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.
2
I stepped into too-white snow and dead leaves that crunched beneath my bare feet. I covered my face with my hands. The sun was too large. It burned my eyes, making me want to retreat into my tree.
The surface was death. I needed shelter. How had I come here? Where was the closest ice cave?
I backed against the tree, letting the comforting roughness of the bark rub my bare skin. I curled my toes into the frozen earth, gripping the roots and reaching instinctively for the warmth of my grove-sisters.
I felt nothing. There were many trees, more than I had ever imagined, but they were empty shells. How could they survive the cold without their dryads to give them strength?
I had never been alone before. Not like this. I had never been lost.
Tears warmed my cheeks. How long had I slept?
I shivered then, not from cold, but from fear. I remembered Neptune. I remembered my sisters. I remembered fighting in the arena, the excitement of combat as my wooden sword slammed against my opponent’s spear. I remembered the pleasure of the bedchamber.
I remembered all these things, but I couldn’t remember being there. It was as though my memories had been ripped away, replaced by someone else’s dreams.
This place, wherever I was, felt too real, too bright, too much. Too many sensations. Too many thoughts. I dug my fingers into the skin of my thighs and twisted, trying to focus on the pain, using that sensation to drive out the rest. I sagged to the ground and rocked back and forth, losing myself in the movement.
I could return to the oak. I could sleep and be safe. Choose the long death, as the very first dryad was said to have done when her lover was murdered. Her tree had lived on for centuries, guarded by the grove of her children.
If I followed her example, I would be surrounded not by my sisters, but by mindless trees, only half-alive.
After a while, the sunlight began to fade. I blinked and looked around. Every leaf, every stick was so vivid. I picked a half-buried acorn from the ground and turned it in my hand, marveling at the detail. The tiny scales of the cap, the pale line where cap met seed, the hard protrusion at the bottom that made the acorn look like a miniature wooden breast.
I climbed to my feet, off-balance. This world was wrong. Nothing was as it should be. I needed my sisters. I needed my lovers. I needed—
I slammed my head against the tree to break the spiral of my thoughts.
There were trees here. Were there people as well? Tears spilled freely as I stepped away from my tree, from the one thing that felt safe.
If I stayed here, I would die. I would sleep forever. I would lose myself.
I picked up a fallen branch and hugged it to my chest. I could feel it responding to the life within me. Threadlike roots crawled from the broken branch, twining around my fingers. Gleaming buds poked from the other end. I cradled the branch in my arms as I stumbled away from my tree.
Grass whispered as Lena came to stand behind me. She said nothing, but rested her hand on my shoulder.
I needed to focus on the job at hand. I rooted through my book bag until I found a handheld infrared thermometer. I switched it on and pointed it at Smudge. The screen read 109 Fahrenheit, which was only a degree or two higher than normal for him.
In humans, core body temperature fell at about a half a degree per hour. For a wendigo, the calculation went in the opposite direction. Given a standard body temp of twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit, we should be able to get a rough window on the time of death. Although I had no idea how trauma and blood loss might affect things.
Lykanthropos anthropophagos was well-suited to life in the U.P. Wendigo blood worked as a kind of magical supercoolant. Even the marrow was cold as ice. Their fur literally froze the moisture from the air, forming a protective layer of frost and ice.
Like werewolves, wendigos were born human. But once the transformation took hold, they remained in their monstrous form until death. The Ojibwe legends I had studied described them as gluttonous, cannibalistic spirits. In one story, a wendigo’s mere presence caused the river to freeze and the trees to split from the cold.
A lone girl had set out to fight the wendigo, using a pair of sumac sticks with the bark peeled away. Until I met Lena, I had always found that a poor choice of weapon. But the girl defeated the wendigo, crushing its skull. The villagers chopped away the ice, eventually freeing the body of a man.
“Are you ready?” Lena asked.
I took a slow breath, then nodded. “I’m all right.”
“I know.”
We returned to the fence. Lena took the camera from Nidhi and tucked it into her pocket, then gripped the rail in both hands. The muscles in her arms tightened as she bent the fence lower to the ground. Keeping one hand on the rail, she stepped over and studied the drop-off. It wasn’t completely vertical, but nothing short of a mountain goat would be able to climb that slope. Moss clung to the dark brown stone. Roots poked through like the coils of sea serpents.