Authors: Elizabeth Einspanier
“Wolf!” I called. The man in question was inspecting the beheaded body of Kyle, turning the severed head over in his hands, and he glanced up as I called. “I need you to get me a handful of flour or ashes or the like. Her neck is torn and I need to stop the bleeding.”
He nodded sharply, set Kyle’s head aside, and made his way towards the back of the house. While he rummaged, I turned back to my patient.
“Sarah, can you hear me?” I asked quietly. She stirred and made some feeble noises but did not wake. She yet lived, at least—that much was a relief.
Wolf returned with a double handful of flour and a towel slung over one shoulder. Grateful at his foresight—for I did not relish the idea of destroying a curtain for a bandage—I bound the flour compress over her bleeding throat with the towel.
“He’s gonna be madder’n a wet cat when he gets back,” Wolf said gravely as I worked.
“How long do we have?” I asked as I checked Sarah’s pulse. It was rapid and thready. Her face was pale—whether from blood loss or trauma, I could not yet tell.
“Not long,” he replied.
“A shotgun blast to the face ain’t gonna stop him for long. Not tonight.”
“It isn’t safe for her here, then,” I said, “and while she’s out of immediate danger, she’ll need more medical care. We’ll take her back with us.” Without waiting for any argument—and none seemed forthcoming, in any case—I gathered Sarah up in my arms and made for the door.
When I stepped out onto the porch, I realized something was amiss. Normally a commotion like this would have roused half the town—but I saw no lights coming on, no curious neighbors peering out to see what the fuss was. To my unease, I didn’t even hear any of the usual nocturnal creatures that populated these parts. Even the crows were silent. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
Wolf clasped my shoulder. “Come on,” he urged, and I followed him, cradling my precious cargo as though she were made of porcelain.
Once we had returned to my clinic, I set her down on the examination bed and started treating her other injuries. I was not aware what Wolf was doing, so focused was I, and in fact it was not for several minutes after I had finished patching up Sarah that my blood-smeared hands started shaking, the full enormity of the events of the past fifteen minutes suddenly hitting me like a ton of bricks.
That thing—
that
was closer to Russeau’s true nature than the handsome gentleman that he appeared to be otherwise. Only now did I truly fathom how thoroughly monstrous he was, that creature—that
monster
—who wished to make Salvation his own personal larder.
In hindsight, perhaps I should not have glanced in Wolf’s direction at that moment, because I discovered that he had chalked a circle on the floor in the corner and had placed Kyle’s severed head in the center of it.
“What on earth are you doing?” I blurted.
“I’m gonna have a talk with the only other witness,” he said, as though there was nothing at all wrong with attempting a conversation with the torn-off head of one’s next-door neighbor.
It was too much. My gorge rose, and I retreated to the kitchen, driven by some instinctive need to hide from… from what? From everything, I suppose. I vomited the remains of my dinner into the sink, heaving again and again until I had nothing left. After all the events of this week, my nerves were about shot. I was still trying to recover my equilibrium when Wolf entered the kitchen, his fingers still red with blood.
“Ya’ll want to be there when I talk to him,” he pronounced.
“No, I don’t,” I returned shortly, wiping my mouth on a dishcloth, “You can talk with your severed head all you like, but leave me out of this.”
He scowled. “He’ll be back. Mark my word
s. A face full of buckshot won’t stop him.”
“I know!” I exploded, “I saw that… that creature decapitate one of the strongest men in this town like he was made of tissue paper! What do you think I’d be able to do?”
“Ya’re a doctor,” he said, “Do ya mean to tell me ya never amputated a gangrenous limb?”
I said that I had.
“Ever cut out a cancer?”
Again, I said that I had.
“This Russeau… ya know damn well he ain’t part of the natural world. And ya know damn well that if he ain’t stopped, Salvation is gonna die. I got my own reasons for wanting him dead, but ya and I are the only ones in this town who know how to handle him.”
I said nothing. He huffed and turned away.
“In that case,” he said over his shoulder, “ya better ferget about Miss Sarah. I doubt she’d care to be courted by a lily-livered, yellow-bellied coward like ya anyways.”
In that instant, my fear of blood-sucking demons burned away like flash-paper. I took a couple steps toward Wolf.
“Say that to my face,” I said quietly.
He turned to me. “I
said
—” he began, but that was as far as he got. Now, I was raised to be a gentleman, and as such I had learned to abide by various codes of fairness and sport. For this reason, I wanted very badly for him to be facing me when I decked him.
The two of us scuffled for a good five minutes, and by the end of it we were pretty scraped up, but we were both forced to admit that I was not a coward, as much to my own surprise as to his. My clothing and hair were quite disheveled, but I was still standing, a feat of which I found myself decently proud.
“Now,” said I, once I’d determined that I still had all my teeth and that neither of us had any serious injuries, “I’ll ask again: What can I do?”
“Ya can talk to Kyle,” he said, wiping blood from his mouth on the back of his hand.
“Kyle is currently a severed head,” I pointed out.
“There’s ways of talking to the dead. Come with me.”
I followed him back to the clinic with the chalked circle. Kyle’s head had been propped up in the middle of the circle, at the junction of an equal-armed cross drawn across the middle of the circle. He looked as dead as I would expect a beheaded man to be.
Wolf knelt next to the circle and had me sit on the floor across from him. He drew some designs on Kyle’s face with some dull red pigment that I’m almost sure was not blood, and set the head on its ragged stump of a neck facing me. He started chanting in a low, musical voice, sprinkling a white powder I could not identify over the head with one hand while shaking a rattle above it with the other hand. Nothing seemed to happen as he sat back, satisfied with his work.
“All right, Doc,” Wolf said, “talk to the man.”
I gave him a puzzled look, but he offered no further instructions. I cleared my throat.
“Er, Kyle? Can you hear me?” I ventured. “It’s Doc Meadows. I live next door to—”
I got no further than that, for at that moment the head’s eyes snapped open, glowing green, and Kyle let loose with a torrent of profanity that I will not reproduce here. The suddenness (and, to be honest, unexpectedness) of it fairly rocked me back on my heels. Finally the tirade stopped, and Kyle’s head glanced around, as though the man was trying to get his bearings.
“Where am I?” he finally asked, his eyes fixing on me.
“You’re in my clinic,” I said, as calmly as I could manage, “I’m Doc Meadows. I live next door to you.” I felt silly, introducing myself to his severed head. I knew him well enough to exchange greetings, but Sarah had been my only real social connection to the man.
A few expressions of recollection crossed Kyle’s face. “Yeah. Yeah, I know ya. Sarah talks about ya a lot.” I kept my expression neutral, and he got a thoughtful look on his face. “Why can’t I move?”
I exchanged a glance with Wolf, mine a silent plea for aid and his only a grave nod. I sighed. “Kyle, I’m sorry to say this but… your head was torn clean from your shoulders.” And I
was
sorry about it, even though Kyle and I weren’t close. “You fought well, though. You just, er… lost. You died.” There was no better way I could have put it.
Kyle gave me a sharp, urgent look. “And Sarah? Is she okay? Please—tell me she’s okay!”
“She’s alive,” I reassured him, “She was a bit torn up, but she’s alive. That thing that killed you bit her on the neck and scratched her up. Wolf and I got there shortly before… it left, and I patched her up. She’s unconscious, but God willing, she’ll be okay.” I shook my head. “It didn’t need to happen, Kyle. I aim to square things with the one who did this.”
“So,” Kyle said, rather more calmly than I might have expected, all things considered, “I won’t be around to watch over Sarah anymore.”
“It… looks that way,” I said gravely.
“In that case, Doc, I need ya to make me a promise.”
This was going to make a curious twist on the deathbed promise, but I nodded.
“Watch over Sarah,” Kyle said, “Protect her. Keep her safe. She’s real fond of ya, Doc, and maybe she ain’t wrong about that.”
I nodded without hesitation. “I promise,” I said, “I swear by my mother’s eyes I’ll protect her.”
Kyle’s head nodded. “That’s all I can hope for, I suppose,” he said. “I can’t exactly do anything about it now.”
“You did what you could, Kyle,” I said. “I… I’ll take it from here.” As I spoke to my deceased next-door neighbor, I felt a steely resolve form itself in my core. The terror I had felt when seeing the leathery bat-monster was being replaced by something stronger—something that would, I hoped, help me destroy Russeau once and for all. “You rest now,” I said, surprised at how level my voice was. “You’ve earned it.”
Kyle closed his eyes, and the green glow that had surrounded his head faded. I looked up at Wolf, and he raised his eyebrows.
“Ya ready to go huntin’ properly?” he asked.
The question hardly needed to be asked. In an instant I was on my feet and reaching for my newly-blessed rifle. Russeau was worse than a predator—he was a remorseless monster. He was inhuman, not part of the natural order. He stole what wasn’t his. He fed on the helpless. He planned to slowly kill Salvation, the town that I considered to be under my care from the smallest infant to the oldest codger. He wasn’t going to stop unless someone was strong enough to stop him.
And worst of all—my breaking point—were the events of that night, designed specifically to hurt the only two people still in a position to stop him, to warn us away from further campaigns against him. He’d dragged an innocent woman into our personal feud, and for that I would not stand.
He.
Had.
Hurt.
Sarah.
“I am,” I whispered, double-checking that my rifle was loaded and ready to go.
He nodded. “Let’s get ya some more protection, then.”
He chalked a fresh circle on the floor, again with an equal-armed cross in it, and had me stand within it. He started to chant in his native language, in musical tones so low that I fairly felt the air thrumming, like the vibrations around a tuning fork. He daubed my forehead and cheeks with clay pigments, and I felt the hair on my arms stand up in the building energy like that before an electrical storm. I cannot describe the sensation any better than that, and to this day I don’t know the mechanics behind what he was doing.
As the chanting reached its close, he placed his clean hand on top of my head, and my ears popped.
“There,” he said. “That’s the best I can do. The rest is up to ya.”
I took a deep, bracing breath and nodded. “So how are we going to catch a flying monster?”
He smirked. “I got a few plans for that—but first I need to get ready for battle myself.”
He closed his eyes and performed the same ritual on himself, and I suspected he wore the war paint better than I ever would. I felt the same vibration in the air around him, and I grew ever more certain that whatever he was doing had real power behind it, power that I would never truly understand.
Finally he opened his eyes, and they shone luminous yellow.
“Let’s go,” he growled.
***
The two of us went outside, locking the door behind us. Wolf raised his nose to the air and sniffed. I heard the heavy flap of leathery wings somewhere too distant to see the source but too close for comfort. The waning moon glowed hazily through a thin veil of clouds, casting everything into an uncertain light. I strained every sense, trying to find some sign of Russeau’s presence.
“He’s close,” growled Wolf.
“Will she be safe in there?” I asked, peering into the gloom.
“I ‘spect she will,” he said. “Stay sharp and he won’t get the chance to try.”
The leathery flap came again, closer, and I spun in that direction, bringing my rifle to my shoulder. I saw nothing for certain, however, just vague shapes just outside my vision.
“He’s playing with us,” I whispered.
“’s what he does,” Wolf replied, pressing his back against mine.
Something screeched past overhead, and my heart gave a frantic leap of terror as I tried to locate it. I fired a shot at a likely patch of darkness, but heard no cry of pain to reward my efforts.