew it. It was the crossword deputy, Pickens.
Another man chuckled. “You was right. Looks like it’s gonna be a full hunt tonight. Lots of prey. Lots of meat.”
Michael didn’t pause. Turning and seeing the two men, he hurled the lantern into the deputy’s face. Pickens cursed.
Michael charged to the truck, started it—fortunately, the engine was still reasonably warm—and then ground gears to get her moving. He tried to get the truck into second, but the clutch was sticking. He glanced into the rearview mirror and saw, lit by the red of his taillights, two faces from a nightmare.
The shaggy hair of the hunched creatures looked like blood in the lights. The long faces of wolves hung over the huge, muscular bodies, and they reached out with human hands tipped with vicious nails.
A third figure leapt out of the darkness and onto the side of the truck. Michael had the window rolled down, and the stink of the thing washed over him. It was the musk and bestial stench of something not animal and not human, but a mixture of both.
A werewolf. Michael was looking into the face of something that should only exist in movies. There was no fossil record. There was no science to this thing. It shouldn’t exist.
But it did.
The wolf man snapped its head into the truck. Michael threw himself forward, accidentally jerking the wheel to the right. The truck plunged into the reeds and water plants growing on the embankment.
Michael was forced to slam on the brakes. That whipped the wolf man off the car, and it rolled across the ground, in a swirl of dust motes and shredded grasses that floated in the Double-A’s headlights. From behind, howls and growls from the two werewolves running toward him.
Michael slammed the gas pedal to the floor. He shot forward, and the werewolf dodged aside. Its nails screeched down the side of the truck before it leapt back up on the running boards, on the right side of the car.
“The lamen!” Michael called out. He wasn’t shouting to the wolf-monster, but to himself. “I have a lamen, in the side door, and it’s going to protect me. I know it!”
The wolf man grabbed hold of the door with a furry hand tipped with yellow claws.
Michael swiveled in his seat and slammed his right foot into the door. Just as the wolf-man pulled the door open, Michael kicked it wide, and the monster swung out away from the car, yelping, and struck a tree, bouncing to the ground.
“Take that for empirical evidence!” Michael bellowed.
Michael stomped on the pedal again, and the engine screamed. He shifted into second, then third, bouncing over the rough dirt, and jarring himself and the truck, as it rumbled over washboard in the road.
His wheels spun in the gravel, he felt the backside fishtail, and again, he found himself riding the edge of the road, reeds thwacking the grill, and the murky smell of the water crowding in. He tried to steer back on the road, but something was wrong, one of his wheels felt flat, or something was weighting down the back.
Instead of driving faster on the bad tire, Michael applied the brakes until he stopped. A cloud of road dust rolled into his headlights.
Michael turned, grabbed the shotgun, and exited the cab. He left the engine going, and it ticked, running hot, in the hot night.
Lightning flashed above, and the air was electrified, all that energy in the clouds, but not a single drop of rain falling. The wind gusted.
There was a flashlight in the toolbox. He could get it and check the tires, but what would he do if he had a flat? He couldn’t very well try and fix it with werewolves prowling in the night. Hunting him. Was this the hunt? He didn’t know for sure, but they didn’t talk about the Tithe, or the Blót, happening alongside the Colorado River. It was definitely up in the Monument, near the arch, near where Jimmy Udall had been killed.
The river gurgled below, a rush of water, he could hear over the sound of the Double-A’s engine.
A growl from the back. A lupine face rose above the truck bed, over massive, bunched shoulders. One half of the monster was lit indirectly by the headlights, glowing yellow, and half was lit by the taillights, glowing red.
One of the wolves had gotten in the back. That must have been the weight Michael had felt.
He raised the muzzle of the shotgun. “I know you’re human. I know you can understand me. And I know I can fill you full of buckshot before you can spring. There’s only one reason you’re still alive right now.”
The wolf growled harder, a line of saliva dropping from its exposed fangs.
“Your people have my pap,” Michael said. “And I have you. If you move, I’ll blow your damn head off.”
Michael winced. He couldn’t keep cussing. He didn’t want the magic to stop working for him.
The werewolf leaped toward him.
Michael squeezed both triggers. Fire erupted from the weapon in long lines of light that instantly disappeared but left impressions on Michael’s eyes. The gunpowder stink followed.
The wolf-man went rolling backward, whining like a beaten dog. He’d hurt the thing. Or had he? Did he need silver? Pap said he’d shot the deer-men and the bullets hadn’t done much. But even if the shot didn’t pierce the wolf-man’s skin, that was a lot of kinetic energy for a creature to absorb.
Michael wheeled. Opening the door, he grabbed two new shells, expecting to be torn to pieces from moment to moment.
He spun, broke open the action, and burned his fingers on the used shells. He shoved fresh ammunition in and snapped the shotgun closed.
The werewolf was up, near the darkness of the river, snarling and slavering.
Michael wasn’t going to outrun this thing. And he wasn’t going to be able to kill him with the shotgun. But he could still take care of the beast. He hurried forward, getting as close as he could to the beast, ready to spring.
The beast-man rose.
Michael, still advancing, took aim and squeezed both triggers. The shot sent the wolf-man into the river, and the current snatched him away.
Michael hurried back to the truck to reload it. The night had become suddenly still, the only sounds the tick of the engine and the burble of the river. He loaded the shotgun and then circled the truck to check the tires, and they were all full. He must have simply lost his nerve driving across the reeds at the very edge of the road.
Back in the cab, he drove off, got into second gear, and stayed there, avoiding potholes and ruts as best he could.
He felt shaky and overexcited—that was the adrenaline in his system. His mind racing, he blinked the sweat from his eyes. “Okay, let’s go through where we’re at.” He tittered, sounding hysterical.
“This is what crazy people do…they talk to themselves. But talking is better than stewing in silence. Pap is in trouble, all right, but they want him for the hunt. Then again, Gudmundson cut Lloyd Preece’s throat. No, that was a murder, not a hunt. Not the Tithe. Aren’t the werewolves supposed to be in London? Why must you lie to me, Hollywood?”
He laughed again. Crazy or not, his soliloquy was helping him.
“So, they’re going to take Pap up to the Monument for the hunt, which is probably going to happen any time now. The arch. They were going to kill him at the Bloomers, the bishop said. Only, he won’t be running alone. Davison Rock and Preacher Bill will be with him. The wolves hunt the prey, and that’s the Blót. And why?”
This was an old ritual hunt, from Iceland. Hunting was a powerful and terrifying thing, it brought food to families, but a lot of a hunter’s success depended on luck. How did people try and control their lives, when luck could save them or kill them? They added ritual to give that luck meaning. In a ritual hunt, they acted out the best possible circumstances, and so, they used the fantasy to help with their uncertain reality. They pretended to catch the deer, so they could catch real deer. Or they re-enacted the stories of their greatest hunters, so they could have the luck of those great hunters.
Didn’t they?
“But why do the deer run?” In an ordinary hunt, the deer ran because they were chased. They had no choice. But these deer-men, Erasmus Green’s herd, seemed to be choosing to participate.
Green, at the hotel, had said that the Tithe brought him money.
That didn’t feel right.
How does one win the hunt? By surviving, if you were a deer-man, and by slaughtering, if you were one of the wolves. The deer-men he could name—Erasmus Green, Leon Björnsson, Banjo Johansson—all were wealthy business owners. Banjo’s mercantile was doing well, unlike the Moab Co-op. The ones who knew ran the race and prospered. Like Lloyd Preece, who was the wealthiest man in the area.
Michael checked for more wolves following him. None were, or at least not that he could see.
“So I survived the Blót. Does that mean I’m going to be lucky and rich? Let’s hope so. Michael, my friend, you need help.”
Here was the crux of the problem. “The Sheriff is a wolf, as are his deputies. So I can’t go to the local police. Gudmund and Clem are wolves too, and Gudmund is the son of a bitch in charge. Sorry, God. Go easy on me. I meant it literally.”
Michael’s mind continued to work. “If I drove up to Green River, not much there in the way of policemen, and my best bet is Price. I know Carbon County has a sheriff.” Michael knew at least one friendly policeman in Helper, too, and likely some miners who would help. But that was what, a couple hours up, and a couple hours back? By that time, his pap might wind up inside a werewolf’s belly.
“No, this is happening tonight, the eclipse, Jupiter moving into the third decan of Scorpio. Which brings us to those knives, I bet Gudmund’s knife is going to be full of power tonight. Green said that one of the hunters was going to be damn near impossible to avoid during this Tithe. Yeah, that would be Gudmundson, the First of Fang.”
Michael had Lloyd Preece’s knife, the murder weapon. He’d picked it up when Preacher Bill had dropped it, wanting to examine it, and he’d tucked it up inside the seat of the Double-A. He hadn’t told his father because he didn’t want to implicate his pap in obstruction of justice, which sounded very serious.
The knives were supposed to channel power, but not just to anyone. They worked for someone born at the right time. Gudmundson’s knife was inscribed with the sign of Aquarius. Michael knew from reading the tables of star-data that Jupiter would next enter Aquarius in December 1937. Since Jupiter was in a constellation for roughly a year, he could count back twelve years at a time and see if he, Michael, was born when Jupiter was in Aquarius. He could do this rough math while driving, no problem, and if he got a near hit, he could confirm the precise dates when he stopped.
Subtract twelve and you got 1925, when Michael was already seven. Which made the next year of Aquarius before that about five years before Michael’s birth. Nuts.
What about Preece’s knife? Preece had the sign of Taurus on his knife, and Michael started to feel excited. Jupiter entered Taurus next in 1940, didn’t it? Which meant that maybe it was in Taurus in 1918, when Michael was born, so the dead man’s knife would be good for Michael?
Michael stopped the truck. With the engine trembling beneath him, parked by the side of the road, he leafed through the widow’s astrology book by the glow of a flashlight.
And found that, on his birthday, Jupiter had been in the constellation Gemini. A near miss, only a couple of months away from Taurus, but still a miss.
The knives were going to be of no use.
He needed an ally.
He put the truck in gear again. “Okay, Michael, who do you know in Moab who could help, and who isn’t already a prisoner?”
It was a short list. Almost every one of the men he’d met was part of the Blót. Howard Balsley wasn’t, but how could Michael find him? And would Balsley help him? And what could he do? Rex Whittle was way out in Spanish Valley, and didn’t seem especially formidable.
“The Udalls might want justice for the men who killed their kid,” Michael said. Of course, they might not. He and his pap hadn’t thrown Moses Udall’s name into the clay balls—what if he was out running in the Tithe? And even if he wasn’t, Michael wasn’t sure Moses could be much help.
Michael was left with only one person, and that person definitely wasn’t part of the hunt. Because Diana Artemis might have helped kill Lloyd Preece, but she was a woman, and according to Erasmus Green, that meant that she couldn’t participate.
She was a flimflam artist, no doubt. On the other hand, she had useful books, and, as Pap had said, just because she had lied about the falling-sickness cure, it didn’t follow that she had no craft. And what had Erasmus Green said about her—that she’d do anything for money?
Would she help rescue Pap for money?
Michael hit the intersection and stopped. To the right was the road to the Monument. To his left was the dirt strip that led into town.
A plan formed in his head. He turned left. In the end, he would only need Diana to drive. Surely, she could drive. If she knew any actual magical spells, so much the better.
Sudden summer rain slashed across the truck’s windshield, and lightning cracked over Moab.
And if she turned into a wolf? Well, he had the shotgun and the bolt-action rifle. He’d shoot her and run.