missing totem. Of course, what good did it do him to be upset? The thing was gone - or so he thought.
When I joined him on the couch, our hips bumped. I shifted away. He followed, pressing his jean-clad thigh to mine. When I cast him a quick glance, however, he was staring at the paperwork and not at me.
I left my leg right where it was.
"See this?"
I followed his finger to an extremely accurate pencil drawing of the totem, larger than the actual stone; the markings had been enlarged as well. They were much easier to see this way.
"You're good," I said.
"You have no idea."
That surprised a laugh out of me. The sound made me realize how seldom I heard it. Pretty sad. I was twenty-six and already the laughter had died. Perhaps with this man I could get it back.
Cadotte shuffled the stack of papers - printouts from the World Wide Web.
"What would we do without the Internet?" I murmured.
"A lot of work. I can find more there in an hour than I could find in a week at the library. Aha!" He snatched a sheet out of the center of the pile. "Look at this."
Placing the two papers next to each other, he slid them closer to me. The Internet printout showed an ancient, emaciated being with long teeth and even longer fingernails.
"Matchi-auwishuk," he whispered.
The trees rustled outside, and a sudden breeze came through the open balcony doors. As if expecting it, Cadotte put his hands on top of the papers. The breeze stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
Okay. That was weird.
I glanced at him, but he didn't seem disturbed. By the breeze. Instead, he scowled at the drawings.
"I don't remember seeing that." I pointed at the Matchi-auwishuk.
"I used a magnifier to identify some of the smaller markings. It's there. Take my word for it."
I would. Until he left and I scrounged up my own magnifying glass.
"And take my word on this." He shoved another piece of paper at me.
A shiver ran from my neck to the base of my spine. The Matchi-auwishuk had been ugly, but this was downright creepy - given the circumstances.
The figure was half-man, half-wolf.
"What in hell is that?"
"The wolf god."
The drawing was exemplary, the naked man impressive - sleek and muscled - perfection except for the paws growing where his hands and feet should be. A tail sprouted from his backside and ears from the top of his head. Instead of hair he had fur, and a snout blossomed where his mouth and nose had once been.
But those little foibles weren't what made me shrink away from the table, irrationally terrified of touching the picture or having it touch me.
Nope, what bothered me about the drawing were the damn eyes - sly, intelligent, human.
"Where did you find this?"
"There's an old and obscure legend of the Ojibwe. The wolf god can be brought to life during a blue moon if the way is paved by an army of wolf men. And women."
I turned my head so I could see his face. He wasn't laughing - so I did.
' "What does that have to do with anything?"
"' Jessie, aren't there a few too many coincidences here? The totem, the madness of the wolves, and the blue moon?"
The blue moon. I remembered telling Zee about it the night Karen Larson had been bitten by a wolf. The night I'd found the totem. The night I'd met William Cadotte running around naked in the woods.
"What's a wolf god, and how is it brought to life?"
He shuffled some of the papers, scowled, pushed his glasses up in an absent gesture. "I'm not sure."
"What good are you then?"
"We'll get to that later." He winked. Even in the middle of his delusion, he was propositioning me. Why did I think that was cute?
Cadotte returned his attention to the gibberish he'd been reading. "All I've determined so far is that a werewolf army is needed - "
"Whoa!" I jumped to my feet. "Werewolf army? Where did that come from?"
"What do you think wolf men and wolf women are?"
"A figment of your imagination?"
"Mine and whoever else has decided they want to be the wolf god."
I rubbed my forehead. "Back up a minute. Someone is going to be the wolf god?"
"I guess so. I haven't been able to determine how that happens, exactly, but the making of a werewolf army between the two moons is the beginning."
"Between what two moons?"
"Two full moons in