"You're not cooking a dead body in there, are you?" Margaret asked.
I almost dropped my plate on my lap. "What? Eeew!"
Sean raised his eyebrows. "Why would you ask that?"
Margaret came around and sat in the chair. "You haven't seen the news? Turn on channel five."
Suddenly I got a cold nagging feeling that something was terribly wrong. I got up. "Excuse me a moment."
Sean followed me inside, into the front room.
"Screen," I said. "Channel five."
The wall opened, revealing the monitor. It came to life, showing footage of a rural house shot from above, likely from a helicopter.
"...Scene of a terrible tragedy," a male anchor's voice said. "What's the death count now, Amy?"
The footage switched to a blond reporter standing in front of a driveway. Behind her in the distance, the house loomed, flanked by police cars.
"Police officials confirmed that all forty-two cows were killed and partially eaten, Ryan. There is no official word on the condition of John Rook's body; however, sources close to the investigation tell us that he suffered the same fate as his livestock."
"Are you saying someone fed on his body?"
Amy looked like she was about to vomit. "It appears so, Ryan. He was dismembered postmortem and part of him and the cows has been... cooked."
I almost gagged.
"Nobody had seen John Rook for several days; he could've been dead for quite a while. We'll have to wait for the coroner's official..."
Below the footage a news update flashed: local farmer found dead, his livestock mutilated.
It had to be the dahaka. How horrible. It killed the farmer, cooked him, and fed him to its dogs. I had to stop it.
Sean pulled out his phone and typed in it. "It's less than ten miles north of here."
"What are you thinking?"
"Let's say I'm the dahaka. I have a pack of stalkers on my hands and I have to feed them, but I don't want to be found. Stalkers would likely require a lot of meat. They're large and carnivorous. So I find this farm with a herd of cattle. It's remote enough for me to hide for days. I kill the farmer, start slaughtering his cows, and use the stalkers to patrol the boundaries of my territory and make sure nobody is coming. Except if the stalkers are like dogs, then they'll get bored and start to roam farther and farther until they find something interesting."
"Like our subdivision."
"Exactly."
On the screen a shot of the butchered herd flashed again. It made me sick to my stomach. "Forty-two cows. That's a huge amount of meat."
"I found a leaked photo." Sean showed me his phone. On it a bloody carcass of a cow lay on the grass. Its head, back, and legs were intact, but its stomach was missing, and the entire front of the body was a mess of shredded red tissue.
"They went for the soft parts. Wasteful. This tells me that either he doesn't have great control of them or he doesn't care."
"Either way, he has to find an alternative food supply." I knew exactly where that supply was. Either he would hit more farms or he would come south, toward us.
Toward a subdivision filled with families.
I took a deep breath and plastered on a smile. We had to go out and chat with Margaret before she decided to come in and investigate what was taking us so long.
*** *** ***
I sat at the kitchen table. The werewolf sat across from me. Two perfectly round wooden spheres lay on the table, each about the size of a small kiwi. A complex pattern of dark, crisscrossing spirals wove through the wood. We'd fished them out of the pot once the flesh had fallen off the stalkers' bones. The inn grounds had swallowed both skeletons and the disgusting broth and pots with them. I wouldn't be reusing them.
The trackers waited on the surface of the table, quiet and inert. No magic emissions. No electromagnetic signals. Just two harmless-looking chunks of wood. But when I reached for them with my magic, I felt a spark. It curled deep inside them, vibrant and alive, waiting to be released so it could blossom.
Around us the inn was quiet. Caldenia had gone to bed, having delicately devoured enough meat to satiate three grown men. Outside the windows, a sunset burned down, one of those glorious Texas sunsets when the color grew thick and vivid and long stripes of clouds glowed orange on a nearly purple sky. Beast lay by my feet, gnawing on a bone Sean had given her. Through the day she had upgraded his status from kill on sight to suspicious to the man with delicious treats who can't be trusted. She would take a bone from him, but petting was still out of the question.
Sean regarded the spheres with calm interest. "Can you activate them?"
"Yes."
"Did the trackers turn themselves off because the stalkers died?"
"I don't think so. From the scans, they look simple: turn on, turn off."
"So the dahaka deliberately turned them off."
"Probably."
Sean leaned back. "If I were him, stuck in an unfamiliar place, I would want to know where my dogs were at all times. He turned off the trackers. He's hiding, but not from us. From someone who can track him by whatever signal these things send out."
I thought out loud. "He could be hiding from someone he's hunting."
"Or someone who's hunting him," Sean said.
If someone was hunting a dahaka, that someone would be armed to the teeth, ruthless, and powerful. In other words, someone we would be wise to avoid. Or befriend.
Sean picked up one of the spheres and studied it. "You have to decide how involved you want to be."
"I know." If we left the dahaka to his own devices, he would kill again. I had no doubt of it. He had turned off the trackers for a reason, and he would want them kept off. If we reactivated them, he would stop what he was doing and come directly here to investigate. And not just him, but anyone else who could pick up his signal, predator or prey. "We can ignore him or we can give him a target."
"Agreed." Sean leaned back in his chair.
As long as the dahaka concentrated on the inn, the rest of the people would be somewhat safe. I was better equipped to deal with him than pretty much anyone else in the county. And if I did activate them, it would have to be here. I wasn't quite useless away from the inn's grounds, but I was a great deal weaker.
Activating the trackers on the grounds went against the fundamental principle of keeping an inn. The safety of the guests had to be maintained at all times. If I turned these things on, I would be putting Caldenia at risk. But the dahaka graduated to killing human beings. I was in a position to do something about it. Then again, if I made the inn a target, I would put my neighbors at risk. I would have to make sure to hold his attention here at the inn, where I was at my strongest.