The Cursed Blood, стр. 87

“It hunts those with dark hearts,” White Owl answered softly. “Always those.”

“Dark hearts?” I asked uneasily, a thrill of fear tip-tapping down my spine as the fire cracked and popped, and White Owl nodded, a sad, distant look on his leathery lined face.

“Oh yes,” he answered. “I helped with a hunt for it once, long ago.”

“It was a glorified snipe hunt, and you know it,” Gramps snorted, his pipe between his teeth as he peeled a slice of pepperoni from the delivery box and plopped it onto his plate.

White Owl ignored him and fixed me with a serious and haunted look. “By the time I arrived, three had already died. Horribly. Heads savagely ripped from their bodies by something very, very strong with very sharp claws.”

“It was probably a bloody Ogre. They have a thing for heads, you know,” Gramps bantered back with a chuckle. “Damned stinking, bumbling, brutish beasts like to boil them up in cauldrons. Call it head cheese pudding. Smells bloody awful but they go absolutely crazy for a good bowl of it. Especially if it’s spiced with curry and sage.” I almost choked on my pizza as my stomach did a lurching flip flop at that idea.

“Ah, yes. An Ogre that mysteriously passes through warded and locked doors and leaves not a trace of their passing?” White Owl arched his brow at Gramps who merely HARUMPHED and grumbled to himself as he took a huge bite of his pizza.

“Yes, every scene was the same,” White Owl explained with a touch of frustration in his voice as he steepled his fingers before his face and took a long deep breath. “Down to the last detail. The basement doors were the only things left open, and there wasn’t a single sign of forced entry, mundane or magical. No scratches on the locks, no smells of sulfur, no aura spikes, nothing. Not a thing disturbed, looted, or out of place. Just grizzly headless bodies.”

“Sounds awful,” I answered in a much squeakier voice than I had attended that I tried—and failed—to hide by slurping at my straw I had in my bottle of Coke. Manx, who seemed to agree, whined mournfully as he continued to stare up at the Master hopefully.

“That wasn’t the worst of it,” White Owl divulged in a voice so soft that the rhythmic tick of the wall clock and crackle of the fire nearly smothered it out. “On Devils’ Night while the hunt was on for the killer, we had an unusual break in the case.” At this Gramps scoffed, belched, and went back to munching on his supper with a roll if his eyes.

“There was a witness,” White Owl finished to which Gramps almost choked as he swallowed and laughed at the same time.

“Hardly a credible one,” Gramps snapped.

“Credible enough,” White Owl retorted blithely as he snapped his fingers and the pizza box on the coffee table floated over to him, hovering over his lap till he selected a slice then zoomed back to the coffee table. Manx perked up at this as he absolutely adores pizza, eyeing the flying box then the slice in White Owl’s hand hungrily.

“It was a little girl scared out of her wits. Had likely been up watching scary movies all night,” Gramps explained, as if that cleared everything up. “Poor thing had no idea what she had seen and was likely so terrified her mind was playing tricks on her.”

“Anyway,” White Owl dismissed Gramps with a pronounced eye roll. “Her name was Jesse, and she confirmed what I had feared all along, that the Click- Clack had come for her babysitter who was a particularly awful young Witch with a penchant for cruelty, bullying, and nastiness.”

Gramps barked out a dry, sarcastic laugh at this. “Oh, so a teenage girl being mean is justification for her to have her head ripped off in the kitchen as she makes popcorn, now is it?”

White Owl nodded sadly. “To me, no. To the Click-Clack, however, it definitely seems to. Does everything terrible have to have a reason you agree with to do what it does?”

Gramps again rolled his eyes and dunked his pizza crust into a bowl of blue cheese salad dressing he’d poured out. (Dipping crusts and chicken wings are just about the only use Gramps ever has for salad dressing as I doubt the man has ever willingly bought a head of lettuce or an actual salad in his very long life). He chewed thoughtfully then took a pull of his pipe, his old friend watching him with a long-suffering frown, waiting patiently for him to answer.

“No. But normally there would have to be a shred of evidence for a thing to be taken seriously or investigated. As to this Clack-Clock of yours, that is certainly not the case,” Gramps insisted as he double dipped then jabbed the drippy blue cheesy half eaten crust at White Owl with a chuckle. “And people, nasty or not, meeting unpleasant ends in unconnected places isn’t pattern enough to prove a thing.”

White Owl eyed him a moment, shaking his head in disgust at the odd crust habit before continuing. “Yes, she was a particularly nasty girl, a bullying brat, but we only found that out much later. I obviously had my suspicions though. And no, she didn’t deserve what happened. Few deserve to have their heads ripped off as they pop popcorn, now do they?”

He looked to me for support but all I could manage at this point was a bit of a squeak and nod as I sipped at my drink. “We were let in by the local Darkling Sheriff (towns or areas with large concentrations of the races or magical folk have a duly appointed sheriff from the local bureau to investigate and keep the peace) and there she was on the floor, headless and splattered on the floor like a broken doll.”

White Owl shook his head sadly. “Little Jesse was shaking, cuddling her