Chapter 14 Hangover
Green awoke to a high-pitched whine.
His first desire was to stop the sound. He wondered what was making it, then realized it was him. It was the involuntary sound of his body objecting to being conscious, rejecting it like a foreign object.
The entirety of his skin was an open eye and the night air was dusted with cayenne.
“Oh my God.”
He rolled over.
His clothes were soaked from the wet turf and grass clung to his face. Every sensation was magnified to intolerable clarity. The smell of horse manure filled his sinuses. He placed a hand on the ground and noticed that he was vibrating. Not shivering, vibrating.
He coughed.
Phantom strings of iridescence unraveled from his mouth and braided in the wind like ribbons.
He sat up.
His tailbone vibrated against the ground like a phone buzzing on a table.
Valentina was crumpled in a small ball nearby, tendrils of pastel, frosted breath drifting from her nostrils.
Next to her were the halves of the broken log. The splintered wood glowed an eerie blue.
The wolf, Catskill, was gone.
Green stood.
Standing felt terrible.
There was a pulsing engine under his feet and his hypersensitive skin felt it in every cell.
He looked back toward the house. It was far across the field, but he could see the door was standing open, a rectangle of yellow light in the deeper shadow of the porch. A figure in white lay by the front stairs.
Spore-log? Or dead from the fawn’s presence?
Green touched the acorn in his pocket. A trade from a king of crows. A payment for a meal. Perhaps more.
He tried to prioritize. He was awake first. There were things to do, but thinking was difficult.
Valentina was alive.
Valentina had done this to him.
He huffed out a breath and another shred of iridescence coiled into view and faded.
He decided his teacher could stay in the dirt for a bit and went to check on the house.
The moon was low and the first hint of dawn had washed the stars from the eastern sky.
Walking was not fun.
He moved with slow care. His bowels rumbled like a dryer full of sneakers. The glass fawn was not near and the certainty of that knowledge startled him.
There was a thin, elderly man sprawled face down in front of the house, a dead flashlight beneath his fingers. Green knelt and rolled him to his back.
The remnants of a minor nosebleed left a dull red line across his cheek. Still breathing. Warm to the touch.
Green sighed.
Gotta move him inside.
“Okay. This is going to hurt.”
The man was heavier than he looked, but Green hauled him into a fireman’s carry and took him into the house.
Inside, a woman was slumped in an upholstered chair, silver crochet hook gleaming on her lap. She snored softly. A shaggy Maine coon cat slept on a rug nearby. Phantom colors drifted from both sleepers.
The television chirped about a revolutionary juicer that would detoxify and make skin glow.
Green deposited the man on the couch, did a quick check for other survivors, and locked the door as he left.
They would not be happy when they awoke, but it was a miracle that they were alive at all.
He didn’t know the lethal range of the glass fawn, and he did not like the idea that these people’s lives had become a data point in that deadly question.
He couldn’t imagine what they would make of spore-log aftereffects, but at least they would outlive the pain and confusion. That was a victory.
He stood on the porch and looked out into the dark, swinging his jaw wide open to quiet the drumroll of his chattering teeth.
Catskill was out there somewhere.
Thinking of the wolf did something strange.
The landscape lightened. There was no more light, but the darkness had shifted from black to grayscale. It was like a moonlit night when the world was blanketed in snow. Something had turned up the dial on contrasts.
“Catskill? Did you do that?”
The wolf was busy elsewhere. He knew. He just knew. But yes, his packmate had done that. Catskill was sharing a piece of himself with Green.
That’s new.
He tried to feel exactly what Catskill was doing, then recoiled.
He tasted mineral grit and felt the whip of roots lashing his face as he sped through the soil. The sting of it lingered on his raw nerves even after he pulled his thoughts away.
Right. Shit. Never mind.
Valentina was a small lump far out in the field.
He couldn’t leave her. He couldn’t carry her all the way back to Candle-Fly. He couldn’t just wait in the cold field until she woke up.
With a groan, he left the porch, cursing the high-voltage zap of pain that shot up his leg with each step.
He had just found a wheelbarrow in an old potting shed and was rounding the house with it when Valentina appeared.
“There you are,” she said. “Where is the horned wolf?”
She coughed and a shimmer of color swam in the air like a hunting eel.
Green grunted and dropped the barrow handles. Touching anything hurt.
“The wolf is gone. We…He…is not a threat to us.”
Valentina shook her head and spit on the ground.
“Save the story for later. Pizdets. If possible, it feels worse than I remember.”
She coughed again.
“Or I am just old.”
Green tried to hold his arms away from his sides, wincing each time he brushed against his own ribs. Something akin to heartburn hit him each time Valentina spoke. This particular brand of misery did not love company.
“Please tell me you have something in your backpack that ends this. I don’t care what it is. I just need it to be over.”
She shook her head and flinched.
“No. Just time. A few hours. Did you check the house?”
He knew a few hours was better than a few days, but he wanted to scream in her face anyway.
“Yeah. They’re alive, but they won’t be happy when they wake up.”
When Green and Valentina made it back to camp, morning had arrived and the woods were raining down fists made of birdsong.
Every twitter in the branches, every scuffle of chipmunks racing through the underbrush, every chitter of scolding squirrels felt like wet garbage pressed directly against Green’s raw, exposed brain.
The two walked in silence with their eyes on the path.
At camp, they managed a two-word conversation before retreating from the day.
“Bed?”
“Bed.”
Valentina went to her camper. Green to his shed.
He fell into his bed, muddy clothes and all. Exhaustion wrestled with misery and, eventually, his mind surrendered to dreamless sleep.
He woke in the early afternoon and felt shockingly whole.
He groaned, stretched, and touched his face. The sensation didn’t summon a bolt of pain.
That’s better.
He sat on the edge of his bed, feeling wonderfully neutral and promising himself never to take feeling simply fine for granted again.
All the moisture was gone from his mouth and he worked his tongue, trying to coax it back. He sat up and rubbed the grit from his eyes.
Catskill was sleeping somewhere full of inhuman pressure and quiet and the effortless normalcy of that knowledge made Green shake his head in disbelief.
“There’s a monster inside my mind. And we’re family.”
His stove had gone dark and he held his palm above the ashes to check for heat.
There was still enough warmth there that he knew leaving a log to smolder would return the fire to life by evening.
He was beginning to know such things. He placed a log in the fluffy gray ashes, then went out to find his teacher.
She was in the library tree.
Green heard voices as he entered the hatch.
Valentina sat in front of an open laptop. She was video chatting with someone. It was like spotting a microwave in a Renaissance painting of biblical martyrdom.
He hadn’t thought she was a Luddite exactly. He just hadn’t expected her to own a computer.
She was wrapped in a thick coat, though it must have been nearly seventy-five degrees in the room, the electric heaters purring away near the trunk.
She motioned for him to pull up a seat.
The woman on the screen was ancient, a dried apple dollface offset by a colorful pile of shawls. Her left eye was missing. In its place, a stone the color of a tropical lagoon gleamed conspicuously.
“My apprentice. Green,” Valentina said.
The old woman gave a shallow bow.
“Hello, young man. You’ve found yourself quite a teacher.”
Her smile deepened the lines of her face. The map of her wrinkles suggested a face that was fond of smiling.
“In a sense, Mr. Green has already met you,” Valentina said.
“Oh? How’s that?”
“I’ve started him on your journal.”
Green leaned forward in his chair.
“Clara?”
A tingle of excitement.
Both women nodded. Clara beamed.
“I’m flattered,” Clara said. “How far in are you?”
“Well, you just learned that Herkimer is…”
“An asshole,” Clara supplied.
Green laughed and Valentina frowned.
“Ah, yes. My old instructor has some antiquated ideas about cursing,” Clara said. “Though, she just cheats and curses in Russian or old Italian or whatever language she assumes her company doesn’t know.”
Clara winked her one eye and Valentina shook her head.
“I was filling in Clara on our night’s work,” Valentina said.
“I have some context to add,” Green said.
He told them about touching Catskill’s memories and the wolf’s view of the fawn as an outsider to reality.
It was surreal to tell such an impossible story to an audience that simply listened closely and took it all in stride.
Clara and Valentina reacted with calm interest as if Green had just retold the week’s weather forecast.
“Interesting,” Clara said. “Many assumed that the Appalachians had a territory guardian, it being an ancient transitional place, but no such creature had been confirmed. Until now. How fascinating.”
“Territory guardian?”