[Icelander]

Even though Juman didn’t have a drink with his dinner, he agreed to switch seats with Wojciechowski so that the latter could drive for a while. Before taking the wheel, the wiry old Night Hunter fetched a leather case from the trunk and took out two vials that he drank, one after another, making a disgusted face. Kit was still determined to get answers on the Sons of the Bird, but his glimpse inside the case made him curious enough to get sidetracked.

“Uh, Tomasz, what was that?”
Wojciechowski cleaned out his mouth with a sip of water, spit on the ground next to the car and took a seat. “Bialego Wilka, remember? Herbal elixirs. Help my night vision, my reflexes and my conditioning.”

Kit blinked in surprise. “[Excrement], really? We can get Witcher potions?”
Juman blew a derisive raspberry. “Dis lenky mook ain’t got na evidence it works, actually. Na doctors to tell him if it’s gonna kill him, neither. Dunda head is actually playing human test subject with dem obeyah drinks.”
“Yeah,” said Wojciechowski as he started the car. “And you still smoke, you fat [fornicator].”

Rumbling with laughter, Juman lit a cigarette and turned to Kit while the car left the parking lot and got back on the highway. “Dis mook, he quit am a month ago. We is gonna see how long he last without am dis time.”

A few seconds after Juman lit his cigarette, there was a loud squeal from the pig in the other back seat as it tried to get out of the seatbelt. Kit managed to grab it and restrain it from escaping, but couldn’t do anything about the squeals. “Guys, I think she doesn’t like the smell of smoke!”

Without any discussion, Juman threw the cigarette out the window and Wojciechowski said, in an eerily calm voice. “Żabko, you need to find coral to distract pig. Check floor.”

As pigs went, this one was not massive, weighing only about the same as a slender girl, but as Kit discovered in the back seat, that was plenty of heft for a creature throwing itself in all directions, trotters kicking wildly as shrill squeals pierced his ears. His eyes filled with tears as an errant trotter impacted his nose and he lost his grip for a moment. Once he grabbed on to the pig again, he could taste blood running down his face.
“Ouch, you [fornicating] pig[fornicator], stop kicking me! He’s the one who lit the cigarette!”

Juman rolled down the window on his side, rumbling with laughter, and as he drove, Wojciechowski was working on the window on his side. Kit wished that his combatives training had covered frenzied pigs as he tried to immobilize all the flying trotters while somehow searching the floor in a dark car for a tiny little silver-and-ivory ornament. It helped a bit when Juman flicked on the lights in the car, but it still took an eternity of wrestling an angry animal before Kit spotted the toy on the floor.

Transitioning into a grapple where he had a free hand allowed Kit to fetch the coral and wave it in front of the agitated pig. The transformation was instant. Instead of resisting him, the animal relaxed its body and started to follow the ivory ornament with piggy eyes. When Kit inserted the ivory ring of the coral into its snout, it happily suckled at the ring like a pacifier, becoming docile and easy to deal with.

With an amused timbre in his voice, Wojciechowski asked from the front seat, “Did you just need magic pacifier to win fight with baby pig?”
“If I was the ref, I woulda stopped am,” Juman added. “Dis bai was on dem ropes. I is calling it; pig by TKO. And don’t you dream of bleeding in my cyar, bai, or I’m gonna cuff you proppa!”

Kit staunched the bleeding with some napkins from what remained of his road trip supplies in the back and sighed in a nasally voice, “Well, you guys are real supportive.” If he hoped that this would have made the older men reconsider their unhelpful attitudes, he was disappointed, as a chorus of jeers greeted him from the front of the car.

“Oh, okay, laugh at the [Fornicating] New Guy while I bleed. So I haven’t got a merit badge in pig-wrestling. Manhandling livestock feels like more of a Marine thing anyway.” Kit laid back while he waited for the blood-flow to slow. “So, since I’m already feeling [fornicating] awful, how about you tell me about these baby-murdering black magicians into whose home territory we might be going for some inexplicable reason?”

“Not inexplicable,” Wojciechowski said. “Just being good decoys. New Year’s is liminal time, good time for all sorts of magic. We definitely want to ping cultist divination at that time; avoid them being anywhere near real protectee. St. Louis is big city, full of magic, full of danger. Drawing them there would make it hard for them to narrow us down, lot of other magic to interfere, and if we have to bring bunch of feds there, maybe bit of official attention would be good for St. Louis.”
“Uh, okay,” Kit said. “But won’t that mess up this truce?”

In the mirror, the cold smile on the old Night Rider’s grizzled face was as predatory as the wolf he liked to be referred to as. “So I should help them hide? Dante Villareal and old man Kessler care about big picture; so we have truce with Sons of the Bird. Okay, good. Tomasz Mateusz Wojciechowski never officer and never big picture guy. I care about Izzy Landry’s memory and little murdered girls Izzy never got over. So, maybe some [sphincter] Homeland spooks get tangled up with murdering [illegitimate] Sons of the Bird. Maybe I don’t cry about any of them.”
In a quiet voice, Kit asked, “What happened with the Sons of the Bird?”

Regular breathing from Juman’s seat indicated that the heavy-set Night Rider had fallen asleep almost immediately after his big meal. The highway north of Nacogdoches was neither particularly well lit nor heavily travelled at this time of night, so only occasional headlights broke up the December darkness. Without interference from Juman in matters of music, Wojciechowski had felt free to put on a cassette of Leonard Cohen, at this moment singing ‘Bird on a Wire’.

“Okay, kid,” Wojciechowski said. “Like I said, it was back in 2011, 2012. I was fairly new Night Rider, got out of Legion at end of 2009. I wasn’t stationed in Louisiana; I was Penemue team already by 2011 and we had our own stuff back in ’11 and ‘12. So I heard about most of this later from Izzy, when he’d replaced Dante as team lead on Penemue.”

Driving at night didn’t seem to bother Wojciechowski, who drove at maybe 75 mph, five miles over the speed limit, without using the full beam setting of his headlights. “Izzy figures these kid murders have occult component and gets cop friend to run some aspects through VICAP. Gets hits. Over twenty, in last three years. At least three in Mississippi, Adams and Washington Counties. Two in Alabama, Hale County. This Choctaw kid in Le Flore County in Oklahoma. Few in Ohio, maybe. And full dozen up in Illinois and Missouri. Around river, you know.”

Clearing his throat gruffly, Wojciechowski continued in a deliberately casual voice. “Of course, there were probably more. He got more hits, you see, these were just ones he was sure about. All girls, aged ten or less. Beautiful girls, all of them, because that mattered, you see? Not molested, though. Just taken somewhere, isolated and dark. Fed, cared for, in certain way, hair cleaned, combed nice and neat. And such elaborate tattoos, must have taken days to finish. So it was usually about week until their throats were cut. One cut, nice and neat like their combed hair. So they bled out slow, frightened and alone, not understanding any of it. The bird is cruel.”
“Jesus,” Kit said.

“No, boychik,” answered Wojciechowski. “That one you can’t blame on Him. Izzy spent over a year on it. Every spare minute he had, he spent with pictures, doing research. Just thinking. Trying to comprehend. Until he figured out what the spirals and symbols were supposed to do. They marked girls as sacrifices to propriate Ulusunti stone, very powerful medicine that has tendency to turn on user if not fed regularly. It was never about them. They were fuel. Batteries, for magician who’d used up all his occult juice for whatever he was doing.”

Simple guitar chords and harmonica tore up the silence as Cohen sang ‘But no one really could hear him; The night so dark and thick and green…’

“Mother[fornicator] was careful. But not careful enough, because he left prints at couple of sites, when he snatched girls. Hair, saliva, drop of blood on tattoo needle that wasn’t theirs. And it was just one mother[fornicator]. Same MO, same prints, same DNA. But he wasn’t on file. No military service, no criminal record, none of other things that give authorities ways to find you.”

Wojciechowski was speaking barely louder than the music, his face like stone. “Izzy knew some tricks of trade. A few wards, some dowsing, telling fortunes, Mate Care-For to watch over him. More than most can do. But Izzy couldn’t find this child-murdering prick by casting Tarot or reading tea-leaves. More girls turned up missing, like little Mary Flores from Cherokee County just west of here. Some were found, like one in Lafayette County, Arkansas, another in Baldwin County, Alabama.”
Kit closed his eyes. Said quietly, “I never heard about no missing girl hereabouts.”

“No reason you should, boychik. No police in Alto any more to investigate and Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office figured girl’s father took her along when he got job in Arkansas. Mother was drunk, half-breed Indian, not really in position to make much noise.”
“So what happened?” Kit asked.

“Investigation,” Wojciechowski said. “All missing girls and all murders were around Southern Death Cult sites. Looking at missing person reports from Missouri and Illinois knowing what he knew, Izzy figured that he had to be based in St. Louis. Of course. At Cahokia.”