When Adelaide finally woke up, Matthew Kirby had lost a lot of blood.
She didn’t hear him scream because his mouth was covered, the howls muffled. It was almost as if the thumping of his frenzied heart had shaken her awake, and for a moment she wasn’t sure where she was—in Montana or back in California. The horror had a familiarity that reminded her of home.
Adelaide opened her eyes. She wore nothing and the covers were still drawn up around her. This was the only aspect of the cabin that seemed safe and sane anymore. The rest of the place had gone madhouse.
The great chair lay on its side and the top half of the wicker rocker was shredded, serrated, as if it had been bitten off. The books in the parlor were little more than shreds of paper scattered on the furniture like ash. The pans on the walls had all come down. Matthew’s blood was spread on the floor and across the walls and windows.
The steamer trunk sat open and empty.
How had Adelaide slept through all this? When had the world gone so wrong?
Outside it was still nighttime. Dawn seemed impossibly far off. She threw off the covers and shivered. She could hear the Montana wind again; it howled as it crept up the side of her cabin and looped under the roof, then crashed down to chill the room.
And there, in the corner where the great chair had once sat upright, she saw it, out of the steamer trunk, its back to her, the mighty body pressed against the cabin wall.
Great folds of leathery skin hung from the bottom of its arms.
It was out.
And just below those folds was a pair of bare feet.
Matthew Kirby’s feet.
Listlessly kicking.
Not the sign of someone fighting, but someone fading.
This thing, Adelaide Henry’s burden, stooped over the man, consuming him.
Adelaide felt, very quickly, the utter exhaustion of her life; almost all of her thirty-one years had been spent like this. Catching up, cleaning up, covering up. If she couldn’t save her own mother and father, what did it matter if she let a man she hardly knew die?
But this was only a moment of weariness. She wouldn’t abandon Matthew.
Now she leapt on the body, the being. Some would call it a creature. But all her life Adelaide and her family had called it something else: their curse.
Its skin wasn’t really skin, but thousands and thousands of tiny gray scales, linked so tightly they became a natural armor. Impervious to blades and bullets, a fact her father and mother had tested once, and only once. The scales felt like sandpaper to the touch, rougher, so even grappling with it could make a person, nearly any person, bleed.
Except Adelaide.
Ever since she was a child, Adelaide could grip the creature’s scales and come away unscathed. Even their mother hadn’t been so lucky. Breastfeeding had been a short-lived experiment. Adelaide could grip that skin, and was sturdy enough to yoke the creature. Of all the living things in the world, Adelaide was the only one who could restrain it. Their father once said that nature had designed Adelaide for this very purpose. Why else would a girl as strong as her be born into this family, if she wasn’t meant to yoke the thing they’d been punished with? Adelaide Henry had been born with a purpose. Her parents believed this, and told her so nearly every day.
Now Adelaide went after the creature as a veteran rodeo rider might approach a bull. Except Adelaide didn’t need the aid of a flank strap to make the thing buck and jump. Adelaide squeezed its throat with one arm and pulled backward with all her weight. She had the mass to peel the creature away from Matthew Kirby and to twist its massive head.
The legs were short and thin, so it buckled when Adelaide pressed all her body weight down. But with the head turned, now there were the teeth to contend with. Always the teeth were the hardest part.
When Adelaide was young there had been so many times like this, when Adelaide let her arm stray too high, too close to this thing’s maw. Those dimpled scars running between Adelaide’s elbow and wrist were the proof of all her practice.
With the creature turned away from Matthew, Adelaide climbed higher onto its back. It was like scaling a pterodactyl. The thing crashed forward, onto its softer belly, cracking some of the floorboards beneath them.
Now the head was flush against the ground, and this was the trick Adelaide had learned long ago. If the lower jaw was pressed to the ground and one hundred eighty-five pounds of Adelaide Henry lay against the back of the head, well, that head wasn’t coming up. She’d learned this trick after watching alligator wrestlers in a traveling show.
The creature sputtered and snorted but Adelaide held it down. She breathed heavily, but maintained the hold.
Adelaide looked back to Matthew.
Hard to tell, in the darkness, if he’d lost any limbs. She heard him choking and coughing, so he still had a head attached. Better than how she’d found her father. She’d had to retrieve the head and arrange it on the pillow so the silhouette made it seem like the man had been intact.
“Can you hear me?” she asked Matthew between breaths.
More coughing. Was he nodding or having a spasm? She couldn’t wait to find out. She leaned close to his ear.
“How did it get out?” she asked. “Did it break the lock?”
The thing hissed now and belched and through its clenched teeth brought up a spray of blood that soaked the floor.
Matthew’s blood of course.
Adelaide had got the creature into the steamer trunk back at the farmhouse. If she’d done it then, she could do it again now. She wrestled it around, pushing it toward the trunk while keeping one hand against the back of the head so the jaws wouldn’t lift from the floor and snap at her.
And now, seeing the trunk, the thing gave a choked howl. Monstrous or not, nothing loves confinement. Its nostrils flared, inhaling the scent of Matthew’s slaughter. It whined as if begging Adelaide to let it take just one more bite. But Adelaide kept pushing it forward.
Behind her, Matthew Kirby fell forward at the waist like an infant trying, and failing, to sit upright. Adelaide couldn’t look back at him right then; she and the creature were at the trunk and this was the trickiest part. Adelaide reached for one of its arms and pulled it backward until the thing shivered.
And now Adelaide sang to it.
“Your mother wants you to sleep. Your father wants you to sleep.”
The vigor seeped out of its body. Music, savage beast, an old story.
“Now it’s time to sleep, to sleep. Now it’s time to sleep.”
The creature climbed inside. Adelaide closed the lid, but secrets, once revealed, are no longer secrets, no matter how tightly you try to seal them away. It had got out; how much longer until it tried again?