the branches of the trees in the yard and the grass in the nearby fields. Spring frogs croaked, and the night hunters added their calls. But, gradually, the other sounds died and left only the wind.
The odds that the car was Guayota’s skyrocketed into the certainty zone. Our best chance was for me to kill the tibicenas, one of whom was my friend, and then to hold Guayota off in the hope that, somehow, someone was able to reach Adam. Gary could answer the phone. Maybe that was why he’d had to go with them.
Maybe Guayota would finish off Darryl and me, then head back to his home, where he’d find Adam and the others waiting for him. Probably he’d track down Christy, if that’s what he was doing. It must not be a perfect method of finding her, because she was gone and he was still coming. Maybe Guayota would manage to kill us all—it felt like that kind of night.
From the house, I heard Cookie bark an alert. She was answered by two hunting howls, high-pitched and hungry, one on either side of me. Judging by what I had learned while Gary and I had been chased by the pair of tibicenas, they were maybe a hundred yards apart. The sound they made wasn’t the same one that had made my blood freeze when Coyote had taken Gary and me out. Maybe that meant they were still in a vulnerable form, something I could kill.
A darker shadow moved where there hadn’t been a shadow before, and Juan Flores, who was Guayota, stepped out where I could see him. I didn’t bother aiming my gun at him, though I remembered that he’d staggered back when I’d shot him before. He stopped at the edge of the lawn.
“Where is she?” he asked. “Where have you put her?”
He looked so human—but so did I, I supposed.
“She’s gone,” I told him. “We sent her away when we heard your car.”
“I don’t understand you,” he said, a faint frown between his eyebrows.
“I know,” I told him. For a moment I wasn’t scared, just sad. He was so lost. “She’s not who you think she is.”
“Yes,” he said, and, for a moment, the sadness in his voice echoed mine. “Yes, she is. Do you think that I would not recognize the face of my beloved? I looked across the room, and there she was—she knew it, too. I come to you this night, made strong from hot new blood, but I need her to feel complete. Without her by my side, I am always hungry.”
More bodies somewhere, Tony, I thought.
“We are ready to renew the hunt, and she cannot be hidden from me,” continued Flores in this creepy, reasonable voice I remembered from before. “But she might be hurt if we are forced to continue to hunt her, that is the nature of a hunt. I don’t want to hurt her. If you tell me where she is, I won’t hurt her.”
He was sincere. He didn’t want to hurt her. I thought of Kyle’s story and wondered if perhaps he had not meant to hurt the goddess he’d kidnapped and raped. Intention and results are often different.
“No,” I said.
As soon as I refused, Flores’s eyes flared red, and his face, though still human-featured, lost any resemblance to a real human expression. “Take her,” he said.
Something dark and hot moved in the darkness, and I raised the gun and fired at the tibicena charging from my right as rapidly as I could, though even with my night vision, all I could see were its red eyes, as if it somehow drew the darkness around itself like a cloak.
This was not the dog that I’d killed in my garage; this was the bigger, faster version I’d seen the possibility of when Coyote had taken me to visit Guayota’s house. As Coyote had promised, the bullets—and I knew from the bright spots that appeared and vanished on the tibicena’s body that I was hitting it—didn’t even slow it down. When I felt its too-hot breath, I dropped the gun and dove for my pitchfork.
And then we danced.
I could not trust my sight to tell me where it was, but the coyote knew, and I let her guide my steps. The pitchfork was a better weapon against the tibicena than the mop, crowbar, or wrench had been against Guayota. The long wooden handle didn’t heat up, and the metal ends didn’t burn as long as I didn’t leave