Chapter Seventeen Shea
Shea wakes to pitch black.
She’s alone in bed, the pillow beside her cold.
Immediately, the hairs on her neck stand on end.
She sits up, careful not to bump her head on the top bunk, and peers out in the room’s dormered dark.
Seeing nothing, she fishes her hearing aids out from under the pillow and fits them on.
Two beeps follow in quick succession. There’s a rush of white noise. Beneath it, silence.
“Thorley?”
“He left” comes Poppy’s voice from above her. “He took the crossbow.”
Shea slides out of bed and clicks on the lamp, squinting in the sudden glaze of light.
The room is cold, like someone’s left a window open.
Pulling on her flannel, she hops into her boots one after the other, laces trailing as she makes her way toward the door.
Poppy descends the ladder, already dressed to leave.
Kit dangles in the cradle of her arms, teeth bared in a skeleton grin.
“Did you see them leave?”
“Lysander was gone when I woke up,” says Poppy. “Asher went to look for him. He said to stay put.”
Shea casts her a hard look. “Fat chance.”
“He said you’d say something like that.”
“I’ll bet he did.” She pulls open the door and peers out into the hall. A light is on downstairs. The air is cold as ice, and her breath blooms before her in pale sheaves of gray. “Come on—let’s go see what’s going on.”
“I don’t know, Shea,” says Poppy, hanging back. “What if there’s trouble? We don’t have any weapons.”
“They would have woken us if there was trouble.”
“You really think so?”
She doesn’t. Not really. But there’s no way she’s going to sit around and wait for trouble to find her. There’s no way she’s going to tell Poppy that she can feel him—Lys—wrapped around her ribs like twine. He’s too far. The distance cinches tight, cutting off circulation.
“We can go see if there’s anything to eat in the kitchen,” she says, pleased with how casual she manages to sound. “If we still haven’t found them, we’ll go back up and wait. No one will know.”
“ I’ll know,” counters Poppy, but she tails after Shea regardless.
Downstairs, the foyer is quiet. The front door hangs open, cold spilling in in waves. The rain has stopped, but everything outside looks slick and silver in the moonlight. The horses are gone from the pasture. Nothing moves. Nothing sings.
“This feels bad,” says Poppy. “Don’t you think?”
A door falling shut behind them brings them both whirling about.
“Did you see anyone?” asks Shea.
“No. But I see blood.”
So does Shea. Gobs of it, dark with Rot. It drags in a jagged line down the narrow hall. They creep along the trail, rounding the corner into a narrow kitchenette. A pair of heavy work boots poke out from behind a wooden island. Blood oozes, ink dark, onto the penny-round tile.
Heart in her throat, Shea reaches for the knife block on a nearby countertop. A carving knife slips loose with a slight ping .
There’s a wet cough. Then a man’s voice: “Keeling? Is that you?”
Poppy scrabbles for the knife block next, drawing out a serrated bread knife. Shea tosses her a look, which she returns, her shoulders lifting in a shrug.
“Goddamn it, Keeling,” calls the man. “I know you’re in here.”
Shea swallows a breath and steps into view.
The man on the floor is older, but only just. He looks to be in his early twenties, his sour-milk skin sheened in sweat and his hair a short crop of blond, the light going out of his lake-blue eyes.
He lies slumped against the cabinets, his hands clutched to his middle.
The damage is immense. His abdomen has been gorged open as if by the claws of some horrible hell-beast. A wolf, in the body of a boy.
“You,” he grits out.
Shea grips her knife tight by the hilt. “You know me?”
The question makes him laugh, and the laughter devolves into a fit of coughing. Blood dribbles, dark as pitch, down his chin.
“Do I know you?” It comes out mocking. Derisive, even dying. “Everyone knows you. You’re Keeling’s singular obsession.”
Keeling. Her heart races hard enough to hurt. “Is he here? In the house?”
There’s a dull thud, somewhere beyond the kitchen. The scrape of something dragging along the wall. A palpable slackening in her chest. The man’s face falls, and suddenly he isn’t looking at her at all. He’s staring clean through her, out into the dark of the hall.
Reverently, he whispers, “If it’s the devil you want, he’s just behind you.”
Shea stills, the hair on her arms standing on end. Another thud sounds, closer than the last. Shea takes her first deep breath in minutes as Poppy draws in close, her grip tightening around the bread knife.
“This feels worse,” she says.
Shea turns to follow her gaze. Lys is there, just as she knew he would be—just as she felt him—his frame swallowing up the exit.
He looks the way he did that night on the bridge—veined beyond recognition.
His teeth are fanged sharp, his claws bloody.
In his right hand, he grips a wooden baseball bat, the grain dark with blood.
On the floor, the man begins to chant. Quietly, like he’s reciting a prayer. “From the fount of the forest comes the age of the beast. From the fount of the forest comes the age of the—”
“Lys,” Shea whispers. “Look at me.”
His head quirks oddly, following the sound of her voice.
Locking onto her, as though sighting prey.
His eyes are flat and cold, no recognition in their depths.
He takes a single step, his bat clicking over the grout.
The kitchen is small. There’s nowhere to run.
The island’s edge bites into the small of her back.
Behind her, the man is still chanting. “From the fount of the forest comes the age of the beast. From the fount—”
“Babe Ruth,” blurts Shea. “The Titan of Terror.”
Lys halts, going vulturine still.
“The— Shoot , what was it? The colossal something —the colossal—the Colossus of Clout !”
“Shea,” whispers Poppy. “What are you doing?”
“He played, uh, twenty-two seasons of baseball,” she goes on, raising her voice in an effort to drown out the man and his chanting. “He had seven hundred, uh, seven hundred fourteen home runs. Not the record holder but close. Who holds the record? You never said.”
Lys’s eyes open and close in a reptilian blink.
“Finish it,” goads the man. “Kill me.”
“Shut up ,” snaps Shea.
“You know you want to,” says the man, ignoring her. “You want to know what my plan was? You want to know how I would have done it? I’d have crept upstairs, whisper-quiet. I’d have gutted her while she slept. Broken her right in front of you—drained her of blood and made you watch.”
With a snarl, Lys lunges. He doesn’t make it far. There’s the twang of a string loosing, the sick thwack of a wooden projectile lodging itself into drywall. Lys is pinned by the shirt, blood pouring from a graze in his lower abdomen. Asher stands in the door, already reloading.
“Run,” he orders, his voice even. “Now.”
Lys releases an inhuman snarl, grabbing the stake with both hands and wedging it slowly free. Blood trickles down his abdomen like water from a sieve. On the floor, the man goes scrabbling back, dragging a trail of dark in his wake.
“From the fount of the forest,” he gasps out, “comes the age of the beast. From the—”
“Parker, move !” shouts Asher.
She edges hurriedly toward the door just as Lys rips the stake free. As she passes, Asher rams the flat of the crossbow into her chest. She catches it, surprised.
“If something comes at you, shoot it,” he orders.
She nods and takes off running, Poppy at her heels. There’s the click of a loaded chamber, an unholy howl. A gun fires just as she and Poppy burst out into the night, their breath breaking over them in sheaves of gray. The night is overcast, the moon a pale disk in a nebulous sky.
They race toward the barn without stopping, stumbling over hilly pitches and crawling under fences.
They emerge from the meadow soaking wet and shivering.
An abandoned RV has been left parked alongside a tall tensile fence.
All around them, the night is horribly, painfully quiet. Shea peers toward the house.
“Do you hear them? Do you— Is there anything?”
“No,” says Poppy. “It’s quiet. We probably shouldn’t stay out in the open like this, though. If anything is scenting us, we’re upwind.”
“Okay.” Shea palms the stitch in her side. “Okay, no—you’re right. Let’s keep going.”
On the other side of the fence sits a barn.
It’s been built into a bank, the two-storied edifice jutting out of the shallow hillside like a dryad’s saddle.
Searching until she finds a suitable stick, Shea tosses it at the wiring.
When nothing sizzles, she gestures for Poppy to follow her, slinging the strap of the crossbow over her shoulder.
The fence is high, wires taut. They climb to the top of the RV before scaling the rest of the way on their own, careful not to snare themselves in the sumac veined along the posts.
The drop to the opposite side nearly steals the breath clean out of her lungs.
She doesn’t stop to recover. They keep moving, scrabbling one after the other over the stony pitch and slipping through a gap in the second-story door.
Inside is dark. By what little light illuminates the space, Shea can just make out the bare bones of a workshop slung with cobwebs.
The air smells like dry leather and wet hay and—beneath it—something foul.
Immediate unease swims into her. It isn’t the room itself, which at first glance doesn’t look all that different from her father’s workshop back home.
Tools hang suspended from the walls in every direction.
Muck forks and straw brooms. Pitchforks and shovels.
A hacksaw, for cutting metal. A tenon saw, for shallow incisions. A panel saw, for hewing and splitting.