CHAPTER 19

Liam thanked God for the mist that shrouded everything. Dawn was still an hour away, and he needed the time.

There was something strange about Marty Daniels. Liam planned to find out what. Or at least talk to someone who could.

That Kris hadn’t seen the man in years, had no idea even what he did for a living, was troublesome enough. That he’d shown up at Loch Ness at the same time as a murderer was bloody disturbing.

Not that Liam thought Marty had tried to kill his own sister. What possible reason could he have? But the guy was hiding something—most likely himself—from someone who might.

Liam had been wondering why anyone would want to hurt Kris. Certainly she’d come here to debunk Nessie, the livelihood of hundreds, if not thousands. But Kris wouldn’t have been able to, and everyone in Drumnadrochit knew it.

Most likely the culprit was an outsider. Most likely the same culprit who had been snatching and killing young girls. Kris’s brother was the first lead they’d had.

As usual, the lights were on at Alan Mac’s house. Sometimes Liam thought the chief constable slept less than Liam did himself.

A soft knock on the back door was answered so quickly Alan Mac had obviously been nearby. The steaming cup of tea on the kitchen table proved it.

At the sight of Liam, the big man stilled. “Another body?”

“No.”

He stepped back, an invitation to enter that Liam accepted. “What then?”

Alan Mac poured a second cup of tea, pulled bread from a cabinet, set out butter and jam. Whenever Liam wasn’t occupied with the loch, he tried to eat as much as he could. Otherwise he just didn’t have the time.

Between bites, Liam related all that he knew. In the process, he discovered that Kris had never told the constable she’d been shoved off the cliff.

“Did ye see anyone?” Alan Mac asked.

“No.”

“She could have slipped.”

“Which is probably why she didnae tell ye.” Liam took more bread, loading it with both butter and jam. “Ye never believe what she says.”

“That’s my job, if ye recall.”

“Yer job is to make sure no one knows what I’m up to. It isnae to make women who’ve been attacked believe they’re crazy.” Liam fixed Alan Mac with a glare. “Dinnae do it again.”

Alan Mac swallowed as if he’d just downed a dry biscuit with no tea. “Aye, Uilebheist.”

Liam narrowed his eyes.

The constable straightened. “Aye, sir.”

“Find out all ye can about Marty Daniels,” Liam ordered, gaze on the window, where the dark had now truly begun to lighten.

“Do ye want me to round up the man? Ask him a few questions at the station?”

Liam shook his head. He doubted Alan Mac would be able to “round up” Marty. The guy hadn’t stayed out of sight this long by being bad at it. Besides—

“He willnae tell ye anything. Best to let me ask.”

Liam could be quite persuasive when he was of a mind to be.

He remembered Kris’s face in the dim light of the cottage. That yearning sadness, the past memories of hurt.

He was definitely of a mind to be.

“Find out where he’s been,” Liam instructed. “Why is he here? What does he do? Where does he do it? Ye ken?”

“Aye.” Alan Mac nodded. “Ye can count on me.”

*   *   *

Kris was still trying to get her mind around her brother being in Scotland when her computer screen shimmied. She was reminded of the front window of the starship Enterprise, which sometimes shimmied exactly like that right before a transmission came in from a Klingon warship. Instead, a transmission came in from Edward Mandenauer.

The old man appeared as tired as Kris felt. What was going on out there in the world?

Quite a bit, and all the time, from the looks of him.

His gaze paused on her bruised cheek, as everyone’s would until the mark healed, but he merely narrowed his eyes momentarily, then spoke in his usual manner—as if he had somewhere else to be and yesterday.

“I’ve found similarities to other murders.”

“In Drumnadrochit?” If that was the case, these people were really good at keeping secrets.

“No. There have been a string of deaths throughout the world matching the manner in which a local legendary being might kill.”

Kris, who had picked up the yellow legal pad on which she’d first doodled Effy’s tattoo and begun to sketch the others, glanced up. “I don’t understand.”

“In Crete,” he continued, “seven victims have been found at the bottom of cliffs, with donkey tracks on the roads above.”

Kris rubbed her forehead. “I’m gonna need more than that.”

“There is a legend in those mountains of the Anaskelades, a donkey that wanders the hills offering free rides.”

“Offering? As in ‘Hey, pal, want a ride?’”

“Though I have often been amazed at the stupidity of humans, I do not think that anyone confronted with a talking donkey would decide that accepting a ride was a good idea.”

“You never know,” Kris muttered. Humans and stupidity did seem to go hand in hand, regardless of race, creed, or international borders.

“Touché,” Edward agreed. “However, the Anaskelades is not a talking donkey. It is a shape-shifting donkey.”

“Which is so much less weird.”

“It does not shape-shift until its victim climbs aboard. Then it grows to the size of the nearest mountain and tosses the unsuspecting traveler into the abyss.”

Kris couldn’t think of anything to say to that, except: “What else you got?”

“In Australia, over a dozen bodies have been found in remote areas without their heads. Investigation reveals they were followed for many miles by a human with very large feet.” Kris lifted her eyebrows, waiting for more. “The locals began to whisper of the Thardid Jimbo, a cannibalistic giant that tracks its favorite food—humans—and partakes of the delicacy of their heads.”

“Okay,” Kris said. She didn’t know what else to say.

“In Hudson Bay cairns have been discovered. Beneath them lay the corpses of five whose backs had been splayed and holes drilled through their bodies.”

“What kind of monster does something like that?” Kris asked.

Edward answered as if the question had not been rhetorical. “The Ikuutayuuq, an Inuit legend, which translates to ‘one who drills.’ The Ikuutayuuq hunt down any human in their territory and torture them to death, then build a cairn to mark the kill.”

Kris considered what he’d told her. She was still missing something. “Why do you think these incidents are similar? They’re all different places, different legends, different modes of death.”

“And they are all fake.”

“Fake legends?” Kris perked right up.

“Of course not. Haven’t you discovered by now that legends are real?”

Had she? Kris remembered plunging into the loch, the cold, the murk—

The monster.

“Maybe,” she allowed.

She wasn’t ready to tell anyone else what she’d seen while in the loch. She’d been scared, drowning, dying—not having a hallucination would have been strange. Certainly Kris was less inclined to dismiss Nessie as fiction, but she wasn’t willing to completely accept her as fact, either. Not until Kris saw the creature with her own eyes, in broad daylight or even beneath the moon. However—

“I don’t think Nessie is doing this.”

Mandenauer’s gaze sharpened. “Why not?”

Kris explained how she’d been attacked in her yard and again on the overhang above Loch Ness, finishing with: “The last victim had a silver knife stuck in her chest. Why drown and then suddenly stab? Why stab if you can drown? Besides, Nessie doesn’t have the opposable thumbs necessary to—” Kris made a stabbing motion.

“Unless she’s a shape-shifter,” Mandenauer said. “Then she could take human form, use the weapon, then become … whatever the monster is.”

“I thought shape-shifters couldn’t touch silver.”

“Most can’t. Some can.”

Fabulous, Kris thought

“There’s one other problem,” she began, and the old man lifted his bushy white brows. “The silver knife that was found in the chest of the latest victim…” Kris pressed her lips together, not wanting to say the rest, but she had to. “Was probably mine.”

His brows crashed downward. “Whoever is behind the murders is aware you are looking into them.”

“I kind of got that as I was flying off the cliff and into the water.”

“So you conclude that a human is behind the attacks?”

“The ones on me, definitely.” Human hands had bonked her on the head, then attempted to drag her into the loch. Nessie could not have pushed Kris off the cliff when she’d been waiting below to pull her out.

“What about the bodies?”

“If there’s a body attached,” Kris said firmly, “Nessie isn’t involved.”

“Continue,” Mandenauer murmured in the tone of a professor with a brand-new but very promising student.

“If the monster were killing humans, she’d make certain they remained at the bottom of the loch. Why ask to be hunted any more than she’s already been?”

“You think Nessie possesses the intelligence to reason that far?”

“I think to avoid detection this long she’s gotta have human-level intelligence.”

Edward nodded slowly. “You’re right.”

“One thing I don’t get,” Kris continued. “Nessie’s legend is of a benign being that slowly trolls the loch and peeks out at the tourists now and again.”

“Saint Columba would disagree.”

“Considering that there have been no documented cases of monster attacks since, I’m thinking Columba used his tale of the monster to make a play for sainthood.”

Edward tilted his head. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“All the cases you mentioned involved a—,” Kris made quotes in the air with both hands, “bad monster. But Nessie, according to most reports, isn’t bad. So how is this case similar to the others?”

“Nessie isn’t really the legend.”

“Everyone knows that the Loch Ness Monster is called Nessie.”

“Only since the 1930s.” Mandenauer frowned, glanced down, rustled some papers, and squinted. “May 1933 to be exact. The Inverness Courier followed up on several sightings, and within the year Nessie was born.”

“But, according to Columba, Nessie has been here since the sixth century. Probably before.”

“The monster was here; however, the legend of Nessie was invented by the media. Before 1933, the locals called it the beastie. And they knew what it was.”

“What?” Kris asked.

“Of all the local legends the one that most fits is the tale of a supernatural water horse. Each Uisge.”

“Kelpie,” Kris murmured. “Except if Nessie is a shape-shifter, wouldn’t she have to be human some of the time?”

“Not necessarily. Monsters do not survive a million millennia without adapting—to time, to place, to climate. If they are very smart, they even encourage the wrong legend to be passed down, thereby ensuring that no one truly knows what they are, where they are, how to find them, or how to kill them. There are also variations within the legends themselves that relate to how they became what they are.”

“How?” Kris echoed.

“Some are born; some are cursed; some are engineered. Bitten. Injected. The possibilities are endless, and any one of them can alter that legend. Sometimes I think there are nearly as many kinds of werewolves as there are werewolves. And even though silver will kill most of them, with others it only pisses them off.”

Kris was beginning to understand why Mandenauer walked around armed for Armageddon. He never knew what he might face, where he might face it, or what he might need to kill it.

She began to wonder not only how he’d survived this long but also how he’d done so with his sanity intact. Although a week ago if an old man had told her how to kill werewolves and other assorted shape-shifters she would have been the first to call for psychiatric assistance. Now, though she couldn’t say with absolute certainty that she believed everything Edward said, she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“When you first learned about these deaths, you believed they were committed by the creature in question, right?” Mandenauer inclined his head. “Then why didn’t you, or one of your agents, go there with plans to blast a monster to smithereens and either do that or snatch the imposter?”

He sent her another of those withering looks that made Kris feel as if she were too stupid to live. In his world, she probably was. “I sent an agent to each place. By the time he or she arrived, the perpetrator was gone.”

“Gone,” Kris echoed. “Isn’t a cannibalistic giant kind of hard to lose?”

“One would think,” Edward said without missing a beat. “Which again makes me favor human and not monster.”

“Because?”

“Monsters remain near their lair. Depending on the myth, some can’t leave. That the killer does says a lot about his humanity.”

“Maybe your agents just couldn’t find him.”

A glare followed this statement. Obviously, if a Jäger-Sucher was dispatched and did not find a monster, there was no monster to be found.

“In each incident,” he continued, “there were clues that led us to believe someone is mimicking the supernatural rather than truly being a supernatural.”

“Like what?” Kris asked, fascinated. She loved taking apart a legend, piece by piece, discovering the truth, then proving it a hoax.

“The actual legend of the Ikuutayuuq involves brothers who hunt together, stalking whatever is in their territory and eliminating it. In the cases reported, only one set of tracks was found and the victims were restrained, hand and foot, indicating a single killer.”

“Maybe this Ikuutayuuq doesn’t have a brother.”

“If the inconsistencies existed in one place only, I might agree. However, as I said, there are inconsistencies in every case. For instance, in Crete the donkey tracks were the size of donkey tracks. They did not grow to the size of a mountainous donkey. The same in Australia. The giant’s tracks…” He flipped his chicken bone fingers outward.

“Not so gigantic,” Kris finished. “So in your opinion we have a traveling serial killer, making use of local supernatural legends to dictate his modus operandi.”

The old man nodded, his gaze distant. “At first I considered the likelihood of a superior shape-shifter with the ability to become each one of these legendary beings. But I concluded that was too far-fetched.”

“Well, thank God for that,” Kris muttered. The idea of a super-duper shape-shifter roaming from country to country, leaving a trail of dead and mutilated bodies in its wake, before parking itself in Drumnadrochit made her very nervous.

“These monsters are rooted in the histories of their cultures,” he continued. “It is very rare for a shape-shifter to be able to assume the form of a being with which he does not share an ancestry. Only a Scot could become a kelpie. Only a Cherokee can become a Raven Mocker. Only a Norseman could become a Berserker. Although…” He frowned. “In America you have that infernal melting pot.”

“So someone could become each one of these shape-shifters if they possess an ancestor from the country of legend.”

“Theoretically,” Mandenauer agreed. “Regardless, what you need to do now is find the culprit and kill it.”

“I’m not so good with the killing.”

“Everyone thinks that, until they are faced with the option of death or pulling the trigger.” He straightened his stack of papers. “I will e-mail you an inventory of the deaths, their legends and locations.”

“I can remember three.”

“Those are only the tales I chose to tell. The list is much longer—Iceland, South Africa, Brazil.” He made a “and so forth” motion with one hand. “We are still searching our databases, speaking to agents about unsolved cases. I will no doubt have updates daily.”

The idea that the murderer in their midst had killed so many times they needed a catalog, and that more instances could crop up daily, scared Kris more than anything ever had. And it should. She was a reporter dabbling in things she had no business dabbling in.

But was she going to stop?

Hell, no.

This was the story of a lifetime.