The story of broken love, desperate reunion, and one man’s terrible retribution.
Excerpt
It was dark when Hawk woke, damp and shivering, by the side of the river. Instantly alert, he was aware he’d not awakened naturally, but had been startled awake. He strained at the twilight with all his senses yet saw no movement, heard no sound but that of the river, smelled nothing but the rich, sweet scent of clean mud and the faint iron whiff of his own blood.
The night was unnaturally quiet.
Hawk frowned, his pulse racing. He’d been out long enough that the land around him should have reverted to its natural state of activity. The air should have been charged with the sound of nightlife. Instead there was only silence, hushed and eerie.
His knife. He could tell by the light weight of the empty sheath at his side that it was missing. Glancing down, he caught sight of a faint glimmer of light from the blade. It lay where it had fallen when he’d dropped it, lodged in a crevice between roots. Taking it up in his hand, he eased into an upright position. His hair, still damp, hung around him in ropes as he bent to the arduous task of cutting away, as silently as he could, the other leg of his trousers. He couldn’t walk with a bullet grating against the bone in his leg and he couldn’t swim carrying the weight of drenched buckskin.
As the knife sliced through the last inch of water-logged leather he heard the crack of a dead limb. His head snapped around. He held his breath, listening.
The sound had come from upstream. In its wake, silence fell deeper than ever. Something walked the land tonight, something the forest did not welcome. Something that had silenced the songs of the night and caused him to awaken. Skinwalker. Now, instinctively, he hid from it the way the other creatures had, and like them, waited for it to pass.
Over time, the race of the river had hollowed out a small pocket beneath the roots of the oak tree. Hawk dragged himself deeper into the black shadows until he was hidden from view, except for his injured leg, which stuck out stiffly before him.
A rustle of leaves. A clatter of limbs. A sharp chirp and a flutter of wings as a bird took to the night sky. Hawk’s grip tightened on the hilt of the knife. He sensed the ominous thud of footfalls against the earth, one after the other, imagined it coming for him, huge and forbidding, a monster, its shaggy head swinging ponderously back and forth, its quivering nose snuffling the air, following the scent of his blood through the night. Hawk could smell it too, rank and diseased, ripe with the stink of death and corruption.
A shower of debris rained down from the edge of the bank overhead. Hawk could sense it standing above him, could hear its harsh, wheezing breath almost directly overhead.
A beam of light flicked out over the bank. It skipped across the glittering surface of the river and found the rocky shoreline beneath the riverbank. The light bobbled across his injured leg, then came back to it.
There was a sound of low laughter and the skidding of rubber-soled running shoes on rock as someone dropped over the bank onto the shore.
“Well, well. Look what washed up out of the river…”
Terry Harland.
And yet, and yet, it wasn’t Terry Harland that had frightened the night into quiescence. Nor was it Terry Harland’s rotten stench that Hawk could smell.
“Pee-yew!” Harland exclaimed as he shone the flashlight into Hawk’s tiny cave. “What the hell have you been rolling in, boy?”
Hawk held up a hand to block the light and glared at him from eyes that were shadowed and angry and filled with the helpless, bitterly triumphant thought that Terry Harland deserved exactly what he was about to get. His attention split, half of it with Harland, the other half on the opposite bank of the river, for there was true evil loose in the night, and it was staring at them both from edge of the woods on the other side.
Struck by the intensity of Hawk’s attention on the opposite shore, Harland turned to see what he was staring at. Shocked, he staggered back a step.
“What the hell is that?” he whispered. The flashlight dropped from his fingers. It clattered against the rocky shore and its beam of light died, leaving them in darkness.
Yet they had no trouble seeing the beast, no more so than it had seeing them. Of that, Hawk was certain. Ephemeral, surrounded by the glow of a blood red aura, it seemed to burn from within with a hellish magic. It wavered in and out of reality, one moment seeming solid, the next seeming no more substantial than the ghosts of river mist that presaged the fall of night.
Harland began to pant with terror, unable to pull his eyes from the strange and awful apparition on the opposite shore. Human in form and yet not human, it had two faces melded into one: the uppermost, the face of a rabid wolf; beneath it, the face of human insanity. Both were draped with rotting lengths of wolf skin that hung like hair. The beast’s hands were fisted, its yellow wolf-eyes riveted on them. It crouched suddenly, as if it would drop to all fours.
The breath exploded from Harland in harsh, ragged gasps. He dropped to the wet soil of the shore, scrabbling on his hands and knees in search of the flashlight, whimpering “what the fuck? what the fuck?” mindlessly, frantically, over and over again, a mantra to hold the supernatural at bay.
The creature moved.
One second it was standing on the opposite shore, staring at them with its baleful yellow gaze. The next it had leaped off the bank and was running across the surface of the river toward them, its fisted arms pumping, a feverish grin stretching the human face into a grotesque parody of humor. Its feet raised small, steaming splashes of water as it ran.
Harland squealed, a high-pitched, womanish shriek of terror. Forgetting the search for the flashlight, he tried to scramble back up onto the bank he’d dropped down from so easily just moments before.
The beast reached their side of the river and splashed out of it in front of Hawk. It bent over him, leering, bathing him in its moist, rancid breath. Hawk almost shouted with fear as one clawed fist opened and dropped a small, feathered body into his lap. Gasping with terror, he stared down at it in dismay.
It was a chickadee.
A dead chickadee.
His chest heaving, Hawk raised his eyes to the beast’s as it turned its leering grin on Terry Harland.
Copyright 2008 Helen Lloyd Montgomery. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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