to see if I could detect Alex through the window, but the blinds were closed so I couldn’t see anything. He’d also closed the back door behind him so there was no reaching him unless I yelled to him or went inside. That meant I would have to confront whatever was on the other side of Achak’s house myself.
No matter. This was exactly what I’d been trained to do. I took a deep, steadying breath and continued sidling along the wall until I reached the end of it. I held still as I listened for the sound of footsteps again or breathing, or anything really that would point to the fact that I had a visitor. But there was nothing. It was almost as if the creature or person on the other side was waiting for me to make a sound in the same way that I was waiting for him or her. Hoping I had the element of surprise on my side, I counted to three in my head and then pivoted on my right foot as I burst forward, with the gun aimed directly in front of me.
At no one.
Because there was nothing there.
Just the path around the house that led to the front door, a path that was covered in snow. I glanced down at it and noticed there were prints in the snow, but they weren’t made from human feet. There were eight of them and from what I could tell, they looked like paw prints. They disappeared into the bushes just to my left. Even though the idea of paw prints should have frightened me, these were too small to be those of a werewolf. They looked like they’d been made by a fox or something of a similar size. Either way, I didn’t imagine they’d come from something threatening.
I breathed in deeply and then exhaled just as deeply. I had to get back to the rear of the house so I could keep watch on the surroundings. There was nothing more here worth investigating. The more I considered it, the more I thought I should have been able to tell the difference between a fox walking through the snow and a man or a wolf. The truth was that I was nervous and it was affecting me. I was putting too much stock into sounds that ordinarily wouldn’t have fazed me. However, this was no ordinary situation because we were talking about werewolves, but the process should have been the same. I had to rely on my police training, whether I was dealing with the supernatural or not.
I glanced down at my watch and noticed eight minutes had gone by since Alex had first stepped foot inside Achak’s home. That meant there were just two minutes left… well, that is, if Alex was also keeping track. I could only hope he was. The last thing I wanted was to get caught and then have to deal with the subsequent questions that would ensue. Not to mention the possible consequences…
I started to retreat to my original stakeout position behind Achak’s house when something caught my attention. It was jutting out of the snow maybe five feet in front of me, past the tree line and into the forest. At first, I thought it might have been a tree root, however, as I further studied it, I decided it was sitting too high to be a root. It probably came up to my knees. I held the gun down at my side as I closed the three or so feet that remained between it and me. Even as I came closer, I still couldn’t detect just what it was. It could have been a branch that was stuck in a snowbank, but the texture didn’t seem quite branch-like.
When I was close enough, I dusted away some of the snow from the object in order to further reveal it, but I still couldn’t figure out what it was. I became more zealous with my dusting and, instead, pushed handfuls of snow away from the thing, until I recognized a large, black nose sticking out from the pile of snow. It was definitely an animal. I wasn’t sure why I was so morbidly curious, but I pushed the rest of the snow away and found the severed head of a deer staring back at me from its lifeless eyes. It was completely frozen.
But it wasn’t the fact that there was a disembodied head that had been hastily thrown