My skepticism must have shown on my face, because he shot me a pleading look. “Please? It could help. It certainly wouldn’t hurt.”
I sighed. “Fine,” I said, giving his cane a pointed look. “But only if she takes a look at you, too.”
Lily crowed, and Simon flushed a little. “In the interest of science,” he said with elaborate graciousness, “I’d love to experience what she does. Lily,” he added, turning to his sister. “Can you call Sybil and get the number?”
Lily made a face. “Ew. Like, right now? Why don’t you do it?”
I hadn’t actually met Sybil or Morgan, the two elder Pellar siblings, but from what Simon and Lily had said, Morgan was the heir-apparent golden child and Sybil was fussy and cold. Although to be fair, that could just be part of Simon and Lily’s schtick.
They squabbled for a few more minutes before Lily agreed to make the call. She stood up, grabbed Simon’s soda spitefully, and skulked toward the back door.
“Is Sybil really that bad?” I asked, watching Lily go.
“Honestly, she’s become a lot more tolerable since Morgan started having problems with her husband,” Simon said absently. I raised my eyebrows and he winced, as if just realizing what he’d said. “Sorry, that was an overshare. Let’s just say the Pellar family dynamic is complicated. Especially since my dad died.”
I didn’t think I’d ever heard Simon mention his father. “What was his name?” I asked.
Simon’s eyes, which had gone distant for a moment, focused back on me. “Nero. Nero Carter. He was from Louisiana. Why do you ask?”
I shrugged. “Just wanted to know what to call him when I think of him.”
Simon’s face softened. “It’s funny,” he said in a sad voice, “I hardly ever think of him anymore. It used to be every day, all the time.”
“How old were you?” I asked. “When you lost your dad, I mean.”
“Nineteen. Lily was fifteen.”
I had just asked out of curiosity, but it suddenly occurred to me that Simon was in his early thirties. He would have been nineteen maybe twelve or thirteen years ago . . . right about when the werewolf packs were warring in Colorado.
Had Simon and Lily’s dad been killed by werewolves?
Simon must have seen the spark of understanding in my eyes, because he gave me one slow nod. Before I could get the question out, he added, “You needed me to fill you in on the pellet too, right?”
For a moment I floundered. “Uh, yes,” I managed, feeling incredibly guilty. Werewolves had invaded Colorado, and I hadn’t told him. I pushed it aside to think about later. “Any word on our mystery creature?” I asked, composing myself.
Simon raised his eyes to meet mine. His voice was completely casual as he said, “Yes and no. Since we talked this afternoon, I did learn that another pellet was found in Golden Gate Canyon Park.”
Chapter 14
“Whoa,” I exclaimed, barely resisting the urge to smack my injured friend. “Way to bury the lead, Simon!”
He held up a hand. “Hang on, it’s not the same situation. The park rangers found a pellet on the twenty-eighth, probably dumped either that day or the day before, since it rained two days earlier. But this one had no human parts or clothes inside.”
“What was it, then?”
“Antlers,” he replied. “And hooves, and a little bit of fur.”
“A deer?”
Simon nodded. “The parts it couldn’t digest, anyway. That’s why the rangers didn’t pursue it much. It was odd, but not threatening. They sent a sample on to the CBI, but figured it’d be weeks before they got results.”
“So it ate a deer on the twenty-seventh-ish,” I said slowly, “and then it ate a person . . . do you know when?”
“Hard to determine. I called your cousin Elise and fished for more information. The cops are done with the CU prank theory, because they’ve tentatively identified the remains we found. The clothes matched descriptions of a homeless guy who hung out between Broadway and Chautauqua, panhandling the tourists. No one remembers seeing him since the twenty-ninth. Which could be when he was taken, or just when he went off-grid.”
I winced. It was one thing to find an anonymous hip bone, and quite another to know where it came from. I’d volunteered at a couple of local soup kitchens with my mother; I knew some of those guys. A lot of them were veterans. “So this animal, whatever it is, ate on the twenty-seventh and the thirtieth, spitting out gastric pellets both times. When will it need to eat again?”
He shrugged helplessly. “There’s no way I could determine that with the data we have now.”
“Best guess, then.”
Simon cracked his knuckles, thinking. “Best guess, the thing needs two days to digest a deer, maybe a day to digest a person, with its smaller mass. That’s approximate, Lex.”
“So it could be taking its new victim as we speak.” I grunted with frustration and rose to pace back and forth a little near our table. I kind of understood how to hunt down vampires, and even werewolves thanks to the silver allergy, but how the hell were we supposed to track a magical monster that lived underground? “What about the folklore?” I said, sounding a little desperate even to my own ears. “Quinn suggested you look into that.”
Simon leaned forward, excitement brightening his eyes again. I went over and sat down so we wouldn’t be overheard. “Now, that was interesting. Folklore isn’t my specialty, but when I started digging into it, I found that a number of cultures around the world believe in an enormous wormlike cryptid.”