Page 71 of The Vampire and the Case of the Baleful Banshee

‘I’m an okay tracker but I’m nowhere near as good as Patkotak,’ Connor said, once we were out of earshot of the other two men.

‘If she’s here, she’ll want us to find her. She’ll leave something we can follow,’ I tried to sound optimistic but we both knew that if she were truly hiding, she wouldn’t have left anything that Chris might find.

Think, Bunny, think. Where would she go if Chris had chased her out of the water?

If she’d gone to the cave to see if he was checking on the fisheye, what could have happened? The stash had been immense and he couldn’t have retrieved it alone, plus it was wired to explode. We’d searched several paranormal towns before we’d found someone qualified to disarm it, and he wasn’t due in until the following week. We had people primed to retrieve the stash after the explosives had been defused but it would take several people and a large boat.

‘No way,’ I said aloud and stopped.

Connor turned to look at me. ‘What?’

‘He wouldn’t be here alone,’ I said.

‘Chris?’

‘Yeah. If he was seen here, he’d be here for the drugs. Why else would he come back? And he couldn’t manage that huge stash alone, not in a sea-lion body.’ If my theory was right, there would be a bunch of tracks, not just Sidnee’s.

There was a shout and both of us whipped our heads around. Gunnar and Thomas had found something.

We ran.

Chapter 44

Thomas was looking at the ground. ‘What did you find?’ I asked breathlessly.

He pointed. ‘Small feet that could be our girl’s followed by at least three men. They went off into the trees there.’ He nodded to the right.

I took a deep breath. She was on land and that meant we could find her. Please let her be okay, I prayed to any god who might be listening.

We followed Thomas into the trees. Sidnee was no more a woods’ girl than I was, and even I could see her barefoot tracks. One man was barefoot – my money was on Chris – and the other two were wearing boots. Their tracks were easy to follow because they didn’t know they had any reason to hide them.

Thomas stopped and we jerked to a halt behind him. He held up a hand and cupped his other hand around his ear. We listened. Thomas was human, dammit; why was he so much better at this?

I closed my eyes, concentrated and faintly heard what sounded like a woman crying in the far distance. A chill ran down my spine: Sidnee. It had to be. I took two steps towards the sound but Thomas grabbed my arm, shook his head and whispered something under his breath. Even with my vampire hearing, I didn’t catch what he said.

He continued following the tracks even though the wailing was coming from the opposite direction. I vibrated with the need to follow the sound but Connor grabbed my hand. He trusted Thomas, and I needed to trust him as well. With gritted teeth, I followed the tracker.

We continued for ten more minutes before Thomas stopped, looked back at us and grimaced. Blood, flesh and torn clothing were strewn on the ground and even in the trees; what looked like a crushed head was jammed about twelve feet up a tree.

‘Oh my God! Sidnee,’ I whispered, but Thomas shook his head and held a finger to his lips. I might not be the only supernat around here who had good hearing.

Thomas pointed to the clothing scraps and then I understood: Sidnee had come to the island here in mer form with no clothes. The head had close-cropped blond hair: it wasn’t Chris’s. I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed. Something had torn a grown man into tiny bits.

Our master tracker was looking behind us, his expression grim. ‘What?’ I whispered. Thomas mouthed an answer but I still didn’t understand what he was trying to say.

Connor’s grip on my hand tightened: he understood. I straightened my spine, took a deep breath and squeezed his fingers. We skirted around the mangled remains and Thomas picked up the trail again. It felt like we had only walked ten steps when we heard the eerie woman sobbing again. The noise chilled me to the bone. That definitely wasn’t Sidnee.

Connor interpreted Thomas’s strange word. ‘Kushtaka,’ he whispered softly. That meant nothing to me, but I pictured the nantinaq and the beast beyond the barrier. Whatever it was, everyone here was scared of it.

The other man who had been stalking Sidnee had met a similar fate and we found part of him thirty feet away. There were no signs of the rest of him, nor of Chris and Sidnee. We didn’t have time to look further because a massive thing with brown fur launched itself at us with a screech.

We scattered. Thomas’s big handgun barked out five quick shots and we all hit the ground. There was another shriek and the thing crashed away from us, shoving through the trees and brush. ‘What the fuck was that?’ I asked, a shade hysterically.

‘Kushtaka,’ Connor repeated. ‘An otter-man. They’re violent, territorial and incredibly hard to kill.’ The trio of unwanted attributes. Fabulous.

‘I winged it,’ Thomas said with satisfaction. ‘But it’ll be back. We need to leave.’

I wanted to go, too, but I wasn’t leaving without my bestie. I spotted a barefoot track and pointed. ‘Look, she’s heading that way.’

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