Cole burned the shifter wearing the mayor’s face on a Tuesday afternoon, in a storage unit behind the Mankato courthouse, and didn’t stick around to watch the real mayor wake up in the county hospital with seventy-two hours gone and a story nobody would believe even if he told it.
Monday night, a fairy had taken a baby out of a crib in Willmar.
It took him until Wednesday to run it down a ring of toadstools past a dried creek bed and he got the kid back before the parents finished the police report.
She cried the whole drive to the drop-off.
He left her on the porch in a basket, like something out of a story somebody else was writing.
Thursday morning, a wendigo killed a snowmobiler on a trail north of Hibbing.
Cole didn’t hear about it until Thursday night.
Donna called him at eleven.
He was at a gas station outside Willmar filling the Civic and eating a roller hot dog that had been turning since the morning shift.
Her voice came through the phone flat and cop-level.
“Brenner.”
“Yeah.”
“Got a body.
Snowmobiler.
Torn apart on a trail north of Hibbing.
My deputy found your number in his jacket.”
Cole stopped chewing.
“Your deputy?”
“Rick.
He’s awake.
Doesn’t remember three days but he’s talking now.
Had your number written on a gas receipt in his pocket.
You wanna tell me why?”
“I gave it to him.”
“When?”
“Last week.”
“You give your number to a lot of deputies?”
“No.”
Donna was quiet for a beat.
“The body’s bad, Brenner.
Worst I’ve seen.
Ranger says there’s been tracks in the snow for a week but nothing this close to the trail before.”
Cole looked at the Civic.
Hibbing was four hours north if he drove fast.
“You still at the scene?”
“Just left.
ME’s got the body.
I’m writing a report that’s gonna say ‘animal attack’ and we both know that’s not what this was.”
“No.”
“So what was it?”
Cole counted the pumps in the lot.
Four.
Two cars besides his.
A woman at pump three with a kid asleep in the back seat.
“I’ll be there in four hours.”
“Brenner”
“Stay off the trail tonight.
I mean it.
Don’t send anybody back up there until I call you.”
“What is it?”
“I’ll tell you when I get there.”
He hung up and finished the hot dog.
It tasted like warm plastic and salt.
He got in the Civic and drove.
The road was empty and the night was cold.
He ran the math.
Mankato Monday.
Willmar Wednesday.
Hibbing Thursday.
Three cases in a week was more than the circuit had ever stacked on him at once.
He could take two.
Maybe.
The third one somebody died.
He pushed the Civic to eighty and didn’t touch the radio at all.
Donna met him at the trailhead at three in the morning.
She was standing next to her squad car with her arms crossed and her breath coming out white in the cold.
The ranger station was dark.
The trail ran north into the trees under a low gray sky that looked like snow.
“You drove four hours,” Donna said.
“Yeah.”
“For this.”
“Yeah.”
She looked at him for a long time.
Then she opened the passenger door of the squad car and pulled out a file.
“Rider’s name was Seth Kohler.
Twenty-two.
Went out yesterday morning and didn’t come back.
Ranger found him two miles up the trail at four.”
She handed Cole the file.
He opened it.
The photos were bad.
The body had been opened from the sternum down and parts of it were missing.
The snow around it was red for ten feet in every direction.
The face was intact and the eyes were still open.
Cole closed the file.
“You know what did this,” Donna said.
“Yeah.”
“You gonna tell me?”
“Wendigo.”
Donna’s mouth thinned.
She looked at the trees.
“That’s not a real thing.”
“It is.”
“Brenner.”
“I’m going up the trail.
You’re staying here.”
“The hell I am.”
Cole looked at her.
She had her thumb on the roof of the squad car and her jaw set and her badge clipped to her belt like it was load-bearing.
He could see her deciding.
“If you come,” he said, “you stay behind me.
You don’t run.
You don’t make noise.
If I tell you to go back to the car you go back to the car.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it.”
“I said okay.”
She pulled a flashlight from the car and clicked it on.
The beam cut white across the snow.
Cole got the iron spike and the zippo from the Civic and started up the trail.
The snow was old and hard-packed under his boots.
The trees on either side were tall and black and the trail ran straight for a quarter mile before it curved west.
Donna walked ten feet behind him with the flashlight steady on the ground ahead.
She didn’t say anything.
The body was two miles in.
The ranger had covered it with a tarp but the snow around it was still red.
Cole knelt next to it and pulled the tarp back.
The smell hit him first.
Then the cold.
The wendigo had fed here and left.
That meant it was close.
Cole stood and turned in a slow circle.
The trees were quiet.
No wind.
No birds.
The trail ahead curved into a hollow where the snow sat deeper and the shadows pooled black under the branches.
“Brenner,” Donna said.
Her voice was low and tight.
Cole looked where she was looking.
There were tracks in the snow leading off the trail toward the hollow.
They were too long to be human and the stride was wrong.
The snow around them was disturbed like something had been dragged.
“Stay here,” Cole said.
“No.”
He didn’t argue.
He followed the tracks into the trees with the iron spike in his right hand and the zippo in his left.
Donna came behind him with the flashlight on his back.
The tracks led thirty yards into the hollow and stopped at the base of a pine where the snow was scraped down to the frozen dirt.
There was a cave.
Small.
Dark.
The smell coming out of it was meat and cold and old death.
Cole knelt at the mouth of the cave and clicked the zippo open.
The flame caught and the smell got worse.
He could see bones inside.
A lot of bones.
Some of them were old.
Some of them were new.
He heard the wendigo before he saw it.
A sound like breathing through a wet cloth.
Then a shape in the trees to his left.
Tall.
Thin.
Moving wrong.
“Donna,” Cole said.
“Back to the trees.”
She didn’t move.
The wendigo came out of the dark fast. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
It was seven feet tall and its skin was gray and tight over bones that bent at angles nothing human bent.
Its face was a skull with eyes that were black and wet and its mouth was open and full of teeth.
Cole threw the iron spike.
It hit the wendigo in the chest and the thing screamed.
The sound was high and animal and wrong.
It stumbled back and Cole was already moving.
He grabbed the spike and twisted and the wendigo went down into the snow.
He held it there with one hand on the spike and the other on the zippo.
The flame touched the wendigo’s skin and the skin caught.
The fire went up fast.
Blue at first and then orange.
The wendigo screamed again and thrashed and Cole held the spike until the thing stopped moving.
The smell was burning hair and cooked meat and something chemical underneath.
The flames burned for two minutes and then the body was ash and bone and the snow around it was black.
Cole stood.
His hands were shaking.
His throat was cold.
Not the cold from the snow.
Colder.
He swallowed and the cold stayed.
It settled low in his throat like frost on glass.
He could feel it spreading.
Down into his chest.
Thin.
Permanent.
Thirst.
Faint.
But there.
He turned.
Donna was standing at the edge of the hollow with the flashlight in both hands.
Her face was white.
She was staring at the ash.
“What,” she said.
Her voice was flat.
“What was that.”
“Wendigo.”
“That’s not” She stopped.
She looked at the ash and then at Cole.
“That’s not possible.”
“It is.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time.
Then she lowered the flashlight and her hands stopped shaking and she looked him in the eye.
“I want to learn this,” she said.
“No.”
“Brenner”
“No.”
“You can’t just”
“I can.
Go back to the car.”
Donna’s jaw set.
She looked at him the way she’d looked at him in the diner a week ago when she’d put her hand on his wrist and told him to come back with better cover.
Like she’d already decided and the conversation was a courtesy.
“I’m going to learn this,” she said.
“With you or without you.
So you can teach me or you can watch me figure it out the hard way.”
Cole said nothing.
Donna turned and walked back toward the trail.
Her flashlight beam cut white through the trees and then she was gone.
Cole stood in the hollow and looked at the ash.
The rider had been dead before he’d started driving.
Four hours wouldn’t have changed it.
He could have taken all three cases if he’d known the order.
But he hadn’t known and now a man was dead and a woman was walking back to her squad car with a resolve he couldn’t talk her out of.
The cold in his throat pulsed once.
Faint.
Permanent.
He pulled the notebook from his jacket and wrote it down.
Wendigo.
Faint thirst.
Won’t fade.
Then he walked back to the trail.
The sky was still gray.
It would snow before morning.
He got in the Civic and drove south.
Donna’s taillights were already gone.
There was a vetala in Decorah and a revenant in La Crosse and the niche had limits he was just starting to see.
The thirst would last.
He turned the radio to static and left it there.