Tricked

said. » We can call him. «
    It was far too late for that, signal or no. The hammering on the hogan ceased, and we heard a thunderous impact against metal and shattering glass. I rushed to the east wall, where the door faced the road, and peered through a gap in the door’s hinges. Frank kept chanting over Darren’s startled cries. Through the wee gap, I couldn’t see much except for his truck’s headlights cresting the lip of the mesa. The lights shuddered violently as the skinwalkers rocked the vehicle. A yell, two gunshots—he must have had a pistol in his glove compartment—more broken glass, a bobcat scream, then a human one, and then the headlights reeled crazily and disappeared. A rolling, crashing noise followed, as Darren’s truck tumbled off the graded road and down a half mile of rocky hillside. I doubt he survived it; my only hope was that one or both of the skinwalkers had taken the plunge with him.
    Frank kept singing, but everyone else had fallen silent. Sophie was doing her best to be stoic about it, but I saw tears on her cheeks and she’d probably be plagued by guilt for years if she didn’t get help.
    I patched up all the logs with bindings while we waited to hear something that would tell us the fate of the skinwalkers. There were no more bobcat growls or attacks on the hogan. A tense half hour passed with no sounds from outside, all of us wishing the silence would last another minute and yet feeling that it couldn’t possibly last any longer. What broke the silence, finally, wasn’t a bobcat. It was a human voice—or, rather, two of them, on the outer edge of what could be called human. The voices were hoarse and throbbing with menace, and they spoke in Navajo on the north side of the hogan.
    Peering through the cracks, I saw the skinwalkers in their human form. Though they kept moving from place to place in a blur, they would stop briefly here and there, as if they were following some unseen connect-the-dots pattern on the mesa. In their brief flashes of stillness, they were lean, of stunted stature, and unclothed. That didn’t mean they were underwhelming; their menace was simply concentrated, like frozen orange juice fortified with Vitamin Evil, and their eyes kind of reflected that, a liquid fire glowing out of their sockets with no pupils. The bobcat skin was gone, so now it was just them with that spirit wrapped all around and through them; their human auras were tainted with black ichor. I was curious to see where Hel must have cut them, but neither of them looked wounded. Whatever it was they were saying, they kept repeating it, and lots of eyes shifted briefly in my direction before looking away, pretending that I wasn’t there. Frank winced the first time he heard it but then grimly continued to work on his sandpainting and lead the singing.
    I flipped my faerie specs off. » What are they saying, Sophie? « She pretended not to hear and, in so doing, set an example for the others. No one would meet my eyes. They began chanting in time with Frank—he’d apparently reached a sort of call-and-answer section in his » sing. « And I think it would have been a casual passage under normal circumstances, but in this case they were belting it out and supporting from the diaphragm, an unconscious agreement that they should drown out the skinwalkers with their raised voices. Somehow, the skinwalkers’ voices cut through it without increasing their volume.
    › What’s going on, Atticus? ‹ Oberon asked.
    I don’t know, buddy. I don’t speak their language .
    › Those things out there don’t smell like cats anymore. They’re human but tainted with something else. Kind of like burnt rubber. ‹
    » Sophie. I need to know what they’re saying. « I got no reply. » Come on, somebody help me out here. I can handle it. «
    The man who’d prevented Sophie from going out to save Darren—and getting herself killed in the process—finally took a step toward me and offered his hand. I shook it and nodded once to him gratefully.
    » Ben Keonie, « he said.
    » Um … Reilly, « I said.
    » I think Sophie wants to finish the sing, « he explained, as she and the rest of the crew continued to chime in at the appropriate places. » But I can tell you what those things out there are saying if you like. «
    » Yes, I’d appreciate that. «
    » They’re saying, ‘Feed us the white man.’ «

Chapter 8
    Fucking Hel.
    Oberon leapt in front of me and began to growl at Ben, teeth