Chapter 12 The Cost of Our Principles #3
He didn’t know exactly how near the fawn might need to be before its chilling effect took hold, but it was moving closer to the house.
He still harbored doubts that the glass fawn was to blame for the recent deaths, but those doubts were nothing so vain or foolish as certainty. He took a step forward.
The fawn was well over a hundred yards away, but it stopped as soon as Green moved. Even at that distance, he could feel the fawn’s eyes upon him like a winter wind following a newcomer into a warm room.
Well. If not now, when?
He raised the flare gun, estimating an angle that would carry the bright fire up and over the road where the fawn stood. He pulled the trigger.
There was a muffled crack and a smell like sulfur, then nothing.
The fawn took a step toward him.
He cocked back the hammer and tried again.
Even more nothing than before.
Valentina had said that you don’t meet the unknown armed for war, but they were also there to defend people who couldn’t defend themselves and now Green was absolutely without any tools to turn away the approaching cryptid.
“Shit.”
The fawn looked away from Green and began a slow arc around the practice ring, heading for the house. Something about the motion flipped a switch in Green’s mind. The deer wasn’t fleeing and it wasn’t wandering. That turn wasn’t random. Was it hunting?
He picked up a stick, planning to crack it against trees and fence posts to startle the fawn into retreating. It was better than nothing.
Suddenly, the fawn went still and Green saw its attention snap to the opposite tree line.
His mouth went dry.
That’s where Valentina was heading.
He stared at the fairy-fire thing. It looked peaceful, even lovely, but he trusted his teacher. He still struggled to believe the fawn was responsible for all the death on the mountain, but he trusted her.
The fawn reoriented its body and began gliding toward where Valentina was no doubt watching. Its legs moved, but the movement seemed out of sync with its speed. It shifted across the ground like a marionette in the hands of a novice puppeteer.
She’d been joking when she said that her immortal apprentice was her plan for defense.
She was half joking.
The fawn began to slide faster toward Valentina.
“Aw, hell.”
Green ran.
He felt heavy and loud, but he ran as hard as he could toward the fawn.
He threw his stick aside and put all his effort into a full sprint.
Distantly, he heard the front door of the house click open as he passed.
He ignored it.
He wasn’t a runner and he felt a fire blooming in his chest from the effort.
The fawn’s legs swayed in a languid dance, but it was still leaving him behind.
He needed its attention.
He meant to yell “hey,” but it erupted from him as a half-roared “haaaaaa.”
The fawn paused and did a boneless somersault that made no physical sense and then it was facing Green again, standing stone-still and waiting for his approach.
He slid to a halt thirty feet from the creature, feeling rivulets of sweat freezing on his face.
His lungs burned and his chest ached with the sunless cold beneath a frozen sea.
Between the sudden winter within his body and his panting exertion, he had to plant his hands on his knees to stay upright.
He eyed the fawn and fought for breath.
Up close, Green saw his mistake.
At that distance, without fogged glass between them, the fawn was neither graceful nor lovely. Neither ethereal nor statuesque.
It was a deer-shaped pool teeming with rotting, malformed fish. A pale, wet, pulsing thing pressed beneath a stone. Its two dark eyes were not eyes and looked at nothing, between them a buzzing, hateful disk spun like a coin on a dish.
Green met its sightless gaze and something unhealthy touched his mind. For a moment, his inner voice was no longer alone within his skull. There was something else in that refuge beneath the bone, something the color of cream with a forest of questing fingers.
He screamed noiselessly and clutched his forehead.
Then, something else was there in his mental darkness, in the place he had thought so safely locked away and private.
This new thing came with a booming, thunderous growl that drove the invader from the hollow places inside the walls.
Look away, not-man.
Green gasped in a breath and shifted his whole body away from the fawn, turning his back on the creature. The ice in his beard clattered like beads as he turned.
There, tearing through the dark like an obsidian knife, was the horned wolf.
Its fleshless jaws hung wide, bone and tooth amid a thicket of sharp black peaks that roiled like a lightless fire.
It leapt, sod spraying skyward in the wake of its speed.
The wolf sailed over him, raining down soil and grass. Green toppled into a roll, feeling the earth shudder at the wolf’s impact.
There was a streak of white fire in Green’s peripheral vision that took a moment to parse.
The glowing deer was there, then away, leaving an afterimage of itself on the dark landscape.
The glass fawn was across the paddocks and disappearing up the wooded slope.
It was impossibly fast, not just faster than an animal should be, but faster than a physical object could move through space.
It didn’t speed like an arrow, it transitioned like the swing of a flashlight’s beam across the landscape.
Here and then gone. Whatever mechanism it had just used to flee the wolf, it wasn’t muscle or bone or sinew. It was something else.
Green tilted himself up to hands and knees, then rose, the muscles in his legs shuddering. He heaved in the air, watching his breath transform from crystallized vapor back to transparency. Melting ice in his hair sent streams of frigid water trailing down his neck and back.
The wolf had not pursued the fawn.
There was no chasing after speed like that.
Green summoned all the calm that was left to him and turned.
It was there, standing six feet away, the nightmare that shattered his windshield again and again in his memory. It was bigger than he recalled.
He had no weapons. He had no strength left. Yet, somehow, his fear was all spent.
“Well. It got away.”
Green’s voice was hoarse.
The bear-size wolf turned to him, slow and smooth as honey. The pine scent of its breath was sharp and with it came the wolf’s thoughts.
It won’t be caught with speed, but it may be denied prey and rest and territory.
Green knew the wolf wasn’t speaking words. The wolf was transmitting raw meaning, mind to mind. The words were Green’s.
It didn’t matter.
They were communicating. Green was, in every way that counted, standing in the dark talking to a monster.
Bravely done, not-man.
Green met the wolf’s eyes. There was something new there.
Some deep part of his brain was screaming at him to run, to seize a weapon, to protect his soft throat.
In a timeless, detached space, Green took those ancient impulses and set them on the table in Valentina’s cabin.
He studied them. His teacher was there, standing in his headspace watching him steadily.
Clara was there too. No. These artifacts of terror, fear of the dark and unknown world, could not be trusted as guiding principles.
“Thank you,” Green said. “And likewise. What is that creature?”
A soft sigh behind the wolf rose like a phantom from the ground.
Green and the wolf turned.
Valentina was there, wreathed in frosty breath. She held the rotting spore-log in both hands.
The wolf growled low and Green felt the vibrations in his ribs.
“I hate this part,” she said.
“Wait!”
It was too late.
She broke the log over her knee and tossed the halves at the horned wolf’s feet.
“I apologize in advance, Mr. Green.”
Green had just enough time to question if it had worked before he noticed, in an offhand way, that he had slumped to the ground.
The wolf slumped next to him, eye to eye.
He wondered if all wolves’ eyes looked like that, like deep green water glinting with islands of gold.
His consciousness became too light then and the wind caught it, sending it dancing out and away over the distant treetops, but he wasn’t alone.