He reached out and put his fingers on my forehead. I jerked back.

“You don’t feel warm,” he said. “Did you get any of the blood in your mouth?”

“Why am I even talking to you?”

I turned, and he moved to block my way.

“How did it go from Eugene Shepard to that?” He pointed at the head.

“Shepard paid a taxidermist to stuff the ‘hodag’ and paraded it at county fairs for the next several decades. The Smithsonian scientists called him on it, and he had to admit that the whole thing was a hoax, but he didn’t stop displaying it, and people didn’t stop paying to see it.”

“Aha. What was he displaying exactly?”

“I have no idea. I saw a picture of it, and it looked like a large bulldog with horns glued to its head.”

I walked to the edge of the building and looked down at the hodag corpse.

“So it was a fun local legend. Then what?”

Why did he keep asking me about the stupid hodag? “Then the logging business died out, and the town shifted to hodag tourism instead. A hundred years later, they had a Hodag Country Festival, Hodag Park, Hodag BMX Club, Hodag Honda… The high school mascot was a hodag. They even built a giant statue of the creature in front of city hall. Tourists used to take pictures with it.”

“Let me guess, the Shift hit, and the creature came to life.”

“Something like that. Locals might not have believed in the hodag, but the kids did, and some of the tourists too. At some point, all that accumulated faith gained critical mass, and a pack of hodags ran out of the woods and came after the crowd at the Hodag County Fair. Rhinelander is a walled town now. Bad news, hodags lay twenty-five eggs at a time. Good news, their leather and fur fetch a good price. So, the woods are back, but they’re full of hodags.”

“Someone sold the Honeycombers a black-market hodag egg,” he said.

“Probably.”

“Why would Honeycombers send a hodag after you?”

“Because that’s the third time I cut their phone line. I need to find out who hired Jasper…”

I stopped and pivoted to him.

He smiled, showing me a forest of fangs that would give any sane person nightmares for life.

“Nice,” I told him.

“Who’s Jasper?”

“Nobody.”

I pulled a rag from my pocket and wiped Dakkan’s blade. The stench made my eyes water.

“Let’s work together.”

“Let’s not.”

He moved to stand in front of me again. “You and I carried on a civil adult conversation for the last five minutes.”

I blinked at him. “I fail to see your point.”

“You were distracted, and amazingly you didn’t demand that I leave, and you didn’t try to run away from me. Clearly, you can control yourself in my presence.”

“Trust me, I’m doing a superb job controlling myself right now. When I lose control, you’ll know about it.”

“Let’s join forces. The faster we find Pastor Haywood’s killer, the sooner I will leave this city, and your life again will be blissfully free of me, just as you like it.”

He planned to leave again. “Where will you go?” Why did I ask that?

The werewolf shrugged. “Home.”

“Where is home?”

“Not here.”

It was like a stab to the heart. Atlanta used to be his home. Kate, Curran, and Conlan were still here. I was… Right. I wasn’t.

I recognized the look in his eyes. Derek had locked onto a target. It would be impossible to avoid him. I had exhausted all of my emotional reserves trying to shove him out of my orbit. He was powerful. He was an asset. We would help each other, and then he would leave.

“Jasper was the self-proclaimed king of the Honeycomb,” I told him. “A little girl, a street kid, witnessed Pastor Haywood getting into a car with a fatso who took him to identify the artifact. Someone hired Jasper to find her, so he got two of his flunkies and crawled out into the city. I got to the girl first. When Jasper couldn’t find her, he caught one of the other street kids instead. The child wouldn’t tell him anything about the girl or me, so Jasper and his two assholes beat him to within an inch of his life.”

Derek’s hackles rose.

“Jasper had an iron hound and tracked me to St. Luke’s Cathedral. When I came across the three of them, they were dragging the boy on a chain with him. He was black and blue. He couldn’t stand. They broke his leg. They snapped his arm. They shattered his ribs…”

My voice was about to quiver. No. Not happening. I scrambled to maintain some semblance of control. Derek took a step forward.

A bullet dug into the concrete inches from my foot. I threw myself left and ducked behind a wall.

Derek swore and jumped over the edge.

I studied the two people Derek dropped on the concrete. He’d come up the stairs, carrying them by the back of their pants and dumped them in front of me. They seemed slightly rumpled, but their guts were still inside their bodies, which was a huge plus.

The younger one had short chestnut hair and bronze skin and was probably a young girl in her mid-teens dressed in oversized men’s clothes. The older one, about my age, had lighter skin, dark hair, a dark beard, and the kind of look in his eyes that told me he expected to be beaten and had come to terms with it.

“You sent a hodag after us.”

The man spread his arms. “You cut the cable three times. Honestly lady, what do you have against us? Do you cut other people’s phone lines or is it just ours?”

“Just yours.”

He leaned back. “What did we ever do to you? I don’t know you.” He turned to the girl. “Do you know her?”

The girl shook her head.

He turned back to me. “See? We don’t know you. We need that line to survive. We need food, we need clothes, we need ammo, and backyard gardening only gets you so far.”

“Gardening, huh?”

“Yes. We grow things, tomatoes, cucumbers. We’re peaceful folks. We mind our own business.”

I pointed at the hodag’s head. “To grow a hodag to that size, you have to feed it human meat.”

The girl looked freaked out.

Surprise flashed in the man’s eyes, but he recovered quickly. “So, he ate a few corpses. They would have rotted anyway. It’s a circle-of-life thing, lady.”