Duel Nature (14 page)

I must have looked at him funny, because
Quinby explained. “My husband minored in Folklore in college.”

Certainly, starvation or cabin fever, or
both, could result in the right conditions to invite demonic
possession. The physical changes, the speed and invulnerability to
harm were all much greater than anything I had seen before. This
might be a different breed of demons than I was familiar with or a
different kind of possession because of the cannibalism.

“Tomorrow is the first full moon,” Tanya
said, looking up at the silvery orb in the night sky.

“Jake will turn and these things will hunt
him,” I said, understanding her thought train.

“How did you survive your encounter,” Quinby
asked.

“I told you. We fought, he didn’t like the
direction things were going in and left,” I said.

“I am familiar with Jake’s kind, somewhat.
They are helpless against these things,” she said.

“Well, many demons can hide themselves from
humans or supernaturals. Also, these things are really fast and
there is at least three of them.”

“So how did you see them?” she continued.

I shrugged, but my vampire answered the
question for me. “Christian was born to fight demons. He was
selected by God to do so,” she said.

All four Boklunds gaped at her. “Selected by
God?” Garth asked, his tone derisive.

“Your women are all witches, you live in a
forest haunted by demons, and you know about werewolves and
vampires. Yet you have difficulty thinking that God might choose a
warrior?” Tanya replied, turning unerringly toward the distant
resort with liquid grace. She floated through the woods, leading
the way back without waiting for a response.

Garth, Quinby and the twins exchanged
glances, looked at me curiously, then started to follow without a
word. Tom and I took up the rear of the silent column. You could
just about hear the gears of thought grinding among them as we
returned to the resort.

Chapter 15

Satisfied, we escorted the Boklunds back to
the resort, then the three of us attempted to trail the Cheeno I
had wounded. We lost the trail at the edge of a boggy swamp, the
tracks and trail utterly absorbed by pools of stagnant water and
mud. The swamp was big enough that attempting to circle it for more
tracks would take most of a day, even moving at vampire speeds.

Momentarily stumped, we headed back to cabin
four.

“So, what’s the plan?” I asked my vampire as
I made a gi-normous omelet to split with ‘Sos, who was back in wolf
form. The moon had begun its descent and my bed was calling me. It
had been a really long day and night.

“Keep wolf-boy from running off into the
woods and yet not killing anyone else, while hunting down and
killing the Cheenos, all without anyone noticing,” she said
straight faced.

“Sounds like a piece of cake,” I said around
a big bite of omelet. She frowned at me, a little furrow forming
between her perfect brows.

“You didn’t fill that thing with onions did
you? You know I don’t like that much onion,” she said.

I held my right thumb and forefinger a half
inch apart. “This much onion I swear and only ‘cause ‘Sos insists
on onions in his omelet,” I replied. Awasos lifted his head from
his own platter and growled at me.

“Leave him out of this,” Tanya said, moving
across the tiny room in a liquid blur till she was half a foot
away. She sniffed my face.

“Hmm, I guess it’s not that much onion,” she
said, smiling suddenly and kissing me quickly.

Tanya doesn’t eat solid food – no vampire
does, but she says she can taste what I’ve been eating when she
drinks my blood. Since I’m the only one she drinks directly from
(except emergencies like in the middle of combat or something) the
only variety she gets is by changes in my diet.

So now we’re a little like a middle-aged
married couple where the wife is always monitoring what the husband
eats to protect him from his own cholesterol or triglycerides or
something. And she has definite opinions about what tastes good and
what doesn’t. She’s not big on onions, habanero peppers or
licorice, but ironically thinks garlic is tasty.

So I fed, she fed and, of course, Awasos kept
right on feeding straight through. Then I caught a couple hours of
sleep, waking at dawn to take over so Tanya could sleep when the
sun came up.

Ten AM found me and the big bad wolf circling
the property looking for trails and sign. I wanted to understand
which approaches the Cheenos favored, which paths they traveled the
most. Awasos had already scouted the day before with Tanya, so once
he understood what I was looking for he led me straight to it. Of
course, all that took was for me to explain it out loud – once. I
swear he’s smarter than two thirds of the humans I know.

What we found was that the Cheenos always
came from the swamp, although they had about five well-travelled
trails approaching the resort from multiple directions.

I pulled up a map of the swamp on my
smartphone and discovered it was much bigger than I had thought.
After a moment I turned to Awasos.

“Go back and guard Tanya while she sleeps.
I’m gonna travel through the trees and see if I can get a read on
these things.”

He didn’t care much for that idea. Frankly,
neither did I.

Three hours later and I had confirmed that it
was a big frigging swamp. Jumping from tree to tree, wading through
muck when necessary, I had covered big swaths of it. Still didn’t
really touch the place. The terrain had been carved by glaciers in
the last Ice Age, that much I recalled from my Google of Hiawatha
Forest some days ago. It had left this part with lots of ponds and
swamps dotted with raised land that managed to provide some dry
areas. One of those hummocks had sported a rotting husk of a cabin,
but it was long deserted. I had managed to hit the scent of the
Cheenos a couple of times but it always petered out before I could
get more than a whiff.

Sodden and filthy, I returned to little cabin
four and cleaned up, then fed myself and the bottomless pit named
Awasos.

About four in the afternoon, Tanya popped up,
snacked on me and got ready for the night. First we checked on Jake
and Steve, who had stayed at the resort all day. Then we met with
the Boklunds to plan.

The women had reinforced the perimeter wards
throughout the day, doubling the number of little Blair Witch
memorials that circled the property. Their idea for the night was
to raise a circle of Power that would keep Jake on the property. If
the Cheenos showed up and we wanted to get ourselves killed by
them, well that was our problem. We agreed, although I had
misgivings about trying to contain a werewolf in a witches
circle.

Next we all trooped to cabin three and
explained the plan to the werewolf lad and his brother. Both were
pretty skeptical about both the circle holding Jake and the whole
Cheeno thing.

“So you’re good with werewolves, you believe
in vampires, but the witch and Wendigo part are too much?” I asked
in disbelief of their disbelief.

“It just seems too much,” Jake said with a
shrug.

Quinby raised one eyebrow at the brothers,
then fingered one of her necklaces.

“Oh boy, here we go!” Garth said, backing up
to give his wife room.

Quinby smiled at the brothers and nothing
appeared to happen as her right hand rubbed a small wooden bead
formed like a bird. Then suddenly every object on the table, the
counter tops and the unmade beds lifted straight up into the air,
all hovering at eye level. Running shoes, dirty cookware, a box of
donuts, shotgun shells, a camo hat, the toaster, numerous cans of
Budweiser in various stages of consumption, and a pair of chili
pepper emblazoned boxers all floated around us. Jake and Steve
looked around the tiny cabin, eyes wide and nodded. “Okay, this
might work” was Steve’s input. Jake was a bit shaken looking and I
could see him glancing at Britta occasionally. I’m pretty sure he
was rerunning every conversation he’d had with her, reviewing every
promise or endearment.

The twins sat in the worn armchairs that
flanked the south facing picture window, Erika grinning and
bouncing her crossed leg while she snapped her gum and Britta
looking out the window, a sad and resolved look on her face.

“Okay, so we’re onboard with this now?” I
asked the brothers. They nodded and Quinby released her charm, the
objects all dropping to the floor, table or countertop below.
Except the box of donuts which found its way into my hands. I
snagged two of the powdered sugar-covered jelly-filled beauties
then spotted a huge liquid brown eye staring at me from the screen
door. Sighing I a snagged two more for my furry buddy and together
we scarfed them down.

“Where do you want to put the circle?” Tanya
asked Quinby, then sighed as she glanced my way. She made a face
cleaning motion at me, looking mildly exasperated. Still beautiful,
but exasperated.

“Out beyond cabin five. There’s a big clear
spot where we sometimes set up a volleyball court,” the blonde
witch replied, looking at me and my wolf-bear curiously. “I used to
play volleyball in college you know,” she added, apropos of
nothing.

“Really?” I asked in my best surprised voice,
almost loud enough to cover Tanya’s snort…almost.

Chapter 16

Dusk crept across the resort, turning the
bright spring day to a dark foreboding night. The forest loomed
around the resort, making it an island in an ocean of blackness.
The lodge was lit up, the big sodium light over the woodpile
humming to itself while every cabin had a bonfire burning.

Tom had built a fire at each cabin,
supposedly at the Boklunds request on the false pretense of giving
each guest a campfire atmosphere. The additional light was not
enough to alleviate the gloom that had fallen over the Copper Top
Cabin resorts, but it did reflect nicely from the metal roofs that
gave the resort its name.

I was in the woods just outside the clearing
at cabin five where Jake stood unhappily inside a fifteen foot
circle of salt. Britta and Steve stood near the empty cabin
watching the half-naked werewolf and waiting for the moon to come
up.

Tanya and Awasos were on watch about a
hundred yards to either side of me. Our theory was that the Cheenos
would be drawn to Jake, if they were, in fact, attracted to
supernatural creatures. Having the three of us clustered around the
young werewolf concentrated the supernatural bait so to speak.

Britta and Steve would head into cabin five
which was outfitted with a whole slew of stick man fetishes. In
addition, Steve clutched his Remington 1100 shotgun in his hands.
While I doubted he could even hit a superfast Cheeno, the mixture
of salt and steel shot in the shells might have some effect at
close range. Maybe, maybe not.

The rest of the Boklunds were back at the
lodge, which like cabin five, was liberally festooned with
stickmen. In fact, all the cabins sported Blair Witch mementos as
an attempt to keep the Cheenos away. Quinby thought the demons
would come at the resort from the woods closest to cabin five, but
would be held by her Wards. My own experience with the things
didn’t give me as much confidence in her perimeter. The Cheenos had
avoided the witches till Jake had shown up a month earlier. Now I
figured they might find a way to get through. Although it made me
wonder that the demons were drawn to weres and vampires but avoided
witches. Odd that.

The silver moon had not yet made her
appearance and the dusky gloom was quiet save for the sounds of
crickets around me and frogs chorusing down by the pond.

Tanya was calm and thinking quiet thoughts,
Awasos was watching silently and my lack of sleep was making me
drowsy. All told, I’d only had a few hours of sleep since leaving
Chicago and now I was starting to nod off. After a few attempts to
push myself to a higher level of awareness, I sensed Tanya’s
amusement at my condition. “Go ahead, it’s early and we’re
watching,” she whispered at me a football field away. I heard it
like she was next to me and I immediately took her words to heart.
It was too early for demons. Still hearing her silken tones in my
head, I nodded off.

***

It was the tree falling that woke me. A slow,
low vibration that started in the ground then moved up in the
canopy of the forest to the wide limbed top of an old maple. One
moment I’m dreaming of an all-you-can-eat buffet at a steakhouse,
the next I’m staring at a giant mass of leaves slamming through the
roof of green overhead. It fell directly into one of Quinby’s
talisman trees, ripping the smaller tree out of the ground and
shoving it over at an angle, then hitting the ground with an earth
shaking whump.

Almost immediately two other trees fell a
little further down the circle of the Wards, taking out another
pair of magical fence posts. Broken limbs and clusters of ripped
leaves continued to fall after the thick trunks had settled to the
forest floor.

“That can’t be good,” Britta muttered behind
me.

The forest quieted by
degrees, falling into a complete silence. Then the stench of
rotting flesh and feces rolled over me, giving me a split second
before
it
appeared
on the twisted trunk of the maple. It could have been the same
monster from the night before or its twin. Same ugly elongated,
skeletal build, covered with grayish skin and cabled muscle. Same
needle sharp teeth and wicked claw-tipped hands. Goblin ears and
huge light-catching orange eyes. Those lantern eyes stared straight
at me, penetrating the dark shadows I was hidden in. It hissed. It
leapt.

I was watching all this as an observer, my
Grim side running the show from the moment I awoke. My combat
persona surprised both watcher-me and the Cheeno. We/I sprang right
at the oncoming monster, meeting it in mid-air, shooting under its
outstretched arms like an Olympic wrestler. My body twisted in
mid-air, changing both our direction of flight and the sudden
landing that came after.