“Are you okay?” Jenny asked, resting her hand on her little boy’s shoulder. “We don’t have to do this.”
“I’m okay,” Waaboo said and began to walk slowly ahead.
They followed him to the place where Fawn Blacksmith’s body had been buried, then Waaboo paused. The others stayed a few feet back, as if to give him room to reach out with his unusual sensibility.
“Do you feel anything?” Daniel asked.
Waaboo closed his eyes for a long moment, and slowly turned, then his face scrunched up as if in pain. “Something bad is here. But it’s not her. Bad… and… alive,” he said.
“Alive?” Daniel said.
Waaboo’s eyes were still closed, his face twisted. “Mad… angry… kill…”
“Stop, Waaboo!” Jenny said.
She crossed the few feet that separated her from her beloved son, reached out, and drew him against her. In that same instant, the shot came. The bullet kicked up dirt where Waaboo had just been standing, and the report of the firearm followed almost immediately.
Daniel knocked Jenny and Waaboo to the ground and covered them with his body. Annie and Maria dropped to the ground, too. Cork, Bonhomme, and Prophet all spun toward the tree line from which the sound of the gunshot had come. Prophet leapt in that direction, sprinting through the sparse undergrowth of the clearing. Cork and Bonhomme followed, but Prophet was faster and reached the trees long before they did, vanishing among the pines.
When Cork and Bonhomme arrived at the place where Prophet had disappeared, they stopped, looking for signs of where he’d gone. “There,” Cork said, pointing at a vague deer path that led through the trees and up the slope. They ran along the deer path a quarter mile, until it came out on the main road a couple of hundred yards from the lane to Paavola’s cabin. Prophet knelt there, looking at the imprint of tires in the dirt shoulder of the road.
“I heard his vehicle leave, but he was gone before I got here,” Prophet said.
“Did you see him at all?” Cork asked.
Prophet shook his head, then held out his hand, in which he gripped a ball cap, pale green and with an image in black that Cork recognized immediately. Under it was printed a single word: ANIMIKII.
“Found it over there.” Prophet pointed toward where the deer trail broke from the trees. “Looks pretty new. I figure the lowest branch of that birch sapling must’ve caught the bill and flipped it off his head. He was in too big a hurry to stop and pick it up.”
“Animikii,” Cork said. “Anishinaabe for Thunderbird.” He looked at Bonhomme, then at Prophet, feeling bewildered and betrayed in the common ancestry they all shared. “Jesus, Monte, is this guy Shinnob?”
“Let’s give it to BCA,” Bonhomme said. “If they can pull DNA from it, maybe we’ll know for sure.”
Cork called Daniel on his cell phone and they arranged to rendezvous back at Paavola’s cabin. Everyone except Prophet, who told them he wanted to check the deer path to see if he could find anything more the shooter might have left behind or abandoned.
Waaboo looked shaken when he arrived, but less so than his mother. Jenny gripped Waaboo’s hand, and Cork could feel the anger coming off her like bolts of lightning.
“I didn’t want him here,” she told them all. “I knew something bad would happen.”
Meloux said quietly, “You also have the gift of second sight?”
“Don’t joke with me, Henry.”
“It is not a joke. I mean only that no one, not even our little rabbit, could see this coming. We cannot hide him on Crow Point forever. If he touched the spirit of this young woman again, and in this, helped to find the evil at the heart of all that has happened, would that not have been a good thing?”
“But he didn’t touch her spirit,” Jenny said. Then she looked at her son. “Did you?”
Waaboo furrowed his little brow, thinking. “For a moment. Then all I felt was the devil. He kind of blocked out everything else.”
“And in that moment?” Meloux asked.
“She seemed…” He thought a moment more, then smiled at Meloux. “Not so sad.”
“Because we’re trying to help her?” Daniel offered.
“Don’t put words in his mouth,” Jenny snapped. “This is exactly what I was afraid of. They know about him.”
Which, Cork figured, was hard to argue with.
“How did they know we were here?” Annie asked.
“Maybe someone’s been watching Paavola’s cabin, just in case?” Daniel suggested.
“A long vigil,” Bonhomme said. “I think they must’ve had a more efficient way of keeping tabs on one of us.”
“How?” Jenny said, a sharp edge to that word.
“A tracker would be my first guess,” Bonhomme replied. “We need to check our vehicles.”
They spent a good deal of time going carefully over each vehicle. They found it on Cork’s Expedition, a little white disk hidden behind his back license plate, an AirTag.
“How long has it been there?” Daniel said.
“My guess?” Cork said. “Only a couple of days. Probably since we began poking into the two girls’ deaths.”
“Since Waaboo touched their spirits,” Daniel said. He looked to where Jenny and Meloux, and Annie and Maria huddled around the little boy as if to shield him from harm. “They want to make sure he doesn’t help us any further.”
“A desperate move,” Bonhomme said. “They must be afraid of how close we’re getting.”
