CVU2

Chapter 21: Part 5

5

The skinwalkers didn't appreciate the bastard's reprisal on behalf of the mortals in Loring, Montana. The psychic buzzing on the end of the 8th gave Tzaraa first a helping of local news, which she thought would be the night's highlight.

Up in Loring, nine special eyeglasses, nine special swords, and nine special jars of poison had been given out to the tutelaries, all of them strange new weapons invented by the vogelfrei for the detection and destruction of the Navajo monsters. The bastard might have lost the skinwalkers as a reliable 'ally', but he gained a heap of 'looking the other way' from the guardians.

Switching 'channels', Tzaraa picked up the more national news - and almost woke Kudlak, thinking that this qualified as a sufficiently threatening development. Not just golems, but golems that could hurt Otomi!

And the daughter? What had happened to Satri?

For hours Tzaraa could only hear and rehear that the devastation at the Comprachicos estate had been total, the explosive inside the terminator-golem's belly something intended to punish bunkers. Lobotomies among the guards, and full body scarring, ancient treasures destroyed. But no laundry list of destruction mentioned Satri.

On January 9th no more word came about the attack on the Comprachicos estate. Careless babble had been zipped up quickly.

Tzaraa couldn't conduct a remote vision that hunted for the bastard's thoughts without Kudlak to audit her, but she could dance around the periphery, draw a safe ring around him and know that their quarry was still in Salt Lake City during the day, probably giving Ian Edwards a visit.

How would he do it? Tzaraa had nothing but time to wonder about this question as if it were her problem: how to talk an angry kid out of shooting up his school?

Smash all his guns? Not good enough for the tutelaries. Edwards could get more guns later. It wouldn't give inner change, that unspecified mysteriousness guardians tended to go for.

Appear as an angel in Edwards's sleep to frighten him? It would be easy for any vampire to manipulate a defenseless human with a fake visitation, and the bastard was particularly good at mind control. But the Mormon tutelaries couldn't approve of that. Tzaraa still guessed that a fake angelic warning was probably the vogelfrei's first thought, the inspiration automatic whenever he saw a picture of Joseph Smith on someone's wall around here.

Peeping in on mortal minds around her, she didn't detect any news of school shootings, so the vogelfrei hadn't failed just yet. It wasn't until the late afternoon that Tzaraa realized that it was Sunday, and that most of these mortals didn't go to school on Sunday.

When night fell near the end of the 9th her ears heard nothing but the wheezing moan coming from the direction of the shack. That background sound rose and fell but never went away, and it was starting to drive her crazy, but there was no reason for her to leave Kudlak's side without waking him up. Apart from that ironclad rule a lot of the rest was at her discretion - Kudlak Grando wasn't a micromanager. But Tzaraa was starting to feel rudderless.

With no developments on the golem attack out east coming in, the local news thundered with newer business - most of it a lot of jeering at the expense of the shapeshifting witches, who were promising in quick, hissed clips to give aid to the Proofing's hunters. But they were being caught up in Montana and Idaho with the bastard's gifts, and the aether rumbled with news of a fight and the gossip that followed.

After sunset something new attacked Calxor's fellow bikers in Malad City, Idaho, something that tore down the freshly-turned skinwalkers as well with a single blow, something that opened its mouth to bake the strigoi in howling sunlight. The skinwalkers and the vampiric bikers agreed on a nickname for the construct: the White Doll.

Tzaraa's skin crawled. Golem number two was on its feet.