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new angle, then called out, “Send me the tarp.”
    Jeff and Helen lowered a blue tarp with nylon rope strung through the corners. While they worked on retrieving the body, I turned away to think. Normal ice shattered when struck by a bullet, but the ice covering a wendigo’s body had a significantly greater tensile strength, thanks to the fur mixed through it. A high-caliber bullet might penetrate, but most of the time, trying to shoot a wendigo would only piss it off.
    “Watch the fence,” Jeff said as he and Helen pulled the ropes up, hand over hand.
    “Watch yourself, Chihuahua brain,” Helen snapped.
    The cold had minimized the stench of decay, as well askeeping most of the flies away. I waited for them to peel back the tarp, then walked over to help Nidhi examine the body. Without a word, Nidhi handed me a pair of latex examination gloves.
    In death, the wendigo resembled a pale, gaunt man with wrinkled blue-tinged skin and thin white hair. The limbs were stiff, preserving the doubled-over position in which he had died. Much of the skin had been cut away, and shallow gashes marred what remained. Most of the damage looked like it had been done with a knife, or possibly a sword.
    Nidhi pointed to a dark hole in the forehead. “There’s the entry wound.”
    It was smaller than I would have expected. With every muscle frozen, Nidhi had to turn the whole body to examine the back of the head. There was no exit hole.
    I swallowed bile. “They skinned and butchered him like an animal.”
    “No.” Nidhi didn’t look up. “You butcher an animal cleanly. Carefully. This kind of overkill comes from rage.”
    “You think the wendigo killed someone he cared about?” asked Jeff. “This might have been about revenge.”
    “If so, it wasn’t recent,” said Nidhi. “The stomach isn’t distended.”
    My own stomach tried once again to rebel. I managed to force my lunch back down. “Most of the damage was done while he was alive.” I dropped to one knee and pointed to the forehead. “Look at the ring of dry blood around the wound. Wendigos turn human again when they die, but their entire circulatory system freezes solid.”
    The wendigo had bled profusely. The blood would have frozen on the surface of the skin, sealing the cuts. Those frozen clots had broken away when the wendigo shrank back to human form, but thin outlines remained, showing where the body had tried to heal itself.
    “He was tortured.” Lena looked at me, her jaw tight. We had seen this kind of viciousness before, from a madman infested with what Jeneta called devourers.
    I peeled off the gloves and flung them away. “I need to see where he died.”

    Jeff stayed with the body, while Helen guided us through the woods. “You have something in that bag to track whoever did this?” she asked.
    “It depends on whether or not he left anything behind.” Muddy ruts and broken ferns marked the path of the killer’s four-wheeler. When we came to the top of the hill where the vehicle had stopped, I searched for footprints, but found nothing. The ground up here wasn’t damp enough.
    “Down here.” Helen climbed over a fallen tree and gestured to a patch of pale mushrooms growing in the indentation at the base of a thick birch.
    Black blood spattered the ground and the plants. Broken branches and gouged earth told the story of the wendigo’s death. He had fought like an animal. Four parallel claw marks slashed the birch tree at chest height. Crushed ferns showed where he had thrashed back and forth.
    “What are you planning to do?” Helen asked warily. She had never been as comfortable with Porters as her husband was. Most magical creatures resented the laws Gutenberg had set to restrict their habitats and activities. To many of the nonhuman residents of Tamarack, I was about as welcome as an FBI agent stopping by a militia compound. Helen wasn’t as paranoid as some, and she liked me, but that didn’t mean she liked what I was or who I worked