Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 (28 page)

Molly snatched a butcher knife from the wooden block on the counter. She brushed past Eden, who stood staring in wide-eyed terror, too frightened to move.

“Help or get out of the way!” Molly told her.

Dallas—this Prowler that had been in her bedroom the night before, watching her sleep, hoping to taste her flesh—had his back turned. Matt’s arrival had drawn his attention and now it seemed to size him up as the greater threat.
A mistake,
Molly thought. Courtney was on the floor bleeding, maybe dying. Jack had hit his head, was either unconscious or barely so. She had no compunction about attacking Dallas from behind.

With a shriek that tore up from deep within her, Molly gripped the blade of the butcher knife with both hands and rammed it into his back. The beast roared, arched his body, and lashed back at her. Its claws just barely caught her arm but the slash stung even through the fabric of the shirt. Dallas had cut her.

The knife was still embedded in his back. Molly had no weapon.

“Jack!” she screamed. “Get up, Jack! Eden! Matt! For God’s sake do something!”

Eden muttered something under her breath, the beautiful girl still frozen, almost as though entranced. Molly could not make out the words, but she thought there was something about
building
in there. And “not now. Not so early.” Those words were very clear.

Dallas came at Molly.

“You little fool. Why couldn’t you all have just acted like most humans, worry about yourselves instead of the pack? But the cripple hit me, I can barely see out one eye. And you, with the knife? I was going to let you live.” Behind the beast, Molly saw Matt rush at him, silently, terror plain on his face. Yet despite that all-encompassing fear, he leaped at the Prowler, drove him deeper into the kitchen, and they tumbled to the floor together. Matt was fast, his fists pistoned, and he struck the thing three times before it clenched a hand around his throat, then swept the claws of his other hand down and tore his arm off.

Matt screamed. Blood fountained from the ragged stump of his lost limb. Then Dallas shot his snout forward, jaws clenched on Matt’s neck, and the beast tore his throat out and swallowed the torn flesh in a single gulp.

Tears sprang to Molly’s eyes and they stung even more than the cuts on her arm.
Bill’s coming,
she thought.
Matt said he called. He’s got to be on the way.

But she knew that all of this would be over in minutes.

Over.

Artie watched the Ravenous tear Corinne Berdinka’s soul apart and eat it. Her ghost in tatters, the huge beast gnashed its jaws as it ripped another huge part of her essence off in its maw and consumed it. The thing’s eyes glowed yellow, feral . . . evil. Its scorpion tail whipped around, slashed right through the wounded spirit of Father Pinsky.

“
You’ve got to grab it and hold it,”
Seth instructed.

Artie hated him in that moment, this ancient soul, this supposedly sage being who had all the answers.
Spirit guide,
he thought.
What the hell is that?

Across the kitchen he saw one of the ghosts—Jimmy something—disappear through the wall. Artie cursed him silently.
Who didn’t want to run away?
He wanted to take off himself, but the Ravenous, this huge, maggot-ridden, drooling beast, was not just death. The end it brought was worse than death, it was the end of all consciousness, the destruction of eternity. Artie felt terror in his soul, in all that was left that was still
him.
He had lost his life, his flesh, lost everything that he thought had mattered to him, but now he knew it was not
all.

He did not want to disappear forever, to truly die. But the Ravenous had to be stopped, and Seth—know-it-all Seth—had a plan.

“
Grab it and hold it!”
Artie snapped at those who had not yet been consumed, those who had not run despite the fate that awaited in the jaws of the Ravenous. “
If it doesn’t work, we run. But we have to try!”
The ghost of Alan Vance, who had been a policeman in life, met Artie’s gaze from across the room and then the two of them, after a moment of silent communication, lunged at the Ravenous. Each of them grabbed an arm, and then other spirits swept in. Two latched onto the monster’s tail. Others helped with its arms. They clung to its legs to immobilize it. Artie felt the little bits of tattered soul squirming in the thing’s matted, filthy fur as it bucked against them. But for that moment, they held it.

“
Seth!”
Artie shouted.

The blazing brilliance of the spirit guide’s soul drifted forward. He lifted his arms and grasped the sides of the Ravenous’s face. Seth dipped his head forward so that he stared eye to eye with the soul-eater.

“
Calm yourself,”
Seth whispered. “
I know you hear me and understand. You do not belong here. There is a place where your kind can hunt forever, where your pack has gone. Look and see what I have to show you, let me guide you there so that you can be at peace.”
Something happened then. The gray, washed-out world of the Ghostlands that was laid over the fleshworld kitchen, just as insubstantial, seemed to fluctuate. In that flux, the wall where the windows were—one boarded up, one open to the night—suddenly disappeared. Beyond it was a place of even deeper darkness, the stars in the sky in that spirit realm were golden as the moon. A harsh wind whipped through trees in the forest there and howls split the night, first only a few, and then more and more joining in.

The Ravenous stopped struggling. It turned to look at that place.

“
Go,”
Seth whispered. “
That is where you belong.”

With a snarl, the beast bucked again. Artie felt his hand slip across one of the horns on its back, and he lost his grip. They all began to. The Ravenous lunged forward, its maw open wide, rows of razor blade teeth gleaming, and it bit Seth’s head off.

The spirit guide’s decapitated form winked out, gone, like a snuffed candle.

Eden
knew.
She felt as though some tether had broken in her soul and she cried out in sorrow. While Dallas savaged the corpse of the young guy who had tried to help them, Molly tried to help Jack to stand. He seemed disoriented, but he was coming around fast.

Not fast enough.

Eden picked up the chair Jack had tried to attack Dallas with earlier, raised it over her head, barely able to hold it aloft, and then she brought it down with every ounce of strength in her. The chair broke on the Prowler’s head and Dallas slumped onto the corpse.

There was a ringing in Jack’s ears and he felt as though his equilibrium was completely off. He saw the world around him in a kind of haze, not like looking into the Ghostlands, but as though he were drunk. Then he saw his sister lying on the floor in a pool of blood, saw Eden crash a chair down upon the Prowler, saw the almost unrecognizable corpse of Matt Brocklebank under the monster, the creature that even now was beginning to stir.

Felt Molly shake him.

“Jack!” she said. “Snap out of it. This thing is killing us!”

Almost simultaneously, he heard Artie call out to him. Jack twisted around to see the ghost of his friend thrown across the room. Artie passed through the wall, but a moment later he reappeared, eyes wild with panic, long gashes on his face and chest, some ethereal soul-matter leaking like blood from those wounds.

“Artie!” Jack shouted.

“What?” Molly cried. “What’s happening, Jack?!”

His head throbbed as though someone had hammered nails into the back of his skull, but Jack’s mind was clear now. He was torn, but he had to act.

“Under my bed! The shotgun. Go!”

Molly took off, running past Eden even as she brought the chair down on the Prowler again. Jack fought the urge to leap on the monster, to pull the knife from his back and stab him again and again. Molly was going for the shot-gun. And there were other terrors to be dealt with. Matt was dead. Courtney might be fatally wounded. If he did not stop the Ravenous, their souls, rising from their bodies right here and now, might be torn apart, consumed, destroyed forever.

Damnation,
he thought.
That’s what it is. The Ravenous is like damnation for them.

He spun, praying that Molly hurried, and he looked at the ghosts on the other side of the kitchen. Jack lowered his chin and with a thought, his vision shifted, his perception altered.

Shift.

The world swam away into a sea of dull grays but the ghosts were solid again. And he could see the Ravenous. It was thrashing about, tearing into them, its spiked tail shattering souls, claws tearing spirit matter, jaws darting forward to rip and gnaw and swallow them up.

It seemed somehow larger, but he thought that might have been just the room they were in. Its claws lashed out like knives, and with the matted fur and the maggots that squirmed in there, Jack realized now that the thing looked dead. The walking corpse of a monster.

He recalled his first conversation with Seth and immediately wondered again if this was what Prowlers looked like before they had evolved, if this was the primal beast.

The Ravenous sniffed the air, then its head snapped up and its lunatic eyes spotted him. It
saw
him. The wounds on his soul where it had slashed him before seemed to be healed, but still they ached.

“Where’s Seth?” Jack asked, glancing over at Artie.

The ghost watched the Ravenous warily and did not bother to look at Jack. “
It took him.”

The soul of Alan Vance attacked the Ravenous from behind and the thing shrugged him off, the horns that ran up its back opening long gashes in the specter of the dead officer.

“
What the hell do we do now?”
Vance asked, staring in horror at the wounds on his soul.

“Run,” Jack told them. “Take off.”

“
No!”
Artie shouted. “
We’ve got to destroy it. It’s the only way.”

He looked almost foolish in his torn sweatshirt and untied sneakers, but when Artie rushed the Ravenous, Jack thought he saw something else in his friend, a kind of warrior angel, a blazing being like Seth had been. In that moment, he understood that it was a war indeed, against the Prowlers, and now against the Ravenous as well. Somehow his friendship with Artie, and Artie’s murder, had given him this gift, the ability to speak to the dead. This talent gave him a unique advantage in the war with the wild, and Jack realized now that he had to use it, not out of necessity for survival, but simply because it must be done. He had not chosen war, but he would fight it with all his heart.

“Come on, then!” Jack screamed at the Ravenous.

It rushed at him, batted aside the ravaged ghost of Father Pinsky. Artie and Alan chased after it and Jack stood his ground. Just before it reached him, the two ghosts grabbed its arms. Others who had not been eaten or frightened away latched onto it as well and for a moment the Ravenous was off-balance.

Jack could not use weapons from the fleshworld. He had only his hands. He clenched his hands together and brought his joined fists around in an upward arc that hammered at the side of the thing’s head. Soul-maggots fell to the ground and disappeared. The Ravenous bucked, but it was weakening and they held it. Jack hammered it again, then he twisted his hand up as though he too had claws and he raked his fingers across its face, across its eyes.

The Ravenous roared.

It shook Alan off, one arm free, and it slashed Jack across the cheek and neck, tearing open new gashes in his spirit. It shot its head forward, its jaws clamped down on his shoulder and it tore a chunk of him away. Not flesh. Worse.

It swallowed a part of his soul.

The shotgun felt heavy in Molly’s hands as she ran down the hall toward the kitchen. The light in the hall made her blink as she tried to adjust her eyesight, knowing the kitchen would seem darker to her now. She had checked the shotgun, found it fully loaded, and now her finger was on the trigger as she ran to the kitchen.

Across the room Jack struggled with something unseen, and even as she watched he threw back his head and cried out in pain as though wounded. And yet she could not see any wounds. Still, Molly knew what it was.

By the cabinets to her right, Eden lifted the chair again, but too late. Dallas was moving. The Prowler shook himself as he rose. A clawed hand lashed out and grabbed the chair, stopped the blow from falling. Then Dallas snatched up Eden’s hair in one fist and rammed her facefirst into the cabinet. Snarling in fury, given over completely now to the savage beast, he slashed at the girl’s back.

Molly swung the barrel of the shotgun over and took aim. For just a moment she hesitated. If she fired now, some of the spray from the shotgun was sure to hit Eden. But if she did not, the girl was dead.

Her finger tightened on the trigger. The shotgun bucked in her hands, jerked back against her shoulder with jarring force. A huge hole was torn out of Dallas’s lower back, and she cursed loudly that she had missed his spine. Blood and fur and pieces of his loose clothing spattered Eden and the wall behind her. The gaping wound laid bare the monster’s insides, dark wet organs and gleaming bone.

Still, Dallas turned and lunged for her, claws raised, fangs bared.

Molly took aim again, at his face this time.

The Prowler fell at her feet, choking up blood, dying but not dead. His yellow, feral eyes glared up at her and he began to crawl toward her, still trying to rip her apart.

“It was . . . just a job,” Dallas snarled. Then he looked up at her, and his eyes seemed almost human.

Eden stood across from Molly, the monster on the floor between them. The reincarnated girl screamed at her to kill it, to destroy the thing, and Molly glanced up to see the tears running down Eden’s face.

Jack’s soul screamed. The pain was almost blinding, nearly enough to make his mind shut down completely. Again he smashed his joined fists against the monster’s head, and again it slashed at him, tore at him, and he knew that he was going to die. Or that it would eat his soul and his body would be left behind, some hollow shell.

The ghosts piled upon the Ravenous again. Artie wrapped his hands around its neck from one side, choking it, while the others tried to hold back its arms. With a single snap of its jaws, the ghost-beast twisted to the left and bit off several of the finger’s on Artie’s right hand.