Dead Letter Day (27 page)

“Yep. I’ve seen them at the hospital and at the dojo, too.”

“Always two of them?”

“Only always two.”

“And then there were demonic cows?”

“Yep.”

“Anything else?”

I told her about the episode with the Buick’s radio.

Meredith whipped out her iPhone and started hitting buttons.

“There’s an app for witches?” I asked. “What is it? iSpell?”

“No. There’s not an app for spells, although sometimes I still feel like this thing is magic.” She went silent as she pushed a few more buttons. “I think your crows are Muninn and Huginn.”

“Who?”

“Odin’s crows. They roam the world and report back to
him. And I think those cows might belong to Odin and be reporting to Frigga. The cows could belong to Gefion.”

“Who the hell is that?” I didn’t like this at all.

“One of Frigga’s handmaidens, and the thing with the words blasting out of the radio? Totally could be the work of Saga. Another of Frigga’s handmaidens.”

“So what you’re saying is we’ve somehow gotten ourselves tangled up in the doings of a bunch of Norse gods.” Crap. This was not good news. As much as I didn’t like fooling around with supernatural denizens of the night, dealing with the gods and goddesses of various cultures invariably led to trouble. It’s the stuff myths are made of, after all.

“It’s possible.”

“Why would they be following me around?” That was the part that made no sense.

“It started when you started looking for Paul, right?”

“Yes.”

“So it stands to reason that they have something to do with his disappearance, doesn’t it?”

My heart sank further. It was bad enough to just be skirting the edges of the business of gods and goddesses. If Paul was in the middle of it somehow, we’d be in serious trouble. What on earth—or off of it—would a Norse god need with a werewolf, though? And what did Inge have to do with it? “So what next?”

“I think we should take a look at Inge’s house,” Meredith said, waving her phone at me. “And I have the address right here.”

“How’d you get her address?”

“I did a little scrying. You’d be shocked at how well a smartphone can simulate a crystal ball.” She smiled.

“Technology is indeed a wonderful thing.”

“WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?” I ASKED AS I PARKED down the street after driving past Inge’s house at a snail’s pace. It wasn’t anything special. Your basic blue ranch house with white trim, probably built in the late seventies. It had a small front yard, a concrete pad of a front porch and an attached garage.

“I don’t know, but I didn’t know what I was looking for when I went into the shop either.”

She had a point. We watched for a few minutes in silence. Nothing happened.

“How long are we going to wait to figure out what we’re looking for?” I asked.

“I don’t know that either. Can you sense anything?”

I didn’t from this distance, but thought I’d try to open my senses a little further. After all, Inge was back at the shop. Chances of her melancholy slapping me around here seemed slim. I shut my eyes and tried to relax my defenses. At first, it didn’t feel like I was getting anything except a slight residue of Inge’s sadness. Then I felt something else.

“There’s someone—something—in there,” I said, finally.

“What kind of something?” Meredith sat up straighter in her seat, eyes bright.

I tried to focus on the sensation, to get its flavor. “I’m not sure. It’s really faint.”

“Is there anything familiar about it? Anything at all?”

I shook my head. “Maybe. Maybe something a little wolf-ish about it, but it’s not a werewolf and it’s definitely not Paul.”

A little starch went out of Meredith’s shoulders. It would be a little too much to hope that Inge was keeping Paul in
her basement or attic, subdued by a silver net that the two of us could whip off to rescue him.

“Is it another werewolf?”

I shook my head slowly. I wasn’t sure what it was. Just that it was something. I didn’t think I could get much more from it at this distance either. “Let’s get closer.”

She turned to look at me. “Do you think that’s wise?”

I threw my hands up in the air. “I’m not sure any of this is wise. If we’re meddling with Norse gods we’re pretty much asking to get a lightning bolt up our asses. I don’t see that we have any choice, though. No one else is looking for Paul. No one else thinks he’s in trouble. His only chance is us.”

Meredith frowned at me. “I meant is it wise to do this in broad daylight. Maybe we should wait for nighttime.”

She had a point there. It was unlikely that darkness would protect us from anything in the house. If it was a supernatural creature, it most likely had supernatural senses that would know we were coming. Darkness could, however, keep nosey neighbors from calling the cops on us. I was only planning on a brief reconnaissance mission, though. No breaking and entering. At least, not for the time being.

“Let’s just take a stroll past and see what we can see. If we want to do more serious snooping, we can come back later.”

Meredith agreed and got out of the car, stretching her shoulders and arms.

“Hey, no yoga poses on the sidewalk. That will totally make people talk.”

She shook her head, but stopped. “Fine. Let’s take our little stroll.”

We headed up the sidewalk toward Inge’s house. As I got closer, the sense of whatever it was in the house got stronger. It didn’t get any clearer, though. Not at all.

“This is weird, Meredith,” I whispered to her as we walked.

“Tell me about it. We look about as natural as elves at a goblin festival.”

“No. Not that.” Although she had a point. We looked ridiculous. If I was a neighbor, I’d be calling the cops right now, but that wasn’t what I’d meant. “I can’t tell what’s in there.”

“It’s not like you’ve been able to do that for a long time. It’s kind of new, right? You’re not exactly an old pro at it.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t like it’s something unfamiliar. It’s like it’s all muddied up.” I tried to think of a way to describe it. “You remember when you were a kid and at a restaurant with a self-service soda thing? How you’d mix a bunch of different sodas together and you could sort of taste all the different sodas in there together, but it was something else altogether now that you’d mixed them?”

“So we’ve got a mixed-blood thing in there?” Meredith kept strolling, even though I was slowing down and pulling back on her arm.

“No.” I’d encountered a few of those before. They still were what they were.

“Then what?”

“That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know for sure.” Now I did come to a stop, because regardless of what I didn’t know, I knew that something was about to come out of that house. “He’s coming,” I whispered.

“Who?”

“The thing. It’s coming out.” I turned her so we were walking back toward the car.

She started frantically glancing over her shoulder. I yanked her arm. “Cut it out. You’re being conspicuous.”

“How am I supposed to see what’s coming out of the door if I don’t look?” she whined.

“Wait until we’re at the car.” We were only a few feet away by then.

“This is killing me,” she hissed.

“Stop being so dramatic,” I hissed back, but it wasn’t easy for me either. All the hair on the back of my neck was prickling to a salute.

“Pregnancy is making you really bossy.” She got to the car and walked over to the passenger door which allowed her to turn and look at what had come out of Inge’s house. I turned, too.

“It’s just a kid,” she said, clearly disappointed.

I squinted. She was right. It looked like…a kid. A tall, thin blond kid. I bet he looked a lot like what Ted had looked like at sixteen or seventeen. Would that be what my child looked like sixteen years from now? I couldn’t help it. I stared.

“Who’s being conspicuous?” Meredith asked as she slid into the car.

I shook myself out of my reverie and unlocked the door and slid in, too.

Then I saw him lift his head and scent the air. He stopped in his tracks and turned to look right at our car. For just a second, his eyes blazed red.

I started the engine and got the hell out of there.

“WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?” MEREDITH DEMANDED.

“How am I supposed to know?” I shot back, although I had a sinking feeling I knew exactly what it was. It was one of the things that had been in Leanne McMannis’s garage and one of the things that had bitten Michael Hollinger.

“Because it’s your thing.”

“No. My thing is delivering stuff to things like that, not to necessarily know what they are.”

Meredith opened her mouth, but before she could complain more, my cell phone rang. This time, it wasn’t Ted.

“Hello?”

“I hear you’ve been hanging around town again.”

Chuck. Great. Sam must have ratted me out the second he got back to the hardware store. “What can I say? It’s such a cute little town and I find I’m totally getting into rosemaling.”

“Cut the crap, Melina. I don’t know what you were doing there and I’m not sure I want to know. I think you should come by my place before you head home, though.” He sounded impatient.

“I have, uh, company with me.” The idea of taking Meredith to Chuck’s was unappealing on so very many levels. I wasn’t sure if I was worried about them ripping her to pieces or her cursing them to kingdom come. It seemed like a lose-lose proposition to me and those are my least favorite of all the propositions.

“The witch?” he asked.

I sighed. There didn’t seem any point in trying to get him to use her name and to not make “witch” sound like that word that rhymed with it. “Yes.”

“Drop her somewhere.”

“Like where? On the side of the road?” There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot between town and Chuck’s place. Not even a bar.

“Fine. Bring her. But she stays in the car.”

I cut my eyes over to Meredith. Could I get her to stay in the car? “I’ll talk to her,” I said and hung up.

“What?” she asked, her tone already sharp.

“Chuck wants me to stop by before I go home.” I squirmed a little.

“Why?” Her tone was flat. She really didn’t like Chuck
any more than he liked her. Although honestly it was both of their losses. They would like each other, if they didn’t have to play tug-of-war with Paul all the time.

“He didn’t say.” He hadn’t, had he? He’d just summoned me and then hung up. It must be good to be the Alpha.

“And you’re going to go running because he called?” Her tone had gotten very acid.

“Yep. Pretty much.” It didn’t make me feel good about myself, but pretending it wasn’t true wasn’t going to make me feel any better.

“Fine then. I’ve always wanted to see the seat of power of the Pack.” She settled back in her seat, arms crossed over her chest.

“Yeah, about that…” My words drifted off.

“What?”

“He wants you to stay in the car.” There it was, out.

She exploded. “He wants what? You cannot be serious. You cannot. He expects me to stay in the car like a pet that can’t be trusted in the house?”

I didn’t think his view of her was that benevolent, but that didn’t seem the right tack to take. “Look. Could we maybe not take the most confrontational stance at the moment? You could take a little nap while I see what he wants. It might not take long.”

“How would you feel if you had to wait in the car while I went in?” she demanded.

“Like it would be a good time to take a nap.” That part was actually true. I really felt like I could go to sleep instantly whenever.

She sunk lower in the seat. “Fine.”

“Just don’t chew up my seat covers while I’m in there, okay?”

She shot me such a dirty look that it actually made me laugh.