Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1)(11)

I wander away while he goes to work on the skull. I’m not squeamish. Okay, I’m a little squeamish. I mean, I cut the thing’s head off, but that was in the heat of the moment. For some reason it’s a little harder to take listening to a saw hack away on a skull in the light of day while sipping my rare Aztlán coffee.

“Come look,” Tah says.

I return to the table. “What should I be looking for?”

“Shrinkage. Abnormalities. Sickness.”

I look closely, feeling a little foolish. I don’t know anything about brains. The ones I see are usually in bits, scattered across the ground or splattered against walls from bullets from my own gun. This creature’s brain looks like any other brain, as far as I can tell.

“Am I missing it?” I finally ask Tah.

“No. There’s nothing to see. The brain looks normal.”

“This thing was not normal.”

“I believe you.”

“And you saw the weird teeth.”

“Yes, yes,” he says, shuffling over to the sink. He runs the water, washing his hands with a bit of root soap. “You do not have to convince me.”

“I’m not trying to convince you.”

He lifts his eyebrows but doesn’t say anything. Instead, he shuffles back to the sink and pours himself a glass of water. I huff, irritated. Sometimes talking to the old man is like going to a confessor. He makes me feel guilty even when I haven’t done anything wrong.

He motions for me to sit, then pulls out the chair across from me and carefully lowers himself down. He takes a moment before he speaks. “Tell me what you saw. Out there, in the forest. Tell me what this creature did.”

“I told you. He was trying to eat this girl. I shot him through the heart, a clean shot that should have taken him out. I took another shot and blew out his shoulder, but he still kept coming. Turned into a knife fight. I won.”

“Did he speak to you?”

“Speak to me? There wasn’t exactly time for conversation.”

“I mean did he use words?”

I run through the confrontation in my mind, coming up blank. “I can’t remember. No, I’d say no.”

Tah drinks his water, staring out into the distance.

“Talk to me, Tah.”

“I think this is . . . very bad.”

“Yeah. I do too. But why don’t you tell me why.”

“Why her throat, Maggie? Why not her heart? Or her softer belly?”

“Doesn’t make sense.”

“Unless there was some reason, something he wanted.”

“Like what?”

He exhales heavily. “I don’t know. It’s not in any stories I know, this monster who eats the throat.”

“Do you think there could be more?”

“More monsters?” He shrugs his thin shoulders. He pushes himself up from the table. Stands there for a moment. Then sits back down. “I can’t say for sure, but this creature . . . I think it was not born but created. By someone powerful.”

“Created?” The walls around me seem to shimmer, hazy and insubstantial. I want to blame the caffeine, but I know it’s a sudden rush of fear making me dizzy.

He looks at me, his eyes wrinkled and kind. One of his hands rests on the table. The other is wrapped loosely around the old blue tin mug. An oversize silver ring on his middle finger glints weakly in the artificial light. “You’re not going to like this.”

“I already don’t like it, and you’re making me nervous.”

“I can’t tell you much about this monster, but I know it craves human flesh. But not for food. I think it’s looking for something. Like I said, something it’s missing. And the only way that could happen is if someone made it, used bad medicine to shape it.”

“Witchcraft.” My voice is soft, breathy. “I know. I smelled it on him.”

Diné witches are powerful, men and women who trade their souls for dark magic, who take the shape of night creatures to travel under the cover of darkness, who dress in jewelry raided from freshly dug graves. It was a witch who led the pack of monsters that attacked me the night I met Neizghání, whose violence still haunts me. Am I really going to go looking to stir up something like that? Now the kindness in his eyes makes more sense.

“This is not my problem, you know,” I mutter under my breath. “I did my job and got paid. If I go running off now to try to find this witch or whatever it is, no one’s going to pay me for it.”

“You came to me for a reason, Maggie,” Tah says quietly. “I know you’ve been sitting alone in your trailer these months, waiting for Neizghání. But maybe it’s time you move on without him.”

“I don’t know, Tah. I have clan powers, sure, but I’m no Neizghání. I’m not immortal. That witch gets to me, I’ll die like anybody else. And I don’t really want to die.” He doesn’t say anything, so I spit out what’s really bothering me. “Cannibal. Witchcraft. It’s all a little too familiar, isn’t it?” I may not talk about the night that I met Neizghání, but he knows the general details.

“Are you scared?”

“Hell, yes.” I push back in my chair. “I would be stupid not to be, taking this on alone.”