Chills (9 page)

“We have to go,” Jack muttered.

“Come again?”

“We have to get out of here. There are . . . We can't—we need backup.” He swayed where he stood, and Teagan moved to keep him upright, helping him toward the hiking path and in the direction of the tree line.

“Who did this to you, man?”

“They did.”

“The cult?”

Jack shook his head. “The snow . . .” He shook his head, unable to verbalize it.

Teagan carried him back toward the crime scene. About halfway there, they were met by a uniformed officer that Teagan knew in passing, Sabas Moreno Jr. Moreno had been with the force for a little over a year and a half. He was amiable, hardworking, a dark-haired, dark-eyed man in his late twenties with a warm smile and a swagger buoyed less by arrogance than a simple blessing of good health, good looks, enjoyment of his job, and enjoyment of his life.

His usually jovial expression, however, was immediately replaced by one of concern when he saw Jack.

“Shit, Detective Teagan, what happened to him?” Moreno rushed over to help guide Jack across the field.

“He thought he saw someone in the woods—maybe one of those cultists. So we split up to surround the git, and Jack came out of the brush like that.”

The two men maneuvered Jack back to the picnic tables, waving over Cordwell to attend to him.

Jack accepted a blanket but brushed any other help away. Cordwell gave him a skeptical look. “I'm fine,” he said with labored breath, and Cordwell shrugged, backing off. Scratching his forearm absently, Jack glanced over his shoulder, then added, “Really, I'm fine. I just—I fell in the snow, and—and I think the wind got knocked out of me.”

Teagan exchanged glances with Moreno over Jack's head. Teagan clamped the Camel back between his teeth again and gestured for the officer to wait a minute, to hold off asking any questions until Cordwell and some of the other cops hovering around them in concern had gone back to trying to bring order to the scene. It didn't take long; the news crews had finally made it through the snow and were just at the line of police tape, jostling each other and jockeying to get a better view of the carnage. By then, a fluffy layer of snow had accumulated across the benches of the picnic tables and buried most of the blood splatters. The steaming viscera of the butchered had already been bagged and tagged, and Cordwell had begun instructing the CSI team in loading the bodies onto trucks. Many of the bodies had been inspected by Jack already, before Teagan had shown up. There wasn't much for the news crews to see, but it didn't stop them from crowding the officers who had jogged over snow drifts to keep them from crossing the tape.

Teagan glanced around and nodded, satisfied. He pinched the cigarette between two fingers, inhaled its unlit flavor, and pointed it at Jack, saying, “Jack, mate—tell us what really happened. Nothing about falling in the snow, now. Did that—whatever that was in the woods, the figure—did it do this to you?”

“I told you guys—”

“You fibbed,” Teagan said quietly, replacing the Camel between his teeth again.

“And you know that how?”

“Your tell. When you fib, you look over your shoulder, like you're waiting for someone to be walking up on you and catching you out. And you scratch at your forearm like you're doing now.”

Jack looked down, stopped scratching, and sighed. “Okay. But I don't expect that you'll believe what I have to say.”

“Try us, sir,” Moreno said.

“Okay . . . well, that hiking trail there . . . I saw someone, like Teagan said. I thought maybe it was someone who'd come back to the scene. They do that sometimes . . . come back to the scene to admire their handiwork, see the chaos they caused. We don't know a damned thing about these cultists, other than what Kathy's told us so far. We don't know where they are, how much more killing they're planning on—nothing. So I thought if we could nail just one of them . . .”

The rest of the sentence was carried away by a sigh, and his gaze trailed off toward the woods. “Something wasn't right, though. I . . . I think I knew it. The snow, the wind, my being tired—I'm willing to lay this story at the feet of any of those things, but I tell you, I knew in my gut that whatever Teagan and I were trying to get a jump on was just wrong somehow. It was too quiet. It moved too fast. No shadow, no footprints. Like the snow was helping it escape. I don't really know how to explain it better than that.”

“So . . . not a cultist, you mean?” Moreno sniffed, shifting his weight uncomfortably from one frozen foot to the other.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Yeah, I guess. Anyway, I had moved around this tree and I saw him . . . it . . . whatever. I couldn't make out much. I mean, it was sort of camouflaged with the snow and all, so I wasn't even really sure what I was seeing. But it moved. It was the movement, see? It didn't move like a branch or bush in the wind. It moved deliberately. Fast. But then I caught up to it.”

“What was it?” Teagan asked. He wanted to hear Jack say it, to give confirmation of what he himself had seen.

Jack looked up at the men, a look of genuine bewilderment on his face. “I . . . I honestly don't know. A man . . . sort of. Maybe. It looked more like a corpse. Blue,” he said, gesturing to his face, “like it'd frozen to death or something. No eyes.”

“You . . . didn't see his eyes, sir?” Moreno asked.

Jack leveled his gaze at the younger officer. “They weren't there.”

“Ah.”

“I approached the man . . . or whatever . . . and told it to freeze. Heh heh, ‘freeze,' I told it. That's funny.”

“Sir—”

“And it just . . . well, it didn't stare at me. It had no eyes, like I said. But it knew I was there. It knew, and I could feel its disdain. Its disgust. It was like standing so close to a fire that the waves of heat are painful, you know? Except there was no heat at all—it was cold and sharp. And then . . . then there was a blur of snow and it lashed me across the face. It rose up off the ground and twirled into this rope of ice and snapped at me. All around me, the snow did that—swirled into little ice-storm whips. They yanked at my coat, wrapped around my arms and legs, lashed my back and face. It wrapped around my ankle and twisted. . . .” He was shaking now, though it was not easy for Teagan to tell whether that was from the cold blowing under and through the ambulance blanket wrapped around his shoulders or from horror.

“I managed to pull a hand free, and I shot at the figure. I shot it twice.
Boom, boom.
And . . . nothing. But the snow fell away from me and I ran.”

Teagan suspected from Moreno's expression that he was thinking the same thought:
There had been no gunshots, at least none that he'd heard. Could Glazier have only imagined he'd fired his weapon?

Moreno coughed politely. “Sir, I think maybe we should get you—”

“Don't,” Jack said, holding up a hand. “I'm fine. Look, let's just all get back to work, okay? We have a crime scene—a massive fucking crime scene—to process. Get back to your CO, huh?”

Moreno nodded and headed off. Teagan supposed the young officer had questions he'd kept to himself, perhaps none he thought it wise to ask or that he believed Jack could or would answer. That Moreno recognized the wisdom in staying silent instead of pushing the issue affirmed Teagan's faith in him.

“You know,” Teagan said, glancing around the crime scene, “the blue lad—”

“Teagan, please—” Jack put his head in his hands.

“It had light in its mouth.”

Startled, Jack looked up.

“I saw it, too, mate. Just for a minute, but . . . yeah.”

Jack searched his face. Finding truth rather than placation, he nodded. “We can't go back for it now. Later, maybe, but . . . these people need us. These . . . little Gracie. She and the others deserve our attention first.”

“Aye,” Teagan replied, and crossed to another picnic table. Gracie Anderson's body lay in the body bag already. Her little eyes were closed, and flakes of snow blown around on the wind had settled lightly on her eyelashes. Her lips were blue. A symbol like the one found on Oxer, carved post-mortem into the little girl's forehead, made him look away for a moment; a kind of clear gel had been rubbed into the bloodless track. She was wearing a Barbie undershirt; the rest of her had been zipped into the bag, as if tucked into bed.

His tenuous mantle of indifference wavered. The tears that formed in his eyes grew cold and began to freeze to his lashes.

He almost missed the scaly clump of white she was holding between small, frozen fingers. Evidently, Cordwell had missed it, too. The cigarette fell from his lips, unnoticed, to the ground.

“Jack, look at this.”

The other detective joined him at the body. Teagan gestured at the clump.

“Is that skin? From what?”

Before Jack had a chance to answer, Teagan, who had noticed something odd, reached out and yanked it free of the wound in Jack's head.

“Ow! What're you—?”

Teagan held his hand out to Jack. In his palm sat another clump of white, scaly skin, melted a little around the edges. From its center protruded a sharp little tooth like the one Cordwell had found at the Oxer crime scene.

“She grabbed one of... whatever attacked you,” Teagan said quietly, and dropped the clump into the snow. “Whatever made the animal attacks.”

Jack didn't respond, but Teagan supposed they were both wondering the same thing—what the hell (or from it) was out there in the snow?

* * *

Moreno had managed to reach the tree line at the start of the hiking trail without anyone, least of all Jack Glazier, seeing him. The scene was winding down, and more cops were standing around stamping cold feet and cradling cups of warm coffee than actually doing anything productive. It seemed like a good time to slip away.

He didn't know Jack Glazier any better than the reputation which preceded him, one of level-headed efficiency, stoicism, and an understanding of logic and reason that had closed more cases in his nine years in the detective bureau than in the last fifteen or so prior without him. Moreno admired the man's professional career in many ways, and had been happy to find himself under the man's wing, so to speak, and in his confidences earlier that night. Obviously, Jack's perception of events had been a little skewed. Corpses darting through the forest? Snow dervishing up into weapons wielded by unseen hands? But then, who could blame the guy? It was bad out there. Freak snow, bodies piling up like the drifts, no one getting any sleep and everyone on edge . . . plus something very well must have given him that gash on his head. So . . . hallucination, maybe. Hypothermic hallucination. He didn't really know if such a thing existed, but hell, it sounded far more reasonable to him than what Glazier had claimed happened.

Still, he felt a kind of obligation, having been a party to the immediate aftermath of Glazier's incident, to vindicate the man by finding something to explain what actually had taken place in those woods. If it was a Hand member who had attacked Jack—and the possibility was good that it was—then maybe there was something left behind. A footprint protected by an overhanging tree limb and, as yet, unburied by the new snow, or a torn piece of cloth caught on a jagged branch . . . anything. It certainly couldn't hurt his professional aspirations to find evidence of the cult, either.

He turned on the flashlight app in his cell phone and shined it along the trail from which he'd seen Teagan and Glazier emerge. There wasn't much to see, he noted with some disappointment. Massive mounds of snow covered most of the ground; it had started to pile up along the side of the tree trunks too, giving the bark an odd, almost luminescent glow. He let out a long, slow breath and stepped onto the hiking trail, shining the light over the snow. The tiny ice crystals caught the light and sparkled. It would have been kind of pretty, almost sort of peaceful, if not for the circumstances. He followed the trail, examining pockets of darkness between and around the trees, occasionally glancing back at the waning bustle of the crime scene to see if he was missed. It was more of the same: blankets of white enfolding and obscuring blankets of white, piling and spilling over onto more white. It all started to blur after a while, the horrors of the park and the white and the cold and the long hours he'd spent wading through all three. He almost missed the movement to his left, a blue-gray shaft of something sparkling pistoning up and down. He paused, a shaky glove finding the handle of his gun and drawing it out, only to point it at . . . empty snow.

He had a moment to sigh in relief before a muffled thump at his back made him jump. He wheeled around, nearly slipping. A large clump of snow had dislodged itself from the tree behind him.

“Mother of God,” he breathed. He was about to abandon the whole idea and head back to the car when a rustling from the branches above got his attention. He made his way over to the tree, swearing as he sank a leg knee-deep into a frigid drift, and squinted at an inky hole in the pine needles. The branch of needles shifted and from that hole, a glistening, scaly white hand with one extremely long, taloned finger reached out. It disintegrated to flakes that an unfelt breeze picked up and carried a few inches before they melted away. A few seconds later, it reformed again.

“What the—”

A pale head like an anglerfish emerged, baring serrated teeth behind its fleshy lips. Moreno opened his mouth to scream, but the sound died before it could escape him. He raised his weapon to fire at the creature, but in the next second, the thing was on him, tearing at his throat. The heat of his blood melted the snow in a semi-halo in front of him as the thing ravaged its way down his chest. His body dropped.