Free Have Stakes Will Travel: Stories From the World of Jane Yellowrock by Faith Hunter Page B

still green, untouched as yet by the fresh chill in the air. I bent down and spotted an animal trail, the ground faintly marked with a narrow, bare path about three inches wide. There was a mostly clear area about two feet high, branches to the side. Some were broken off. A bit of cloth hung on one broken branch. “They came through here,” I said. Brax knelt beside me. I pointed. “See that? I think it’s from the shirt the blood-master was wearing.”
    “I’ll bring the dogs. Get them started on the trail,” he said, standing. “Thank you, Molly. I know this was hard on you.”
    I looked at Jane. She inclined her head slightly, agreeing. The dogs might get through the brush and brambles, but no dog handler was going to make it. Jane, however . . . Jane might be able to do something with this. But she would need a blood scent to follow. I thought about the house. No way could I go back in there, not even to hunt for a smear of vampire blood or other body fluid. But the bit of cloth stuck in the underbrush might have blood on it. If Jane could get to it before Brax did. . . . I looked from Jane to the scrap of cloth and back again, a question in my eyes. She smiled that humorless half-smile and inclined her head again. Message sent and received.
    I stood and faced the house. “I want to walk around the house,” I said to Brax. “And you might want to call the crime scene back. When the vampires played on the swings, they had the family pets. The dog was still alive for part of it.” I registered Brax’s grimace as I walked away. He followed. Jane didn’t. I began to describe the crime scene to him, little things he could use to track the vamps. Things he could use in court, not that the vamps would ever make it to a courtroom. They would have to be staked and beheaded where he found them. But it kept Brax occupied, entering notes into his wireless notebook, so Jane could retrieve the scrap of cloth, and, hopefully the vampire’s scent.
    Jane was waiting in the drive when I finished describing what I had sensed and “seen” in the house to Brax, her long legs straddling her small, used Yamaha. I had never seen her drive a car. She was a motorbike girl, and lusted after a classic Harley, which she had promised to buy for herself when she got the money. She tilted her head to me, and I knew she had the cloth and the scent. Brax, who caught the exchange, looked quizzically between us, but when neither of us explained he shrugged and opened the car door for me.
    * * *
    The vampire attack made the regional news, and I spent the rest of the day hiding from the TV. I played with the kids, fed them supper, made a few batches of dried herbal mixtures to sell in my sisters’ herb shop in town, and counted my blessings, trying to get the images of the McCarleys’ horror and pain out of my mind. I knew I’d not sleep well tonight. Sometimes not even an earth witch can defeat the power of evil over dreams.
    Just after dusk, with a cold front blowing through and the temperatures dropping, Jane rode up on her bike and parked it. Carrying my digital video camera, I met her in the front garden, and, without speaking, we walked together to the backyard and the boulder-piled herb garden beside my gardening house and the playhouse. Jane dropped ten pounds of raw steak on the ground while I set up my camera and tripod. She handed me the scrap of cloth retrieved from the woods. It was stiff with blood, and I was sure it wasn’t all the vampire’s.
    Unashamedly, Jane stripped, while I looked away, giving her the privacy I would have wanted had it been me taking off my clothes. Anyone who happened look this way with a telescope, as I had no neighbors close by, would surely think the witch and friend were going sky-clad for a ceremony, but I wasn’t a Wiccan or a goddess worshipper, and I didn’t dance around naked. Especially in the unseasonable cold.
    When she was ready, her travel pack strapped around her neck, along