by Hannah West
TWENTY-ONE
The two guys nearly jumped out of their skins.
“You again,” Quinn accused, staying put as the others shrieked and fled.
I pushed her, a gentle push by my intentions, but she fell off the platform to the layer of woodchips on the ground, her camera toppling out of her hand.
“Go!” I growled.
Her lips shaped a rude retort, but I didn’t hear it over the howl that tore through the night, drowning out the sound of another car alarm.
Quinn picked up her camera and scrambled away. The others waited for her to catch up before making a break for it.
I twisted around and found three massive, ragged silhouettes drawing level with the trees behind the park.
Another surge of panic commanded me to run away.
But that wasn’t an option.
I jumped off the jungle gym, covering as much ground with a simple leap than I ever had with an earnest long jump before I’d unleashed my magic. Sweat coated my palms as I grasped my revolvers, reminding myself of the targets I’d hit that morning, replaying the satisfying sound of each victory. But these thoughts soon fled from my mind, replaced with pure, primal terror.
Each of the three hideous creatures was so uniquely appalling that my eyes could only dart from one to the next to drink in each new horror.
The one on the right took a lurching stride forward. Its slumped shoulders were pure sinew, bare and red as raw meat. In place of a face was a deer skull with gaping black eye sockets and a jagged hole at the snout. Flesh clung to its exposed ribs, through which I could see a thin spine. Claws hung from the ends of its skeletal arms.
The one on the left’s body was also a patchwork of bones and ragged flesh, but with the furry hide of an animal. Its legs bent at the knee and its face was a snarling coyote carcass.
The middle wore a human skull topped by reaching antlers with pointed tines.
A low grunt issued from the middle one’s black vacuum of a throat, and the outside two started closing in on me, trailing rot. Their patient, uneven strides were more menacing than any swift advance.
My terrified pause was briefer than it might have been before the Oath had unlocked my magic. I shakily extracted both revolvers and cocked the right one, aiming between the eyes of the coyote-like beast.
The shot bit through the air and busted the side of the creature’s skull. The one on the right had gained on me, so I cocked the hammer, shot, and missed. With only eight more bullets to my name, I resolved to aim more carefully, but only hit its jagged shoulder blade this time. The creature reeled back with a squeal, whipping around to face me again.
As I shot through the remaining rounds in one revolver, they drew ever closer. My fingers trembled as I hastened to tuck away the empty gun and draw the other.
But before I could aim, the deer-skulled monster advanced and gripped me by the throat, its claws stinging my tender skin. It threw me in an arc that defied the laws of physics. Pain exploded through my body as I hit the ground.
Fighting for breath, I stretched toward my loaded gun, which I’d dropped. But when my fingers touched the etched wood of the handle, a clawed grip latched my hair and lifted. I grunted and clasped whatever bare bones and damp, fleshy tissue I could reach to ease the excruciating pull on my scalp.
The coyote-like creature suspended me at its eye level as though I was nothing but a rag doll. My bullet had dragged away the rotting flesh along its snout, exposing a jagged range of teeth. Its eye sockets were lightless, and from the black tunnel of its throat, hot, foul breath swept over me. It reminded me of rotten food, stale dirt, decay. Its mouth stretched wider.…
But the middle Woodwalker, the one with the human skull that had not yet moved, emitted a harsh guttural command. The coyote lowered me and unlatched its claws from my hair, then slunk away.
I looked up to find the menacing, vacant eye sockets of the human skull leering over me.
I scrambled back on my elbows, but with one assertive motion it pinned my chest down with its claws, piercing my flesh.
A whimper left my throat. My loaded gun lay even farther out of reach, and this monster could skewer me like a piece of meat if it had the slightest inclination.
It got a wormy grip on the back of my neck and lifted my face toward it.
The blackness within the cavities of the skull—the scooped-out eyes and jagged nose and bottomless cave of a mouth—held the depths of all evil.
The creature stretched its jaw wide, straining at the hinges. There’s so much hunger, Quinn said. Now I knew what she meant.
They hungered for my power, for the recompense they could use it to obtain. After they took it, they would kill me.
Weakness overcame me, and I began sliding into an abyss. My stomach protested the heat and smell of rot that clamped over me, holding me captive.
I heard a cry and recognized it as Lindsey’s. Then I felt claws pressing into my flesh—and the weight of a revolver against my right side, with the smaller weight of one last cartridge snug against the sacred metal.
Kate had instructed me to load only five to protect from an accidental misfire. But as I’d prepared for battle with a trembling spirit, I must have loaded all six without meaning to.
My fingers slowly glided across the embossed leather of the holster to the engraved wooden grip. I extracted the gun, cocked it, opened my eyes, and pointed the barrel at the creature’s marbled brown-and-white jaw.
A rain of bone shards hit my skin. The pressure of claws on my chest ripped away and a demonic squeal pierced my ears.
I sat up. Lindsey strode past me, hair loose and wild in the moonlight. She approached the staggering creature and cut her own forearm with her knife. The blade dripped with blood.
In one motion, she crisscrossed her daggers and sliced through the creature’s spine. She speared its heart on the end of her knife and the Woodwalker screamed, a noise that sounded like the whole population of hell objecting to their fates. Putrefied bits of bone and flesh fell to the grass. The shadow body they had encased folded in on itself and seeped away to the trees.
“Are you okay?” Lindsey asked.
“Yeah,” I grunted, and tried to stand to prove it. But as far as my legs were concerned, I’d just awakened from a coma.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, rushing to help me up. “Someone tried to chase me down and I had to beguile them, and it didn’t work the first time.”
I waved her away and straightened, feeling the blood that pasted my shirt to my chest. With a hiss of breath, I peeled away the material and surveyed my wounds. There were two cuts on my sternum, fainter ones on the slope of each breast, and a fifth down between my ribs. One wound for each jagged claw.
Lindsey checked out the damage for herself, ignoring an oozing cut above her eyebrow that deserved attention. “Let’s go,” she said. She slid her knives succinctly back into their sheaths and handed me my other revolver.
I turned to follow her, realizing that we weren’t alone. The paranormal chasers were still here, and Jason had arrived. The two boys appeared to be explaining something to him. Quinn stood apart from them, facing Lindsey and me, her blank expression revealed with the flash of lights on the roof of the parked cruiser. We’d meant to lure Jason away from the action, not straight to it.
Even though it was clearly already in effect, I heard Lindsey speak the beguilement under her breath for good measure. “Hey, Sheriff,” she then said with a wave, as though nothing were amiss.
Jason shined his flashlight on our faces. I flinched away from the beam, but Lindsey didn’t bother hiding anything.
“I should have known you two would be where the trouble is,” he said, with no hint of real suspicion.
“Trouble?” Lindsey asked innocently.
“A resident in the area called about an attempted car theft.”
“We didn’t do anything,” the heavyset guy insisted. “We heard the car alarm go off, but we weren’t anywhere near it.”
“My ears are still ringing,” said the bearded guy. “I didn’t know car alarms and coyotes could be so loud.”
Because what you really heard was gunfire and Woodwalkers, I thought.
Jason flashed the light in the guy’s eyes, then on the piece of equipment he had confiscated. “I believe you,” he said finally. “But the park closes at sunset. Where’s your vehicle?”
“We left it around the corner.”
“You mean you hid it around the corner?” Jason clarified.
“Yeah, it’s a little hard to detect anomalies in environmental data when someone crashes your investigation,” the lanky guy said in a tone that wouldn’t go over well with the sheriff.
Jason’s eyebrows snapped down. “Cool it, kid. You’re already off the hook.” With a derisive grunt, he handed them back their equipment. “Drive safe and stay out of trouble. Same goes for you two,” he said to us, casting a subtle glance at the woods. “What is it with everybody trespassing tonight? You know who I found out at the cabin? Levi Langford, of all people.”
My heart pattered. “What was he doing there?” I asked, but Lindsey flashed me a look.
“Certainly not putting taxpayer dollars to good use,” Jason said. “Y’all go home, and if you so much as think about sneaking out to the cabin, I’ll throw you in the slammer.”
Lindsey laughed. “We’re leaving.”
The two guys zipped their equipment into carrying cases and turned to look at Quinn, who was still staring at the trees.
“Quinn,” snapped the bearded guy. “Are you coming?”
Her pixie-sized shadow remained motionless.
Jason got into his car. The harsh blue-and-red lights abruptly shut off. “I need to check out the situation up the street. Be gone by the time I drive back.”
He left us in the dark. Lindsey asked the guys what their names were, shining her phone lights on them to check for double shadows. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, I just wanted to go somewhere that felt safe.
Quinn remained motionless, her black dress and short dark hair flittering in the warm breeze. I approached, startling her. She turned her doe-eyed gaze on me.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I sense a lot that other people don’t,” she said, surprising me. “I saw you fighting the shadows. It was blurry, like a weird dream. But I know you protected us.”
Before I could muster a reply, she hurried to catch up to the others venturing down the road.
TWENTY-TWO
“Here, drink.” Heather set a dainty glass on the grainy wood counter next to the shelves of supplies in the Warden’s basement, exposing a rose tattoo on her forearm and a scar that intersected it.
“What is this?” I asked as the aroma of the drink singed its way up my nostrils.
“I call it a Bootstrap, but I made it virgin for you. It’s got herbs for quick healing and a comfort tea so you can—”
“Pull myself up by the bootstraps?” I asked.
She grinned. “Cheers.”
From the first sip, its magic began working. I glanced to my left. Abuela Sofia was squinting at Lindsey’s cut and tugging a needle through the torn skin. Neither so much as cringed.
“I feel so bad that I left you alone,” Lindsey said. “I didn’t expect things to go down like that.”
“It turned out okay,” I reminded her.
“Cálmate,” Sofia demanded of Lindsey.
“Abuela, ¿ya terminaste?” Lindsey’s physical reactions may not have betrayed how much pain she was in, but her tone did. Sofia snipped the suture and barely had time to bandage it before Lindsey waved her away.
“What do you think Levi was doing at the cabin?” I asked her.
“Probably trying to pressure Miss Maggie into giving him answers by causing trouble. If you ask me, she should just tell him the truth. He already knows so much. What could it hurt? But Miss Maggie, Miss Cynthia, and Abuela are stuck in their ways.”
I looked around to see who was listening, even though Lindsey didn’t seem to care. Only Heather and Sofia were in earshot. Sofia shook her head in disapproval, but Heather nodded emphatically while muddling herbs and scarlet flower petals with a mortar and pestle.
“What about that Quinn girl?” I asked. “Will the elders mind that she sensed something out there?”
Lindsey shrugged. “She’s not the first intuitive person to cross our paths.”
“My stepmom is a psychic,” Heather said, pouring the muddled herbs into a jar. “She refuses to come here more than once a year. She calls San Solano a thin place, where the veil between the natural and the supernatural is more transparent. According to her, there are other thin places, but few as thin as San Solano.”
Thin place. As the phrase hung in the air, I imagined San Solano on a paper-thin layer of ice and us, the Wardens, trading a life in the sunshine to bolster it from underneath.
I caught sight of my reflection in a glass jar of dried dusty miller. Strands of blond ponytail had gone rogue and streamed across my face. A few fresh bruises spattered the sides of my neck. The revolvers lay head to head on the table in front of me, the engraved grips shining in the low light. My stormy eyes—inherited from Grandma Kerry—held a gleam of determination.
I felt powerful. Tonight had awoken something in me. All the miles I’d run, all the times I’d shaken off the pain and kept going…Somehow, I’d always known that was just practice for something bigger and more important. I had always had a higher purpose: to fight in this war of shadow and soul.
The door at the top of the stairs opened. “He’s giving us no choice, Grandma,” Kate was saying as she tromped down to the basement. Camila and Miss Maggie followed her.
“We’ll force a blood oath,” Maggie said in a staunch tone. “Make him swear that he won’t cause trouble again, and that he’ll stay away from us if he really wants to keep Nat and Emmy safe.”
My heart gave a rebellious kick. After last night in the sanctuary, I wanted Levi to come to me, not the other way around. And if our history was any indication, he wouldn’t. But I still felt a thrill at hearing us grouped together, discussed like we meant something to each other. It was so new.
“You know that would only frustrate him more,” Kate said. “And a blood oath unwillingly sworn is less binding.”
When Camila spotted Lindsey, she clicked her tongue and hurried over to examine her wound. “¡Tu cara, mija! Te lo dije, ¡protege tu cara!”
“I know, I know,” Lindsey said, pushing her away. “My face is too pretty for scars. I’ve heard it a million times.”
“Nat, I’m so sorry,” Kate said, forgetting about her argument with her grandmother and squeezing me tight. “You weren’t supposed to have to fight on your first night.”
“She kicked ass,” Lindsey said. “Blew out one of their skulls.”
“You had to finish it off,” I said, embarrassed.
“Well, we saved lives tonight,” she said. “The Woodwalkers wouldn’t turn their noses up at tourists. The Shadowing would keep them local.” She looked from Kate to her mom. “What happened at the cabin? The sheriff said Levi showed up.”
Maggie shook her head. “That boy. He was hiding, trying to catch us in action. It’s a wonder he hasn’t been Shadowed up, down, and sideways.”
“Did he see you?” I asked.
“No, the beguilement held,” Kate answered. “But the more someone knows, the less it works. And we can’t worry about him getting in the way right now. Which is why I think we should just tell him rather than stiff-arming him until he loses his mind.”
“We can’t blab the truth to anyone who suspects something,” Maggie said, raising a thin white eyebrow at her granddaughter. “We took an oath to guard our secrets. If even one person knows, we could get blamed for what happens. Sofia, Cynthia, and I would get blamed for what has happened.”
“You and Kerry were the ones who healed Emmy in front of him,” Kate said, in a tiptoeing tone that suggested she was
n’t accustomed to arguing with her grandmother.
“And Nora was the one who ran her mouth off when Mike Langford was a little boy.”
“Yes, and what would have happened if she hadn’t?” Kate crossed her arms. “Mike wouldn’t have known where to bring Emmy after the Woodwalkers preyed on her. Emmy would have died just like Nora.”
Maggie’s cold expression was carved of stone. She wouldn’t give an inch, even for her own granddaughter.
“Levi’s dad is gone,” Kate said. She stood to her full height, which was impressive, and there was frosty fire in her eyes. “His sister and the girl he likes are in danger from something he can’t see or understand.” She swept her hand toward me. “Our secrecy was already compromised, necessarily so, when you saved Emmy’s life. Don’t you think he deserves some answers?”
Sofia spoke up. “When we say the Oath, each of us agrees to protect our secrets at any cost. It is not built on coercion, but on a sense of honor. Nora broke our codes. We will not break them a second time just to fix her mistake.”
“Sorry, darling,” Maggie said to Kate. “I wish I could help him, too. But two wrongs don’t make a right.” She crossed the room to put away her pistol, ending the conversation.
Kate leaned on the counter next to me and propped her chin on her fists. “I’m worried about Levi,” she said. “He’s been through so much. Could you be persuaded to go check on him for me, Nat? If you need to rest, I understand, but—”
“No, I’ll go,” I said. Lindsey and Heather smirked at each other.
“If you want, Heather can fix you up one of her elixirs,” Lindsey said. Kate’s cheeks turned beetroot red.
Going along with it, Heather said, “They take a few days of steeping, but I have one already made if you want.”
“I’m okay,” I said, laughing. “Let’s see if he’ll even talk to me before we get way ahead of ourselves here.”
SHADY SANCTUARY
Levi Langford