“What we don’t want to do,” Dean said softly, “is run out of ammo.”
“Makes sense,” Baird said.
“But we may have caught a break. They’re packed in pretty tight around us now. With this scattergun—”
“I gotcha.” Baird waved his own rifle. “I can back you with this but it ain’t gonna take out bunches of ’em at once.”
“Wouldn’t hurt, though,” Dean said, wishing the old man had a shotgun instead of his antique rifle and homemade dumdums. “Just be stingy with lead.”
“Son, I can squeeze a nickel so hard Thomas Jefferson weeps real tears. You don’t have to tell me to be stingy.”
“Let’s do it, then.” Dean already had a shell chambered and the gun completely loaded. The animals milled around outside the circle, prodding at it now and then, testing to make sure it remained whole. As he had said, they were packed in tight, for the most part. The difficulty would be that they were on several different levels: rodents and reptiles close to the ground, deer and sheep higher, birds above that.
He had to make his move fast, though. The trampling of the snow around the circle would shift the salt ring even faster than the melting. If he used up eight shells, that would still leave him with sixteen.
Of course, the possibility existed that when they got to the witch’s cabin, this force would seem like a small platoon out of a much bigger army. In which case sixteen shells might not be enough.
Then again, a hundred might not be enough. If he died here, he’d never find out.
“Here we go!” he shouted. He aimed high with the first blast, hoping to take out a good number of the birds. The shotgun roared and the air filled with flying feathers and bird parts. As they fell to the ground, the pieces flashed and glowed black. Very few of them actually landed; most blinked out of existence on the way down.
The other creatures reacted with a start—most freezing in place, some scurrying for cover behind larger animals. That was okay with Dean. The more they were bunched together, the more he could take out with a single spray of rock salt. He wished they were farther back, so the salt would have more time to spread, but beggars, they said, couldn’t be choosers. He lowered the shotgun’s barrel and shot toward ground level, on the theory that rock salt even hitting the ankles of the bigger animals might be enough to destroy them.
Rats, mice, ground squirrels, skunks, were obliterated instantly—the skunks leaving behind, oddly, traces of their familiar burnt rubber stink as they vanished.
The larger ones, the coyotes and raccoons and deer and one bighorn sheep caught in the blast, were not destroyed, but crippled, falling to the snowy plain and releasing unheard screams toward the sky. As they writhed and bucked in evident agony, some of them blinked and flashed while others changed form, strobing back and forth between human and animal shape.
One of these was the deer that had the form of Baird’s father.
“Pa!” Baird shouted again. This time he lunged before Dean could catch him toward the spirit that resembled, momentarily, his long-dead father.
Doing so broke the circle.
“Crap!” Dean said. He whirled and fired a blast, mid-level, behind them, to forestall a charge from the rear.
The spirit animals were momentarily confused. The path to attack was cleared, but so many had died in the three blasts so far that it took them several seconds to decide what to do.
Which—of course, Dean thought—was to charge.
He chambered another shell, fired. Baird had reached his father, who had already changed back into the big buck. The animal tried to gain its footing, and swung its antlers in a ferocious arc toward Baird. Dean dove, plowing into the old man and knocking him clear just in time. The buck brought the antlers back around, and Dean ducked beneath the swipe, feeling the wind whistle past his scalp. He fired from point-blank range into the deer’s muzzle.
Five, he counted. Three more to go.
But he and Baird were both on the ground now, exposed, and the remaining spirit creatures had regrouped. Birds gained elevation to drop down toward them in precipitous dives. Snakes and rats burst from drifted snowbanks at them.
God, I hate rats. Dean fired a blast at ground level, taking out what seemed like dozens more of the crawling, creeping, and writhing vermin.
He heard a sharp crack! and saw Baird, on one knee, firing his old rifle. His slug hit one of the remaining sheep, destroying it. He shot again and eliminated the other deer.
Dean aimed at the largest remaining clutch of animals and fired. Fur flew from raccoons, skunks, squirrels, and the last of the bighorn sheep, and they disappeared.
One of the remaining coyotes rushed at Dean with his mouth open, fangs bared in a soundless snarl. Dean couldn’t bring the shotgun around fast enough, but there was another report from Baird’s rifle. Even as Dean braced for the inevitable impact, the beast blinked away, and all that hit Dean was a brief rush of air.
Then it was over. The remaining animals sprinted or skittered or slithered away. Dean and Harmon Baird both sat back in the snow, catching each other’s eyes and breaking into smiles, then outright laughter.
“I guess we showed them somethin’, eh?” Baird said between fits of hilarity. “You see the way they turned tail and skedaddled?”
“I did,” Dean said, striving to catch his breath. “I did indeed.”
The moment passed. Dean knew they weren’t in the clear—far from it. This had been an advance guard, that was all, meant to kill them or at least delay them before they could reach their goal.
The good part was that an advance guard wouldn’t have been required if there hadn’t been something worth protecting. More than ever, he was convinced, the answer lay at Elizabeth Claire Marbrough’s cabin.
If she had been buried somewhere else—one of those cemeteries he and Sam had visited on their first day in Cedar Wells, for instance—then he and Baird would have been wasting time here.
The fierce defense by the animal spirits was the best thing that had happened in hours, because it gave Dean hope that they were on the right track after all.
“Come on,” he said, standing up. He extended a hand to Baird, who grasped it with his own rough, workingman’s hand, and drew the old man to his feet. “Let’s burn us a witch.”
Baird chuckled again, the amusement still strong in him. “Best invitation I’ve had all week,” he said. “Hell, all month, it come to that.”
Juliet Monroe shivered uncontrollably. She had never imagined anything so terrifying. She’d watched horror movies all her life, and read scary books, and she was present when a fatal automobile accident had strewn body parts all over a street corner and left behind a bloody streak that stayed for weeks.
None of those things, however, had affected her like the sight of two men she knew standing up and stepping away from their own dead bodies.
She tried to take slow, deep breaths, to calm the hammering of her heart and the quaking of her hands. Every time she did, the image of Howard Patrick walking toward her house came back to her, and her breathing became swift and shallow and every muscle in her body seemed to go into hyperactive mode. Sweat ran down her sides and collected at her hairline.
Although she was perspiring—maybe because of it—she felt cold, and decided to turn up the heat, if that was possible with no electricity. That meant going downstairs again, and downstairs was closer to where the not-Howard and not-Stu were, and she thought that if she saw them through the windows she would start screaming and never be able to stop. But the longer she thought about it—and this was over the space of seconds, not minutes—the colder the house felt. Maybe something had happened to the heat. Either way, she had to go to the thermostat at the base of the stairs.
Because she had drawn all the curtains, the house was dark. She flipped the light switch at the top of the stairs. Nothing happened. She tried it a couple more times, down and up and down and up. Nothing. The power hadn’t magically restored itself.
She hurried down the stairs, trying to both look and not look at the living room window, where the curtains didn’t quite come together in the middle at the same time. That was hard to accomplish, so she found herself looking and glancing away, glancing and turning her head, until she reached the wall with the thermostat. It was an old-fashioned kind where you pushed a tiny lever in the direction you wanted. She pushed it toward warmer and waited to hear the heat cycle on.
Nothing happened.
Well, she was in here for the long haul with whatever was in the house. There was a fireplace in the living room, with a few logs stacked on the hearth, but most were outside in the woodpile, where she couldn’t get to them. She had space heaters, which would do no good at all without electricity. She did have candles and matches, flashlights and blankets, even a battery-operated radio. No household in snow country should be without those things, even though the snow here rarely got deep enough to strand anyone for long. In the barn there was even a gasoline-powered generator. But she wasn’t about to go out to the barn with that wolf out there.
And now, it seemed, its once-human allies.
She was downstairs now, but didn’t intend to stay there for long. She would live upstairs, where she could keep a better eye on the wolf, Stu, and Howard, and they would have less of a view of her. She gathered the things she thought she would want—the kitchen matches, a heavy-duty flashlight, and the portable radio. The radio didn’t have any batteries in it, but she had a bunch tossed into a coffee can on another pantry shelf. She fished some out and installed them on the kitchen counter.
Juliet was on her way back to the stairs when she heard a rattling at the front door.
She froze. From here, she could see the door. Anyone outside could take five steps to their right, look through the gap in the curtains and see her.
The doorknob turned, to the extent that it could with the knob latch locked. She had fastened the dead bolt, too. When she’d taken those measures, she felt like she was at least doing something, however small, that would help protect her.
Now, though, knowing that the wolf had figured out how to turn off her phone and electricity, knowing that it wasn’t a natural canine at all but some sort of monster with magical powers to raise the dead, it seemed unlikely that two simple mechanical devices could do much to keep it at bay.
The door rattled in its jamb, harder than before. She could see it moving this time. Some small part of her had hoped that Stu and Howard—the ones that weren’t dead, not the ones still lying where the wolf had left them—were just figments of some kind, without material form. But a canine couldn’t try to turn a doorknob and then use it to shake a door.
That could only mean the wolf’s allies had human shapes and human attributes. Solidity, maybe intelligence. So far she had heard no voices, but that might be next.
Before that could happen, she ran back upstairs. Any sense of security she achieved by doing so would be fleeting. The doors up there had knob locks, but that was all, and they were flimsy interior doors.
At this moment, however, even a little security—false security, if that’s what it was—seemed better than none at all.
She dashed back into her bedroom and closed the door, locking it behind her.
When that was done, she leaned her back against the door, her hands still full of the things she had brought upstairs. The flashlight remained on, even though plenty of light washed in through the open curtains. She liked the feeling of the hard wood against her back, though she knew it wasn’t thick or strong—the wolf’s claws could probably shred it, and a good swift kick would break it down. It was a barrier, though, and it offered the slightest little bit of emotional comfort. Juliet was surprised to discover that her tremors had passed. Once things had started happening, once she was acting instead of just reacting, she’d gained more control over herself.
She had just allowed herself a faint smile when she heard the living room window shatter.