Blood Trail - By Tanya Huff Page 0,33

this close to a sheep before.

"So," leaning carefully against the fence, she picked a tuft of fleece off a rusty bit of wire and rolled it between her fingers, "I don't suppose you saw anything the night that Jason Heerkens, aka Ebon, was murdered?"

At the sound of her voice, the staring sheep rolled its eyes and danced backward while the other two, still chewing, peeled off to either side and trotted a few feet away.

"So much for interviewing witnesses," she muttered, turning back to look down the lane. "Where the hell are Cloud and Pe... Storm?"

As if in answer to her summons, the two wer burst out of the bushes and bounded toward her, tongues lolling, tails waving. Cloud reached the fence first and without pausing sailed over it and came to a dead stop, flattened against the grass on the other side. Storm, only a heartbeat behind, changed in midair, and Peter landed beside his sister in a very human crouch. The sheep, obviously used to this sort of thing, barely bothered to glance up from their grazing.

Vicki, less accustomed, tried to maintain an unruffled expression. Silently, she offered Peter his shorts.

"Thanks." He slid them on with practiced speed. "We almost had him that time."

"Had who?"

"Old groundhog, lives under a pile of cedar rails alongside the lane. He's fast and he's smart, but this time he made it to his den with only about a hair between him and Cloud's teeth."

"Couldn't you just change and move the rails."

Peter shook his head, bits of bracken flying out of his hair. "That'd be cheating."

"It's not like we're hunting for food," Rose put in, stretching out on the grass. "There'd be no fun in it if we used our hands."

Vicki decided not to point out that there probably wasn't much fun in it for the groundhog either way. She slung her bag over the fence and followed a little more slowly. Rails she might have flag-jumped but wire offered no surface solid enough to push off from. Besides, if I try to keep up with a couple of teenage werewolves, I'll probably strain something. Besides credibility.

She pushed her glasses up her nose. "Where to now?"

"Toward the far side of the big pasture." Peter pointed. "Near the woods."

The woods offered sufficient cover for a whole army of assassins.

Vicki picked up her bag. Time to start earning her money. "Who owns the woods?"

"The government, it's crown land." Peter led the way along the fence, Cloud staying close by his side. "We won't cut straight across 'cause these ewes are carrying late fall lambs and we don't want to bother them any more than we have to. Our property ends at the trees," he continued, "but we're butted up against the Fanshawe Conservation Area." He grinned. "We help maintain one of the best deer herds in the county."

"I'm sure. Let me guess, that's how you met the game warden?"

"Uh huh. He came on one of the pack's kills, knew it hadn't been dogs, thought he recognized the spoor as wolf but couldn't figure out what the occasional bare human footprint was doing in there, and tracked us. He was really good... "

"And you, that is, the pack, wasn't being as careful as it could have been." In Vicki's experience, complacency had exposed the majority of the world's secrets.

"Yeah. But Arthur turned out to be an okay guy."

"He could have turned out to be disaster," Vicki pointed out.

Peter shrugged. What was done was done as far as the pack was concerned. They'd taken steps to see it would never happen again and thought no more about it.

"What about the doctor?" She watched Cloud snap at a grasshopper and wondered if the separate forms had separate taste buds.

"Dr. Dixon's ancient history." Peter told her, snatched a high-leaping insect out of the air and popped it in his mouth.

Vicki swallowed a rising wave of nausea. The crunch, crunch, swallow, gave the snack an immediacy the earlier episode with the rats hadn't had. And while it was one thing to see Cloud do it... Well, I guess that answers my question. Then she saw the look on Peter's face. The little shit ate that on purpose to gross me out. She gave her glasses a push and two steps later plucked a grasshopper off the front of her shorts - fortunately, it was a small one.

A long time ago, on a survival course, an instructor had told Vicki that many insects were edible. She hoped he hadn't been pulling