"Do not be dense. Let him hunt. Haven't you at least figured that part by now?"
He was mocking her, and she felt a sudden edge of hate for his superior manner. How could he possibly know so many things that she did not?
"If you know so much, then why haven't you hunted these creatures down?"
"Because I am not you," he answered calmly.
She stood up again, pacing. "I don't even know where to look. How do I start?"
Without warning, his expression became closed, as if he were a living book suddenly tired of producing information. He got up, went to the door, opened it, and repeated, "Use the dog."
Her fear concerning her fate threatened to emerge once more as the tangle of coincidences grew more entwined. How did Chap fit into all this?
Welstiel's opening of the door announced the end of her visit. Besides, he was apparently strong willed, and any further pushing on her part might lead to alienating the only outside source of information she'd found so far. She stepped into the hall and then turned back to him. "How do I kill them?"
"You already know. You've practiced it for years." Without another word, he closed the door. Magiere made her way quickly back up the stairs, and hurried through the lobby, glancing once at Loni on her way out of the foyer. For all Welstiel's cryptic discussions, only two points truly bothered her. First, to the best of her knowledge, Welstiel had never even seen Chap, but he knew a great deal about the animal. And second, he either knew or pretended to know aspects of her past that she did not. Though that last issue troubled her some, she'd never really cared about her past. There was little worth remembering.
In the years before Leesil, all she had was loneliness, which turned to hardness, which turned to cold hatred of anyone superstitious. A mother she'd never known was long dead, and her father had abandoned her to a life among cruel peasants who punished her for being spawned by him. Why would she want to remember such things? Why would she want to look back? There was nothing worth concern in the past.
As she walked quickly toward home, she noticed the sun had dropped a bit lower. She suddenly felt an urgency to get back to Leesil. For all his cryptic words, Welstiel was right about one thing. They had to give up their defensive position and go after their enemies—and they had only a few hours to prepare before sundown.
* * *
Sitting on his bed in his room, in complete solitude, Leesil decided that he hated uncertainty more than anything else, perhaps even more than sobriety. At the moment, he was as sober as a virtuous deity, and that condition gave him clarity— another distasteful state of affairs.
Unlike Magiere, he'd neither bathed nor slept and the odors of blood, smoke, and red wine permeated his nostrils. He knew he should go downstairs and wash, but something kept him here in his room.
Brenden had left the tavern for his home, promising to return soon with appropriate weapons. Caleb had taken Rose into their room several hours ago so he could speak with her. He had closed the door and not come out. Chap still lay by Beth-rae's body, which Caleb had carefully cleaned and laid out in the kitchen in case anyone stopped by to pay respects. And Magiere had disappeared sometime during the afternoon.
Leesil was alone and sober. He was not sure which of those conditions he disliked more.
He went over to a small chest Caleb had given him for storage. Since Constable Ellinwood's examination of the murder scene—or lack of it—Leesil had taken a few private moments to remove Ratboy's dagger from under his clothes, clean Chap's blood from the blade, and store it away. He now pulled it from the chest, careful to grab it by the blade and not the handle. Even while cleaning it, he'd been careful not to wash the handle, for that was the one place he could be certain Ratboy had touched. He would have need of any lingering trace of presence the dusty little invader had left behind.
And once again, uncertainty gnawed at him. Dropping to his knees, he pried up two floorboards that he'd loosened the first night they'd arrived. A long, rectangular box lay inside where he'd hidden it. Even touching the container made him shiver with revulsion, but he never once in