I brought the Jeep almost to a stop.
"What's wrong?" Larry asked.
I hit the emergency flashers. The road was narrow, barely two cars wide, but it was going uphill. Anybody coming down wouldn't see the Jeep right away. The lights helped, but if someone was speeding... Hell, I was going to do it; why quibble? I put the Jeep in park and got out.
"Where are you going?"
"I'm wondering if a troll ripped the trees apart."
Larry started to get out on his side. I stopped him. "Slide over on my side if you want to get out."
"Why?"
"You're not armed." I got the Browning out. It was a solid, comforting weight, but truthfully, against something the size of one of the great mountain trolls, it wasn't too useful. Maybe with exploding bullets, but short of that a 9mm wasn't the gun for hunting something the size of a small elephant.
Larry closed his door and slid across. "You really think there's a troll out here?"
I stared off into the darkness. Nothing moved. "I don't know." I moved to a dry gully that cut the edge of the road. I stepped very carefully into it. The heels sank in the dry, sandy soil. I grabbed a handful of weeds with my left hand and levered myself up the slope. I had to grab one of the butchered trunks to keep from sliding backwards in the loose leaves and pine needles.
My hand came up against thick sap. I fought the urge to jerk away, forcing myself to keep hold of the sticky bark.
Larry scrambled up the bank, slick-soled dress shoes sliding in the dry leaves. I didn't have a free hand to offer him. He caught himself in a sort of half pushup, and used the weeds to move up beside me. "Damn dress shoes."
"At least you're not in heels," I said.
"And don't think I'm not grateful," he said. "I'd break my neck."
Nothing moved in the dark, dark night except us. There was the sound of spring peepers close by, musical, but nothing bigger. I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. I pulled myself up to more solid footing and looked at the trees.
"What are we looking for?" Larry asked.
"An axe makes a wide, smooth stroke. If a troll snapped the trunks, they'll be ragged and full of jagged points of wood."
"Looks smooth to me," he said. He ran his fingertips over the na**d wood. "But it doesn't look like an axe."
The wood was too smooth. An axe will come in at an angle. This was almost flat, like each tree had been felled with a single stroke, two at most. Some of the trees had been nearly a foot in diameter. No human could do that, even with an axe.
"Who could have done this?"
I searched the darkness, fighting an urge to aim the gun into the dark, but I kept it skyward. Safety first. "A vampire with a sword, maybe."
He stared off into the darkness. "You mean the one that killed the guys? Why would the vampire chop down a bunch of trees after he killed them?"
It was a good question. A great question. But like with so many questions today, I didn't have a good answer. "I don't know. Let's get back to the car."
We scrambled back the way we'd come. Neither of us fell down this time. A record.
When we were at the car I put the gun away. I probably hadn't needed it at all, but then again... something cut down those trees.
I used the aloe and lanolin baby wipes that I kept in the car to wipe off blood, to wipe the sap from my hand. The wipes worked nearly as well on tree blood as it did on human.
We drove on, searching for lights. We had to be close to Bloody Bones, unless the directions were way off. Here's hoping they weren't.
"Is that a torch?" Larry asked.
I stared into the darkness. There was a flicker of fire, too high off the ground to be a campfire. Two torches on long poles illuminated a wide gravel turnaround to the left of the road. The trees had been pushed back here, too, but years ago. It was an old, established clearing. The trees formed a backdrop for a one-story building. A wooden sign hung from the eaves. It was hard to read by torchlight, but it might have read "Bloody Bones."
Dark wooden shingles covered the roof and climbed down the walls, so that the entire building looked like a natural growth that had sprung from the red clay soil. About twenty cars and trucks were parked haphazardly on the dark gravel.