Finally, out of sheer exasperation, I did a little dance, just to see if it would have any reaction at all.
It stood up on its rear legs and began to howl, revealing an alarming number of teeth, then dropped to all fours and lunged at me, over and over again, drawing up short each time, like a dog on a leash.
I went perfectly still.
It was almost as if it wanted to attack me, but for some reason it couldn’t.
It stilled, too, growling, watching me carefully with narrowed eyes.
After a moment, it turned and glided away, muscle and madness.
Sighing, I followed it. I had to get my stones.
It stopped, turned around, and snarled at me. It clearly didn’t like me following it. Too bad. When it began moving again, I waited where I was for a few seconds, then followed at a more discreet distance. I hoped it had a lair that it would take the stones to, and when it left again to hunt, maybe I could steal them back.
I followed it for hours, through meadows and finally into a forest near a wide, rapidly flowing river, where I lost it among the trees.
Daylight ended with disconcerting abruptness on this world.
The sun had been inching across the sky most of the day, but at roughly five o’clock—or so I assumed by its angle to the planet—the blazing ball plummeted faster than the one in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. If I hadn’t been squinting up through the trees at that precise moment, trying to decide how much time I had left to find a place to hole up for the night, I’d neither have seen nor believed it.
In the blink of an eye, day was over and it was full, pitch night. The temperature dropped ten sudden degrees, making me grateful I still had my coat.
I hate the dark. Always have, always will.
I fished out my MacHalo, dropped it in my haste, picked it up again, clapped it on my head, and began squeezing on the lights. Since the brackets had snapped off, I moved some of the lights around, wishing I’d made Barrons’ version of my creation, without brackets. I’d never admit it to him, but his was more efficient, lighter, and brighter. But, in my defense, it was far easier to improve upon an invention than to actually sit down and invent it. I’d made something from nothing. He’d merely tweaked my “something.”
I don’t know if I heard it or just sensed its presence, but suddenly I knew something was behind me, no more than a dozen feet to my right.
I whipped around and caught it in the harsh white glare of lights on the front of my helmet.
Squinting, it shielded its eyes with an arm.
For a moment, I wasn’t sure it was “my” monster. It had darkened like a chameleon from slate gray to coal black, and its eyes were now crimson. I might have mistaken it for something else, a distant cousin to the monster I’d been tracking, except for the pouch of stones tied to its black horns.
It snarled at the lights. Its fangs glistened ebony, long.
I shivered. It looked even more deadly than it had before.
I squeezed off the front light, and it lowered its arm.
What now? Why had it come back? It hadn’t seemed to want me to follow it, yet when I’d lost it, it circled back for me. Nothing about it made sense. Might it eventually weary of the pouch banging into the back of its head with every step it took and toss it away? Why did it still have my sweater? How was I going to survive the night? Would it kill me in my sleep? Assuming I ever managed to relax enough to sleep!
If it didn’t kill me, would something else? What was nocturnal here? What did I have to fear? Where would I dare try to sleep? Up a tree?
I was starved. I was exhausted and completely out of ideas.
The monster growled and loped from the shadows, passing within a few feet of me, and headed toward the river.
Chilled by such a near brush, I froze and watched my stones go bouncing by.
In another day or two, would I be so despairing and tired and fed up that I might just try to grab the thing’s head and wrestle them off it? If enough days passed without it trying to kill me, I could see myself getting desperate enough to risk it.
The monster paused on a mossy bank near the river and looked back at me. It looked at the bank and back at me. It repeated it, over and over.
It might not understand me, but I understood it. It wanted me on that bank for some reason.
I mulled my options. It took all of one second. If I didn’t go, what would it do to me? Was there anyplace else I could think of to go? I walked downstream to the bank. Once I was there, it lunged at me and herded me with snapping jaws into the center of the bank.
Then, as I watched in shock and astonishment, it urinated a circle all the way around me.
When it was finished, it rippled sleekly into the night and disappeared.
I stood in the center of the circle of urine still steaming on the ground, and comprehension slowly dawned.
It had marked the earth around me with its scent to repel lesser threats, and I was willing to bet most threats on this world were lesser.
Numb from the day’s events, exhausted from fear and physical exertion, I sat down, pulled out the remainder of my protein bar, made a pillow of my coat, then stretched out on the bank, set my MacHalo beside me, and left it blazing.
I chewed slowly, making the most of my meager meal, listening to the soft roar of the river’s rapids.
It looked like I was holed up for the night.
I had few expectations that sleep would come. I’d lost everything. I was stranded in the Silvers. My stones were gone. There was a deadly monster collecting my things and pissing circles around me, and I had no idea what to do next. But apparently my body was done for the day, because I passed out with no awareness of having finished my meal.
I woke in the dark heart of the night, pulse pounding, unable to pinpoint what had awakened me. I stared up through the black treetops at two brilliant moons, full in a blue-black sky, and sorted through dream fragments.
I’d been walking the corridors of a mansion that housed infinite rooms. Unlike my cold-place dreams, I’d been warm there. I’d loved the mansion, with its endless terraces overlooking gardens filled with gentle creatures.
I felt it drawing me. Was it somewhere in this realm? Was it the White Mansion the Unseelie King had built for his concubine?
Far in the distance, I heard the howling of wolves as they saluted the moons.
I rolled over, pulled my coat over my head, and tried to go back to sleep. I was going to need all my energy to deal with tomorrow and survive in this place.
Something much closer howled an answer back to those distant wolves.
I shot straight up on my bed of moss, grabbed my dirk, and lunged to my feet.
It was a frightful sound. A sound I’d heard before, back in my own world—beneath the garage of Barrons Books and Baubles!
It was the tortured baying of a thing damned, a thing beyond redemption, a thing so lost to the far side of despair that I longed to puncture my own eardrums so I could never hear such a sound again.
The wolves howled.
The beast bayed back. Not so close this time. It was moving away.
The wolves howled. The beast bayed back. Farther still.
Was there something worse than my monster out there? Something like the thing beneath Barrons’ garage?
I frowned. That would just be entirely too coincidental.
Was it possible “my” monster was the thing from beneath Barrons’ garage? “Oh, God,” I whispered. Had IYD actually worked?
For time uncounted, I listened to the mournful concert, eyes wide, blood chilled. Such desolation, isolation, loss in the thing’s cry. Whatever it was, I grieved for it. No living thing should have to exist in such agony.
The next time the wolves howled, the beast didn’t bay back.
A short time later I heard terrifying yipping and the sounds of wolves being slaughtered, one after the next.
Shivering, I lay back down, curled into a tight ball, and covered my ears.
I had no idea what they were. I could see only powerful shadows moving, stalking, pacing hungrily in the darkness beyond the light from my MacHalo.
They didn’t like the scent of the urine, but they could smell me over it, and I obviously smelled like food to them. As I watched, one of the dark shapes pawed a spray of leaves and dirt over the urine.
The others began to do the same.
The black monster with crimson eyes exploded from the forest.
I couldn’t make out the details of the fight. My MacHalo was throwing off too much glare. All I saw was a whirl of fangs and talons. I heard snarls of rage, answered by frightened snarls and hisses and screams of pain. I heard some of them go splashing into the river. The thing moved impossibly fast, ripping and slicing through the darkness with deadly accuracy. Chunks of fur and flesh flew.
Some of them tried to run. The monster didn’t let them. I could feel its rage. It rejoiced in the kill. It reveled in it, soaked itself in blood, crushed bones beneath its taloned feet.
Eventually I closed my eyes and quit trying to see.
When at last it was silent, I opened my eyes.
Feral crimson eyes watched me from beyond a pile of savaged bodies.
When it began to urinate again, I rolled over and hid my head under my coat.
I got up as soon as it was light, gathered my stuff, and picked my way past the remains of mutilated bodies to wash up in the river. Everything, including me, was splattered with blood.
I waded into the shallows, cupped my hands, and drank deeply before washing. I needed water, it was running rapid and crystal-clear, I couldn’t build a fire to boil it, and I had to believe that, after all I’d lived through, I was surely slated for a more meaningful death than by waterborne parasite.
After I washed up, I moved into the forest. Finding food was at the top of my to-do list today. Although there was plenty of raw meat lying around, I’d rather not.
I passed corpse after corpse. A lot were small, delicate creatures that couldn’t possibly have presented a threat to me. They hadn’t been eaten. They’d been killed for the kill.
After about twenty minutes, I realized I was being followed.
I turned. The monster was back, and once again it was slate gray with yellow eyes. My pouch was still tied to its horns. Tatters of my sweater were knotted around its leg.
“You’re IYD, aren’t you? It did work. You’re what Barrons kept beneath his garage, and he sent you to protect me. But you’re not the brightest bulb in the box. All you know how to do is kill. Everything but me, right? You keep me alive.”
The monster, of course, said nothing.
I was nearly certain of it. After the second mass slaughter, I’d lain awake, waiting for the sun to rise high enough in the sky to go foraging, pondering possibilities. It was the only one that explained why the monster wasn’t killing me. When it had first tried to attack me yesterday, it must have smelled Barrons on me. And it was the scent of him that was keeping it at bay. I made a mental note to not wash very well, no matter how dirty I got.
“So, what’s the plan? Do you keep me alive until he finds me?”
Was this killing machine what would have shown up on Halloween if I’d dialed IYD then? I couldn’t see it being any use against the LM and the Fae Princes, but if I’d summoned it during the riots, or even shortly after instead of holing up in the church, it certainly could have cleared my path and led me somewhere safe, where the LM might never have found me.
I examined it. It stared back through matted, bloodied hair. Rage blazed in its gaze, and something wilder, more frightening. It took me a moment to realize it was madness. The thing was one link in a chain away from total insanity.
It had to be IYD. There was no other explanation for it. How had Barrons captured the thing? How did he make it obey him? How had he kept it from killing him? By mystical means? As usual where Barrons was concerned, I had nothing but questions and no answers. When I was finally back in my own world, he wasn’t getting out of answering some. I knew what he kept beneath his garage now, and I wanted to know more.
As I studied its savage face, the eyes deep with psychotic rage, its powerful body built for killing, I realized I was no longer afraid of it. I knew in my bones the thing was not going to kill me. It was going to slaughter and decimate every living thing around me, and piss, and probably collect anything of mine I was careless enough to let get away from me. It might even want to kill me, but it wouldn’t, because it was IYD and its sole purpose was to make sure I didn’t die.
I felt like half the weight of the world had just slid from my shoulders. I could do this. I had a weapon I hadn’t known about: a guardian demon. It occurred to me that I didn’t even need to retrieve my stones. Barrons could get them when he showed up. There went another quarter of the world off my back.
I got on with my search for food. The monster trailed me most of the time. Occasionally something rustled in the distance, and it would tear off through the trees. I began to hold my ears when that happened. I love animals and hated that it was killing everything. I wished Barrons could have taught it to discriminate.
I found berries in the undergrowth and nuts on low-hanging branches in a grove of slender silvery-barked trees. After I gorged, I gathered them, tying as many of the sweet nuts into my hobo pouch as I could. In a gentle brook, I found fish eggs. A big yuck, but protein nonetheless.
Mid-morning, the monster herded me back toward the river, then began snarling and snapping at me, driving me upstream. I figured it had some Barrons-esque agenda.
It “herded” me for several hours. The terrain changed drastically. The forest thickened, the riverbank fell away, and by the time the monster finally let me stop, I was high on top of a sheer rocky cliff that dropped sharply, well over a hundred feet, to white-capped rapids below. The river no longer tumbled; it roared and crashed, filling the gorge with soft thunder.
I stretched out in a sunny patch on the bank and ate half of my last protein bar. I considered getting up and trying to explore, but I wasn’t sure the monster would permit it.
It sniffed the ground around me for a moment, then stalked downstream and sprawled sleek and deadly on the ground. I guessed it was tired from so much killing.
Feeling a little desperate for the sound of a voice, I talked to it. I told it stories about growing up in the South. I told it about all the fine plans I’d had for my life.
I told it how everything had gone so damned wrong and I’d begun losing one thing after another. I told it about the hell of losing my mind and will to the Unseelie Princes and about Barrons bringing me back. I even told it about my recent trip home to Ashford with V’lane, and what I’d learned there, and that I’d begun to fear there might actually be something wrong with me. I told it things I would never have told a sentient being, baring my deepest feelings and worries. It was cathartic to get it all off my chest, even to a dumb beast.
I dozed, too, and woke about a half hour before the sun plummeted to the horizon, cloaking the forest in night.
The monster rose on all fours, stalked over, urinated around me, and melted into the blackness, black on black, with crimson eyes.
I’d been “tucked in” for the night.
I woke several times, startled by one sound or another. Once I ascertained that nothing was lurking beyond my circle, I fell back asleep again.
Near dawn, I was awakened by a storm in the distance, moving closer.
A hundred feet below me, the river swelled to a deafening crescendo of rapids crashing against the sheer walls of the rocky gorge.
The sky crackled with lightning. Thunder rolled, and I braced myself for a drenching, but the storm stayed on the opposite side of the river and passed me by.
It was a violent squall. Thunder cracked and crashed continuously, punctuated by a weird popping, like automatic gunfire. Trees bent low.
Rain fell in sheets, soaking the far side of the river. I was grateful I’d been spared.
Finally the storm blew itself out, and I slept.
I wakened to a hand clamped tightly over my mouth and the crushing weight of a body on top of mine.
I fought like a wild thing, punching, kicking, trying to bite.
“Easy, Mac,” a voice whispered roughly against my ear. “Be still.”
My eyes flared. I knew that voice. It was Ryodan. But I’d been expecting Barrons!
“I’ve come to get you out of here, but you must do exactly as I say.”
I was nodding before he’d even finished speaking.
“It’s imperative you make no noise. Whisper when you speak.”
I nodded again.
He drew back and looked at me. “Where’s … the creature?”
“The IYD one?”
He gave me a look but nodded.
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it since last night.”
“Get your things and hurry. We don’t have much time. Darroc’s here, too.”
“Are you kidding me? How the hell does everyone find me?” What was I, a big red X?
“Shh.” He pressed a finger to my lips. “Speak softly.” He raised the weight of his body from mine, flipped me onto my stomach, and began searching through my hair. “Hold still. Ah, fuck.”
“What?” It came out as a low growl.
“Darroc marked you. He must have done it while the princes had you.”
“He tattooed me?”
“Right next to Barrons’ mark. I can’t remove it here. Come.”
I rolled over, scrubbing angrily at my scalp. “Where are we going?”
“Not far from here is a—what did Barrons say you call them?—IFP. It will take us to another world, where there’s a dolmen to Ireland.”
“I thought Cruce’s curse corrupted everything.”
“The Silvers change. IFPs don’t. They’re static microcosms.”
Dreamfever_The Fever Series Page 33