My eyes flew to Dex’s.
Neither of us understood. But we did understand what happened
next.
Maximus’s foot connected
with Bird’s side and Bird was kicked off the cliff. He screamed and
grabbed blindly at the cliffside but the loose earth and rocks
crumbled under his worn hands. He fell onto the land below with a
cry.
Without thinking I made a
jump for Maximus and snatched the branch out of his hand while he
was unaware.
I took the branch and
speared it directly into his stomach and held it there while he
yelled and screamed and tried to back away. I followed him with it
like I was someone possessed. I didn’t know what had come over me
but I knew that this was not Maximus and that he must die, by any
means necessary.
I ignored the queasy,
sinking feeling, a sign I took as a matter of being human, and let
my anger and determination lead the way and kept that flame pierced
into him as the fire began to take over his body in one sickening
charcoal burn.
Then,
poof
.
He was gone. Maximus and
his flame-haired glory literally disappeared right before our eyes.
One minute I was burning someone alive with a lit branch, the next
I was aiming a branch at nothing but empty darkness.
But a movement at my feet
caught my eyes. I look down to see a cricket wobble back and forth
uneasily before springing off into the void. You’ve
got
to be kidding
me.
I dropped the branch and
felt Dex scoop up our equipment and grab me by the
waist.
“
Come on,” he whispered,
gently, as if he was afraid I’d pick up that stick and spear it
into him.
He led me to the cliff edge
and let go. He crawled down and jumped the last few feet and made
me do the same. He caught me, awkwardly, for the last
part.
We looked down at the
ground. Bird was lying on his back. Dex aimed his camera at him,
the light still working at least. It caused Bird to blink a few
times, enough for us to know he was OK.
We stooped down and brought
Bird to his feet and headed off to the Lancaster’s, with him
dragging along between us. He was stumbled around for the most
part, coming in and out of consciousness. Occasionally he would
mumble, “Don’t trust her, don’t trust her” which did nothing to
make us feel better. At one point he tried to walk on his own, his
hands flying around my waist, as if he was going into my pant
pockets. Then he went back to stumbling.
We had rounded the barn and
had sight of the house when we saw Will’s truck pull up to it. It
stopped and Will and Miguel got out and came running towards us. I
noticed, rather absently, that Maximus’s car was not there. That
gave me some comfort in thinking that he was still alive somewhere
and still heading for us.
Will and Miguel were
yelling things left and right. Another car pulled up behind it and
a short stocky man in uniform came running out of it, the sheriff,
Fred.
I didn’t know what was
going on or what was being said, but Will and Miguel took Bird onto
both their shoulders and dragged him towards the house. The sheriff
ran up to Dex and started yammering in his ear about this and that,
pointing around wildly. They too went into the house.
I followed as quickly as I
could but for some reason my steps felt slow and sloppy, like I was
walking through oatmeal.
I watched them all go
inside. I was only a few steps away from the porch. I would be
inside soon, in the comfort and safety and warmth.
“
Perry,” an unfamiliar
voice, metallic and hollow, said from behind me.
I stopped and looked. I’m
sorry that I did.
A six-foot tall coyote was
standing behind me on two legs. It put its heavy, clawed paw on my
shoulder and smiled as a coyote can only smile. Black gums and
sharp teeth.
“
We need him,” it said
without moving a muscle.
And then all the world went
black.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
My mind eased into a slow
consciousness. The heavy cloud that seemed to hang inside my skull
didn’t dissipate but I found the strength to think past it. Where
was I? There was nothing.
My eyes weren’t open. I had
to tell myself to open them. With great pains, my left eye blinked
open first, then my right. They focused on nothing, just the same
blackness I had behind my eyelids. But as my thoughts became
sharper, the blackness became shapes of things. It stung too much
to take it all in at once but through brief glimpses I could make
out a doorway, some shady things hanging from a wall.
Still, where was
I?
Then it all came rushing
back to me. Shan. The horse. Bird. Maximus. The fire. The coyote.
The end.
Where was I?
My head snapped back and
the world spun. I breathed in wildly. It smelled like hay and
horses and some musty, herbaceous stuff. I couldn’t move my arms or
legs.
The clouds inside my head
moved and swirled into a spinning current of air. I fought against
it and looked down at myself. I was sitting upright in a chair. My
arms and legs were tied to it with leather straps. They didn’t cut
into my skin but they were restrictive enough.
Something stirred to my
left. I looked over and saw a figure standing in the doorway. There
was very little light in the room but my night vision kicked
slowly. It was a short figure. It didn’t move much. And near the
top of it, yellow orbs glowed. I knew who it was.
Sarah.
And there was nothing I
could do about it.
Sensing this, perhaps, she
started walking towards me, step by step, her footfalls echoing
throughout the room, which I guess was a tack room in one of the
barns. I could make out a few western saddles on the walls, and
when I thought about it, it felt like I was tied with
reins.
“
You’re awake,” she said.
Her voice shot across the room yet seemed to come from
nothing.
I didn’t have any snappy
one-liners. I was frozen in fear. I could only process what was
happening here and now. If I thought far enough ahead of
what
could
happen….
“
It’s good to be in
present, Perry,” she said as if she were reading my thoughts. “Too
many live in the future. If you keep living in the future, in what
may be, then the future gets shorter every minute.”
She inched towards me until
she was only a foot away. She leaned over and stared at
me.
Though her face was hazy
and grainy in the dark, she looked different. Her glasses were
gone. And even though her eyes were the luminescent predatory shade
of yellow, I could see she had nice, almond shaped eyes.
Wait, did this mean she
could always see?
“
In a way, I never was
blind,” she said. As if things couldn’t get any creepier and
disturbing, she was seriously reading my thoughts.
She straightened up and
peered down at me. “Losing my sight was the best thing that ever
happened to me. It opened my real eyes. The ones I had buried. The
ones in your soul.”
She tapped her chest for
emphasis.
“
You see, I had forgotten
the way. And it was almost too late. I lost all my faith in a
reckless, false God that had turned its back on me. And why not? I
turned my back on him. I lost my sight, but I gained so much more.
I gained what I used to have. What I used to share with Shan.
Something that, later, I was taught was ‘evil.’ But how could
something that could bring my eyes back, be bad? No. It was
everyone else who was bad.”
“
Including your husband?” I
said, the words coming out of my mouth like sludge. I wondered if
that earthy smell that seemed lodged in my nostrils was peyote, or
something else that was used to drug me earlier.
“
Yes,” she replied
matter-of-factly. “He was bad. He turned his back on the way and he
made me do the same.”
You have free
will
, I thought, testing.
“
I know I do,” she said
without hesitation. “We all do. But to have someone you love
turn…”
You turned.
“
I did. For the better. If
Will could just…see. He is the blind one. I can see
everything.”
How long did you plan on
torturing him this way?
I
thought.
“
Until he gets it. You think
this is all because of you? This was happening for years. These
things take time.”
I really wanted to say
something utterly cliché such as ‘you won’t get away with it’ but
my humor wasn’t allowing it at the moment and anyway –
“
I won’t be getting away
with anything. There is nothing to get, except for
Will.”
She started pacing back and
forth, her hands behind her back. It almost seemed comical, like
she was playing a part.
So many questions flooded
through me. Aside from the big questions – as in what was going to
happen to me, where was Dex, where was Bird and everyone else – I
wanted to know how she thought she was going to resolve her own
problem. As ridiculous as it seemed, I needed to know her logic.
What did she want to achieve? Bird had said that some people got
angry. Could it still be that simple? There was nothing simple
about this situation. At all.
I braced in my seat,
thinking she was going to answer that herself but she didn’t. She
just kept pacing, mumbling to herself now. She was done reading my
thoughts for the meantime.
I needed to think of a way
out. Or maybe this was a decoy, for her to use my own thoughts
against me when I thought she wasn’t listening.
She stopped pacing and
faced me.
“
Do you know why you are
here?” she asked quietly.
I looked her in her animal
eyes and shook my head.
“
You think it’s because
you’re…special’?”
I wanted to shrug but it
seemed too insignificant for what was going on.
“
You have a way about you.
It’s useful. But you think too much. You want too much. Your
ability to retract from reality is useful, but…we’d prefer someone
who is a bit ‘all there.’”
I wasn’t all there? Maybe
not at the moment when my thoughts not only seemed like abstract
objects but were being read at the same time.
“
He’ll be much easier,” she
said. Her tone was tinged with menace.
He?
Without thinking, my arms
and legs seized in their holds like I was some crazy attack dog
held back by a choke chain.
“
Yes,” she said. “We’ve been
looking for someone else. Rudy gave Shan everything he needed. And
Dex will give the same for me.”
How dare she even say his
name? I wildly fought against the straps. What were they planning
on doing to him? Was it too late?
The fear and anger that
coursed through me was incomparable. If this were a movie, I would
have broken through the straps in a Hulk-like manner and laid waste
to Sarah. But this wasn’t a movie. No matter how angry I was, how
badly I wanted to break free, I was stuck. I tried to move and
squirm but the chair held on to me with the entire rein’s might.
Sarah didn’t even flinch. She knew how futile it was.
“
He won’t feel a thing,”
she said, smiling. She kept grinning. Slowly, her teeth started to
shift and elongate until they were too large for her mouth. They
had become fangs and the rest of her face began to follow suit in a
horrific display of shapeshifting.
First her jaw jutted out
into a narrow point that strained her skin until it broke into
bloody rivets, then her face began to spread wider, the sound of
her jaw and cheekbones cracking into place filled the room,
contorting and stretching. I could almost feel her skull splitting,
the substantial sound of thick bone snapping. This was no scene out
of
Teen Wolf
. This
was the real thing. As real as it could be.
I looked down at her arms.
I could see ripples of fur beneath her skin, like it was being
caressed by underwater reeds. Soon the rippling stopped and the
reeds started to poke through the skin; a demonic Chia
Pet.
And soon, Sarah was a wolf,
standing awkwardly. This was the end of me.
I closed my
eyes.
Nothing.
I dared to peek.
It still stood
there.
Then the fur began to
retreat back into the arms and the canine jaw and head contracted
quickly, as if it were sinking in itself.
But as Sarah began to
revert back to human form, I realized it wasn’t going to be what I
thought. Even from looking at the lower half of the transformation,
I noticed she had on the same pants that I was wearing. And then it
hit me.
I glanced up at her face.
As the wolf disappeared and melded into human flesh, as the fur
turned into ivory skin and as the canine eyes moved closer to each
other, and the mane of hair was replaced by black, groomed waves, I
realized…it was me.