Blood Heir (Aurelia Ryder, #1)(63)

“Making things clear.”

I almost did a double take. The voice that came out was deep and powerful, and his diction was perfect.

“To whom?”

“To anyone who’s watching.”

He took a running start, leaped, and climbed the wall, dragging the head with him. In a moment, he made it over the edge and landed next to me. He walked over to the pole, jumped up, caught it with his free hand, pulled himself up, and impaled the hodag head on top of it. Gore dripped down, falling on his fur.

Above us, thunder rumbled. I looked up. The sky churned with thick dark clouds.

Derek hopped down to the floor. He was the biggest werewolf I had ever seen. I stood five feet six inches tall, and he had two feet on me, at least. He was almost as tall as Curran in warrior form, but leaner, with longer limbs, powerful but not quite as bulky. Curran was stronger, but Derek would be faster.

He walked toward me, flinging hodag blood off his clawed hands. Oh joy.

“It smells worse dead than alive.”

“Did any of the blood get in your mouth?”

He was standing way too close, and I had to look up.

“Why?”

“It’s highly poisonous. Even to shapeshifters. I have the antidote.” I lifted a small vial I had fished out from the pocket on my belt.

He raised his bloody hand to his snout, sniffed the blood, grimaced, and gave it a long lick.

“Are you out of your mind?” I thrust the vial into his hand. “Drink this!”

“It’s fine,” he said. “Tingles a bit.”

Argh.

“Tastes like shit, too. Like a pig crossed with a gator.”

“Drink the antidote.”

He flicked his ears. “Or what?”

“Or I use the Order to file a formal complaint with the Pack.”

He pried the cork off with the tips of his claws and gulped the contents. “Lemon juice?”

“Lemon juice is the only known hodag antidote.”

“You do realize that makes no sense?”

“Nothing about the hodag makes sense.”

“Why?”

“Because they are modern Americana mythos. In the 1890’s Eugene Shepard, who was a land surveyor from Rhinelander, a town in Wisconsin, claimed to have caught a hodag. He described a ferocious battle with a fearsome beast with the head of a frog, the face of an elephant, the back of a dinosaur, and the tail of a gator. It had horns on its head and along its spine, sabretooth fangs, and improbably long claws. He claimed the hodags prowled the swamps of upper Wisconsin, feeding on mud turtles, water snakes, and oxen, but their favorite food was white bulldogs. It could be killed only with dynamite, chloroform, or lemons.”

He reached out and put his fingers on my forehead. I jerked back.

“You don’t feel warm,” he said. “Did you get any of the blood in your mouth?”

“Why am I even talking to you?”

I turned, and he moved to block my way.

“How did it go from Eugene Shepard to that?” He pointed at the head.

“Shepard paid a taxidermist to stuff the ‘hodag’ and paraded it at county fairs for the next several decades. The Smithsonian scientists called him on it, and he had to admit that the whole thing was a hoax, but he didn’t stop displaying it, and people didn’t stop paying to see it.”

“Aha. What was he displaying exactly?”

“I have no idea. I saw a picture of it, and it looked like a large bulldog with horns glued to its head.”

I walked to the edge of the building and looked down at the hodag corpse.

“So it was a fun local legend. Then what?”

Why did he keep asking me about the stupid hodag? “Then the logging business died out, and the town shifted to hodag tourism instead. A hundred years later, they had a Hodag Country Festival, Hodag Park, Hodag BMX Club, Hodag Honda… The high school mascot was a hodag. They even built a giant statue of the creature in front of city hall. Tourists used to take pictures with it.”

“Let me guess, the Shift hit, and the creature came to life.”

“Something like that. Locals might not have believed in the hodag, but the kids did, and some of the tourists too. At some point, all that accumulated faith gained critical mass, and a pack of hodags ran out of the woods and came after the crowd at the Hodag County Fair. Rhinelander is a walled town now. Bad news, hodags lay twenty-five eggs at a time. Good news, their leather and fur fetch a good price. So, the woods are back, but they’re full of hodags.”

“Someone sold the Honeycombers a black-market hodag egg,” he said.

“Probably.”

“Why would Honeycombers send a hodag after you?”

“Because that’s the third time I cut their phone line. I need to find out who hired Jasper…”

I stopped and pivoted to him.

He smiled, showing me a forest of fangs that would give any sane person nightmares for life.

“Nice,” I told him.

“Who’s Jasper?”

“Nobody.”

I pulled a rag from my pocket and wiped Dakkan’s blade. The stench made my eyes water.

“Let’s work together.”

“Let’s not.”

He moved to stand in front of me again. “You and I carried on a civil adult conversation for the last five minutes.”