Grim Tidings by Caitlin Kittredge Page A

narrow gurneys. I pulled back the sheet from Lady’s face. She’d died before any of the bruising had gone down. Nothing would ever make her look like herself again.
    They’d taken off her gown and cut away the bandages covering her arms and torso, and I reached out to almost touch one of the deeper bite marks on her upper arm. I’d seen a lot of bodies in a lot of states, but I wanted to remember Lady.
    I wanted to have something to picture when I finally tracked down the Walking Man.
    I shut my eyes, breathing in the sterile smell of formaldehyde and bleach, and then I opened them and got to work. I might not have a badge and a state crime lab to help me but I’d tracked down men worse than the Walking Man with less.
    Leaning close to Lady, I made myself inhale, deep. Aside fromslow decomposition, all I could smell was her blood, coppery and sharp on her skin. Next the bites—a shifter would have just torn out her throat or her femoral artery to bleed her quick. They also probably would have eaten at least one of her limbs if it was a feral or a rogue pack. A hellhound like me would have a wolf’s bite, angular and much deeper than these shallow tears.
    These were human teeth. Sharp, but human. There were folks— from the tribes, Mohawk or Algonquin—friends of my grandmother’s who believed in the Wendigo, a man who filed down his teeth to consume human flesh, transformed at the first bite into a monster that could never eat its fill.
    I gently rolled Lady onto her side, checking her back, and her hair fell away from her neck. It was still in its perfect wave from the last time I’d seen her, the ends stained pink from sitting in her blood.
    The front of her neck was bruised from a hand—at least twice as large as mine—wrapping around it, probably to slam her head into a hard surface and knock her senseless. But the back of the neck was free of bruises, and the mark stood out clear and black. It didn’t look like much more than a pen mark, a backward lowercase r with a little tail curling off the back, but when I rubbed at it, it didn’t go away.
    When I touched it, I smelled the smell. That bitter, burnt, hopeless smell from the camps. The ashes that I still woke up with in the back of my throat.
    I lost my grip on Lady’s body as I shuddered and she slammed back onto the metal tray. I winced, hoping no one had heard. “Sorry,” I whispered.
    I was reaching out to pull up her sheet when her eyes snappedopen, clouded over with the cataracts death leaves. Her mouth gaped, and she let out one short, agonized scream before she wrapped her hands around my neck.
    We both crashed to the ground, the gurney on top of my legs. Lady snapped frantically at me, screaming, spittle trailing out of her mouth to leave a freezing trail along my face and neck. “Lady,” I gasped, bracing my hands against her breastbone. “Lady, it’s me!”
    She whined, low in her throat, like a dog that hadn’t been fed in days. That was it, I realized as she slashed and clawed at me. Lady was hungry. Hungry and so desperate she didn’t even realize I couldn’t feed her. Not in the way she needed.
    And I had to make sure she didn’t get through me to all the human residents of this hospital, sleeping in their beds like an all-you-can-chew buffet.
    I braced one arm to keep her from sinking her teeth into my face and wrapped my other hand in her hair, knotting my fingers into her curls. They weren’t as soft as they looked, more like a doll’s hair now that she was dead. “Sorry, Lady,” I muttered, and slammed her head into the metal edge of the gurney as hard as I could.
    I would have crushed the skull of a living person—I think I put a pretty good dent in Lady’s—but she just rolled off me, dazed, shaking her head back and forth until her bloody hair fell in front of her eyes. I scrambled to my feet, glad now that