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 Neither does whoever sewed you up. What happened?
 This. I pull the Blood Cross from my pocket and toss it on the desk.  Got into a little disagreement
with some wrappers. He tossed this and I cleverly caught it with my forearm.
Charlie picks up the cross, gives it a quick once-over, then slips it into his pocket.
 Hey! Find your own damn war souvenir!
 Don t worry, I ll take good care of it. His voice is as hard and cold as a January sidewalk.  Right
until I return it to its owner.
The situations I encounter in my job can produce the most eclectic combination of emotions, and
Charlie s statement is a prime example: I feel touched by his loyalty but a little afraid of the controlled
fury in his voice. I forget sometimes that Charlie is more than my partner; he s my enforcer, a living
weapon whose job is to protect me and damage anyone who gets in my way. Having Charlie around is
like being shadowed by a hit man with a chip on his shoulder and a crush on you.
 Easy, sandman. The pire in question won t be hurling anything for a while, not unless he s
ambidextrous.
 Details.
I give him the rundown on the confrontation and what Tair told me about Dr. Pete, ending with the
appearance of the Solar Centurion.
Charlie frowns.  He was following you.
 Unless those wrappers actually worship Ra the sun god, I m inclined to agree. But he intervened on
my behalf not the actions of a guilty man trying to impede an investigation.
 Unless he s trying to mislead you.
 Could be. If and when he shows up again, I ll ask him. In the meantime we have a skip tracer to
trace.
 Maybe we should look into Dr. Pete first.
I narrow my eyes.  No. We have an active case, and that s the priority. My accidental involvement
with some half-assed gangsters spouting a wild story is not important. Now where are we off to?
Charlie s stubborn, but he knows better than to lock horns with me.  Granite Falls. It s about an hour
away, in the foothills of the Cascades.
 Okay. Why is Silverado there got a cabin in the woods or something?
 He s working. On the trail of a guy named Helmut Wiebe, indicted for running a Cloven lab. Wiebe s
from the area and is supposedly hiding out there.
 Got it. Let s go I ll get Gretch to forward me the files while we re on the road. I slap my laptop
closed, trying not to wince as I do so. Charlie watches me carefully, but doesn t say anything.
Granite Falls is a foothills town of about thirty thousand people. It s also the site of the Tsubaki Grand
Shrine School, a major Shinto center where acolytes go to study. Like any college town, it has a drug
problem, and since Shinto seems to attract pires that drug is Cloven, or Devil s Hoof:
methamphetamine cut with garlic, just as nasty and addictive as good old regular meth is in my world.
The difference between a hoofer and a crankhead is that a wired hemovore is just as likely to
disembowel you to play with your intestines as he is to go into a laughing jag at the sight of his own.
Wiebe s file indicates he was a fairly major player in the area, cooking up high-quality product for the
local market and even a little for export. He got into trouble when one of his rivals informed on him,
shutting down his operation at a time he was financially overextended; he was forced to use a bail
bondsman to get out of jail, then decided it was cheaper to forfeit the bond than risk going to prison.
Gretchen dug up plenty on Wiebe, but the pickings are extremely slim on Silverado. Licensed bail
enforcement agent, but his license doesn t list his date of birth or in a lem s case, date of activation.
His home address is a post office box, his phone number a cell. Obviously, Mr. Silverado is a golem
who appreciates his privacy; our best chance of tracking him down is to track down Wiebe first.
Which could be tricky. Wiebe is from Granite Falls, and his brother, Julian, is one of the priests at
Tsubaki. If Julian is protecting his brother, we could be in for some major headaches, both political and
supernatural. A Shinto priest is Gandalfian on the wizard scale.
Granite Falls lies at the beginning of the Mountain Loop Highway, a scenic route that winds through
the Western Cascades and over the Barlow Pass to Darlington too bad we re not going that way. We
get on the I-5 to Everett and go east, taking Highway 2 then switching to the 204. The landscape is
nice, lots of tall green pine and spruce lining the roads. After we pass through West Lake Stevens the
countryside becomes a little more rural, cattle ranches or the occasional farm interrupting the tree line.
A row of black Angus beef-on-the-hoof stare at me blankly as we drive past, chewing their cuds and
thinking moody cow thoughts. I know how they feel.
At Frontier Village we head north on Highway 9, then onto the Granite Falls Highway. We turn off at
Crooked Man Road, which leads to the massive red tori, the distinctive Japanese portal, of the school s
entrance. We ve timed our arrival to coincide with sunset the school s alumni are mainly pires, and
this is the beginning of their day.
The school is large and sprawling, the layout very organic and non-institutional. We find a parking lot
almost completely hidden by trees and get out of the car.
 Where do you want to start? Charlie asks me.
 Wiebe s brother is head of the Aikido Department. Let s go see if he s in.
I take a deep breath of air, enjoy the heady aroma of pine. I m a city gal, but I can appreciate natural
or in this case, carefully tended splendor as much as the next person. We stroll through a Japanese
garden of elegant plants and night-blooming flowers, over an arched wooden bridge and past clusters
of students hurrying to classes. Ages vary widely; I see women with 1940s hair-dos and polka-dot
skirts alongside men in kimonos and teenagers wearing jeans and sweatshirts. There are also more
thropes than I expected, many of them in full were form, loping along with book bags strapped to their
backs. I remark on this to Charlie.
 Not so surprising, he says.  Lot of hemovores are into Shinto, but the Northwest has more thropes
than pires. Lot of thropes from the Midwest come here to study, too. Like the climate, I guess.
Makes sense. There are plenty of Asian faces, but lots of non-Asian ones, too Shinto is a global belief
system now, vying with African witchcraft for popularity.
We find the Aikido Studies building, a low-slung structure with a pagoda roof. Inside, students in
loose-fitting white clothing are paired off, practicing throws, holds, and strikes. Aikido is particularly
well suited to pires; much of the art consists of techniques designed to protect the practitioner from
cutting blows to the neck or thrusting attacks to the torso. It s popular in the Shinto movement because
of its emphasis on the integration of spirit with nature, of inner harmony. It s also one of the most [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]