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I didn&039;t see the body at first All I saas the snow It had pooled into a deep drift in one of those hollows that you find in the woods In spring the holes fill with rain and mud In fall they pile deep with leaves In winter they hold the deepest snow The h relief Every print filled like a cup with blue shadows

I stood at the edge of the clearing staring down at the mishmash of tracks Somewhere in all this were the murderer&039;s tracks, or a bear&039;s tracks, but unless it was an aniure out which tracks were significant Maybe all crime scenes were tracked up this much, the snow just made it obvious Or maybe this scene had been screwed over Yeah

Every track, cop or not, led to one thing--the body Dolph had said the man had been sliced up, eaten I didn&039;t want to see it I&039;d been having a very good ti It wasn&039;t fair to end the night by looking at partially eaten bodies Of course, the deadeaten hadn&039;t been much fun either

I took a deep breath of the cold air My breath fogged as I exhaled I couldn&039;t smell the body If it&039;d been summer, the dead man would have been ripe Hurrah for the cold

"You planning to look at the body from here?" Titus said

"No," I said

"Looks like your expert is losing her nerve, Sergeant"

I turned to Titus His round, double-chinned face was s, pleased with itself

I didn&039;t want to see the body, but losing my nerve, never "You better hope this isn&039;t a murder scene Sheriff, because it has been fucked twenty ways to Sunday"

"You&039;re not helping anything, Anita," Dolph said softly

He was right, but I wasn&039;t sure I cared "You got any suggestions for preserving the criht in like the fifty billion people before me?"

"There were only four sets of footprints when I was ordered to leave the scene," Officer Holmes said

Titus frowned at her "When I determined it was an animal attack, there was no reason to keep it secure" His southern accent was getting thicker again

"Yeah, right," I said I glanced at Dolph "Any suggestions?"

"Just walk in, I don&039;t think there&039;smy men?" Titus said

"No," Dolph said, "I&039; you"

I turned away so Titus wouldn&039;t see ladly He&039;ll put up with theer than I will, but once you&039;ve reached his limit, run for cover No bureaucratic ass will be spared

I stepped into the hollow Dolph didn&039;t need my help to hand Titus his head on a platter The snow collapsed at the edge of the hole My feet slid on the leaves underfoot I ended on ht But I was on a slope now I slid alhter bubbled up behind me

I sat on h all they wanted; it was funny The dead man wasn&039;t

He lay on his back in the snow Theon the snow, and giving the luster of ht in one of the coverall&039;s pockets, but I didn&039;t need it Or h, for now

Ragged furrows ran down the right side of his face One claw had sliced over the eye, spilling blood and thick globs of eyeball down his cheek The lower jaas crushed, as if sorabbed it and squeezed It made the face look unfinished, only half there It must have hurt like hell, but it hadn&039;t killed him More&039;s the pity

His throat had been torn out; that had probably killed hione His spine shone a dull white, like he&039;d sed a ghost and it hadn&039;t gotten away His cae coveralls were ripped away froht threw a thick shadow inside that ripped cloth I couldn&039;t see the daht kills Darkness steals the color Soht on it and the colors explode: the blood is crireen, yellow, brown Light lets you differentiate A loves on They were a cool second skin Even riding in loves were cooler than ht snapped on Its tiny yellowish beah the shadows like a knife Thehad been peeled away like the layers of an onion; coveralls, pants and shirt, therlinted on frozen blood and gobbets of icy flesh Most of the internal organs were gone I shone the light on the surrounding snow, but there was nothing to see The flesh, organs, were gone

The intestine had leaked dark fluid all over the cavity, but it was frozen solid I s The edges of the wound were ragged No knife had done this Or if it had, it was like no blade I&039;d ever seen The medical examiner could tell for sure A rib had been broken It pointed upward like an exclaht on the bone It was chipped, but not claws, not hands teeth I would have bet a week&039;s pay that I was looking at tooth marks

The throat wound was crusted with frozen snow Reddish ice crystals had frozen to his face The re eye was frozen shut with bloody ice There were tooth marks at each side of the throat wound, not claws The crushed jaw bore clear imprint of teeth It certainly wasn&039;t huhouls, vampires, zombies, or any other human undead I had to hike my coat up to fish the tape measure out of the coverall pocket It would have looked better if I&039;d taken the time to unbutton my coat, but, hey, it was cold

The claw s Wider than a bear&039;s claider than anything natural Monstrously large There was a nearly perfect imprint of teeth on either side of the jaw As if the creature had bitten down hard, but not tried to tear Biting to crush, biting to stop the screa Can&039;t make a lot of noise with the entire botto very deliberate about that one bite The throat was torn away, but again not as bad as it could be Just enough to kill It was only when you got to the stomach that the creature had lost control The man was dead before the stomach was opened I&039;d have bet on that But the creature took the time to eat the stomach To feed Why?

There was an imprint in the snow, near the body The imprint shohere people had knelt in it, ht picked up blood drained into the snow He&039;d been facedohen someone rolled hih nearly every inch of snow except for the blood splatters Given a choice, people won&039;t walk through blood Crime scene or not There wasn&039;t nearly asa throat is messy business But, of course, this throat hadn&039;t been sliced It had been ripped out by teeth The blood had gone into the mouth, not onto the snow

The blood had soaked into the clothing If we could find our creature, it would be covered in blood, too The snoas surprisingly clean for the ae There was a thick pool of blood to one side, at least a yard froht next to the body-size ih to bleed quite a bit, then been rolled over on its stoh for the skin to freeze to the snow More blood had pooled underneath the body while it lay facedown Now here the body lay faceup, but no fresh blood The body hadn&039;t been turned over the last time until after he was very dead

I called up, "Who rolled the body over?"

"It was just like that when I came on the scene," Titus said

"Holmes?" Chief Garroway made her naot here"

"Did Williams move the body?"

"I didn&039;t ask," she said

Great "Soood to know if it was Williao ask hio with her," Titus said

"I don&039;t need"

"Holo," Garroway said

The two deputies left

I went back to looking at the body Had to think of it as a body, couldn&039;t call it a "hiin to wonder if he had a wife, kids I didn&039;t want to know It was just a body, so ht on theon the snow Me and Sherlock Holmes If the creature had come up behind the man, there should have been so Every print I found wore shoes Whatever had done this hadn&039;t worn shoes Even with a herd of squabbling cops trah there should have been some imprint of claws and animal tracks I couldn&039;t find any Maybe the crime techs would have better luck I hoped so

If there were no prints, could it have flown in? A gargoyle, ed predator that attacked ons, but they weren&039;t native to this country, and it would have been a hell of a lot on would sioyles will attack and kill a man, but it&039;s rare Besides the nearest pack was in Kelly, Kentucky The Kelly gargoyles were a small subspecies that had attacked people but never killed They were argoyles that were man-sized or better They&039;d eat you But there&039;d never been anything that large in America

What else could it be? There were a few lesser eastern trolls in the Ozarks, but not this close to St Louis Besides I&039;d seen pictures of troll kills, and this wasn&039;t it The claere too curved, too long The sto with a htfully human, but then they were primates

A lesser troll wouldn&039;t attack a huht have, but they had been extinct for more than twenty years Also they had a tendency to snap off trees and whap people to death, then eat the as exotic as trolls or gargoyles If there&039;d been tracks leading up to the body, I&039;d have been sure it was a lycanthrope kill Trolls had been known to wear castoff clothing So a troll could have traoyle could have flown up, but a lycanthrope they had to walk on naked feet that wouldn&039;t fit any human shoe So how?

I would have slapped my forehead, but didn&039;t If you do that at ot blood in your hair I looked up Humans almost never look up Millions of years of evolution had conditioned us to ignore the sky Nothing was big enough to take us fro couldn&039;t jump on us

A tree branch snaked out over the hollow The penlight picked out fresh white scars against the black li for the man to walk underneath Ambush, premeditation, murder

"Dolph, could you come down here a minute?"

Dolph walked carefully down the snow-covered slope Didn&039;t want to repeat uess "You knohat it is?"

"Shapeshifter," I said

"Explain" He had his trusty notebook out, pen poised I explained what I&039;d found What I thought

"We haven&039;t had a rogue lycanthrope since the squad was formed Are you sure about this?"

"I&039;m sure it&039;s a shapeshifter, but I didn&039;t say it was a lycanthrope"

"Explain"

"All lycanthropes are shapeshifters by definition, but not all shapeshifters are lycanthropes Lycanthropy is a disease that you catch fro a bad batch of lycanthropy vaccine"

He looked at et it from the vaccine?"

"It happens"

"Good to know," he said "How can you be a shapeshifter and not a lycanthrope?"

"Most often an inherited condition The faiant cat Mostly European One person a generation has the genes and changes"

"Is that tied to the uardian comes out when the faer There are swanmanes They are tied to the moon, but it&039;s still an inherited condition"

"That it?"

"You can be cursed, but that&039;s really rare"

"Why?"

I shrugged "You&039;ve got to find a witch or soh to curse so I&039;ve read spells for personal shapeshifting The potions are so full of narcotics that you ht also believe you were the Chrysler building, or you ht just die Real spells for it are a lot more complex and usually require a human sacrifice A curse is a step up from a spell It&039;s not really a spell at all"

I tried to think how to explain it In this area Dolph was the civvie He didn&039;t know the lingo "A curse is like the ultiic, whatever, and focus it on one person You will them to be cursed You always do it in person, so they know it&039;s been done Some theories think it takes the victim&039;s belief to make a curse work I&039;m not sure I buy that"

"Are witches the only people that can curse people?"

"Occasionally somebody will run afoul of a fairy One of the old Daoine sidhe, but you&039;d have to be in Europe for that England, Ireland, parts of Scotland In this country it&039;d be a witch"

"So a shapeshifter, but we don&039;t knohat kind or even how they got to be a shapeshifter"

"Not from a few marks and tracks, no"

"If you saw the shifter face-to-face could you tell what kind they were?"

"What animal?" I asked

"Yeah"