“I’m just wondering how long it’ll be before you go off with Leonard to ‘save’ the rest of us. It’d be easier. Sure, he’s a genocidal maniac who’d probably skin me as soon as look at me, but at least he’s human. Or there’s James. You could stay here with him and play small-town witch, and not have to deal with any of this bullshit.”
I started to reply. Then I stopped, forcing myself to count to ten.
There were a lot of ways this conversation could go. I could see several of them unfolding, like a terrible Choose Your Own Adventure. There was the version where I let my frustration boil over and started yelling, and we had the kind of fight that we maybe didn’t recover from. There was the version where I listened to what he was saying without thinking about why he was saying it, and got hurt, and walked away, turning some of his fears true.
Both of them were versions that would absolutely have won out, once. I was the baby of my family, the one who’d never had any expectations set upon her shoulders, the one who’d been allowed to keep the family babysitter long past the point where it was necessary. I’d been a little mean and a little judgmental and, weirdly, a little sheltered, which is something that can be difficult to accomplish when my parents insisted on dragging me into the woods to meet every damn thing that came along. It had been easy to focus inward since the world was big and didn’t seem to want me.
Sam had grown up in a community that was larger and smaller than mine at the same time, surrounded by people who loved and accepted him, but who never let him forget he wasn’t human, that he could never leave. College had never been on the table for him: he couldn’t sleep and stay in human form. Without a degree, most jobs wouldn’t even look at him twice. He’d been born into the carnival. He’d expected to stay there forever, no exit, no escape.
And then he’d met me, and I’d been the first girl who wasn’t from his community who didn’t seem to care that he wasn’t human, or that he was a rude asshole when he was anxious, which was most of the time when there were strangers around. I’d also been the first girl to kiss him without demanding he turn human first, like the side of him that came more naturally was somehow inappropriate or obscene.
Cryptids like Fern and Cylia move through the world looking like members of the currently dominant species, and if they decided to hook up with a human, no one would bat an eye. But Sam . . . he would always be a little fuzzy, and I suspected, would always be a little insecure about it. He’d been raised by humans, indoctrinated by human stories and human media, and if we weren’t exactly a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, it was only because we could both be pretty beastly when we wanted to.
“Hey.” I touched his shoulder. He didn’t turn. “Hey.”
“What?” Sam finally looked at me, eyes wary. “Are you going to argue with me? Because I don’t think—”
I leaned over and kissed him.
Sam stiffened, clearly not sure what he was supposed to do. He’d been expecting a fight, not . . . this. In the end, hormones won out. His hands slid around my waist, pulling me closer, as his tail snaked up to tangle in my hair. I scooted over accommodatingly, letting him pull me as close as he wanted, offering no resistance.
Kissing Sam is basically the same as kissing a human. There are some subtle differences in his bone structure, and his sideburns are fur, not hair, making them dense and soft against my fingers, but apart from that, he has lips, he has a nose, he has a face that’s close enough to human that when I close my eyes, I can easily pretend. So I didn’t close my eyes. I kept them open, watching as I kissed him. Watching the tension in his brow, and the way the skin around his own eyes crinkled, still tight.
I pulled back, stroking his temple with one hand. “Hey,” I said. “No. Okay? Don’t go there. There’s nothing good, and you don’t need to waste your time.”
“Really?” He opened his eyes, looking at me solemnly. “Because it sure feels like I need to book a ticket.”
“Really,” I said, still stroking his temple. “I’m not saying we’re going to be together forever, okay? You need to meet my family. You need to figure out what you signed up for when you took me on that Ferris wheel. But I’m not running away with the first human guy who glances in my direction. After you, human guys would seem boring. But maybe more importantly . . . you know, we talked about your dating history—”
“Such as it is,” he muttered.
“—but we never really talked about mine. You know I wasn’t a virgin when we got together. That wasn’t because I’d been in capital-L love before. It was because I fucking hate unicorns and didn’t want to be somebody’s sacrifice of the week. Even though ‘virgin sacrifice’ means ‘sacrifice whose blood has not been used in a ritual before,’ and not ‘never gotten laid,’ linguistic drift happens and people get confused and I’m babbling again.” I took my hand away from his face. “I didn’t date before you came along and fucked up my life of voluntary celibacy, okay? I was happy not dating. Relationships are a lot of work. They’re complicated and confusing, and they never seemed worth it before you. You made this worth the work. Do you get what a big thing that is for me? I love you. Capital-L love, stupid squishy let’s write a musical about it love. I’ve never been able to say that before. I don’t fall fast, and I don’t fall easy, and I’m not going to run after the first human guy who bats his eyes at me. Okay?”
“I’m trying to believe that,” said Sam reluctantly. “I know . . . I know I’m being sort of stupid, and I know you’re not going to dump me for some guy just because he has the ability to wax his chest and have it stick. But this is all new to me, too.”
“I know,” I said, and kissed him again. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m in this for the long haul. You and me against the world, right?”
“The world won’t know what hit it,” said Sam, before kissing me in earnest. I leaned against him, enjoying a moment where nothing was wrong, and nothing needed me to fix it, and I was just a girl with her guy, sitting on the dock while the sun shone.
“That is disgusting,” said a familiar, British-accented voice. “Genuinely vile. Bestiality, Annie? Really? I knew you were dallying with filth, but this . . .”
I shoved away from Sam, hands going for the knives in my shirt. His tail was in the way, keeping me from getting to my weapons.
“Sam! Let go!” I shouted.
Leonard Cunningham was on the bank not fifteen feet away, a crossbow in his hands and a sneer on his face. He looked as revolted as he sounded.
Sam unwrapped his tail from around my wrist as Leonard raised the crossbow and prepared to fire. There wasn’t time to throw a knife, and even if there had been, I knew the consequences of me killing Leonard—heir apparent to the entire damn Covenant—would be much more extreme than the consequences of him killing either one of us. I could kick off a whole damn war. So I took a guess as to which of us he was about to shoot, and I shoved Sam off the dock as hard as I could.
The last thing I saw before Sam hit the water was his face, eyes wide, bafflement giving way to horrified understanding.
A sharp snapping sound and an accompanying pain pulled my attention back to Leo. I looked down. The crossbow bolt was sticking out of my left shoulder, just above the collarbone.
“Thought you weren’t going to start attacking me when you still thought you could recruit me,” I said, words made thin by shock.
“I was aiming for the monster,” he spat.
“Oh. Cool. Because so am I.” I smiled wanly and allowed myself to topple to the side, following Sam into the icy waters of the lake.
Twelve
“Nothing—nothing—is more important than making it home alive.”
–Evelyn Baker
In a lake, injured, sinking, because that’s a great way to spend an afternoon
THE WATER WAS COLD.
That doesn’t quite cover it. The water was fucking cold, the kind of c
old that makes a girl think a supernova might be a good time. If there had been any question whatsoever of whether the crossroads had my magic, the plunge would have answered it once and for all, because there was no way I could have stopped myself from involuntarily setting the lake boiling.
The crossbow bolt was still in my shoulder. A numb ache spread out from the wound, one that had nothing to do with cold, and everything to do with whatever tranquilizing agent Leo had spread along the shaft. I wasn’t willing to consider the thought that it might have been poison. If it was poison, I was going to drown. Simple as that.
Well, no. Not simple as that. If I died here, there wouldn’t be anyone to stand between my friends and the Covenant, or to keep James from letting his hunger for revenge—however justified—lead him into a dead-end attack on a force so much bigger and older than he was that he’d wind up wishing for something as easy as a crossroads bargain. I fumbled for the bolt, hoping I could either pull it out or shove it through.
The water was dark and murky, and the amount of blood I was already losing, even with the bolt to slow it down, didn’t help. There was no telling how much bacteria and pollution was getting into the wound. If not for the spreading sleepiness, I would have left it where it was, one more thing to be dealt with later. Unfortunately, my air was running out, and if I wanted to be able to swim to safety, I needed both full range of motion in my arm, and not to pass out from some novel Covenant toxin.
I was still struggling with the bolt when something hit me from the side, shoving me away from the dock, out toward the middle of the lake. I didn’t pause to think or assess the situation. I just reacted, producing a knife from inside my shirt and stabbing wildly into the dark.
For a moment, the thing that was pushing me along fell back, grip faltering. Then it surged back, pushing me onward. I tried to stab again, to no avail. The cold and the numbness and the lack of air were getting to me, and the knife slipped from my fingers, to be lost forever among whatever forgotten things covered the lakebed.
I thrashed without breaking free. Another hot gush of blood escaped my shoulder. This was it, then; after everything, this was the way I died. Powerless and pinned and bleeding out from a Covenant crossbow in the middle of a lake in Maine. Would my friends get away? Cylia would. She might not be able to save the others, but her luck was good enough, and she was good enough at using it, that I had faith she would escape. She might even get Fern to safety.
Cylia knew where to find Elsie. Once she had Elsie, she could find the rest of my family. She could tell them what had happened. She could tell them not to go to war over me. She was no Aeslin mouse—God, I missed my mice—but she could still be my black box, and tell them everything that had happened.
I hoped she’d tell them I had finally managed to fall in love and mean it.
The lake was so cold. The water was so dark. I closed my eyes, breathing out, and let the water have me.
* * *
What came next came in flashes, separate and distinct, like pieces of a dissolving dream
Sam, staggering out of the lake in human form, his clothes waterlogged and clinging to us both, me cradled in his arms like something out of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. I didn’t wake up, exactly, but I came close enough to consciousness to glimpse the light slanting through the branches overhead, to feel my frozen clothes sticking to my skin.
Everything hurt. I didn’t like it. I slipped away again.
Flash: The ground beneath me, crackling with leaves, sharp with stones, cold, but not as cold as the rest of me. Sam was hitting me on the back, solid smacks between my shoulders, like he was trying to play some kind of drum. I coughed and water flowed over my lips, wet and warm and terrible. It had been part of me and now it wasn’t anymore. I felt, paradoxically, like I had lost something. I sank back down to think about it, even though there was no thinking on the other side of wakefulness.
Flash: Sam, no longer human, his hands larger and his skin warmer as he held me against him, his breath coming in short, panicked gasps. His voice was a distant echo, distorted and far away. “Annie? Hey, Annie? Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes, or say something, or do anything if you can hear me?”
I could not. I returned to the dark, where the lake was waiting, ready and eager to pull me under. The water was no longer cold, or even really water; it was the light and floating nothingness that had met me at the crossroads when I went to make my bargain. It was a space outside of space, where nothing could hurt me ever again. If I opened my eyes, I was sure I could find Mary, and that she’d be happy to show me where I needed to go. She was waiting for me. I just had to go to her.
But I couldn’t see her, and when I did open my eyes, just a little, it was on another flash of the real world: Sam, running through the wood, every step jarring the crossbow bolt in my shoulder, sending waves of pain and nausea crashing through my entire body. It was too much. I closed my eyes again, and the next time I opened them, I was on the couch in the living room, Cylia bending over me, James and Sam hovering, equally useless, nearby.
“I need to get this out so I can clean the wound, and I don’t want her bleeding to death,” said Cylia. “James, get over here.”
I wasn’t fully present, but I was close enough to realize what was about to happen, and struggle to dive back into the dark. No such luck: Cylia said something rendered incomprehensible by my own dizziness and the increasing pounding in my ears.
I still have enough of a heartbeat for it to pound, I thought, feeling strangely proud of myself. I stopped fighting, exhausted from this revelation. Cold spread through my shoulder, even deeper and more intense than the cold of the lake. It was like someone had wrapped just that corner of my body in a sheet of ice.
“Hey. Be careful. She needs that arm.”
“I am being careful.”
“She’s a cryptozoologist, not a side of beef.”
I recognized Sam’s voice. That was nice. It was nice that he was here. It was nice that he’d been able to make it out of the lake. I didn’t know how he’d done that, not with the thing that had been in the water, that had taken me—unless he was the thing. Maybe that wasn’t a big revelation, but at the moment, groggy from blood loss and cold and shock, it seemed like a twist worthy of the original Twilight Zone. Up was down, left was right, and Sam was the monster in the lake.
Any further revelations would have to wait. The cold stopped spreading, and before it could recede, it was replaced by a pain so intense that I snapped all the way to wakefulness, already screaming.
“Hi,” said Cylia amiably, and held up the crossbow bolt she had just removed from my shoulder. “Welcome back and don’t move, I still need to get you patched up. James slowed down the blood in your shoulder enough that you’re only leaking instead of gushing, but that’s still not great.”
“Annie?” Sam sounded worried. For the first time, I realized the pillow beneath my head was too warm and too firm to be anything but his leg. “Are you okay?”
“Never ask someone who’s just been shot if they’re okay.” I closed my eyes, hissing through my teeth as Cylia began methodically cleaning my wound. “But I’m alive.”
“Thank fuck.” He smoothed back my hair with one large hand. His fingers were shaking, the motion traveling across my skin like a subsonic vibration. “I thought . . . fuck. You know what I thought.”
“Sorry. You don’t get rid of me that easily.”
There was a knock at the door. I opened my eyes, staring up at the ceiling.
“I don’t suppose Fern took the car and went to the store,” I asked carefully.
“No,” said Cylia. “She’s upstairs, where she can keep a watch on the whole yard and shout if somebody comes walking across the yard with a crossbow.”
“Swell.”
Whoever was outside knocked again.
Would Leo be knocking? Assuming he knew w
here the house was—and realistically, he had to know where the house was; there simply couldn’t be that many visiting strangers in a town this size—would he come in through the front door, knowing we’d all be pissed off and waiting for him, or would he go around the back and approach us like the low-down dirty snake he was? If not him, then who?
Fern hadn’t yelled. If it were Leonard, wouldn’t she have yelled to warn us that he was coming? She didn’t know what he looked like, but the crossbow was probably a big giveaway on the “bad intentions” scale.
“James, are your hands bloody?” I struggled to sit up. Sam pushed me gently down.
“No,” he said. “Not yet. Please stay put so I don’t have to make you.”
“Kinky,” said Cylia, with forced cheer, and kept patching my shoulder.
“There’s no blood on me,” said James. “It froze and fell off. Why?”
I closed my eyes again. There was nothing on the ceiling for me to see. “Go answer the door. It’s either Leo, who shouldn’t shoot you when he doesn’t know you, or it’s your father, and you can tell him you’re here to visit your new tourist honeybunch. Buy us time. That’s what we need right now.”
“Couldn’t we just, I don’t know, not answer the door?” asked Sam. “Is that an option?”
“Not with Leo. Not with James’ father. A controlled confrontation is better than a break-in.” James’ father probably had a key. Dammit.
I needed time. Time and stitches and about a gallon and a half of antiseptic poured into the open wound where my flesh had been violated, rinsing away the risk of infection, leaving the hole behind. There was going to be a scar. Would it be enough to limit my range of motion, to leave me less than I had been before? I didn’t know. At the moment, I didn’t much care, because regardless of whether or not there was permanent damage, I was going to skin Leonard alive as soon as I had the chance.
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