“Good idea,” I said. Crime scene techs would have been a better idea this morning, before several hundred tourists had access to the area, and before the powerhouse released thousands of cubic feet of water, but who was I to point out someone else’s mistake.
While Emmett pushed back the guides and gawkers and called the sheriff, I followed the tracks on my hands and knees across a gravel parking area to the small, two-lane road. The scent of shifter magic filled my nostrils where the wolves had changed back to human form. Yeah. I knew them. And I knew it was no coincidence that they were here. The attack, here, now, so close to Stirling Mountain, so close to the parley of vamps I was guarding, wasn’t an accident. It was a personal challenge and a private threat, issued on the body of innocents.
A growl vibrated through me—Beast, angry, thinking of the photographs. Yearling human. Not experienced kit. Her claws milked into my mind, piercing and withdrawing. Too young to fight off pack hunters. Hate pack hunters. Stealers of winter food. Thieves of meat.
I stood and brushed off my hands again, looking from the street back to the river and the bridge, envisioning the wolves waiting in the tall brush just downstream of the bridge, slinking into the water in the dark, attacking the young woman, Itty Bitty. The wolves dragging her—bleeding profusely, terrified, screaming—to shore and deliberately infecting her with the were-taint. In my mind’s eye, I saw her boyfriend leaping from his kayak, seeing indistinct shapes swarming in the night, hearing her cries, rushing in, swinging a sharp-bladed paddle, only to have the wolves turn on him, savaging him for interfering. Other predawn paddlers coming fast. The weres slipping away in the ruckus. Anger burned under my breastbone. This had happened because of me. The wolves were here because of my actions and decisions. My advice. My plans. Crap.
“The victims are both going to go furry at the next full moon, aren’t they?” Mike said. After the decades of shouting to be heard over rushing whitewater, the guy had a voice with little volume control, but this time, his words were muted with worry.
“Maybe not,” I said. “I have a few contacts with the vamps. They have some healers.”
Emmett snorted, not impressed with vamp healers. He muttered under his breath something insulting about suckheads, weres, and witches in his county. I glanced at Molly, an earth witch, who ignored him, so I ignored the comment too, thinking instead about the logistics of getting a Mercy Blade here to heal the injured couple. I didn’t know if there was a Mercy Blade in North Carolina or Tennessee, but I’d find one somewhere. I turned my attention to other logistics.
“How far”—I paused, uncertain, trying to recall the distance from a long-ago vacation—“is it from here to the Mississippi River?” The last time I saw a grindylow was on a bayou that emptied into the Mississippi, west of New
Orleans. And New Orleans was the birthplace of everything that had happened to me for the last six months, most of it bad. I wanted to know how the green-skinned, semiaquatic grindy got from there to here. Sure as heck not on a Harley.
“It’s four hundred miles from Knoxville to Memphis,” Dave said, his voice raspy and soft, in contrast to Mike’s booming volume. Memphis was a Mississippi port city, and the most direct route overland to the river, but the water-loving grindy hadn’t taken an overland route.
I indicated a group of playboat kayakers coasting in after a run on the Upper Pigeon. The small, human-teenager-sized grindy would likely need as much water as a playboat. “Is it possible to paddle from the Mississippi to here, if you only count water big enough to handle something that size, and you prefer cold water, rocks, and privacy?” I looked around at the numbers of boaters. “Usually.”
The guides both looked northwest, downstream. Dave squinted, shading his blue eyes with a hand, and said, “If you can jump dams and paddle a lot of miles of waterway, all upstream,” he paused to draw in air, and my eyes slid to the scars on his throat. They looked like the result of a down and dirty tracheotomy, though I’d never asked how he came by them. “Then yes. The Pigeon goes west to Knoxville, eventually joins into the French Broad and heads south into northern Alabama. It empties into the Tennessee River, which empties into the Miss.”
Mike added, “I know people who’ve paddled the distance downstream, but it’s a hell of a long paddle even moving with the current. I don’t know anyone who’s paddled it upstream.”