Feast

by Merrie Destefano

  Here, in the mountain crevices, there was room for dark magic and moonlit nights. Here, the Darklings practiced the fine art of harvest and interpretation and inspiration. And as a result, Ticonderoga Falls was brimming with artists, musicians, writers, craftsmen and inventors. From the turn-of-the-century plein air painters to the twenty-first-century rapper who lived in the hills to that war-poet who had just sold a screenplay, artists were drawn here like slivers of steel to a magnet.

  Kismet. Destiny.

  I took another slug of beer, finished off the bottle and set the empty on a nearby table. I didn’t want the Legend to change, but I had learned long ago that I was just a cog in the Darkling machinery.

  Like the rest of the town.

  My opinion didn’t matter.

  But I wished that it did, because an uncontrollable fear surged through me, so strong that even the alcohol couldn’t numb it. Something was going to happen tonight, something dark and unexpected, and no one in Ticonderoga Falls—not even Ash himself—would be powerful enough to stop it.

  Chapter 62

  Shadowy Creatures

  Maddie:

  Fist clenched, my knuckles struck wood once, twice, three times, and the knock echoed with a dull thud. I glanced down at Tucker. He turned away from the door and stared back in the direction we had come, probably watching the crowd of trick-or-treaters as they disappeared around a distant corner.

  Samwise stood at attention, ears forward, listening for movement on the other side of the door. Just then the dog cocked his head and looked up at the sky, as if he heard something.

  I glanced back toward the sky too, still shrouded with cloud, moon peeking through, snow tumbling down. Sometimes the snow drifted up, as if it had changed its mind, white flotsam caught in an unseen eddy of wind. I hoped there wasn’t something lurking out there—something I couldn’t see.

  Like another one of those shape-shifting chupacabras.

  Standing on the porch, with all the other trick-or-treaters gone, I suddenly realized how vulnerable we were.

  I should have stayed home like Ash suggested. I should have realized something was off-kilter in this Thomas Kinkade village.

  A shadow drifted behind me, moved ever so gently, and when it did I saw the outline of a man in its midst—almost invisible except around the edges. The unnatural warmth returned and the snow around us began to melt. I instinctively draped one arm around Tucker’s shoulders.

  Would the dog attack if I told him to? I’d never tried anything like that before, but then he’d never been a werewolf-hybrid before either.

  Would you turn into a werewolf if I told you to, boy?

  Samwise gave me a piercing glance, then answered with a hearty, “Wrrooof!”

  The door swung open just then, revealed a light-filled room and a tall man dressed in flannel shirt and jeans. Joe Wimbledon, an unopened bottle of beer in one hand. He glared outside, eyes hooded, head tilted down as if he didn’t want to see what might be prowling beyond the edge of the porch.

  Nobody said anything for a long moment, then Tucker started his trick-or-treat rap song.

  “If you wanna trick or if you wanna treat,

  I’m the one to folla ’cuz I can’t be beat,

  If you do your part an’ give me somethin’ sweet,

  Then I’ll leave you be an’ move on up the street—”

  He opened his bag right on cue and flashed a bling-studded grin.

  But Joe just stared at me, a glimmer of recognition in his eyes.

  “You’re that woman from the vet’s office today, the one that claimed chupacabras were in her house last night. But it was the wrong night, don’t ya know. They don’t come out ’til tonight. See”—he pointed to the sky, a black canvas where the clouds had pulled back to reveal a glorious moon—“full moon is tonight.”

  He retreated a step, hand on the doorknob as if he were about to slam it closed. Just like I had done to Ash earlier.

  “I think ya made the whole thing up,” he said.

  I knew I had about a second or less to convince him to let us in. I grabbed my coat sleeve, hitched it up to my elbow. Exposed bare flesh on my forearm and a six-inch jagged wound. “Did I make this up?”

  He cursed, eyes narrowed.

  Then he reluctantly widened the door for us to enter. “You better get inside,” he said. “Whoever made that mark is probably lookin’ for ya right now.”

  Chapter 63

  The Darkness of His Soul

  Ash:

  The Hunt called, strong and sweet, just like it had for thousands of years. I crouched in a corner, behind a house, listening, trying to resist. I didn’t want to take Maddie against her will, but she was fair game as long as she was out in the open. I could swoop down from a rooftop, cast a Veil, put the boy and the dog to sleep while I harvested. None of them would even remember.

  But the Legend was too loud tonight, and the version that curled through the trees was wrong—it was painting me too dark, with brushstrokes too broad. All the nuances of love and torment had been erased, the paint had cracked and bits had fallen off. I was no longer a noble creature who had cursed the village for a horrid wrong, I was now an evil captor who kept his sheep from roaming free, who kept Driscoll prisoner.

  It said that madness was the cup I had offered the Driscoll family on that night, that mercy and hope had died with Lily. And now, the darkness of my soul was spreading throughout the village, it leaked down alleys and streets like dark oil, contaminating everyone. They all walked with my stain on their brow, all marked for my pleasure.

  But none of it was true. Not really.

  The curse had bound me here—I was the prisoner. Unable to hunt anywhere else. Unable to return home.

  I covered my ears, bowed my head, but I could still hear every footstep Maddie took and each one took her farther away from me. Yes, I might be able to seduce her, to enchant her for an evening.

  But in a few days she would leave and go back to the world of humans, she would return to her place of prominence. I knew what she truly was—a master storyteller. In my world, she would have been royalty, she would have been the one to rule this village and I would have been the peasant, even lower than Thane.

  If she knew what I had done, she would hate me. If she knew what I was . . .

  I stood suddenly, with a snap of wings in the brittle cold, lifted my head.

  I could feel him now, pulling on the tether that connected us—Driscoll, climbing in his car, tires grinding gravel, running away.

  A sharp ache tugged at my chest like a grappling hook, pulling me unwillingly toward the fleeing human. I didn’t want to go, but the curse had wearied me, burned down my resistance. I felt as if I had been dipped in wax, all senses deadened to the world everyone else inhabited.

  I longed to follow Maddie—the storyteller—I wanted to see where she would go this last night when she walked through my world. Wanted to see every blade of frost-crusted grass that she touched. Wanted to drink the fragrance of her ideas trailing behind her like pale ghosts.

  But I couldn’t.

  The curse demanded that I follow my prey.

  And stop him from escaping.

  Chapter 64

  A Quiet Night

  Sheriff Kyle:

  I sat in my patrol car with Rodriguez, both of us eating the roast-beef sandwiches I had picked up over at the Steak & Ale about an hour and a half earlier. So far it seemed like a quiet night, unusually tame for a Halloween. Even the kids’ pranks had been toned down this year. No animals locked in the garage or eggs splattered on new cars. A few complaints had sizzled through on the police radio: rocks in mailboxes, flattened tires, and apparently a spray-painted barn. But old Mr. Hudson had needed to paint that barn for years. Served him right for leaving an eyesore like that right on Main Street where everybody could see it.

  The radio crackled to life again.

  “Kyle, you there?”

  I sighed.

  “Here,” I answere
d. No need to follow protocol when Alice was working dispatch.

  “I just got a bunch of weird calls, Sarah Duncan over on Timberline, Jane Culpepper on Creek Wood, and the Walkers on Mountainview—that new couple that just moved to town, remember them?”

  “I remember, Alice. What happened?”

  “Oh, yeah, well, each of the women just walked into their living room and found their husbands asleep on the floor.”

  Deputy Rodriguez looked at me with raised eyebrows.

  “Do they want us to go over and make sure everything’s all right?”

  “Well, you could, but then I got a call from Bob Miller. He says Agnes hasn’t come home yet. Guess she’s like clockwork, locks up the Steak & Ale at nine, drives home, in the door by nine fifteen. He tried calling the pub, but no answer. No answer on her cell either.”

  I glanced at my watch. 10:08 p.m. I set my sandwich on the seat and started the engine.

  “Tell Bob we’re on our way.”

  The streets were deserted, all the trick-or-treaters had either gone home or headed over to the annual bonfire. The patrol car fishtailed in the snow on the corner of Main and Running Springs Road. That was when I noticed the string of Buicks and Hondas and Mazdas with cracked windshields, all leading toward the junkyard.

  The kids had taken it up a notch after all.

  “We should stop at the bonfire after we’re done with Agnes,” I said. “See if we can figure who’s been up to trouble.”

  “Good idea,” Rodriguez said, then she stuffed the last bite of roast beef in her mouth.

  I glanced at my own sandwich with longing, realized I probably wouldn’t get to finish it. We drove slower through town, giving it a visual once-over just in case anything else was amiss. Saw a flurry of overturned trash cans, picket fences kicked in and a broken picture window on Charlie Mitchell’s house.

  “Kids have been busy,” Rodriguez noted as we pulled into the Steak & Ale parking lot. One car waited for us, covered in snow.

  Agnes’s car.

  I stepped into the cold, felt an uncharacteristic shiver run over my back. I walked toward her car—a Honda Element. “Check the front door of the pub,” I told Rodriguez. Meanwhile, I brushed the snow off the windshield, stared through the tinted glass. Empty, all doors locked. No purse or coat inside, just a few empty Diet Coke cans and a half-eaten package of donuts. “Agnes!” I called out, sweeping the nearby bushes with my flashlight. No footprints in the snow out here, no evidence that she’d been to her car recently. I paced around the lot, stared into the thickening gloom that had settled like glue amid the shrubbery.

  “Hey, Kyle, you need to come see this!” Rodriguez shouted from the front of the pub.

  You need to come see this. My least-favorite expression when investigating a crime. It never went well after somebody said that.

  I reached the edge of the building, was just about to swing around the corner when Rodriguez grabbed my arm.

  “No, stay where you are,” she said. Her flashlight pooled on the ground right in front of the door. “Look at the marks in the snow.”

  A pair of footprints, probably Agnes’s, faced the door. She must have been closing up because the key was still in the lock. But then the footprints slid backward, formed two solid lines, like somebody had dragged her away from the door halfway into the street.

  But that was where they stopped, and there were no other footprints beside hers. It was almost as if something had swooped down from the sky and carried her off.

  Chapter 65

  Shapeshifters

  Maddie:

  Pine logs crackled and spit in the fireplace, filled the room with flickering light and woodsy fragrance. Family mementoes covered the walls and mantel, black-and-white photos mixed with sepia tones and turn-of-the-century tintypes. The Wimbledon resemblance ran strong—I thought I could pick out Joe’s mother and grandmother, possibly a sister or two. Tucker sulked in an overstuffed chair, while Samwise paced the room curiously, lifting his head whenever Joe started to speak.

  “I want to go to the bonfire—” Tucker said in that whine all children have perfected by the age of three.

  “Later, sweetheart.”

  “But, Mom—” He dragged the word Mom out for three syllables.

  “No.”

  Then Joe walked back in the room with two cups of hot chocolate and a bowl of water. In a minute, both Tucker and Samwise were slurping their respective drinks. I leaned forward on the sofa, elbows on my knees.

  “What do you know about the local chupacabras?” I asked.

  He shrugged, took a long sip of Coors. “Not much.”

  “Now I think you’re lying. One of your shape-shifters got into my cabin last night and then today, two of them attacked me in the woods.”

  He bristled, then shook his head. “I don’t know how you got that mark on your arm, but if two Darklings attacked you in the woods then you wouldn’t be here tellin’ me about it.”

  “Darklings, huh. I knew they had another name. Chupacabras never quite fit.” I pulled a small pad of paper from my pocket and started taking notes. “I found a dead body in the woods today.” I paused to see how he would react. So far, he was still acting like I was making everything up, just like Sheriff Kyle. “The body was almost completely flat—”

  His eyes found mine, studied them.

  “—and there were two holes, just like all the blood had been drained out.”

  “Not blood. They’re not vampires. You really found a body?” He stood up and walked to the mantel, his back to me. “Where is it? How come Kyle hasn’t called me?”

  “Why would he call you? He acted like you were the local nutcase.”

  “Some folks think so.” I noticed that he held a small picture frame in his hand when he turned to face me again. A young woman, maybe his wife. “But whenever things turn sour around here, everybody suddenly remembers what I been tellin’ them over the years.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re an outsider,” he said. “Ain’t no reason for me to tell ya the Legend.”

  At that point, Samwise lifted his head and barked, his body shifted and grew, fur got longer and thicker, his eyes turned silver, his chest and back expanded.

  “Whoa! Cool,” Tucker said. “Do you see what Samwise just did, Mom?”

  Joe retreated behind a chair.

  “He isn’t going to hurt you,” I said.

  “What the hell is that thing? It’s not a dog.” Joe had backed into the corner now, his eyes wide, a look of terror on his face.

  “My dog bit one of your precious Darklings,” I explained. “What you see is the result.”

  Joe continued to stare at the dog, an expression of shock and horror on his face.

  “Then it’s a werebeast,” he said. “But he told me they were just a fable, he’d never even seen one before—”

  “Who told you that, Mr. Wimbledon? Where did you hear about werebeasts?” I asked.

  Before either of us could speak again, the front door swung open and a river of cold air rushed in. Outside, the wind mourned through the trees; sagging limbs, twisting clouds, and all the colors were suddenly wrong. It felt like all the air had been sucked from the room.

  Then a lone silhouette stood poised on the threshold. A tall, black shadow framed by swirling snow and moonlight.

  Ash.

  Unlike the other Darklings in Ticonderoga Falls, he didn’t need to be invited inside.

  Chapter 66

  Footprints in the Mud

  Sheriff Kyle:

  We searched the Steak & Ale, but I already knew we weren’t going to find Agnes inside. Most likely she was somewhere in the woods on the other side of the street; I could feel it gnawing in my gut. First Madeline had claimed that she saw a dead body in the woods and now this.

  But people didn’t just disappear in Ticonderoga Falls.

  Something was wrong here. I had a strong desire to call Joe Wimbledon; as loony as the guy was, he still had a
handle on the local folklore and customs.

  I stood outside the pub, hands on my hips, staring into the bramble of Sierra currant and bush chinquapin and lodgepole pine across the highway. Right now the pines whispered, branches taunting and swaying—

  You won’t find her. You’ll never find her.

  I wasn’t about to be spooked by a thirty-acre canyon covered with seventy-foot trees.

  “I’m hiking in the woods,” I told Rodriguez.

  “Right behind you.”

  As soon as I got across the two-lane highway I saw a spot where the shrubs had been pushed aside. Two sets of footprints in the mud and snow led down into the darkness of a steep ravine. “Here,” I said pointing so she could see, then I led the way down the rugged path. Whoever had been down here hadn’t tried to cover their tracks, almost as if they didn’t care. Or maybe they wanted to be caught. Criminals did that sometimes, led a merry chase, secretly hoping someone would stop them and put an end to the madness.

  We didn’t get cases like this very often up here, but I’d seen plenty back in L.A. Bodies found in Dumpsters, babies in garbage bags, people tossed out like litter. That was the reason why I had moved up here. I had needed to reconnect, to stop seeing people as victims. Or murderers.

  Meanwhile, the wind tossed the trees about, making them creak and moan as it swept through the canyon. Then it broke overhead in a long pitiful wail.

  “Creepy,” Rodriguez muttered. “Wish that awful wind would stop.”

  “Me too,” I admitted.

  The narrow path leading into the ravine turned at a sharp angle, then turned again. Neither of us could see what was up ahead, not through the wild tangle of branches and undergrowth; our flashlights transformed the black night into shades of violet and blue. The mist still clung to the lowlands and it began to roll toward us, billowy clouds that ate up the landscape, that stopped our beams from exposing anything until we were right on top of it. Rodriguez sensed it before I did. She laid a hand on my arm, held me still.