Chapter 15
The time for running was over.
His feet were bleeding badly. His joint pain was escalating, the flare-ups in his hips and shoulders pulsing with pain. Everything he had done to his body over the past week had been just begging for this kind of reaction. He placed one foot ahead of him, grimacing as the rock pressed against the battered flesh. Behind him were a series of bloody footprints on the hogback.
Don’t think about Lyme’s, he thought. Don’t think about your feet. Then what? The girl, maybe. The one ahead of you, the one who keeps looking back to make sure you’re okay. What about the thing that’s in the ground, the thing that seemed to not only swallow Henry, but seemed to . . . savor . . . him? Try not to think about that, either. That’s all, just try not to. That part is behind us.
He dug his fingers into a small concavity and leveraged himself a few more feet up the bluff. A dislodged stone bounced down the side, coming to rest on the gravel beach far below them. He had unscrewed the broadhead from the arrow and could feel it lying flat against his leg. If he twisted or flexed wrong, the blade would cut him, but there didn’t seem to be any better storage options.
“Okay?” Rachel asked. He couldn’t make out her features; the gray sky was getting darker by the moment, and her face was lost in the shadows.
“I’m fine,” Jake said. “Keep going.”
She looked out behind them. “They’re crossing the river.”
“I know,” he said. “We need to get to the top.”
“Then what?”
“Then we rest. Come on, Rachel.”
Ten minutes later they reached the top. She helped pull him over the edge, and they lay there panting, muscles shaking. It was cold, and he could feel the heat of her very distinctly as they lay side by side. After a moment, she got up and knelt next to his feet, squinting. “Don’t,” he said when she started to tear of a section of her shirt for a bandage. “It’s going to get cold tonight.”
“We have to do something,” she said. “You’re bleeding like crazy.”
He withdrew the broadhead from his pocket and handed it to her, then motioned towards the cuff of his jeans. “Slice off the bottoms, about a foot long.” She bent to the work, carefully cutting through the thick denim and then sliding the sections down and over his battered feet. She paused to inspect the bandages-slash-moccasins, frowning. “We need to tie them on,” she said. She cut a long strip from her shirt, then cut that into four smaller strips and tied the bundles of denim into place, cinching them tightly. “How bad does it hurt?”
“Not bad,” he lied. He got on all fours and climbed to the edge of the cliff and carefully poked his head over the side.
They had made it to the base of the cliff and were staring up at them. Darius saw Jake immediately and turned and said something to Weasel, who looked up and nodded.
Jake pried a fist-sized rock from the ground and let it tumble down the cliff. The men at the bottom scrambled out of the way, the rock smashing into the gravel beach a few feet away from them and sending out a spray of smaller rocks. Jake pulled another stone out of the ground and hefted it in his hand, letting them see it. Rachel brought a couple more rocks over and set them by him, including a larger rock, almost the size of Jake’s head. He considered sending it down to make a point, then decided to save it. If they were stupid enough to begin climbing, he would make the big rock his first drop. No more warnings.
“A stalemate,” Rachel said.
“For now.” He looked up at her. At some point she had taken a moment to wipe away the worst of the blood and the mud, but her lip was swollen and there was a large bruise on one side of her face. He supposed he didn’t look very good himself, but he liked the look in her eyes, the set of her mouth. “They’re going to try to kill us, Rachel. Maybe not today or tonight, but tomorrow for sure.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ve made up their mind to do it,” he said. “They’ve already lost two of their men. They won’t let it go.”
“It wasn’t our fault.”
“No,” he said. “But we’re the reason they came out here. The reason why all of this”—he gestured below them—“happened.”
“Jake,” she said, “I had no idea there could be this kind of reaction. You have to believe me. I saw trials in the lab, but it was with algae and bacteria. The promethium affected them, yes, transferred some properties. Like a virus using the DNA of its host, the kind of methods we use for genetic therapy, but enhanced. Still, it was nothing like this, nothing to suggest—”
He held up a hand. “Rachel?”
“Yes?”
“Calm down. I believe you.”
She swallowed, searching his face. “You knew there was something strange about this place, too.”
“Yes,” he said. “Legends.” He paused, a small smile creasing his lips. “But nothing like this.”
From somewhere below them, the earth shuddered. It was not the steady rumbling of earlier. These were a series of convulsions spaced a few seconds apart, as if the earth were retching, trying to dispel something caught in its throat. They crawled to the edge of the bluff and peered out over the darkening valley, the river a pale ribbon of light. On the far side, something was moving, a writhing mass of shadows next to the rock pad. It grew larger, seemed to contract, then grew again.
Not retching, Jake thought. More like giving birth.
Below them, Weasel’s voice drifted up, angry and frightened. Jake dropped another rock over the edge in case they were having second thoughts, sending it careening toward them. It landed between the men and the river, but they hardly seemed to notice. All eyes were locked on the far side of the water, the epicenter of the convulsing earth.
“Rachel?”
“Yes.”
“It could move before.”
“Yes.”
“But it was tethered to something, wasn’t it?”
She looked at him. “There would have been a central mass,” she said. “The tendrils are just the fruiting bodies. I can’t be sure.”
“It could move, but it couldn’t . . . travel.”
“No,” she said.
His eyes remained locked on the cluster of twisting shadows, the vague details becoming less distinct as the last of the light faded. In seconds it was not much more than a darker shape in the blackness covering the valley bottom, easy to lose sight of. “Those legends about this place, the ones I heard when I was a kid?” he said. “They were about the great wanderer. The Whitigo, the old man of the woods. Not really a man.”
She was silent. The earth shuddered again, and then again, sending pebbles cascading down the bluff.
“It was a moss eater, Rachel. This great big old beast who could move through the woods and the sky—he ate moss. Most of the time. Sometimes, though, it craved something different. Flesh. But only young, innocent flesh.”
“Jake, let’s not wig ourselves out, okay?”
“Do you know what the greatest punishment for a wanderer is, Rachel?”
“Jake, come on—”
“Prison,” Jake said. “Being locked in one place. No change of scenery, no new people to meet, to torment. The same thing, day after day.” He turned to her. “It would be a terrible thing.”
From below them, the earth gave a final shudder and something ripped open, with a sound of fabric—or perhaps flesh—rent apart. Wind sighed through the branches above them.
“We need to go, Jake. Now.”
“There are three of them coming after us, Rachel. I can’t outrun them with my feet in the shape they’re in. There’s a Cree village called Highbanks about ten miles from here. There’s a constable there, or at least there used to be. He can call in to Potowatik for more help.”
“Help for what?”
“To arrest Darius,” Jake said after a while. “He killed Henry.”
“Jake—”
“If we both go, they’ll come up through the pass right behind us. All of them. If I stay here, I can delay them, maybe stop them. You go for help, Rachel. I’ll hold them off.”
Below them, Weasel’s voice came again, pleading this time. Darkness had descended fully, and the starlight was minimal. Jake knew that later his eyes would grow acclimated to the darkness and he would be able to see fairly well. Well enough to drop a rock on his pursuers? Perhaps, perhaps not. But Resurrection Pass was not the only way out of the valley for them. They could go around the cliff and flank him, it would just take a bit longer. That was okay, too. It would allow Rachel to build up her head start.
“Can I find it?” she asked. Her pulse was visible on the side of her neck, beating rapidly against the thin skin. “Highbanks?”
“Yes,” he said. He gave her directions, pointed out the stars and constellations she needed to orient herself.
“If they make it up the pass, it’ll be three against one.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll be ready for them.”
“With your arrow? Even if you build a bow—”
“There are other ways, Rachel. To slow people down, to stop them. All of this,” he paused, waved a hand at the forest, “is still my home as much as theirs. With a little luck, I’ll catch up to you.”
She seemed about to say something, and instead looked up at the sky again. Below them, the three men had stopped arguing. He listened for sounds of them climbing up the rock, but the night was quiet. He wormed back over the edge and peered down. The river still held some light, the stars reflecting off the slow current. The men were gone. Jake craned his head, listening, and thought he heard splashing far upriver.
“They’re circling around,” he said. “Go, Rachel.”
“How do I get there? Tell me again.”
He laid out the route as best he could. The river bisected her path at a right angle, so she would hit it at some point. He studied the landscape in his head. Eventually, the river looped back around and would lead her to the village, and for a moment he considered telling her to just follow the river. But that route was three times longer and would require her to cross more streams and another small river, plus make her go through one of the most treacherous swamps he had ever encountered—miles of sucking bog and floating mats of vegetation. In the end, he told her that if she got lost she should simply follow a stream, any stream, to a river, then the river to civilization. And to stay on high ground when she could. It sounded better than it worked, he knew. Countless men and women had followed some unnamed river to their death in this country.
When he was done, she turned and studied the tangled wilderness behind them and then turned back to him. “Are you going to kill them?”
“I’m going to slow them down,” he said.
“If you do—”
“Only if I have to.”
“If you do,” she said, then seemed to pause and refocus on his face. “If you have to kill them, Jake, do it quick. Then come find me.”
She disappeared into the wilderness.
* * *
The clouds had finally parted, the sky above ablaze with distant stars. He was glad for the direction it would give her, but with the clouds gone it had turned colder, and he knew the night would be frigid—the first night of autumn, regardless of what the calendar said.
If they came for him, they would come soon. It was a few hours at most before they would work their way around the northern edges of the bluff. Then they would either retreat or circle back for him. Or build a fire, wait him out for the night, and come at him when they were rested and warm and he was weak and cold. He thought of the convulsing earth, spasming as it vomited out something, something, onto the cold rocks of the valley floor. No, they would not build a fire tonight.
Jake lay in his position, flexing his toes and fingers to keep the circulation going. When he moved, if he moved, it would have to be very fast, and the cold was becoming a serious issue, the hard northwest wind of autumn cutting into his body, so cold that he sometimes thought he could smell the vast frozen tundra to the north, a place where the soil never completely thawed. It was different country from this, even colder and far more open. Some of his people lived there, and he had visited once and had not liked it. It was too bright and too windy, and there was nowhere to escape the sun or the wind. The woods were better, and this place he had chosen was deep in the heart of the forest, where Jake lay nestled in a tangle of blowdown, where the worst of the wind could not reach. But it was still very cold.
He’d reopened some of his wounds, some deliberately and some from his exertions. They were minor lacerations for the most part, and he had been trained to avoid letting the pain take precedence in his thoughts. It could not be ignored, and anyone who said so was a fool. It was simply about making sure you kept the pain in the proper perspective; suffer through the little pain to prevent the big pain. But it still hurt, and so he needed to think of other things.
Where was Rachel?
It would be dark in the woods, and she wouldn’t be able to see the fading light in the west, like you could see it when you were in more open country or on a lake. She would have to rely on the stars as he had told her, and yet the forest was thick, so thick. The branches would block her sight and it would be hard to keep in a straight line. And you are doing a great job analyzing the situation, he thought. It is very helpful to try and figure out what she might or might not be doing, instead of listening to what might or might not be coming through these deadfalls. Focus.
He was shivering. He supposed the shivering would be bad enough in an hour that he would have to leave this spot and move around to prevent hypothermia. Already he was stiffening, and he would be unable to move like he would need to. He grasped the short spear he had carved, using the broadhead, between his bloody fingers, his index finger and thumb marked with dozens of nicks from the short blade. The spear had taken a long time to whittle, and he had concealed the shavings in a pile of woody detritus at the bottom of a dead spruce, where a woodpecker had left a series of exploratory holes. The other shavings, for the hidden triggers, the sharpened sticks he had carefully crafted, those shavings he had buried in the forest duff behind the biggest tangle of fallen and semi-fallen trees. The wind subsided for a moment. He heard something move in the silence, the softest of footfalls. It was repeated, and then, just before the wind picked up, the murmur of a voice. He tightened his grip on the spear, told himself once more to be patient. They were three and he was one. They had knives, and he had what would best be described as a sharp stick.
The narrow opening through the blowdown of dead spruce and cedars created a tunnel, like the dark gullet of some grotesque beast, the fractured tree limbs like broken fangs. There were thousands of such blowdowns in these woods, mostly victims of ice storms in the spring. He blinked. There was a shape in the tunnel, crouched over, its gaze alternating between the ground and the path ahead. It took a few steps toward him, then stopped and studied the ground again, like an animal tending to its serious and unknown business of the night.
It was Weasel. He was whispering to someone behind him, and the wind carried his words to Jake in a series of vowels and consonants, as hard to decipher as the shape of the man, now just twenty yards in front of him.
“St . . . leedin. Ryin . . . iggle into . . . brush.”
The shape behind Weasel was much heavier and taller. Darius. Billy must be behind them, or perhaps circling behind Jake. Jake urged Weasel and Darius to continue forward in his mind, rah-rahing them on, telling them there was nothing to worry about, just a half-blood city Indian with bad feet and no weapons. Still they waited. There was no flashlight beam, and he knew that even if they had flashlights with them, they would be loath to turn them on. They knew he was waiting for them, a hunter being driven into a corner by other hunters. A flashlight was a beacon.
He hoped that was what they thought, hunters against a hunter. Because although he had learned to kill at an early age, he had been a trapper long before he had become a hunter.
Move, he thought. Move.
The two shapes merged together in the darkness, then separated, slowly advancing along his blood trail, the trail he had left for them. It led from the small campfire he had cobbled together, then just as quickly smothered, knowing the smoke and embers would draw in his pursuers. If they chose to pursue him, which Jake had not been sure of; he suspected they might just flee back toward Highbanks. But Darius was nothing if not tenacious. The trail leading from the campfire to the blowdown was difficult but not impossible to see, a line of scuffed and bloody marks from his feet. He had not thought how it might look in the dark with no flashlight, and realized Weasel must be a first-rate tracker.
Come on, he thought. Don’t think about how obvious it is. Just look at the trail, at the pitiful picture it paints. Your poor old city Indian, bleeding and trying to hide. Outnumbered and now outmaneuvered.
Weasel drew near. Twenty-five feet, twenty, the acrid smell of him pushing ahead on the wind. Darius was ten feet behind, his head swiveling constantly, looking everywhere except where Weasel was looking. The starlight was sprinkled throughout the gnarled tangle of canted tree trunks and broken limbs. Jake had to fight to control his breathing, had to keep from clenching his fist on the spear. He wanted to lunge, to ram the stick through Weasel’s scrawny throat.
Weasel passed by almost close enough to touch, barely glancing at the three logs, fallen close together with a triangular space between them, a narrow cave suspended three feet off the ground. The two big spruces were on the bottom, forming the cave floor. The other was on top, the heavy tangle of limbs covering everything except Jake’s eyes, peering out like the eyes of the wolverine, which was what he needed to be now: mean and tough, vicious enough to drive a young grizzly off its feed, the glutton of the northwoods. The wolverine was the trapper’s nemesis, a scuttling beast that would follow your trail and eat everything you had caught along the line. A maddening creature, one damn near impossible to figure out.
“He’s nestled in real deep,” Weasel whispered. “There’s a blood mark between those big logs up there.”
“Go on,” Darius said. “You see him, let me know.”
Weasel stepped forward, Darius pausing just a few yards away from Jake. Jake couldn’t risk turning his head to watch, so he listened, listened to Weasel weave through the tangle, listened to Darius’s light breathing. Overhead the wind shrieked and blew the last bit of warmth from the air.
Come on, he thought again. It’s exactly what you think. Some pitiful guy you tracked down, huddled underneath the big blowdown. It must have looked like safety to him, to this pitiful guy. All those logs crashed together like a flattened tipi. Looks good, doesn’t it, Weasel? You won’t even have to try to conceal my body once you finish me off—it’s already buried under there.
He was no longer cold.
Weasel paused, then circled around the cluster of giant tilted logs. Then he returned, his footfalls a series of light scratches under the sound of the wind.
“He’s under there,” Weasel said. “I can see part of his leg. Nestled up underneath.” Weasel sounded simultaneously apologetic and excited when he spoke next. “You can’t fit, Darius.”
Jake did one quick assessment of his body. There was one throb from his hip, almost as though it said, I’m hurting, buddy, but ready when you are. His toes and fingers were singing with hot blood, and he could feel the battle haze creeping in on his mind, crowding out all other thoughts.
“Fine,” Darius said, motioning with his knife. “Go bleed him out and let’s get going.”
The jumble of logs was thirty feet from where Jake lay. Darius was roughly halfway between Jake and the blowdown. The trees had fallen into a clump, leaving a bit of open space around them, as close to a natural clearing as there was in this mess of logs and leaning timbers. Weasel surveyed the blowdown again, trying to determine the best route in. Finally, he dropped to his hands and knees, then pulled several loose branches away from a dark triangle at the base of the pile. He inspected the ends in the dim light, holding up the severed tips, then tossed them aside.
Jake drew in a breath, flexing his legs.
Yes.
Weasel wiggled into the blowdown, his knife held out in front of him. Darius moved a few steps closer, watching Weasel and then swiveling his head from side to side. Jake had seen moose do the same thing walking into a shooting lane, feeling something tickling at the base of their brain, the sensation of being watched.
“He blocked it off,” Weasel said from inside the tangle, his voice muffled. “Gotta kick through it.”
“Hurry up.” Darius was looking above him, at the top of another tangle of fallen trees, where one of the branches was rubbing against a tilted trunk, moaning in the wind.
It’s not even me he’s looking for, Jake realized. It’s the other, the dark shape from the valley. The one that drove them away from the base of the cliff.
“You ready for me in there, Jake? I got something for you.”
There was a splintering sound from inside the tangle. Then another, and the pile of logs shifted, one of the massive trunks that had been precariously balanced crashing down, its branches snapping, sending wood and bark flying. The ground shuddered briefly, and for a moment the forest was quiet. Then Weasel began to scream, his voice exploding out of the tangle of branches.
“My legs! My goddamn legs!”
Darius started forward instinctively, then stopped short. He whipped his head around and stared at his backtrail, rotating his knife so it was held flat to the ground, the faintest silver light reflecting off the blade from the stars. He looked at the tangle of logs around him, all the storm-felled trees lying at odd angles, studying each one closely. His breath came out in smoking clouds, evaporating over his head.
“Help me, Darius!” Weasel screamed. “My legs are pinned! Jesus! Jesus Christ,” his voice trailed off for a moment and he groaned in pain, then took in several ragged breaths. When he spoke again, it was in almost a normal voice. “Darius, get me out of here.”
Darius took a step back, still holding the knife out in front of him, and swiveled back around. Weasel began to scream again, louder and louder, beseeching Darius to come in and lift the crushing weight of the logs off his legs. Darius continued his visual reconnaissance, and after a minute his eyes locked on Jake’s resting place. In the starlight Jake thought he saw Darius’s eyes narrow briefly, his shoulders tense. Jake bunched his legs under him, not wanting to emerge quite yet, but that was fine, it was what it was. He almost started forward, then caught himself as a branch broke above and behind Darius.
Darius spun around, the knife tracing an arc through the air in a warding-off gesture. A dark shape emerged from the tangle on the far side of the blowdown and slid to the ground, panting.
So Billy did circle around, Jake thought. They were going to flush me out of here like a rabbit.
“What the hell’s going on?” Billy asked. More screaming issued from inside the blowdown. Billy bent over it. “Weasel?”
“Get me out of here!”
Billy straightened and looked at Darius. “Why are you just standing there?”
“He’s out here, somewhere.” Darius motioned to the blowdowns with his knife, jabbing it in the direction of the thickest spots.
“Who?”
“He’s out there,” Darius said. “Waiting.”
Billy blew out a disgusted breath and turned back to the deadfall. He pulled a flashlight out and poked the beam into the tangle. He traced the light up one log, down another, and then repeated the pattern on Weasel’s legs. The limbs and needles threw out a series of clawing shadows on the deadfalls behind them, and for a moment Jake saw the shadow of Weasel’s outstretched hand through the tangle, reaching out for Billy.
“It’s not as bad as it could be,” Billy said at last. “His legs fell between a couple smaller logs. The one that fell on top of him is resting on those two. He doesn’t have the full weight on him. We just got to pry it up an inch or two to get him free.”
Billy bent down and picked up a limb from the ground, as thick as his wrist and about six feet long. He wedged it under the log resting on Weasel’s legs, using one of the smaller logs as the fulcrum, and pushed down lightly. “This might work. Come on, Darius.”
Darius looked around him again and then shook his head. “Leave him.”
“What?”
“Leave him there. We need to go.”
Weasel began to scream again, a stream of curses directed at Darius. Billy waited for Darius to join him, but he stood where he was, his knife still held out in front of him. Billy muttered something under his breath, wedged the flashlight into the crotch of a branch, and shoved the limb deeper under the log. There was an enormous dead spruce tree tilted above him, the roots mostly ripped free of the earth. Billy pushed on it, testing its stability. It swayed slightly, then returned to center.
“You’re going to have to pull yourself out, Weasel,” Billy said. “Can you drag yourself out with your arms?”
Weasel croaked something in the affirmative. Billy pushed down hard with his lever, the limb cracking but not breaking. Weasel groaned again, but this time the timbre was different, a bit of relief mixed in with the pain. Billy pushed down even harder, and the pile of logs shifted again. “Almost there,” Billy grunted. “Give me a hand, Darius!”
Darius did not move, and Billy finally took the extra step he needed, two feet deeper into the log pile, to improve his leverage, the two feet Jake had been urging him to take in his mind. Billy’s boot crunched on something and the log above him, the canted log that Billy had tested a moment ago to ensure it would not fall on him, came alive. A tension-loaded limb, held back by the number-four deadfall trigger, an ancient and deadly catalyst that could hold back such tremendous weight or energy, a trigger Jake had whittled so painstakingly that evening—the same style trigger Jake had used to kill his first snowshoe hare—that tension-loaded limb whistled forward in a perfect arc, its length marked with yellow scars where the smaller branches had been trimmed away, and struck Billy three inches below his left collarbone. Billy stumbled backward as the limb rebounded in the opposite direction, waving back and forth in the light from the flashlight.
Billy staggered back several feet, his shoulders slumped, his breath whistling oddly. Weasel called out something to him and Billy turned his head a fraction of an inch.
“Billy?” Darius said.
Billy’s hand crept up to his chest and touched the dark spot blooming there, pressing his fingers against it. He looked at the darkness on his fingers, cocked his head to the side, and slumped to the ground. The flashlight had fallen, and the beam was now pointed toward the log pile. In the light that spilled from the ground up to the dark sky, Jake watched the branch that had struck Billy finally rock to a stop. The eight-inch shaft Jake had affixed to it at a right angle was still there, the broadhead from Garney’s arrow dripping blood into the log pile. From the ground, Billy exhaled. The exhale went on for a very long time, finally ending in a quiet rattle, almost lost in the wind.
Darius watched him for a second. Then he turned to face the spot where Jake still lay. “Come on, then,” he said.
Jake wormed his way off the logs and stepped into the clear, the stick held flat against his leg. He’d been trained in hand-to-hand combat. That training had been with other weapons, and it had been when he was younger and wearing good boots and not scraps of denim on his feet—the rest of his pants were under the log pile, the legs that had lured Weasel in to Jake’s trap. Despite all of those things, the battle haze had descended fully on him now, and he had to hold himself back from rushing forward. Darius waited for him, a dark silhouette with the tangled shadows of the deadfall behind him.
“The one-two punch,” Darius said. He had dropped his knife hand to his side, and they stood looking at each other from a distance of twenty feet. “I’m impressed. Did the first one trigger the second?”
Jake took a step forward. “Separate,” he said. “Each one was independent of the other.”
Darius glanced at Billy’s crumpled form. “It went into his heart.”
“Yes,” Jake said. He moved forward several more feet. “I was just hoping to catch a lung.”
“Lucky.”
“You can stop talking now.”
“Luck runs out,” Darius said. Jake took another step forward, Darius’s features coming into focus: the bent nose, the hooded eyes, with the lighter scar tissue slicing through his eyebrow. The flashlight was fading, but there was still plenty of light. Plenty.
“Yes,” Jake said, “it does.”
Darius looked at him. “They’re all dead.” Behind them, Weasel gave a whining gasp. “Or dying.”
“I’m not done yet.”
“Are there any more traps out here?”
“No,” Jake said. “No more traps.”
“Then I could walk away?”
Jake lifted the stick away from his body, letting the faint and yellowing glow from the flashlight wash across it. “Theoretically.”
Darius dropped his knife, and the blade stuck into the ground with a scratching whisper. “Then let me.”
“What?”
“Henry was right,” Darius said. “There’s been enough death.”
Jake strode several steps forward, grasping the spear in both hands, feeling the solid, deadly weight of it, the heft and balance exactly right, perfectly in tune with his thoughts, his emotions. He was enraged rather than pacified by this sudden cowardice. When he was a few yards from Darius he leapt forward, moving with a speed he had not used in years, a speed he thought had departed him and that he now found diminished but certainly not gone. It was a speed he had used to great effect in various ways, and with which he now moved towards Darius’s right side and swung the spear like a baseball bat. Darius brought his hand up at the last moment. There were two cracks. The impact drove through Darius’s forearm and struck him on the side of his head. He took one awkward side step and fell to the ground.
Jake was on him immediately, his knee pressed into Darius’s sternum. The spear had cracked and broken, but in the light Jake could see that it had fractured in such a way that, although it was shorter, it was also sharper. The end was like a stiletto, tapering to a point, which he pressed into the hollow of Darius’s throat. Darius was stunned, the side of his face bleeding. Had he not brought his arm up, Jake would have crushed his skull.
“Come on,” Jake said. “Open your eyes.”
Darius’s eyelids fluttered. Jake gave him a moment to focus, testing Darius’s body with his knee, ready to plunge the sharpened end of the spear into his throat at the first flexing of muscle. But not wanting to, not quite yet.
“Come on,” Jake said. “Can you feel it?”
Darius tried to swallow, and his Adam’s apple pressed against the point of the wood. Jake held the spear where it was, and a line of blood trickled out from the cartilage. Darius mumbled something and one of his arms twitched, scratching in the leaves and pine needles.
“Can you feel it?” Jake said again. “What you wanted for me, for Rachel.” He pressed the point of the stick deeper into the hollow of his throat. “What you gave Henry.”
Darius’s eyes opened all the way. His left hand, the unbroken one, continued to scratch and twist in the forest floor. For a moment, Jake allowed himself the luxury of seeing himself through Darius’s eyes, to peer upward at the stars with this monstrous dark shape over him. To feel the point of the stick on his throat, the awful throb on the side of his face—waiting, waiting—not understanding how it had come to this and certain it was a mistake, somehow. But knowing also that mistakes happen.
“This is what you wanted,” Jake whispered, twisting the stick a bit, enlarging the hole he had started. Darius’s eyes opened a bit more, his breathing tightening. “This is what they felt.”
Darius’s lips parted, a grimace or perhaps a smile, and a second before Jake plunged the stick into his neck he heard his name. It came from above him, whispering down through the pine needles from the cold starlight above.
“Jaaake . . .”
He paused, one hand still wrapped in the collar of Darius’s shirt, his knee still pressed against his sternum, the hot throb of his own pulse in his ears.
“Jaaake.” This time his name was followed by laughter. Something moved through the air above him, the crackling of branches, as though something were descending from the treetops, drifting down to the jumble of the blowdown.
From inside the logjam Weasel gave a whimpering sob and then fell silent.
Jake looked up. There was a silhouette atop one of the other blowdowns, a shape that blotted out a portion of the night’s stars. The light from the dying flashlight did not reach it and Jake was glad for that, glad that whatever stood there was hidden from view. He looked, and although it was hidden in the darkness of the Canadian night, Jake knew that it looked back at him. Looked and watched and waited. And he understood, with an insight so clean and terrifying that it could not be anything but the truth, that this man, if it was a man, had spoken not to stop him or forewarn him, but only so that Jake would acknowledge its presence before he proceeded. So that he would know he killed with an audience, and that the audience approved.
Suddenly he was cold again, the adrenaline and the red haze gone, his arms breaking out in gooseflesh. His muscles felt suddenly stiff, clumsy with pain, all the pain and aching that had gone away now flaring up in a complete and sudden return, as though in response to this presence, like a ship signaling back to a lighthouse beacon. Pain signaling to pain, cold reflecting back to cold. Jake’s breath plumed out into the dark sky and passed over his eyes in a veil of white smoke. Then his breath evaporated. The shape was still there.
“Jaaake.”
His name again, so soft it could have been the wind, could have been the moan of the limb rubbing against the larger trunk of the spruce.
Go ahead, he thought. Kill Darius, make him pay for the pain. Make him pay for the terror he had inflicted on the group, for the killing . . .
There was movement underneath him, and before he could react he felt searing pain along his side. He fell away, rolling along the ground as Darius’s knife sliced through the air inches from him. All of his movements felt nightmarishly slow, the knife intensely animate by comparison, seeking to burrow in through his ribs for warmth and sustenance. He rolled twice more and came up holding the stick in front of him, but Darius was not on him. Blood was coursing down Jake’s back, and he could feel the laceration tearing open even more as he scrambled to stand. Darius was on his feet, his broken right arm held against his chest.
That’s why I’m still alive, Jake thought. The first cut had gone along his ribs but not through them, and the other attempts had missed him cleanly. He was stabbing with his left hand.
Darius still had the knife in his hand, but he wasn’t looking at Jake. His head was tilted upward, toward the silhouette perched atop the tangle of blowdown. The shape was still, except for a slight movement around it, a shimmering Jake thought might be clothes, or perhaps hair. The flashlight beam did not touch it, the light slowly extinguishing.
Darius walked over to the log pile, tucked the knife into his belt, and picked up the fallen flashlight. Before Jake could yell at him to stop, before he could shield his eyes, Darius pointed the flashlight beam at the dark figure standing above them.
The countenance upon which the flashlight beam, weak as candlelight, shone was plain and human and familiar. It—he—did not react to the light in any way. The pale yellow beam went trembling across the face and then, reluctantly, descended down the torso. The weak beam of light stopped at the abdomen, encased in the remains of a shirt stained with blood and dirt. Something was writhing under the tattered cloth, greenish black, something that seemed to be rooted inside his stomach and now was twisting in the light, recoiling from it.
Darius jerked the flashlight back up, and as he did, the batteries lost their tenuous connection and the night went dark.
“Hen . . . Henry?”
The shape seemed to float down the log pile. Jake found the movements hard to follow in the darkness and knew that his eyes and perhaps his brain were not processing information correctly, that somehow he was hallucinating or embellishing what was actually happening. But the shape continued to move, and its face had been Henry’s and somehow it had not been. Could not have been.
There’s life underneath us. Jaimie’s words came flooding back to him, poor lost Jaimie. More life below than above, sometimes.
The shape reached the base of the blowdown, and now it seemed to merge completely with the darkness, the starlight not reaching it. Darius dropped the flashlight. He said his own name, Darius, whispering it in a breath of smoking white vapor. His name was repeated, and this time Jake could not tell if it was Darius who spoke or this other, this impostor in Henry’s clothes and Henry’s skin, who said it. It came closer, silent, until it was standing very close to Darius. Darius’s breath continued to plume out and break across the dark shape that was almost but not quite lost in the shadows of the deadfall, a dark shape whose breath did not smoke, whose chest appeared to be still. But there was movement below the chest, slithering and bulging under the fabric of its shirt.
“Henry, I . . .”
The shape leaned forward and whispered something into Darius’s ear. Something—an arm, Jake thought, it has to be an arm—reached out and caressed the side of Darius’s face. It did not look like an arm, though. It looked like a tendril, a tendril that had taken on the shape of an arm, an abomination of a human limb. It pressed against Darius’s cheek, slid across his mouth, and then withdrew.
After a moment, Darius tilted his head back to the firmament, as though to howl. Instead he began to laugh, and a moment later the Henry shape joined him, their laughter twisting together and floating up into the star-studded night, wending through the broken limbs and the pine needles and joining with the night wind still howling from the northwest.
Jake watched. If he chose to, he could walk over and join them and they would welcome him in, the joke would be shared with him, and he would laugh too, laugh and laugh as his pain finally and completely left him, the pain in his joints and head and heart. It would all be gone, and there would be something else—not happiness, but the savage pleasure of giving in.
He took a step forward. A branch cracked under his step, and the two figures turned to look at him. In the darkness he could not tell one from another. They laughed again, not in mockery, and one of the shapes beckoned him closer.
“Come.”
Jake did not know who spoke. It did not seem to matter.
“Run with us.”
There was an honor in the invitation. Not all were worthy, not all would make good company. He understood this; he feared this. Jake planted his foot in the ground, feeling the stick he had stepped on pressing through his hastily made denim shoes, the pain clarifying his jumbled thoughts. Pain, he thought. It’s there for a reason. It’s there to remind you what happens when you don’t pay attention to life. It’s what makes you human. His thoughts flashed to Deserae, lying in her hospital bed hundreds of miles away. She was beyond pain. She had felt the sensation when he pinched her, but it had meant nothing to her damaged mind. But she was with him, her pre-injury presence imprinted in his conscience.
Okay, then. It was not only rare earth elements that could transfer properties. All that was good and joyful and lovely about Deserae was still with him, pressed deep inside. And it was Deserae he heard now, her words whispering in his mind.
Theirs is not your path, Jake. For a moment he could almost smell her light fragrance, could almost feel her warm breath tickling against his ear. Choose your own way.
“Run with us.” One of the shapes—he thought it was Darius—had stepped closer. There was something smeared across his face. Blood, perhaps, from the blow Jake had given him minutes earlier. But the darkness seemed to be spreading out in a radial pattern rather than dripping downward, a darkness that was blotting out his features one by one.
Not your path.
The other’s head was cocked to the side, as though it heard the whisper of Jake’s lost love. Before it had seemed relaxed, completely at ease. Now it was tensed, and the slithering noises were intensifying. The Henry shape seemed to be growing and morphing at the same time, twisting and wending up into the night sky.
Jake turned and ran.