“How do you know werewolves did it?”

“Because the family hired me to kill the first one. They told me.”

1 shook my head. “Whoa, what?”

'The parents, the kid's parents.”

“The wolf was a kid?”

“No, he was twenty years old! This is all coming out wrong.”

“Then calm down. Start over.” I held my coffee mug to my face and breathed in the steam. I had to calm down as well, if I expected Cormac to be civil. He was right on the edge.

“They knew he'd gone wolf, knew he was killing sheep, and they were afraid he'd start in on people. Nobody could control him so they called me.”

“They just gave up on him? Their own son and they wanted him dead?”

“It's a different world there. Out in the desert, on the edge of Navajo Country. Shit like this happens and they look at it as evil. Pure evil, and the only thing to do with it is kill it. You've seen this kind of thing, you know they're right.”

1 had, and I did. I just hated to admit it. “What happened?”

“I knew his territory, knew how to find him, because he was going after livestock. But 1 got out there and found two sets of tracks. Werewolves are tough, but one of them couldn't have done that much damage on his own. His family didn't know there were two of them.”

“Him, and the wolf who turned him?”

“Maybe. I don't know. They had no idea who the second one was. Or they wouldn't tell me. That was when I called Ben. The whole job was a mess, I should have just walked away. Too many details didn't fit—like the noise. These two had slaughtered three flocks by the time i got out there. Somebody should have heard something.”

“How did you find them?”

“I left Ben by the Jeep, with a gun. He was on the hood, keeping a look out while I went to set bait.”

I almost interrupted again. Bait? Is that how he hunted werewolves, with bait? But I didn't want to stop him—he might not start the story again.

“I found them right away. One of them. I shouldn't have, it was too easy. And it still wasn't right—the wolf had red eyes. I've seen plenty of wolves, wild ones and lycanthropes, and none of them have red eyes. But this thing—if it wasn't a werewolf I don't know what it was. I sure as hell didn't like it. I aimed my rifle at it—and then I couldn't move. I tried to shout to Ben, and I couldn't move. I couldn't even breathe. I've stared down werewolves before. I've never frozen up like that.

“I'd be dead, I'm sure that thing would have ripped out my throat if Ben hadn't fired just then. Then it was like somebody flipped a switch and I could move. And there was Ben, on the hood of the Jeep, with a wolf on top of him. I don't know if he shot at the thing and missed, or if it was just too fast for him. But it got him. He didn't even scream.”

Sunlight covered the clearing outside my house, but Cormac, turned away from the window, was still gray with shadows.

“What did you do?” I whispered. I almost didn't dare breathe.

“I shot the wolf. It was a lucky shot, one in a million. I could have hit Ben instead.”

“Then what happened?”

“The other wolf—the one in front of me—screamed. Not howled, not barked. Screamed like a human. Like a woman. I turned back and was going to kill it next, but it was already running. I shot at the thing but it got away.”

“And the wolf you did hit?”

“It was the kid, the one I'd been hired to get. The shot knocked him right off the Jeep. When I got to him he was dying. 1 put a bullet in his head. He turned back to human. Just like he was supposed to.”

He was right to do it. A cold, rational part of myself knew that a werewolf who couldn't control himself, who killed indiscriminately, was too dangerous, impossible to control within the legal system. What are you going to do, call the cops and stick him in jail? Strangely enough, that rational part of myself included a little bit of the Wolf, who knew exacdy what to do when one of our kind got out of line. Only one thing to do. To my human side, to my gut emotional level, it still looked like murder. I couldn't reconcile the two views.

“And Ben?”

“I brought him here. That's the whole story.” He drew in a slow breath and let it out with a sigh. “He's not cut out for this shit. He never was.”

“Then why did you drag him into it?” My voice was stiff with anger.

For the first time, Cormac looked at me. “He's the only one in the world I trust.” He walked to the doorway to the bedroom, leaned on the frame, and stared in.

It wasn't true, that Ben was the only one he trusted. If that were true he wouldn't have brought Ben here. But I didn't say that.

Cormac straightened from the door. “You mind if I crash out on the sofa?”

“Be my guest,” I said, trying to smile like a gracious hostess.

“I'll get my bedroll out of the Jeep.” He went to the front door and opened it.

Then he stopped. He stared for a long time, holding the knob, not moving.

“What?” I set down my coffee and went to look out the door.

There on the porch lay another dead rabbit, gutted like the first. I wasn't surprised when I looked at the outside of the door and found a cross made of smeared blood, fresh blood covering the stained outlines of the old cross. It hadn't been there when Cormac got here with Ben. They hadn't been here that long, maybe an hour. So this had happened within the hour, and this time I hadn't heard a thing. Of course, I'd been a little preoccupied.

I groaned. “Not again.”

Cormac glanced at me. “Again? How many times have you been animal sacrifice central?”

I went outside, smelling the air, staring at the ground, looking for footprints, for anything that showed someone had been here, how this had happened. But the blood and guts might have appeared out of thin air, for all the evidence I saw. I stood on the porch, circling, studying the clearing, the house, everything, which even in the morning light had taken on a sinister cast. The place didn't feel cozy anymore.

“I wanted Walden and got Evil Dead,” I grumbled. I faced Cormac. 'This is the second one. You have any idea what it means?”

The scene seemed to pull him out of his recent trauma-He sounded genuinely fascinated when he said, “1 don't know. If I had to guess I'd say you've been cursed.”