"Want to come to the newest site when I finish breakfast?" Joshua asked.
"Sure, if you don't mind," I said.
"It's the least I can do since you led me to the only evidence we've been able to collect so far," he said. "And you can call me Josh, when nobody's looking. Otherwise it's Agent Billings."
"Sure thing, Agent Billings."
"What can I call you? That was a hint, you know."
"Lissa," I said. "Just Lissa."
"I can track you through your registration at the hotel."
"Then do it," I shrugged.
"You don't seem worried that I can find out all about you," he sipped his coffee.
"Agent Billings, if you threatened me at all, I'd let you know," I muttered.
"You're that confident?" He watched me over the top of his coffee cup.
"No. It's just that I've been dead before. Should still be dead, actually. I don't think you could do any worse to me than what has already been done. How's that for an answer?"
We walked out of the restaurant later and I climbed into Agent Billings' vehicle, flying north with him toward San Luis Obispo. There was another army of police and FBI agents covering an empty stretch of beach when we set down.
"Who's this?" An agent walked up to Josh and me as we made our way toward the biggest knot of investigators on the beach.
"Special consultant," Josh sounded snarly. The other agent backed off. We continued toward the site as the other agents moved aside to let us through. The only things left at this site were a large beach blanket, a cooler, suntan lotion and a few toys. Fuck.
"Their vehicle is located on the parking area off the road," someone told Josh as I stood, staring in horror at the toys scattered across the blanket. "It's registered to a Michael Thomas. Married. Wife and six-year-old daughter." I wanted to kneel on the sand and scream.
There was no scent around this area; Josh and I both checked unobtrusively. There hadn't been any contact between what had swept this family away and any of the objects left behind. "We got something!" Someone shouted just north of us. Josh grabbed my arm and hauled me in that direction. Something turned out to be a small blanket that looked as if it had been carried for years—the kind a child might refuse to turn loose of at night, though it was full of holes and should have been tossed long ago. It also held the stench; the one Josh and I both recognized yards before we reached the scene.
"Going north," I muttered to Josh, who nodded slightly at my side. Someone was saying the blanket looked as if it had been dropped from the sky. There were no footprints, paw prints, claw prints, hoof prints—nothing anywhere around. No beach grasses or plants had been disturbed; the blanket had just magically appeared there. I drew in a huge breath.
"What is it?" Josh demanded, pulling me over to the side so he could talk without being overheard.
"Nobody ever sees anything, do they?" I asked urgently.
"No. Nobody has seen anything. It's like one minute they're there, the next they're not."
"What will people think if you leave for a while?" I asked.
"I'll just say I'm following a lead; they've got more than enough here," he muttered and walked away. I watched him as he talked to somebody who looked to be in charge while the winds off the ocean whipped hair into our faces. The man Josh spoke with looked grim, but he'd looked grim before Josh approached him. The man nodded and Josh walked back to me. "We can go," he said. We made our way over loose, warm sand toward Josh's vehicle.
"Just get us out of sight; somewhere we can leave this thing behind," I said, meaning the hovercar. Josh nodded, started the thing up and off we went. We traveled two miles north of the crime scene before Josh parked at a lookout over a particularly pretty stretch of beach. There were people below us, either lying in the sun or playing in the water. I sighed.
"Are you afraid of heights?" I asked.
"Not particularly," Josh said.
"Well, Agent Joshua Billings," I said, patting his shoulder, "prepare to be airborne." I turned both of us to mist and followed the coastline, paying special attention to the higher cliff areas. Twenty miles north of the last crime scene, I caught the briefest whiff of stench and zoned in on that.
Have you ever gone looking for something, thinking it might be one thing, and when you find it, discover that it is so much worse than you'd imagined? I remember once when Don and I had a couple of cats, we'd installed a pet door so they could come and go as they pleased. One day when I was cleaning, I caught a whiff of what might have been a mouse decomposing. Thinking the cats had brought one in and left it in the house; I started moving furniture until I found what I was looking for. It wasn't a mouse. It was a snake. Dead, thankfully, but a snake, and a poisonous one on top of that. What Josh and I found was something out of nightmares.
A huge nest was situated atop a rocky cliff, built of tree limbs, grasses and anything else available. Some of those tree limbs were thicker than my arm. What lived in that huge nest, though, was the frightening thing. They looked like evil pterodactyls. There were two of them inside the nest and each was larger than an ultralight aircraft. I could feel Josh's impatience as we misted over the nest. It had to be twenty feet in diameter and the two creatures inside were the source of the stench, along with the regurgitated bones littering the nest itself. The nestlings were curled up and sleeping after a nice meal of a man, a woman and their six-year-old daughter.
I misted Josh downwind and dropped him on the ground, materializing right beside him. He was cursing softly and hauling out his communicator.
"Not yet," I put a hand over his. "Those are the babies. The parents are still out there somewhere and we don't need to blow this." Under other circumstances, I would never have called them, but I needed help and knowledgeable help on top of that. Griffin—Pheligar, can you hear me? I sent, praying that they could.
I hear you, baby, Griffin came in loud and clear. Pheligar's assent was right behind Griffin's.
We have some terrible creatures, here, and they're eating people, I sent. Please come and look before I try to kill them.
Griffin and Pheligar were beside me in seconds, frightening Josh half to death. He was used to the extraordinary, but he wasn't prepared for an eight and a half foot blue Larentii who fed on sunlight.
Pheligar was the one who transported us nearer the nest—he shielded us, somehow. "Flakkar," Griffin muttered.
"Yes," Pheligar nodded slightly at Griffin's assessment.