Feast (11 page)
Authors: Merrie Destefano
The best way to make your dreams
come true is to wake up.
—Paul Valery
Maddie:
A few lamps cast light about the small living room, though not enough to quench the darkness that seeped in every window. I leaned against the cabin door, my heart hammering. A scratching noise sounded outside, followed by a whimper. I held up my hand, motioning for Tucker to hold still. Then I cracked the door open. Samwise bounded in, a blur of black-and-tan fur, sometimes dog, sometimes something else.
I locked the door, then slid to the ground.
A dead body still lay back in the woods. Despite everything that had just happened, I had to let the authorities know.
One hand instinctively reached to my pocket and pulled out my iPhone. I couldn’t even remember putting it back, thought I must have dropped it somewhere back in the woods, when I’d been fighting—
What the hell had I been fighting?
I shuddered, felt something crawling around inside my skin, in my mind. Something oily and dark and rancid was trying to figure out where I was.
That beast is inside me.
I dropped the phone with a clatter and pulled up my jacket sleeve. A six-inch ragged scrape ran down the inside of my left forearm. Blood and bits of torn flesh and something like speckles of silver. That monster had marked me with a rough swipe of its long tongue.
“No!”
My jacket fell to the floor and I ripped off my shirt as I ran to the bathroom.
“Mom, what is it? What’s wrong?” Tucker jogged after me, the dog at his side.
I glanced back at the two of them. Didn’t he see it? Couldn’t my son see that Samwise wasn’t a dog anymore? Even now I saw the hackles on the dog grow as his back hunched up and his chest widened. It looked like he was preparing to go into battle.
With a twist of my wrist, I turned on the hot water, let it run in the sink, grabbed the soap and started scrubbing my arm, wincing when the water got too hot.
“Tucker, look in the medicine cabinet. Quick! See if we brought any disinfectant or rubbing alcohol or anything—”
He climbed on the toilet, awkwardly reached over me, rummaged through the few items in the cabinet that we had brought with us. He pulled them out one by one. I lifted my arm out of the water, doused it with mouthwash, then hydrogen peroxide. My arm was bleeding, the peroxide foaming up, turning a sickly shade of green.
Tucker ran into the other room and left me alone with the dog.
We stared at each other. His tail wagging, his mouth opened in a grin.
A memory came back: a nightmarish monster that had pawed through my every hope and dream. A great hairy beast had come lumbering through the forest, taller than the sky; it had swept the shadow monsters away. Then it had taken me in one hand and carried me back up the trail—
Samwise
.
“It was you, boy. Wasn’t it?” I asked, kneeling down. He padded closer, nuzzled my free hand, pushed it open and licked it. I pulled his big head next to my face, then kissed him on the nose. “Good boy,” I whispered.
He licked me on the mouth and I laughed.
Tucker ran back into the room then, his hands full. He poured his loot on the bathroom counter: aloe vera and Neosporin and gauze bandages. And my iPhone.
“Someone’s talking,” he said as I spread a thick layer of Neosporin over the scratch.
I pressed my ear against the phone while he held it up. I didn’t remember dialing any numbers but I must have.
“This is nine-one-one. What is your emergency—
”
The patrol car arrived sooner than I expected. San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. Lights flashing outside. Someone pounding on my door. When I opened it, I found myself face-to-face with 250 pounds of backwoodsman-in-khaki.
“Evening, ma’am.” He touched his hat with a hand. “I’m Sheriff Brandon Kyle.”
Was it evening? I peered around him, wondered how long I had been down in the woods. The fog had settled in the lowlands and it had started snowing. Still, I could see patches of dusky blue sky and a full moon that cast the Driscoll mansion in an eerie silhouette. A group of trick-or-treaters shuffled along the main road, clutching paper sacks that would soon be filled with candy.
“You reported a dead body in the woods?” He shuffled from one foot to the other, as if eager to get down to business.
“Yes. I did. It’s on the Ponderosa Trail.” I pointed toward the gap between the trees, where a wood-chip tongue and a throaty trail led down into a dangerous black chasm—like a hungry mouth. A shiver worked its way up my arms to my neck, but I fought it. Gauze bandages laced my arm, covering the wound that I had scrubbed until raw and bleeding. It tingled now at the thought of what might be down in the forest, waiting for me.
Were those creatures still down there?
“What happened?” The officer gestured toward my arm.
“I—uh—I must have scraped my arm in the bushes. I don’t remember. Think I panicked when I saw that body.”
Oh, yeah, and by the way, there are monsters down there.
His stare said he didn’t believe me.
I shrugged. “I’m clumsy.”
“She is.” Tucker joined me at the door, nodding. “Really. She tripped and fell down the stairs back home last year—”
“Okay, sweetheart.” I put an arm around my son. “They don’t need to know what a klutz I am.”
“I’m going to need you to show me where you saw the body, Mrs. MacFaddin—”
“Miss
, not Mrs. Miss MacFaddin.”
He glanced down at his clipboard. “Right. Sorry. My deputy can stay with your boy.” A woman in uniform, almost as tall and broad as Mr. Backwoodsman himself, appeared on the porch.
“Deputy Rodriguez,” she introduced herself. “Think your dog will mind if I come in?”
I glanced down at Samwise, standing beside Tucker. Well, Rodriguez wasn’t a mailman, so it should be all right. I knelt beside the dog, “Stay with Tucker. Stay.” The dog stared at me with inquisitive brown eyes, tilted his head to the side as if trying to read between the lines.
Don’t follow me and don’t even think about turning into a werewolf while I’m gone.
I had no idea if he could read my mind, but it was worth a try.
Then I cautiously opened the screen door, watching the dog to see how he acted. With a wag of the tail and a lick on the hand, he proved that he could be good.
If he had to.
Maddie:
The moon slid behind the tree line. A breeze followed the creek, over mossy banks, past a swinging bridge. A light snow drifted down and mixed with the fog, settling in clumps between tree trunks, drifting and stretching, now a vaporous cobweb. Wet, damp, cold. It filled my lungs as I led Sheriff Kyle down into the mazelike wilderness. We carried hefty flashlights and brandished them like weapons against the thick, steamy darkness.
I wasn’t used to being so far away from the neon-city glare, from the white noise that speaks even at night. Here, the sky was so black it didn’t seem real. The moon was full tonight, but at the edge of this wood-chip trail the darkness sang, heavy and deep. It whispered and sighed, told stories I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear.
Stories about monsters with shadowy wings. Creatures that wanted to steal your dreams. Creatures that apparently only I could see.
My fingers tightened around the barrel of my flashlight. Both of our beams of light swung to the right now; they crossed each other, searching the empty pockets where trees refused to grow. A small figure darted through the woodland gloom, a charcoal silhouette against forest green. A fox or a rabbit, visible only for a moment, a flash of red eyes, and then gone.
“You were hiking down here by yourself?” Kyle asked.
“Yes. Stupid idea.” The moon stared down at us through black filigree branches. I saw his shoulders rise in a brief shrug. “You think I imagined the body?”
We passed a berry briar and the scent of wild raspberries swirled around us.
“No, ma’am, it’s just—”
He hesitated. One hand tumbled through the air as he searched for the right words.
“—visitors don’t always understand what it’s like out here. Kinda surprised me too, when I first transferred from L.A. The locals claim that this place is a sanctuary, protected from things like that.” He continued as we tramped through autumn leaves. “I can’t remember the last time anybody got murdered, either in town or in the woods. Haven’t had any problems with coyotes or bears either, not like they do up in Lake Arrowhead or Big Bear. It’s like there’s something out here that watches over folks.”
I gave him a sidelong glance. Welcome to Mayberry. “What about your local legends? Somebody at the vet’s office told me he’d seen a chupacabras.”
“Chupacabras, huh?” He let out a short laugh. “You must have been talking to Joe Wimbledon. His family’s been seeing and talking about those damn things for almost a hundred years.”
“I thought chupacabras have only been around for about twenty years.”
“The Wimbledons used to call ’em something else.” He focused a white-hot shaft of light across the thicket, through trees that wavered and shadows that danced. “Can’t remember what. Not vampires or werewolves—”
“Shape-shifters?”
He scratched his chin, inadvertently tossing the light into the branches above us, making it look like we were in a cavern of interlocking branches. “Yeah. That’s it.”
“But nobody else has ever seen one.”
He grinned. Even in the darkness I could feel it. “You mean besides you? Every couple of years somebody claims they see something ‘funny’ in the woods or outside their house. Pretty standard for a mountain community surrounded by thousands of acres of forest. Usually happens about this time of year. Right around Halloween, when everybody’s already looking for ghosts and goblins. But nobody’s ever gotten hurt. I take it back—there was that time when a group of Joe’s poker buddies decided to play a practical joke on him, so they tied a big bat-like dummy outside his bedroom window. Joe’s wife nearly had a heart attack when she saw it. But that’s the only time. Honest. It’s possible your guy fell and hit his head, then died from exposure.”
“Yeah, and then a steamroller ran over him.”
I stopped, swung my light over the ground. There, to the left of the trail was a lumpy, misshapen pile of leaves, dusted with snow. I bent down, picked up a long stick, maybe even the same one I had used before, then swept it through the leaves.
A haze of flies and gnats rose up.
I froze. This was it, I was sure of it. A quick flash of light revealed all the landmarks I remembered.
But it couldn’t be the right place.
Because the body was gone.
Chapter 38
Skin Like Chameleons
Ash:
I watched Thane and River spin through October skies until they finally landed on the lawn before the Driscoll mansion. They would be gone soon, though not soon enough. Pain surged through my gut, stubborn and incessant, horrid beyond bearing.
“We must hide the dead human,” Sage warned.
At least, I thought she said something like that. I wasn’t sure. The knife blade had gone in a hundred years ago, but the pain had never left. My wings curled in spasms of agony.
I tried to latch one hand around a nearby tree trunk, but failed.
“Ash!” my sister cried.
One feeble gasp and then, suddenly I was tumbling to the ground, weakly grasping at branches as I fell, a rustling thunder of pine needles and leaves, and the cracking of bone against wood. Sage tried to catch me, tried to soar faster than my descent, but couldn’t reach me in time.
The forest walls became a rushing tunnel of pain. I instinctively tucked my wings around myself, but couldn’t stop the jagged rips or brutal blows, each delivered with purpose and intent.
I could feel it—even the forest was angry with me.
With a wicked thump that echoed and reverberated, I hit the ground. Crumpled in a ball. Spine striking earth. A cloud of dirt and fallen leaves exploded around me.
For a second, I thought I might never breathe again.
Then oxygen came rushing back and with it, every pain and every blow the forest had given. Still, the worst was the ache in my side, that damnable hole that would never heal. I masked it with a Veil when around other Darklings, I couldn’t have them know how easily I could be defeated in battle.
And yet, somehow Thane had found it.
The world around me wavered and faded, turned into a ghost horizon.
My sister was holding me in her arms, but she was as transparent as the fog.
“Can’t have them run away,” I murmured. “The humans always run away when they see my wound—”
“Lie still,” Sage said. “Your old wound is ripped and torn.”
Leaves and evergreen needles still fell in a rain, blanketing me, burying me just like the dead human who lay a mere wingspan away. I tried to straighten my limbs. Unable to stand, unable to move, and yet, through it all, I could hear the song of the moon, somewhere overhead, a song like ambrosia—fragrant, healing, powerful. But not strong enough.
“Drink this.”
I shuddered, then realized that my eyes had opened and Sage had lifted a vial to my lips. A thick, rich liquid flowed down my throat—a fresh harvest. I could taste the tang of wild berry and russet leaves, could hear the song of summer wind through green branches. Could feel strength returning to weak limbs.
Already I was growing stronger, muscles sleek, flesh glowing. The distilled dreams of a hundred Sleepers warmed my belly through the elixir that Sage had poured down my unwilling throat. The Nectar of the Hunt stirred the old hunger within. For the first time in almost a century, my desire for the old dreams vanished.
My sister had won. She had lured me back into the Land of the Living.
“Did Thane hurt her?” I asked, my voice weak. My cousin had been hunting Maddie, I knew it.
“No.” Sage paused, some unwilling bit of news on her tongue. “But he marked her.”
I sighed and glanced away.
Then Sage placed a firm hand on my wrist. “We must hide the dead body. Quickly. The sun has departed. They will come stumbling through the wood soon, with their bright lights and their weapons of sulfur and steel.” She lifted her head, caught a scent on the wind. “One of them is here already, a man who wears the stench of oil and death.”
We stood at opposite ends of the dead human, lifted him gently, ceremoniously, both chanting a holy requiem poem. Then, wings flapping, we carried the body into star-spun skies, shifted our skin like chameleons, and we sailed to the boundary of Ticonderoga Falls.
But the Legend followed me, even there. When the moon rose in the heavens, and we mourned the human’s death, joining the hymn offered by the birds—at that very same moment, the Legend sang in my ear. Maybe a mother was telling her children a story as she tucked them into bed. Or maybe one teenager was daring another to walk through the shadowed wood.
The curse descended and his human disguise cracked and fell away, it seared and turned black. Because of it, he is no longer a beautiful mythical creature in a wooded glen. He is now a monster who slinks through darkened corridors, someone who haunts your dreams . . .
