“Remember when I said our case involved a wendigo in the Appalachians?”
During one of my required weekly check-ins with my team, Clay had filled me in on the details of their case. I was their sounding board, though it didn’t involve black magic. Therefore, it shouldn’t have involved me.
That assignment had called them away on Halloween night, hours after we closed the copycat case.
Poor Colby had been heartbroken. She still pouted because they left before taking her trick-or-treating.
“I remember being grateful I didn’t have to fool with it, yes.”
Wendigos resembled emaciated corpses more than anything else, with tufts of wiry fur on their ears and down their spines. Their jaws were alligator-strong, and their rows of serrated teeth belonged on sharks. Their fingers were triple jointed, and their nails cut open their prey with scalpel-like precision.
And they stank. Phew, boy, did they stink. Like durian fruit but meatier.
After I wrung out the daemon’s hair as best I could, I helped him straighten to avoid an epic hair flip that would have splattered water all over creation.
“Yes, well.” Clay mashed his index finger to his thumb. “We have a tiny problem.”
“Obviously.” I edged past the daemon, who admired himself in the mirror. “What kind of problem?”
“The wendigo is back.”
“Are you sure it’s the same one?” They tended to travel in packs. “It could be a clanmate or its mate.”
“Ace tore off its head.” Clay let me digest that. “This is the wendigo, spotted in town two days later.”
Removing his phone from his pocket, he showed me the screen. The wendigo’s neck was a mass of black sutures. I enlarged the photo to be sure I wasn’t imagining things, but sure enough, a row of tall stitches appeared to be anchoring its head onto its body.
“Who would offer a wendigo medical care?” I chewed my bottom lip. “That’s downright bizarre.”
They were humanoid in shape, with limited speech capabilities, but they were animalistic in thought and behavior. You couldn’t communicate with them. Their language wasn’t replicable with our vocal cords.
It was a whole thing, decades ago, to teach them basic signs, but they were too food motivated and often ate their instructors the second the treats ran out. Needless to say, that experiment didn’t last long.
“See, that’s the problem.” He pocketed his phone. “This was done postmortem.”
While most supernatural races would be dead as a doornail after decapitation, there were a few able to regenerate if they got their head back on their shoulders fast enough. Wendigos were one of them. They were so close to dead, forced to feast on organ meat to survive, they were nearly impossible to kill.
But what he claimed surpassed even a wendigo’s healing abilities. “Are you thinking necromancy or…?”
“The Society for Post-Life Management only involves itself in necromancer and vampire affairs.”
Seeing as how the race of undead humans was their creation, really, they only cared about themselves. I didn’t mind that. It took two factions off the board, for the most part. Black Hat only stepped in when an issue arose that the Society failed to handle to the director’s satisfaction.
Bonus for us, the Society didn’t know about Black Hat, or at least not the scope of our operation.
A necessary evil when tasked with policing the agencies responsible for punishing their own.
“That leaves black witches.” I should have led with that. “I assume the director signed off on this?”
“You are our black magic consultant.” A twinkle brightened his eyes. “He couldn’t very well say no.”
He could, but he wouldn’t. He wanted me invested, wanted me active. Simply put, he wanted me back.
“What, exactly, is this zombigo doing in Appalachia?”
“Eating people.” He rolled a hand. “Rewind.” He tilted his head. “Did you say zombigo?”
“Um, yes?” I didn’t see the problem. “What would you call a resurrected wendigo?”