was his equivalent of Ryan’s wolf grin. He loved the prospect of a hunt as much as any of them. As long as there was action to take he was well satisfied, so long as it was meaningful, with a proper chance of payoff.
“The only question is, how?” Doc asked. “If they manage to elude even our master tracker, Jak.”
“Try again.” They heard the albino’s soft voice from right over their heads, perched on a ledge above the cave. “Catch next time.”
“Mebbe,” Ryan said, but he was nodding, acknowledging the possibility. “They’re good. They know the country. But they make mistakes, double sure.”
“And they don’t know Jak,” Mildred said.
“What are we looking for, exactly?” Krysty asked. “I mean—what are those things?”
“That one local yokel thought werewolves,” Mildred replied.
“We have seen werewolves,” Doc said. “It is just as well young Ricky didn’t choose to share that fact with that distraught young woman. It might quite have swayed the case against us.”
“He wasn’t with us when we were down in Haven, Doc,” J.B. said gently.
“Ah. So he was not. My apologies. Time…my time is all out of joint, it appears…”
“Still good,” Ryan said. “But I’m not willing to jump that far quite yet. The baron and his lady down there were special cases.”
“Muties?” Ricky suggested.
“Albinos not—” Jak began, with quiet heat.
“We know, Jak,” Ryan said. “Albinos aren’t muties. But we also know some muties are albino.”
“We lack sufficient facts to speculate,” Doc said.
“Speculation doesn’t load many magazines,” Ryan agreed. “What interests me is, you shoot these things, they holler and bleed. Meaning also, you shoot them enough, they die.”
“So you want to stay here, in the Pennyrile,” Krysty said carefully, making sure her wishful thinking wasn’t making her read more into Ryan’s words than he meant to put in them, “and look for evidence even Wymie will have to accept.”
“Go hunting,” J.B. stated.
“Bull’s-eye,” Ryan said. “Fact is, it’s not like there’s anywhere really safe in Deathlands. Shy of the grave.”
“That crazy chick in the gaudy was right about one thing,” Mildred said. “They don’t call these Deathlands for nothing.”
“Got a plan, Ryan?” J.B. asked.
“Go scout around. Keep our eyes skinned. We know they hang out around the dig site, so we can inspect the area around it triple close. Better than we did this afternoon. See if we can cut sign on a second pass.”
“And if we don’t?”
Ryan shrugged again. “Widen the search, I reckon. There doesn’t seem much point in continuing with the scavvy operation until we figure out who these hoodoos are and how to keep them off our necks anyway, the way I see it. We can head off the local folks from doing anything rash, so we won’t have to ventilate a power of them.”
“Now?” Mildred asked. She yawned. It wasn’t an attempt to back up her question—not consciously. She was that beat.
It had been a long, hard day before they’d had to face down wild murder accusations and a potential lynch mob.
“Mildred, the way our asses are dragging, we’d be in double-deep shit if we ran into any of the shadowy bastards. If Jak couldn’t follow their tracks in the daylight, we bastard sure aren’t turning up anything now.”
He straightened and stretched.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
“What a mess,” Mathus Conn said, shaking his head.
The ruins of the Berdone house still smoldered, drooling dirty brown smoke into a mostly cloudless blue morning sky. The sweetish smell of overcooked meat spoiled the freshness of a new day’s air. It even overpowered the stink of still-burning wood.
“You didn’t expect it to be pretty, did you?” his cousin and chief lieutenant, Nancy, said.
He grunted and rubbed his chin. “Just funny how it always turns out worse than you expect.”
“I always hear tell of how your imagination makes things worse than they really are,” Tarley Gaines said. “But then the reality usually sucks harder.”
The three, along with a few of Tarley’s kinfolk and half a dozen or so well-disposed or just curious ville folk from Sinkhole, had trekked out to the Berdone location to see for themselves what could be learned from the site. It was clear that Wymie had been telling the truth.
At least so far as she knew it.
“So who set the house afire, I wonder,” Conn said.
“Don’t see as we’ll ever know for sure,” Nancy replied. “Mebbe the outlanders did it. Mebbe Wymie did it in hopes of trappin’ some of whoever chilled her family inside.”
“Speaking of which,” Tarley said. “Yo, Zedd. Find any chills in there?”
“Two,” came back the voice of one of his nephews from inside the gutted house. Like many established homes in the Pennyrile, the outer walls were stoutly built of fieldstone, not scraped-together scavvy and newly sawn lumber the way villes like Sinkhole tended to be. Wymie’s great-grandfather, a man remembered only as “Ax,” had built the house with the help of his sons, after setting up a successful wood-cutting claim in the area.
And now it’s gone to ruin overnight, Conn thought, shaking his head.
“Reckon we’d best go see for ourselves,” he said.
* * *
“NUKE THAT MATHUS CONN!” Wymie exclaimed, slamming her fist on the breakfast table in the boarding house Widow Oakey ran. The assorted crockery clattered and tinkled. “I can’t believe he stuck up for those outlanders like that!”
“Now, Wymie,” the widow said, tottering in from the kitchen holding a steaming pot of spearmint tea on a battered tray. “You got no call to be pounding around raising a fuss like that.”
Wymie judged the old lady had to have seen her. She was deaf as a rock, unless you hollered in her face. At that there was no telling how much was lip-reading rather than any kind of hearing.
Widow Oakey was a tiny woman, who seemed to consist entirely of a collection of dried hardwood sticks bundled up in what had most likely started its existence as a gingham dress, but now seemed mostly made up of roughly equal amounts of soaked-in seasoned sweat and patches, all topped off by a bun of yellowish white hair. She seemed frail and so bound by arthritis and rheumatism that her joints barely functioned at all. Yet Wymie knew she chipped her own kindling like a pro, and her cooking was better than passable good.
It was her housekeeping that fell by the wayside.
“Why are you wishin’ death and devastation on Conn?” asked Garl, one of her fellow lodgers, from across the table. A few fragments of scrambled egg dribbled from the side of his mouth and cascaded down his several chins toward his belly, which kept him so far back from the table his comically short-seeming arms had trouble reaching his plate. He looked as if he went straight from being a baby to being a vast, gnarled, weathered, grizzly baby, without passing through the intervening stages of childhood and adulthood.
“How dare he stick up for outlanders who chilled my baby sister?” she asked hotly. “Cannie coldhearts.