Ichabod Crowley series 3 The Thorn Tree

Chapter 2

Somewhere Between Solodono and the Orange Grove

Ichabod had stopped the car more than a minute ago, having found what he was looking for but, unable to process what it meant. Before him was no less than a battlefield with bodies strewn around in all directions. Finally deciding that nothing ventured equaled nothing gained, he exited the car and collected his weapons from the trunk. Two iron knives, a pair of pistols named Pacos and Veto Mori, one silver dagger, and a brand new satchel which contained vials of salt, iron shavings, a few smoke bombs, and his most prized possession, a cryomantic glove with the name December etched across the back hand. Collecting his wares, and, as prepared as he might ever be for conflict, he walked onto the red sands, trying his best to determine just what the Hell had happened.

Finding the nearest body, he crouched down to examine its injuries and saw them incredibly hard to define. The Chupacabras themselves were indeed massive, almost as tall as he was from foot to head, the killing blow for this one particularly seemed to be a bite to its throat, however, the edges were perfectly rounded and smooth. More than that, the edges of the wound were caked in a thin layer of sand, the other wounds on its body were of a similar condition, bizarrely deep, yet crusted in dirt.

"Filthy and clean at the same time," he mentioned, examining the slashes that seemed to come in sets of fours and measuring the bite marks, he began to get a certain dimension for the attacking animals, "Smaller... maybe there was just a lot of them..."

Stepping away from the first corpse, he moved on to the next, finding similar wounds and, all together, becoming slowly convinced that this group of Chupacabras had been ripped apart by a pack of wolves with unusually sharp claws and teeth. Yet there were many logistical problems with that, which his minds was still struggling to come to terms with.

"Coyotes maybe...no, no dog has teeth this sharp," it truly was the neck wounds that were disturbing him the most, canine teeth were made to grab and pull, generally leaving a bit of a mess with torn muscle and hanging veins, not these clean smooth edges, the third body he examined was much the same, but for a weirdly deep hole in its chest, again, smooth as though bored out with a drill, "More sand," he observed, "It's gotta be some kinda elemental, but... is this what they were running from?"

Looking over the third body, he finally realized where the paint had come from, someone had marked them with the words: 'Tag You're It'.

"So these belonged to somebody? Hm," he pulled a single bullet from his gun belt, the Centurion Round, a very special bullet he had been hoping to use on a very special someone, within it were contained the collected souls of nearly a dozen demons and monsters which he had been contracted to kill in the last few months, each one represented by a glowing skull face on the surface of the bullet, while he had hoped to add the spirits of these monsters to the power already contained within, the idea of using someone's pets made him uneasy, then again, it's not like anyone would miss them, they were already dead after all, "Waste not want not."

Taking one last look around the battle field, he surmised that there were no more clues to be found and, taking the round in his right hand which bore the sigil of the spirit forge, he sliced open the base of his palm and used the dripping blood to draw a circle on the Chupacabra. Willing the sigil to its work, Ichabod watched as the body of the monster was consumed by green flame which slowly turned red before slurping into his hand as though it were being sucked down a drain, leaving behind a new skull impression on the bullet. He repeated this process six times, even humming a little song as he worked before finally coming across something that made him stop. It was a new body, laying in the dirt amongst all the rest, a small brown coyote, missing a leg, and one of its eyes was hollowed out to an infinite black depth.