by John Conroe
“What?” I asked.
“It’s one thing for me to tweak you about other males, because I have Chosen. But you know how I feel about other girls!” she said. “And you always, always play down how attractive you are to them!”
She was pissed. Even I could figure that out. Despite my internal link to her I still struggled with relationship stuff.
“I think it’s stupid that the V-squared suddenly made me stand out. I spent my whole life being ignored by women and now, suddenly, I’m like a big target,” I tried to explain.
“Do you know how much most men would love to be in your position?” she asked, her voice still dangerously quiet.
“I have never been, nor will I ever be, like most men. Most men didn’t grow up with demon crosshairs on the forehead of anyone who got near them. I was happy to stay unnoticed,” I said, which wasn’t fully the truth but close to it. Who wants to be ignored? But long ago I had made a sorta peace with the concept of not drawing demonic attention to anyone I thought I could like.
“This change in my appearance is artificial, created by the virus,” I said, dismissively.
She snorted. “More artificial than fake boobs, liposuction, makeup or even clothes that flatter the physique? Yours are at least skin deep,” she said.
“So what’s our next step?” I asked, changing the topic.
She frowned and wagged one finger at me, letting me know she wasn’t fooled. Still, she went with me. “I think, now that it’s fully dark out, that we three should keep watch around the perimeter of the resort to see what shows up. My inclination is that we stay inside the circle of talismans,” she said.
I looked at her sharply. “Really? Inside? What did this thing smell like again?” I asked, concerned by something that made her want to play it safe.
“It’s tough to say. Some supernatural that I haven’t come across yet. Maybe human at one time but now……not so much.”
“You said it smelled wild?”
“Hmmm, probably not the right word. It smelled bad, like rotted flesh and rotten eggs, mixed with forest loam and pine needles,” she explained, frustrated with trying to put words to a scent.
One of the hardest changes for me to learn to handle was the increased ability to smell. Tanya had grown up with it, but I was still trying to learn to sort through the vast miasma of scents that constantly bombarded my now sensitive sniffer. Honestly, I don’t know how dogs deal with it. One part of her description worried me in particular.
“Wait, rotten eggs?” I asked.
“Yeah, it was definitely mixed in,” she said.
“Rotten egg smell comes from sulfur,” I said.
“I get it. Sulfur and brimstone, as in demons?” she clarified.
“Yup, there’s always a nasty sulfur smell whenever I’ve messed with demons.”
“Well, we’ll just have to see about this time,” she said.
Chapter 14
A couple of hours later found the three of us spread out around the resort, waiting in the dark. We ideally should have formed a kind of triangle, each at a roughly equidistant point from the other two, covering as much of the circle that was formed by the little talismans as possible. But the pond blocked a big portion of the territory. A path circled the pond along its shoreline and the talismans on that part of the perimeter were just off the path. So we decided to ignore the quarter or so of the arc blocked by the pond and concentrated on the rest of the circle.
Tanya was farthest from me in the woods behind cabin one. Awasos was across the main road where it met the driveway directly out from the lodge. I was out past empty cabin five watching the woods that were closest to cabins three, four and five. I could feel where Tanya was and even get a little flavor of what she was sensing. Awasos was between us and even though he moved ghost quiet I could tell roughly where he was. Something like a stereo effect of my vampire’s senses coming through our link and my own. Plus all the little animals and insects were quiet in a ten foot radius from where he lay stretched out in the pine needles. The little vacuum of silence radiated in the mental map laid out in my head, lit up like a computer grid.
Tanya was alert, her mind in predator mode. The woods looked bright, lit by the mostly full moon, making it look like daylight to my changed eyes. The smaller denizens of the forest were busy gathering food; chipmunks, mice, voles and shrews, all scurrying through the leaf litter alert for things to eat while trying to avoid being eaten. A barred owl and her mate hunted seventy-five yards to my right, while a small weasel stalked a deer mouse ten yards directly in front of my sitting log.
Part of me automatically tracked the little life and death struggles around me, while another part worked on the odd mix of people that inhabited the resort. Garth seemed straight forward enough, while his wife, Quinby, was a complicated enigma. The twins were normal, bored teenage girls, if you ignored their ability to throw magic around. Britta was quiet and deep, those were the ones my mother said to watch out for. Her sister was brassy and adventurous, what you saw was what you got.
Cleveland was a small minded asshole, mad at the world and frustrated with a life that didn’t live up to his high school years. His wife carried herself with the pained expression of the oppressed; someone trapped in a dead end marriage. Billy was, as far as I could tell, a good enough kid being raised by an asshole father.
The professors were an odd couple. Closet cryptozoologists who were open about their gay lifestyle but nervous about their monster hunting hobby. They seemed open and nice, but something about them wasn’t quite right.
The brothers Anderson were a surprising find and the most likely answer to the mystery of the Dogman. But Jake being a sane rogue was a statistical anomaly, one that added to all the other anomalies of the resort. Finding three Swedish witches living deep in the Michigan forest with a sane werewolf rogue surrounded by a perimeter of protective talisman while a monster hunting gay duo looked for evidence practically begged for me to play the lotto with all their cabin numbers or something.
The fucked up Cleveland family was the most normal part of the whole Scooby doo adventure. Then I realized something else; the odd tug of recognition I had experienced when I saw the dude in the woodpile cleared itself in my mind. It was the simple fact that his facial features reminded me of my friends among the Mohawk people back home. No great mystery as Michigan was home to many Native peoples.
The watchful part of my brain suddenly poked the thoughtful part. The woods around me had gone dead quiet. Every little animal and bird had frozen in place, too terrified to move. Then the stench hit me, hard enough to make my eyes water. Carrion, rotten eggs and a shitty sewer smell all rolled into one delightful bouquet of vomit inducing proportions.
Grim roiled inside me, ready to pop free and take charge. Tanya tells me that my purple eyes flash dark violet when that part of me peeks out. The wind which had been blowing gently from the northwest suddenly kicked up a notch, bringing more of the miasma of rotting meat and crap my way. It died back down as quickly as it had started, and I realized it wasn’t the wind but the passage of something large moving incredibly fast. And I knew without a doubt, that that something was now less than thirty feet away, on the other side of a large maple tree. It was standing there, sensing, reading the forest around it. One of the Boklund witchy talismans was fastened to that very tree, right about where the thing was standing.
A scratching sounded on the far side of the tree, just a little etch-etch of a sound, like a very sharp talon lightly tearing at bark. Just about where the talisman was tied up. It was poking at the little stick figure posted sign, like a thief trying to pick a lock.
Grim surged to the surface and I shot ten feet forward of where I had been standing, now staring at the thing behind the tree.
Seven feet tall, and bone thin, it stood naked staring back at me. Huge orange eyes took up much of a sunken, stretched face that was defined by a grotesquely distorted mouth full of needle pointed teeth and long ears held clos
e to its skull. Its skin was ash gray and stretched tight across the body like a drum. Sinew and muscle twisted and writhed under the taut flesh like snakes in spandex, moving even as it stood frozen watching me. Long filthy hair dangled around its shoulders, greasy and matted, filled with twigs and leaves. It had no sex that I could see, although I didn’t try to real hard to find one. The arms, long and spindly looking were tipped with four inch long black claws.
My appearance had shocked it, that was easy enough to read in its body language, but it didn’t stay that way for more than a second. It flashed forward coming straight at me as fast as anything I had ever seen. As fast as Tanya, as fast as an Elder vampire. Grim took me low and to my left a half pace, my aura bladed right arm swinging at its long thin right leg. Surprised again by my move, it nonetheless managed to jump high enough to avoid losing a limb. Its leap took it twelve feet up the side of a big maple where it clung like some elongated goblin. A flick of my Sight showed a greasy blackness pooled around it, telling me it was demonic in nature.
My left side was pressed up against a thigh thick ash tree, leaving me one less direction to move when it sprang in my direction. This time it screeched as it flashed through the air, and the cold, calculating Grim part of me noted two answering screeches from deeper in the forest. Its speed was awful and it took every bit of my own to move out of its path. My left arm had encircled the ash tree and when I moved, the aural blade running the length of my forearm sliced through the trunk without resistance. The thing hit the tree, the tree leapt off its stump, the angry screech changed to shock and my right fist punched it in the back of the head. In slow motion the heavy log hung suspended, horizontal to the ground, the demon thing clinging upside down and shaking its head. My punch should have killed it, although it did stun it long enough for the tree to slam down on the ground, the monster pinned underneath. Time sped up to normal and the forest was quiet for a short second. Then the tree was shoved violently into the air, rising ten feet up. The monster hauled itself out from below and bolted into the woods, screeching the whole time. Two more answering cries echoed out of the forest. The sounds of its lightning fast movement died away and it was gone, all in the time it took for the fallen log to resettle to the forest floor.
“Making friends with the local wildlife?” Tanya asked from behind me.
“I have no idea what that thing was, but it should have died right there!” I replied, turning to see Awasos in bear form and my vampire standing a few yards away.
“Sounded like two more just like it,” she commented.
“Tanya, it was as fast as you,” I said. “And tough!”
“What did it look like?”
“Tall and cadaver thin, with gray skin. Like a skinny seven foot tall basketball player who hasn’t eaten in a month. Long claws, pointy teeth, orange eyes and a demonic essence,” I said.
“Awesome,” she said, sounding remarkably like Lydia.
“That’s creepier than the monster,” I said, shuddering at the thought of two spikey haired little vampires tormenting me.
She grinned then glided through the woods to the big maple, studying the talisman and the bark around it.
“Looks like it started to pick apart the Blair Witch thingy,” she noted.
Moving up beside her, I saw what she meant. The little stick figure was held together with vine and twisted fibers. Those twists of vegetation were now ripped and slightly shredded looking, although the talisman still held together if only by a strand or two.
“Looks like someone was trying to disarm the alarm, so to speak,” I said. Awasos sniffed the ground under the fallen ash tree and growled deep in his chest.
“Let’s go get the alarm makers,” Tanya said.
***
An hour later found us back at the tree with Quinby, Garth and the twins. Also along for the merry ride was the mystery wood stacker, whose name was Tom. Apparently he was a general handyman sort who had worked at the resort even before the Boklunds had bought it.
Quinby examined the shredded talisman for several moments before looking first at her husband then her girls. Finally she looked our way, her expression sour.
“You seem to be right, Mr.Gordon. This one was close to falling apart,” she said, her voice still showing anger at me, but now mixed with fear. Waking the Boklunds and explaining why hadn’t been smooth or easy. We had spent almost forty minutes convincing them that Tanya wasn’t going to attack them and that the whole story of the monsters was real. Oddly, it wasn’t the monsters themselves, but the part of my story when I had mentioned fighting one of them that met the most disbelief.. Quinby had been certain I was lying as no one could fight one of them and live. But the part about the stick figure being pulled apart had scared her enough to accompany us back into the woods in the dark.
Tom, the handyman, had appeared fully dressed and armed with a Mossberg shotgun with a three D battery flashlight duct taped to the barrel when we all trooped outside. Garth carried a big double bladed ax and the three women just wrapped a couple of their wooden bead necklaces around their hands. My Sight showed deep pools of black around those strands of string and wood, indicating that they would likely be much more effective against the monsters than the ax or the shotgun.
“So, Mrs. Boklund, what are these things?” Tanya asked, quietly.
Tom answered first.
“My people, the MicMac, call them Cheenos. The local tribes around here would call them Wendigos.”
“Wendigos? Don’t they come from cannibalistic humans?” Tanya asked.
“That is the legend,” he agreed with a short nod.
“They have mostly avoided us, but lately they’ve been around more and more. But the wards always kept them away. Now they are trying to break through. I’m not sure what can stop them,” Quinby said.
Her husband had been studying the ash tree I had cut, rubbing his fingers on some of the really nasty looking black goo that was stuck underneath the tree trunk. He glanced my way, then looked back at the stump of the tree, the one that was cut so clean it looked like it had been sanded and polished.
“They’re demonic?” Tanya asked, her face pointed at Quinby and Tom, but her eyes glancing sideways at me.
“The legends of my people say that Cheenos have hearts of frozen ice and that they take in the souls of those they kill,” Tom said.
Quinby glanced his way then spoke her own piece. “They are drawn to supernaturals more than regular humans. Our magic has kept them at bay, but when Jake arrived last month they became bolder, more interested,” she said. “Some of my sister witches here in Hiawatha feel that they prefer to prey on weres and possibly other supernaturals.” She looked at Tanya as she said the last few words.
Tanya snorted, her message clear. She was no one’s prey, although sometimes mine as I was hers. She smiled at me as I thought that.
“I think they have invited demons inside them, but haven’t been forced out for whatever reason,” I said, thinking of the greasy black aura of the one I fought had had.
“So a newly bitten werewolf shows up and they start swarming about,” Tanya mused.
Quinby, who was watching both Tanya and I with distrustful eyes suddenly spoke. “Who are you people? Why are you here?”
Tanya swiveled in place to face her head on, her movements smooth and liquid.
“What do you know about my people?” she asked in reply.
“You are vampire…Darkkin,” Quinby said, her eyes tight with worry and fear. The twins were watching this exchange with tense postures and my Sight showed pooled blackness in their hands.
“Yes, true enough. You know the name we call ourselves. Do you know of our society, our laws?”
“Just that you are ruled by a coven of very old vampires.”
“It’s quite a bit more structured than that. Kind of a cross between a monarchy and a corporation,” Tanya said. “Chris, Awasos and I are a Rover team. We investigate mysteries and solve problems. If Darkkin break our rules, w
e are jury, judge and executioners for them. One of our biggest jobs is to keep our world away from society at large.”
“What brought you here?” Erika asked, but her sister answered first.
“The Dogman sightings,” Britta guessed.
“Yes, Britta, the Dogman. See, the local werewolf population considers this forest off limits, yet suddenly there are sightings of what we thought was a werewolf, which turned out to be Jake. We were asked to investigate.”
“The two-natured avoid these woods because of the Cheeno,” Tom said from his crouched position where he was studying something.
“That is what we are thinking as well. The weres never explained why Hiawatha is off limits but I think its because they fall prey to the Cheeno, who because they are demonic, can sneak up on weres,” Tanya said.