chapter five

Short and heavyset, with large eyes and dark lips, Lena didn't look like someone who could go toe-to-toe with a pissed-off vampire and walk away without a scratch. Her skin was the rich brown of oiled oak. A single black braid hung to the middle of her back. Cutoff jeans emphasized the curves of her hips. She was barefoot, her toes curling into the dirt with each step. A pair of curved wooden swords—Japanese bokken—were thrust through her belt.

If I were to pick a single word for what attracted me to Lena, it would be her passion. Not merely physical, but for everything she did. She threw herself into life with no reservations, never holding back. She possessed a fearlessness few humans ever matched.

Nidhi Shah coughed softly. "We were getting ready to try to retrieve the body."

Judging from her outfit, Nidhi had come straight from her office. She wore a teal shirt with iridescent buttons, black slacks, and Converse high-tops. The sneakers were her formal black pair. When it came to footwear, Nidhi refused to let fashion trump comfort and practicality.

She was in her mid-thirties, older in appearance than Lena by a good five years. Her hair was pinned back, revealing a blue tattoo on her temple. The Gujarati characters for balance, a spell placed by the Porters to help her in her duties, were the only magical thing about her.

I stepped toward the fence. "Do we know who it was?"

Helen shook her head. One hand rested on the semiautomatic pistol holstered on her left hip, her only visible sign of nervousness. "I don't recognize the scent of either the victim or the man who dumped him."

"You're sure it was a man?" asked Nidhi.

"You can't smell the body spray?" Jeff snorted. "Lucky you."

"The wendigo was killed about a half mile into the woods," said Helen. "Whoever it was used a four-wheeler to get the body here. He drove east after that, but we lost him once he reached the road."

The upper bar of the fence was dented toward the ground. Dark streaks of blood striped the rusted aluminum. About twenty feet down, hanging from the broken branches of a white spruce growing out of the near-vertical rock, hung

the wendigo.

Imagination was part of what made me a good libriomancer: the ability to visualize the story, to make it so real in my mind that I could literally reach out and touch it.

Imagination could be a curse as well. I would be seeing the remains of that poor creature in my dreams for months to come. The broken limbs, the pain and fear frozen on its face, the bits of white fur, matted with blood.

I turned away. Ignoring Jeff and Helen's worried whispers, I crossed the road and rested both hands against a fat birch. I sucked air into my lungs as my mind played out one scenario after another to explain the injuries the wendigo had suffered.

How the hell had a human being done this? The average wendigo could kill and devour a man in minutes.

Which made the man who had deliberately and methodically butchered this creature far more dangerous than any monster.