As far as food services went, it wasn’t much. There looked to be less than five items in all, and none of them seemed to have been touched. Cole amended that last observation when he spotted a man at a table next to the short bed of hot plates, hunched down over at least three dishes piled high with food. He couldn’t quite make out the man’s face, but pointed him out to Paige anyway and asked, “Is that him?”
She took her eyes from the stage and looked in the direction he was pointing. “Yep. That’s him.”
“Were you watching the dancers?”
“Come on,” she said quickly. “Time for business.”
“There’s an ATM by the door, just in case you’d like—”
Shaking her head, Paige swung one arm back and effortlessly snapped her hand against a spot in Cole’s midsection that robbed him of his next breath. By the time she made it to the table with the buffet’s only fan, she was smiling warmly. “Hello, Prophet,” she said. “Catch any food poisoning yet?”
The guy at the table was about a hundred pounds lighter than Cole would have expected for someone with so much food piled in front of him. A black man with short, clipped hair, he was dressed in old jeans and a dark, hooded sweatshirt. One leg was stretched out from under the table to stick a work boot a little too far into the common walkway. Cole narrowed the man’s age to anywhere in the late thirties to early forties range, but the black light hanging nearby made that a difficult call to make. A narrow face and hooked nose all pointed down to a fairly well-trimmed beard.
“I’ve got business here this time around, Paige,” the hungry man said. “I told you about the nymph I was tracking.”
“Nympho?” Cole asked anxiously. “Point her out.”
“No,” Paige shouted over the music. “Nymph. Prophet always comes up with some stupid excuse to meet me at places like these. This time he’s tracking woodland creatures.”
“This one doesn’t live in the woods, obviously,” Prophet added. “Who’s this you brought with you?” Sharp eyes sized Cole up in the amount of time it took for him to lift a callused hand. As far as Cole could tell, there were no scars on the man’s palms.
As Cole shook the man’s hand, Paige announced, “Cole Warnecki, this is Walter Nash.”
Doing his best not to match the other man’s iron grip, Cole said, “I’ve heard you also go by Prophet.”
“The MEG guys came up with the name, but I don’t know you well enough for you to call me that.”
Cole raised his eyebrows and asked, “You’re a psychic?”
“If you’re expecting a prediction after this handshake, you’re in for a real disappointment.”
“Just tell me one thing.”
“What?” Walter asked warily.
Cole glanced down at the plates, which he could now see were covered with mashed potatoes and some sort of goulash. “That food any good?”
Slowly, Walter’s beard widened as the mouth beneath it formed a vaguely demonic grin. “Yeah, it’s all right. All you can eat. Nobody ever tries the food in these places, but I figure it’s gotta just be catered from somewhere so it should be fine.”
“And here I thought men were drooling over the dancers,” Paige grumbled as she sat down.
“Dancers are over there. Food’s over here,” Walter said. “No reason I can’t have both.”
Cole took a seat next to Walter and turned his chair so he could stay in the conversation while also watching the stage. Since one song was fading into another, the strawberry blonde was at the farthest end of the stage and reaching down to help the next dancer up. The new arrival was tall, dressed in an outfit made of purple silk scarves, and had long, coal-black hair.
“What’ve you got for us, Prophet?” Paige asked.
After setting down his fork, Walter reached into the large pocket sewn on the front of his sweatshirt to retrieve a small spiral notebook. He flipped the notebook open and studied the scribbles written there. “It’s a place due west of a town called Milton, which is near Clear Lake. One of the MEG guys called me, since neither of you could pull yourself away from Chicago.”
“Did I tell you how much I appreciate you taking up some of the slack now that Gerald and Brad are gone?” Paige asked in a sweet voice that Cole wasn’t sure he’d heard before.
Walter ate it up with a smile and said, “Not until right now, but it’s no problem. Anyway, the MEG guy’s name is…Jarvis. He took me out to some creepy old house that had a pit in the back of it.”
“Did you say a pit?” Cole asked.
“Yes I did, and I checked it myself. It could’ve been a basement or cellar at one time, but it’s a pit now. He says he saw some messed-up-looking animals in there, but they weren’t there when I was.”
“You went to have a look inside?” Paige asked.
Nodding, Walter flipped the page of his notebook and angled his head as if he was squinting through a pair of bifocals. “It’s a Half Breed den.”
The smile that had been on Paige’s face disappeared. “You’re sure?”
“I may not hunt the damn things, but I’ve tracked down plenty for you guys over the years. There were Half Breeds living there. I could smell ’em. The pit looked big enough for three to five of them, but I wasn’t about to crawl around to count the droppings for myself.”
Paige nodded.
“Since Half Breeds like to run out in the open, I took a drive around that area,” Walter continued. “There’s a spot about five miles from the den that’s got ‘werewolf hunting ground’ written all over it. It’s some lake called Osh Kong…Koshconnong…what the hell is that?”
Paige leaned over and squinted at his notebook. “Lake Koshkonong. Is that right?”
He nodded and said, “It’s a pretty good-sized lake and there’s plenty of room for the things to run, which is what they like to do as the moon gets fuller. In any case, you should be able to bait one from there no problem. If they aren’t at that lake, they’ll be close enough to catch the scent.”
“Okay,” Paige said. “What else?”
“I’ve had a few dreams about werewolves, but some weren’t werewolves. One looked like a black and gray cat, another looked like a panther, and one might’ve been a freakin’ beaver or something, but they’re all ugly and they’re all pissed.”
Paige laughed and glanced at Cole. “Sounds like Cole’s girl. What else?”
“I’m serious,” Walter said. “Something’s going on with these things that’s drivin’ them crazy. I don’t know when, but it’s coming.”
“What’s coming?”
“Blood. Lots of it. Goddamned Armageddon, from what I saw. Now, it may not be as bad as all that or it may be worse, but there’s a big fight on the way. I’ve dreamt it too many times for it to be bullshit.”
Paige’s eyes drifted toward Cole, but he was too busy studying the brunette on stage. She danced toward the pole as if she floating through water, and when she got there, she twirled around it fast enough to send the scarves wrapped around her fluttering through the air until they practically dissolved.
“Wow,” he said.
Looking up at the stage, Walter smirked. “Yeah. That’s Tristan. She’s somethin’ else.”
“You were saying?” Paige reminded him. “Something about Armageddon?”
Walter pushed away his dinner and leaned back into his chair. “I’ve dreamt it plenty of times. There’s a lot of fighting and plenty of dying. It’s like the beasts just decide to come in from the hills and take over. They were even ripping through the pale kids like tissue paper.”