We stood there staring at Marie’s body. “Maybe we should call the cops,” Gary suggested.

I pulled my glasses off and rubbed my eyes, then put them back on. Marie was still lying there, dead. “Shit,” I said after a while. “I am the cops.” I backed up again and went looking for a phone. I found one in the kitchen, lying beside the tooth Marie’d collected from the church parking lot. She’d cleaned the blood off it and it looked innocuous, like it was waiting for the tooth fairy. I picked it up and stared at it, then folded it into my pocket as I got the phone and went back into the living room, dialing 9-1-1.

We were still standing there twenty-five minutes later when the real cops showed up. They bustled us down to the station in separate cars. I thought if we were really criminals, we’d have either abandoned the place or worked out our story while we were waiting for the cops, but no one wanted to listen to my point of view.

Gary had an all-day alibi; he’d been at work until two, then at a senior’s poker game until he came to wake me up. I had no alibi at all. A cop I didn’t know questioned me for over an hour. He kept getting hung up on the fact that I’d seen Marie from a plane in the first place. Everybody was having trouble with that idea. I made a mental note not to play Rescue Chick from the air again.

He let me go after verifying I really was a cop. Gary was waiting on the station stairs for me. We stood there watching splats of rain hit the sidewalk.

“You think it was Cernunnos?” Gary asked after a while.

“I don’t think his horse would fit in that apartment.” I sat down hard on the steps. Gary looked down at me in surprise. I smiled up at him weakly. “I haven’t eaten this week.” I didn’t think I was even exaggerating.

“You could eat?” he asked in horror.

“Either that or I could pass out.” I gave him my hand to pull me up. He did, and put a steadying hand at my waist when I wobbled. I smiled dizzily at him. “You know, Gary, if you were forty years younger I could get to like you.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what all the girls say. Where we going? My cab’s at Marie’s.”

“There’s a Denny’s right around the corner.”

“No doughnut shop?”

I grinned a little. “Down the street. But I need real food.”

“You could eat,” he said again, sort of admiringly. I nodded and teetered down the street.

A plate of mozza sticks, a grilled chicken-with-cheese-and-bacon sandwich, a copious number of fries and a chocolate milkshake later I could think again. Gary watched me eat with silent fascination and didn’t so much as steal a fry. When I ordered a hot-fudge brownie sundae and sat back to wait for it, Gary judged it safe to speak again. “So do you think it was Cernunnos?”

I pulled my glasses off and chewed on the earpiece. “I don’t know. Do ancient Celtic gods go around murdering people in their apartments?”

“Dunno. Never met any before. Don’t know why they wouldn’t.”

I looked up and squinted, trying to resolve his fuzzy edges into something more solid. My vision wasn’t that bad—I could drive without my contacts, if I had to—but I’m nearsighted and things more than about three feet away took on the Christmas tree-light effect. “I think maybe we should start with something a little less esoteric.”

“Sure,” Gary said, “like a jealous rival in the anthropology department.” He stared at me until I wrinkled my nose and put my glasses back on.

“It could happen,” I mumbled.

“Could,” Gary agreed. “You think it did?”

“No,” I said reluctantly. “I think Marie was into something weirder than that.”

Gary nodded, satisfied. The waitress came back with my sundae and I poked at it with a fork, no longer hungry enough to eat it. “It was too clean to be Cernunnos.”

“Whaddaya mean, too clean? Didn’t you look at her?”

“Yeah, but.” I waved the fork around. “Think about his host. Dogs and birds and guys on horses. Do you think he goes around killing people all by himself? What if it was that other guy?”

“What other guy?”

“The one with the knife. She said it wasn’t Cernunnos, but she’d thought it was up until the diner this morning.” I frowned at my brownie, and took a bite. It was pretty good. I took another bite.

“The human guy?”

“I donno. I wonder if there are any humans associated with Cernunnos. Maybe we should find out.”

“I don’t think the library’s open this late, Jo.”

My eyebrows went up. “Doesn’t matter. I’ve got a computer at home.” The brownie really was pretty good. I ate some more.

“Never touch the things,” Gary said disdainfully.

I grinned. “Try it. You’ll like it.” I finished my dessert, paid the bill and we went home.

I have a little sign on my computer that says: On The Internet, Nobody Knows You’re A Dog. I dusted it off while the computer booted up. Gary stood back about four feet, looking wary. “It isn’t going to bite you, Gary.”

“That don’t look like the ones on TV,” Gary announced.

I shook my head. “I’m running Linux.”

Gary squinted at me. I inhaled to explain, and gave it up as a bad job before I even started. “It means I’m a computer geek.”

“Right.” Gary edged closer. I opened up a Web browser while he watched curiously. “And you know what you’re doing?”

I grinned over my shoulder at him. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, Gary. Anything you want, you can find it on the Net. It takes hardly any effort to find one hundred percent right answers, and one hundred percent wrong answers.”

He leaned over and planted a hand against the corner of my desk, peering at the screen. “How do you tell which is which?”

“Personal prejudice, sometimes. But for this kind of stuff—” I waggled my fingers at the screen “—you can check through half a dozen sites or so and pick up the information that’s common to all of them. That’s pretty close to being true. I mean, we’re talking about Celtic gods here, Gary. I don’t think there’s a real unquestionable expert on the topic, you know?” I clicked through to one of the sites. Gary dragged a chair over and we both read the screen.

There were a lot of origin stories for the Hunt. Some of it was what Marie had told us already, though some of them mentioned someone called Herne the Hunter. Those ones said the Hunt was made up of mortal hunters who had worked for Richard II of England. The rest suggested it was either of “faerie,” which looked like an obnoxious way to spell “fairy” to me, or made up of great warriors from the past. Even King Arthur was listed among the riders.

“His punishment for killing the children,” Gary said when we got to that bit.

“What?” I pushed my glasses up, peering at him.

“Arthur had hundreds of kids killed.”

I stared at him. “I never heard anything like that.”

Gary shrugged. “It’s one of the stories. Sort of like the Pharaoh killing all the kids trying to get to Moses. Except Arthur was trying to destroy Mordred. Maybe he’s riding with Cernunnos as his punishment for killing them.”

“Where’d you learn all that?”

Gary cocked an eyebrow at me. “I’m an old dog, lady. You pick up a few tricks along the way.”

Great. Apparently I was the only nonbeliever in Seattle. Well, me and Morrison. Somehow that didn’t make me feel any better. Gary reached out and clicked back to the search engine, and through to another site. I half smiled.

“I thought you never touched these things.”

“Don’t tell anybody. You’ll ruin my rep.” He leaned forward, jutting his jaw at the screen while we waited for a slow-loading page to resolve. “So the only mortal mentioned with Cernunnos is this guy Herne. Is he our guy?”

I slid down in my chair, sighing. “I don’t know. Some of the descriptions sound like they might just be the same person. Which doesn’t do us any good. Dammit.”

“What’s that?” Gary leaned forward, examining the screen. Badly rhyming nonsense filled the page in a painstaking handwritten font.