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"DON’T COWS SLEEP at night like everything else?" I asked, irritable about being startled by every distant rass corazing land ere "watching"

What you can "watch" crouching in corn plants in the dark of night is zero

"Me too," Ric said in defense of irl history

"You? City-raised? Naw" Leonard Tallgrass had spoken "You’ve got an inside-the-Beltway DC manner and you’ll never tell "

I knew Ric would leave Tallgrass’s pronounce silence

"Say, guys I still don’t get e’re doing in a cow pasture in the dark of night, or what you’ve been ‘looking into’ on the rural scene Or why you were so interested in the footage Slo-ot of the cow mutilation scene here"

I’d returned Dolly to the Thunderbird Inn frorass, and Quicksilver waiting, all ravenous After a fast-food dinner, Tallgrass wanted to eyeball et the two-footed httime "operation"

So here ere two hours later in the dead of night At least the nighttirees and the Kansas humidity was low I couldn’t believe that my quashed TV story on cattle ed clawed tracks I’d noticed at the original scene had looked hty bear-like on rass told Ric, "I figure the herd will be a our way in twentytheet here in ten to twelve minutes"

"Herd?" I asked "Nobody herds cows overland these days Aren’t we laying a trap for the rotten teenaged cow oneoff livestock"

A as shifting in the night wind right undercrouch and let rabbed ain

Ric and I had outfitted our designer jeans for unexpected night surveillance ork boots and long-sleeved black cotton shirts froht boots weren’t broken in The stiff leather would chaff my ankles raw if I er

"She okay?" Tallgrass asked softly

"‘She’ is fine," I whispered "I uys back to the sao"

"Yes, you did, scout," Ric answered "Any pasture where several cows have been mutilated and some officious Fed shows up to kick out the localo," I objected "A lot of weather has been over this field since"

Tallgrass snorted "You got that right Especially lately Wichita’s been having excessive ‘weather’ for early summer Doesn’t matter When blood is shed, the earth reh it was a perfectly teht Crickets chorused their approval all around We could occasionally hear the almost metallic rustle of birds of prey briefly silhouetted by the nearing three-quarterlike a uys had their night-vision, bone-finding field binoculars glued to their sinuses They radiated teamwork and concentration for the hunt What exactly they were hunting other than cows, they’d been seriously tight-lipped about telling me, but all our faces wore swaths of ca to share the cramped disco the real scout-work so broken threads of my past all day ondetails when theout serious shit

Obviously, Ric’s FBI assignht hirass was about as "retired" as the Energizer Bunny Co pink relieved my boredom and all-over outdoor itches and made me smile

"Don’t show your pearly whites on point unless you’re going to use theru

"What about those funky tracks in the field?" I whispered into Ric’s ear

"Yes," he said

Okay, so eren’t here to share, but pounce On so

Ain the already trato make a no-no of a ruckus, so I twisted my head overagainst the lighter panora was crawling toward our position

I poked Ric in the ribs and nodded behind us He lowered the binoculars and frowned, hearing the sahtly behind the crouching ’s first appetizer

"Ty-ohni," Tallgrass whispered without turning "Your wolf-heart returns, silver-woiant furroas being churned up Did Kansas have any burrowing predators, beside possible post–Millenniuhouls?

The moon sailed free of a train of cloud to reveal Quicksilver belly-crawling to join us Some joker had smeared his snout and paler colored lower face with sooty ca a quick lick of greeting along ed neck just below the black shirt’s collar line He knew not to re us all up at the Thunderbird Inn after this outing was going to be messy and aard, like some cheesy B-movie threesome

More than one coed, iantthey were er

After seeing the royal Egyptian vaenerations, I was soon converting to soetarianisrass’s head nod

"Three minutes, tops, and they’ll be on us," he warned

Oh, come on Like Quicksilver can tell tiers around the black leather collar he ca fatter and overheated, as if the sun had been out Ouch

"Okay You can tell time," I whispered in his perked ear

He flickedclaws into earthen clods and darting into the clearing o

Tallgrass and Ric ju weapons I’d noticed and couldn’t naly autoun, an assault rifle, and a flame-thrower

I didn’t have time to watch our tea herd of cows--longhorn cattle--wereforward as one boulevard-wide ht of a very tall Texan, to hear those braggarts tell it I was ready to becoht of cows--steers and cows, I should say--astoward us with thundering hooves and ru helht down to earth

The earth, Tallgrass had said, that never forgets a drop of blood spilled on it

And maybe that explained the va Kansas, the Civil War nexus, onies, the notion of cattle as human sacrifices, which would really rile the beef industry, my old TV news reporter persona realized

I’d been taught my Kansas history In the twenty years after the War Between the States, only the ten endary trails to railheads in Kansas and beyond kept the nation fed It was called the largest movement of animals underof the Karnak vampires’ puny human herd, but how many had they added up to over a couple thousand years?

Yet the cattle drive I itnessing noas beyond the ordinary, eons-old business of eat and be eaten, graze and be slaughtered, be anietable, or human and be worried

This was a herd whipped up froendary cowboys partnered with another grazing herbivore, the conquistador-descendedon foot, dozens and dozens of theos mounted on palominos of pale aspect A skeleton corps of horses and riders, pale horses, pale riders, pale cowherds on foot beside them Ghosts and zombies and flesh-and-blood cattle, oha multicentury parade of the blood price between hu by in a half-phantom for, fog-gray bone and blood and fang nipping at the herders’ paranorle once-and-future mass of past and present, real and supernaturally preserved life … and death

And, a this supernatural Wild West Show rode and walked the real game-masters, actual men From Ric’s intent expression, these were the cri before

Meanwhile the silver ht down on whole flocks of clouds that weredown to earth in diseined the Kansas plains could host such an abundance of forgotten and now refreshed life and death The vast scope of the prairies as Strip look tawdry and pinched

Here, in the wide open spaces, the Millenniu all the dead and undead life of our endlessly evolving planet Nothing was lost Nothing failed to survive, but everything had been reborn in so forhostly panora could happen, could be real, could require dealing with

Especially Lilith and Lili, as and especially Ric and Quicksilver and Leonard Tallgrass beside me joined in a quest to free the future fro knocked ing into the earthy ground

So horns in the sky