THE SUN SKIMMED over the treetops, allowing shadows to seep from the forest’s interior and pool in its clefts and clearings. The cold air made phantoms of Derek’s breath, each exhalation twisted and tangible and doomed. He rubbed his hands together and jammed them in the pockets of his jeans, positioning his thumb in a streamlined fashion that permitted a quick draw if needed. The sense of impending change was palpable. It rumbled through the earth, the flywheel of some vast machine gradually gathering speed.
Majka led the party through the woods, cutting a pathless trajectory effortlessly through the thickest growth. Brambles parted for her like mist, and trees swung aside like strings of beads decorating a doorway. The forest people followed with similar grace. Luka and his pack struggled to keep up, stumbling over roots and stubbing toes on nodules of moss-draped limestone and swatting aside low-hanging branches, their needles raking across naked cheeks. Trundling behind the eerie silence of the forest folk, the city-dwellers seemed almost deliberately noisy, a chorus of groans and grunted epithets and rustling clothing. Frost-stiffened twigs crunched underfoot, each snap a gunshot in the sylvan stillness. The Asian kid walked with his face scrunched in obvious discomfort. Though his legs had been unshackled, his hands remained bound behind his back, leaving him prey to every gouging branch and bramble that happened upon his unprotected face. Motes, though likewise bound, seemed not to notice the branches at all. He muscled through them not with strength so much as a kind of sublime numbness, his face bearing the expressionless countenance of a man reading a news article of no great interest.
The forest thickened as they progressed, congealing into a semi-solid tangle of hedge and bark and boughs before yielding in an instant to the sharp decline of a gravelly bank over which the forest folk flowed neat as water. Luka’s pack took the drop less nimbly, catching frantically at tree limbs or sliding on sore asses or tumbling headfirst over the edge. The descent was steep but brief, five feet where the ground lurched downward before resuming its gentler gait, trees replaced by bulrushes and sprigs of hemlock and dandelion. A shallow but briskly flowing stream cut through the bedrock, its current dappled with foamy bergs of white water. The hoarse and constant roar of falling water crackled its organic static somewhere upriver.
Majka waded knee-deep into the water, her bare feet cradling the pebbled riverbed, and began walking upstream. The forest folk followed, indifferent to the water’s glacial chill. Derek preferred to walk along the riverbank where the ground was less even but dry, as did much of Luka’s pack. Scarped earth hemmed them towards the water as they progressed, forcing a protracted slog through a churning sludge of silt and sediment. River mud clung to the bottom of Derek’s boots, transforming his feet into misshapen hooves. He scraped the treads clean on passing trees at each patch of dry ground, only to accumulate a fresh layer a few metres down the way. Mosquitoes whined in his ear, their silence followed by the itchy sting of a proboscis piercing some unguarded parcel of flesh. He fluttered his hands around his head like a lunatic and slapped the back of his neck at random, hoping to nail a few of the bastards through the law of averages.
The steep earth fell back from the river, smoothing into a mud-caked amphitheatre bordered by a ring of burly evergreens, stern and gladiatorial in their cheek-by-jowl stance. The escarpment remained on one side, over which a torrent of rushing white water plunged endlessly, stirring the shallow water below into a mania of pale foam. The waterfall, bifurcated by a horn of dolostone, fell in two white pillars resembling tusks.
“Whitetooth Falls, I’m guessing,” Derek said.
Luka grinned back at him, his own incisors a mirror of the waterfall’s alabaster flow. “Good name, ain’t it?”
“Call it Swinging Dick River for all I care, so long as it means we don’t gotta keep walking.”
Luka grabbed Motes by the shoulder and manhandled him into the water, where Majka stood calmly parting the current. Slipping off his boots and socks—wet but not quite soaked through yet, which was how he wanted to keep it—Derek followed, interested in catching this exchange.
The three stood in a rough triangle. Majka and Luka faced one another, while Motes adopted a moderator’s stance between them, his back to the falls. Though the water barely passed his knees, the current was swift, forcing him to continually shift his weight and adjust his footing to avoid toppling face-first into the water. His bound arms made this even more of a challenge, and he nearly slipped twice before turning to Luka with a snort of annoyance.
“Are the handcuffs strictly necessary? I’ll only break them in an hour or so.”
Luka considered a moment, then fished a key from his pocket and unlocked Motes’ hands. “You try to run on me before the moon takes you, you’re a dead man, translator or not.”
Motes rubbed his freed wrists. “Trust me. I’ve nowhere worth running to.”
With Motes unshackled, Luka turned and spoke directly to Majka. Motes followed on the heel of his words, interpreting in his stiff but confident Russian.
“I brought my pack like I promised, Majka. I’m ready to claim my rights as True Silver.”
Mother’s reply filtered through Motes’ tonally flat delivery. “She says you’re still young yet, but she admires your spirit. The right’s yours if you want it. Your pack must drink the silver water from your hands before the moon rises. They’ll drink again from your paw print once you’ve undergone the change. The moon will take them and bind them to you.”
Derek didn’t like the sound of that last part. It sounded awfully . . . permanent. His bare feet, inoculated to the water’s chill, squeezed river mud between their toes. He watched as Luka flagged over his pack and raised handful after handful of river water to their lips. They lapped and sipped the liquid one by one, their eyes alight with an almost religious fervor. Sarah shot him a small ironic smile before taking her own brief baptism, though the look on her face as she drank was no less earnest than the others. Something beneath her skin seemed to change, a subdermal contortion of muscles and connective tissue. As if a creature still half-formed shifted in its chrysalis, its minute postural adjustments meant to accommodate its coming metamorphosis.
Luka motioned Derek forward with a finger. He scooped a fresh handful of water from the river and held it under Derek’s nose, close enough to reveal the bits of dirt imbedded in the whorls and ridges of his callused fingertips. The liquid in his cupped palms was so clear it seemed almost luminescent, a quicksilver tonic pregnant with a queer glow. A sharp, pungent, musky odour wafted from it, a smell of blood and moonlight. His parted lips hung suspended over the water’s still surface. The Governor seemed to pulse against his chest with its own cold heartbeat, two silver bullets glinting in the darkness of its chambers. A quick glance around confirmed such a move would be suicide, and Luka’s posture made it clear he would brook no backpedalling.
The water was flavourless despite its smell, though alive with its peculiar effervescence, as if carbonated with a gas heavier than air. Derek felt it settle in a heavy mist beneath his tongue, tendrils ebbing and whirlpooling on the currents of his breath. He mimed a swallow and wiped his lips with a theatrical swipe of his wrist, allowing the bulk of the liquid to trickle down his forearm. Its tingling residue remained on his gums, a mouthwash sizzle that lingered no matter how much saliva he rinsed across it. He had no idea whether the amount he’d spat out mitigated the water’s effect, or even what that effect might be. All he knew was that this shit was seriously hinky.
A svelte old man in furs jogged into the river, his ornately braided beard penduluming with each step. Muscles twitched and rippled beneath wrinkled flesh. He barked a torrent of hoarse Russian at Majka, who listened impassively, nodding to herself. Luka glanced over at Motes, who knew what was expected of him without prompting.
“There are people in the woods. A couple dozen of them, about half a kilometre south of here.”
Luka cracked his knuckles. He directed his words to Majka. “That’s on me. You want me and my boys to deal with ‘em, Majka?”
Motes related the question. Majka shook her head, spoke a few words in terse Russian.
“She says let them come,” Motes said, glancing at the darkening sky. “They’ll know us as we are.”
Luka’s smile bore an impossible quantity of teeth. “Bet your ass they will.”
He whistled, gathering his pack. Derek stood to his right as he spoke, cheating half towards him and half towards the crowd.
“You guys got your first taste, but the real fun comes once the moon’s full. In the meantime, I want you to take Motes and the kid upriver a bit, on the far bank. Find a spot out of the way and hang tight.”
“There gonna be words, chief?” asked a scraggly-armed packmate awash with tattoos.
“Could be. Either way, I want our offering protected. You lot keep a close eye on him. The professor too. He don’t so much as go for a piss without my say-so, get it?”
The packmates tromped into the woods, carrying the Asian kid in tow and nudging Motes along ahead of them. Luka watched them go with the air of a parent whose child has done something foolish but endearing.
“They’re a good bunch, eh?”
“I guess,” said Derek, who in truth couldn’t disagree more.
“But they ain’t blooded like you, bro. That’ll change, but for now they’re better off out of the way. You, on the other hand, I want right here. If shit goes south, find a safe spot and cover my ass. With luck, the assholes won’t get here ‘til full dark.”
“I’m guessing they’re gonna aim for daylight, if they got any idea what they’re up against.”
Luka shrugged. “They’re fucked either way, but I’d like my own little piece of the action. And I won’t get it unless that bad boy is shinin’ full and unimpeded.”
He thrust his thumb skyward. The moon, full and clearly visible, dangled above a cauldron of orange-red sky. Luka licked his lips, fingers flexing. “It sort of itches. In the back of my eyeballs, mostly. Like it’s tuggin’ on me and the sun’s tuggin’ back.”
“So what happens when the sun sets?”
Luka’s lips disappeared into his mouth, reappeared red and slick with saliva. “The moon wins.”