Jamie and Koda were looking at a vast collection of maps, pictures of old books, and even some letters. Koda, who was in the midst of smoking a pipe that Jamie was certain he'd stolen from the dead, couldn't help but take a jab at him.
"Why the hell do all old men smoke pipes? Why not just grab a cigarette? I know your best years are behind you, but you don't need to look like pompous asswhole smoking that."
Koda, thoroughly enjoying his pipe tobacco, fiddled with it and blew smoke rings. "Pipes last a hell of a lot longer than cigarettes. You get far more tobacco than those dinky things," he said, pointing at Jamie's dwindling cigarette pack. "It's good for thinking with—makes you look smarter than you really are."
Jamie shot back, "You think?"
Koda sarcastically replied, "Yes, it makes me think about how I have such a loving nephew. I'll be so heartbroken if one day he just flops and dies, and there's no one left to judge me for drinking my life away ever again."
Smiling, Jamie said, "Well, if I die, I get a chance to haunt your ass. So you better hope I don't catch a stray bullet and don't wake up."
"You already haunt my ass," Koda said.
Jamie laughed. "Yeah, but I'd get to make spooky ghost noises—that's going to really piss you off."
Koda sighed and said, "Let's just go get this girl."
"All right, let's go over the basics. They're going to want someplace cold all year round to store their skin. The question is whether it's really high up or really low—those are the only places that can store it," Koda pointed to a map with a massive mountain, likely somewhere in the Alps.
Jamie, intensely studying another map, disagreed. "I don't think so. There must have been at least a hundred of them. No mountain base can meet the needs of a few hundred bear-sized Skinwalkers. They're going to need a lot of space and a lot of food, and they're not going to live in some cramped, easily bombable mountain."
Koda scratched his nonexistent beard. "Then it must be a mining town. Mine shafts can get pretty cold, deep underground, and they're a hell of a lot harder to bomb. Wouldn't be a bad place to hang their... skin."
Jamie flicked his last cigarette into an empty metal trash can. "Okay, you've fought in every godforsaken war zone in the past 200 years, including the last conflict that was fought here, so where the hell are they?"
"Hey, kid, just because I've lived for 200 years doesn't mean I remember everything that has happened in the last 200 years," Koda shot back.
"All right, old man, calm down. Don't get your panties in a bunch. Koda, just bring me that old map."
Koda carefully laid the map on the rugged old table, doing his best not to rip or damage it. He got most of it intact—the part they needed anyway. Koda pulled out an old pencil, tapped it a couple of times, and then doodled a small face. "We're in business. Damn thing still works."
Acting like he was at an auction, Koda started loudly, "Ladies and gentlemen... and Jamie, this is the exclusion zone. We're at the Italian-German border, one of the most fortified borders on Earth, with two of the most heavily armed armies in the world on either side. Both sides are terrified of provoking each other. However, within this small zone, there's a perfect spot—roughly 30 miles—that's just right for a merry band of Skinwalkers to settle."
He then carefully outlined the "Goldilocks zone" on the map.
Koda grabbed the pencil and circled some small towns on the map. "I remember these three having mineshafts when we were fighting back and forth. This town, in particular, had a bunch of vampires underground. We're kind of like hermit crabs—once one monster leaves, another moves in," Koda explained.
Jamie, skeptically studying the map, said, "Well, the towns are a good place to start, but something tells me they'll pick up and hightail it out of there. Even if they're there, 30 miles is still a hell of a lot of ground to cover, even though we can run over a hundred miles per hour."
Koda, in the middle of blowing another smoke ring, replied slowly, "She has a personal vendetta against you. She wants you dead. They all do. And this Shiloh—she must be one hell of a leader to have survived this long, built herself up from nothing, and escaped that facility. Something tells me she's going to want the home-field advantage. She'll wait for us to come to her."
Jamie cut him off. "Why not just kill us in our sleep? Why not disguise themselves as animals and sneak up on us?"
Koda took a deep drag from his pipe, the ember glowing bright in the dim light. He exhaled, the smoke curling lazily in the air before he responded. "I think she knows how hard it is to kill you—let alone sneak up on you. The element of surprise is out the window. Besides, she probably had the same kind of training we did. After all, I think they were meant to replace us. If I were in her shoes, I'd hunker down and let us come to her."
He tapped the pipe gently against the table, knocking out some ash before taking another slow puff. "She's got assets she's not going to want to leave unguarded—prisoners, wealth, fortune. God knows what else she's stashing in those towns. We don't know, but from her perspective, it would be like looking in a needle in a haystack trying to find two werewolves in 30 miles of dense forest. So, it's a lot easier for us to come to her."
Jamie was quiet, the wheels turning in his head. It was clear he was slowly starting to accept Koda's reasoning, the realization plastered across his face.
"Fine," he said at last. "We'll play it your way. But I want some sort of proof. We need to capture one."
A deep, bellowing laugh erupted from Koda, the kind that seemed to shake the walls of the old room. His shoulders heaved as he looked at Jamie with amusement. "Well, I find it funny that you think one's just going to stumble in here and find us." He leaned back in his chair, taking a long drag from his pipe. The smoke, thick and heavy, swirled lazily around him, creating a fog-like atmosphere. "Listen, kid, she's in one of these places."
Jamie couldn't shake the uneasy feeling that Koda was wrong. The flickering light in the room cast shadows across his face, accentuating the doubt in his eyes. His fingers absently traced the edge of the map in front of him. "I don't think most of them are soldiers," he said, his voice quiet but firm. "There's something civilian about the way they fight. A lot of things they do just don't make any sense."
Koda leaned forward, elbows resting on the worn table, blowing another cloud of smoke. His face, barely visible through the haze, twisted into an exaggerated smirk. "Oooh," he answered mockingly, "so you're allowed to have these assumptions, and I'm not. I get it." He chuckled softly and waved his hand dismissively. "Tell you what, I'll cut you a break. But if we don't hear anything in an hour or two, we're going after them. We've got about six or seven hours before the sun comes back up, and if we don't find a place to hide..." He trailed off, letting the unspoken threat of daylight linger between them. "Well, you know, only one of us can transform, and we don't want that disadvantage again."
Jamie's brow furrowed, the tension settling deeper into his face. The weight of their situation hung heavy in the air. "Yeah, old man, but it'll be hard for you to hide when even a human could smell you from a mile away."
Koda grinned, his teeth flashing briefly in the dim light. "Kid, I've been hiding from the IRS for nearly a century. If I can hide from them, I can hide from anyone." He puffed on his pipe again, the ember glowing red as he spoke, the air thick with the scent of tobacco.
Jamie still wore that wary expression, his eyes narrowing slightly as Koda offered him the pipe. The air around them grew tense for a moment as Jamie looked at it, then shook his head with a grimace. "I don't even want to know where your mouth has been, so I'm going to have to decline."
Koda's grin widened as he tapped the pipe against the table, ashes scattering onto the surface. "Well," he said with a wink, "I did visit a brothel before coming here."
"Jesus, Uncle!" Jamie recoiled, his disgust clear. "I'd rather read Twilight than hear what the f*** you did with your mouth."
Koda let out a small chuckle, shrugging his shoulders, and said, "Jesus, man, it can't be that bad."
Jamie hesitated for a second, considering. "Yeah," he said reluctantly, "I suppose you're right."
"But come on, man, there's something else bothering you," Koda insisted, his voice steady but probing.
Jamie hesitated for a moment before replying. "Yeah, I was fighting the Skinwalker disguised as a horse. However, I'm not disturbed by the fact that I was fighting a fleshy, humanoid abomination of a horse. It's the fact that I think there were two of them. I killed one, but I don't know where the other is." He paused, letting the silence hang for a moment before continuing, "Sooooo... there might be another one out there."
Koda stared at him, his eyes sharp, almost as if he could see through Jamie's thoughts. "Are you sure?" Koda asked, his voice low and scrutinizing.
Jamie's reply came swiftly, with confidence. "Yes, I am."
Koda gave him a crooked smile. "Well, it looks like we found your prisoner. Someone I'm sure you'll have a pleasant conversation with once you catch 'em." His tone was oddly joyful, as if the prospect of a new chase excited him.
Before Jamie could respond, a rich, inviting scent drifted into the room. It was warm and savory, filling the air with an aroma that was both unfamiliar and tantalizing. The smell of simmering broth carried subtle notes of roasted herbs and earthy vegetables, mingling with the hearty fragrance of tender, slow-cooked meat. There was a faint hint of spice—maybe pepper or paprika—that added a bit of warmth to the air, balanced by the sweetness of caramelized onions. Whatever it was, it smelled like the kind of soup that wrapped around you, comforting and homey, but with a depth that suggested it had been cooking for hours, drawing out the flavors.
Jamie's stomach growled in response, a sudden reminder of how long it had been since he last ate. "Damn," he muttered under his breath, realizing he hadn't had a decent meal since those barely edible sloppy joes a while back. He caught himself thinking, Whatever that is, it sure is a hell of better than what I've been eating.
Jamie continued his rant, his frustration spilling out. "You know, I've told you this so many times, but every time you hit the bar, you just seem to forget everything. I get it—the beer can't kill you—but it sure as hell messes with your memory. How many years have you lost to it? How many people have you purposely or unintentionally forgotten? I've said this a thousand different ways, but could you just listen for once? Stop getting drunk, *before it's too late.*
Koda smiled, a strange sense of relief on his face, and replied, "I was going to try and convince you to drink a little wine with me to go with the meal, but... I think I'll stick to water tonight. What do you say?"
Jamie, surprised, raised an eyebrow. "Well, maybe you can tell me about all those wild adventures you had when you were homeless," he said, half-teasing.
Koda handed him a napkin, his expression unreadable. Jamie glanced at it and froze. The note, written in Navajo, caught him off guard: *"If you're reading this, don't look up. She's here."*
Koda kept talking as if nothing was out of the ordinary. "Those days were crazier than anything I've seen in the military," he said casually, stirring his soup.
Jamie, still processing, responded passively, "I don't believe you."
But both of them went silent when they heard it—a strange metallic sound, followed by something wet splatting onto the table. The rancid stench hit Jamie immediately—the unmistakable odor of a rotting horse, dead for at least a week. He looked down in disgust as pieces of flesh fell onto the table. One lump of decaying meat landed in his lap, another piece splashed into the soup with a sickening plop.
And then, with a grotesque thud, the horse's head—its skin, not its skull—fell in front of them like a mask dropping to the ground.
Both Jamie and Koda slowly looked up.
Hanging from the ceiling like a spider, its exposed flesh glistening and raw was the Skinwalker. It was far larger than any they had fought before. Its limbs were grotesquely elongated, arms and legs easily three times the size of the others they had encountered. Yellow, glowing eyes stared down at them, gleaming with a twisted, sadistic glee. A jagged, unsettling smile curled across its face.