A Shot in the Dark

by K. A. Stewart

  The demon bellowed in pain, and I ducked under his arm to take a swipe at a hamstring, feeling my blade slide through thick fur into the solid muscle beneath. I let my momentum carry me off the rock, arms pinwheeling for balance as I landed on the next one below. A rank breeze ruffled my hair, the Yeti’s backhanded swipe just missing my head as I dropped out of his reach.

  Like I said, it almost worked. Before I could get my balance on my new perch, before I could turn around, I was bludgeoned across the back hard enough to send me hurtling through the air and into the rocks below. I went rolling down the jagged boulders, bruising and scraping every single part of me, and into the trees where the pine needles gouged at the already bloody places. Just as I came to a stop, I heard a distinctly metallic snap, and my sword hand came up empty.

  Oh fuck.

  I found the blade, easy enough. It was pinned beneath my body, and only kind fate had kept me from impaling myself on it. But it was snapped off neatly, just where the guard should have been, and the hilt was long gone, wedged somewhere in the rocks above me. If the Yeti didn’t kill me, Marty was going to.

  I scrambled to my feet, bare blade in my hands because hey, it was all I had. Holding it loosely was no problem, but the second I tightened my grip to strike, I was going to fillet my own fingers. Mentally, I did a quick check, cataloguing my other injuries from my tumble down the hill.

  My back and both hips were bruised all to hell, I could tell that much. Something warm and wet was trickling down my left shoulder. I was scraped from knuckle to elbow on both arms and the back of my head throbbed dully. All in all, it could have been worse.

  And where was my overly hirsute dance partner?

  It was dark under the overhanging branches. I didn’t realize how much I’d relied on the starlight above until it was taken from me. I blinked furiously, trying to will my eyes to adjust to the pitch blackness. I was blind here, cut off from sensation.

  It also didn’t escape my notice that I was in the trees again. Handless’s turf. If she was going to get involved in this debacle, now would be the time. I could only hope I’d get some kind of warning before she pounced.

  Nothing useful reached my ears. In fact, all sound seemed to be drowned out by my own panting breath, vibrating oddly in my damaged ears. Like a glass jar. Like a cave.

  It occurred to me, in a flash of goose bumps and stomach cramps, that I’d been here before. Almost every night for the last four years, I had been in this place, surrounded by darkness and cold. My breath frosting the air, the sound distorted in my ears. The Yeti, hunting me.

  “I know you’re there.” I couldn’t stop myself from saying it. I always said it. It was always answered with a soft growl to my left, just out of my range of vision.

  I turned, because I had to. Because in the dream, I always turned toward the sounds. God, I wanted to tell Mira about this. I wanted to ask what she thought of my dreams becoming reality, ’cause honestly it was freaking me out. “Come on . . . come get me,” I whispered, my words echoing in the bell jar that was my skull.

  A sound behind me, the faintest scrape of fur on stone. And I turned, because I knew I had to. Nothing faced me but the bare ghosts of pine trees, a lighter shade of gray in the black.

  This was the moment, in every nightmare I’d had in the last four years. The moment when the sound stayed in front of me, but the attack came from behind. Always from behind, and I was always motionless, spellbound, paralyzed.

  There came the faintest of clicking sounds from the darkness in front of me. The Yeti’s talons . . . Or Handless’s long toenails? I tasted the blood in my mouth, where I’d bitten my tongue.

  This isn’t a dream, dammit! “And I’ll move if I fucking want to.”

  I reversed my grip on my broken sword and stabbed backward along my own rib cage, the blade slicing neatly through the first layer of my T-shirts. The point hit something solid, and suddenly the world lurched into motion again, like a film stuttering back to life. I never looked back. The blade bit into my palms as I slammed it home, then yanked hard to the left. I dropped to one knee, feeling the swipe that was meant for my throat pass harmlessly over my head, and with a heave, I dragged the naked metal to the side and out, ripping through the white-furred abdomen.

  Blight poured out in place of glistening intestines. A river of black nothingness, it ran down the white-furred legs, visibly seeking to rejoin the part of itself that had already been shed. Still on my knees, the next two slashes opened up each massive thigh, severing what would be the femoral arteries in anything actually living. The blackness gushed out with force, washing over my hands, instantly numbing the searing pain I’d caused myself.

  The Yeti roared but there was panic in that guttural voice. His claws flailed in the air, trying to connect with anything at all, but in his agony, they were blind strikes and came nowhere near me.

  The wickedly curved horns went first, cracking and splintering into tiny shards, which in turn vanished into motes of blight, flowing against gravity and up the hill toward the waiting dark pool. Then the ears, crisping like they’d been charred in a fire, curling in on themselves. The bellow turned into a strangled gurgle, and only a quick roll saved me from being crushed as the Yeti pitched forward, his legs being eaten from the belly wound outward.

  He writhed in the pine needles, hands grasping at the fleeing essence until his fingers melted away and he could only twitch. His glowing red eyes found mine, and what was left of his muzzle wrinkled in a silent snarl.

  “Remember this,” I told him. “Even on my knees, I killed you.”

  The last things to go were the wicked fangs, bared in a defiant snarl to the bitter end. The stream of blight wafted its way up into the rocks, and I could smell the ozone. If I looked, there would be a pool of liquid demon up there, like black mercury in its pristine reflection. Even at that distance, I could hear the screaming, a sound just beyond my range of hearing, but something that I could feel in the back of my teeth. The unearthly call of Hell itself.

  Just as suddenly, it was gone. It took the Yeti with it.

  It did not, however, take his little pet. The brush to my right rustled and parted around a bald, filthy head. Handless hobbled her way into the open, settling on her haunches only a few yards from me. If I wanted, I could have reached out and touched her.

  Even unarmed as she was—seriously, that joke never gets old—I wasn’t sure I could take her in the condition I was in. I rose to a half crouch, blade cupped gingerly in my flayed hands. “You let him die. You could have stopped me.”

  She didn’t move. For long moments we stared at each other across the six feet of intervening space. Then her cheeks stretched again into the mockery of a smile. The unearthly gleam of her black eyes betrayed how much hate she had for me, for all the living, but I understood. The only thing she hated more than me was him. She was free now. Free to rip my throat out, eat my flesh, feed. But I think in the end, she wasn’t sure she could take me either.

  She opened her mouth, and a man’s voice came out. “Well, this is quite a pickle we find ourselves in, isn’t it?”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle a little, bleakly. “Yeah, you could say that.”

  It was a woman’s voice next, someone elderly perhaps. “I just don’t know what I’ll do without him. He always took care of everything.”

  She was doing it on purpose, somehow. Those echoes, those memories of long dead conversations, she was calling them up, using them to speak for her. “You go far, far away, where you can’t hurt anyone.”

  A man’s voice again. “A growin’ boy’s gotta eat!”

  I forced myself all the way to my feet. “If you hurt anyone else, I will come for you. I will end you. You know that.”

  The next voice was John Wayne’s, or a really good impression thereof. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” Finally, she bared her rotting teeth at me in one last voiceless snarl, and started fading back into the trees. Her parting shot, though, chilled me
to the bone. A deep gravelly voice emerged from the darkness. “You are to beink careful.”

  Ivan’s voice. I’d know it, and his butchered English, anywhere. Somewhere, sometime, Handless had been close enough to Ivan to hear him speak.

  About five minutes later, a bird chirped nearby, proving that she was truly gone.

  I know I sat there for at least forty-five minutes, perched on the jagged pink boulders until my legs stopped shaking and my breath didn’t burn in my lungs anymore. Idly, I peeled the flaking black skin off my arm, the demon tattoo erased with the contract I’d fulfilled. The sky was growing light in the east, false dawn heralding the passing of another night.

  And I was still here.

  I couldn’t find the hilt of my sword, lost somewhere in the stones, but I carried the blade with me as I slowly picked my way down the rockslide. My hands were stiff, and the cuts across my palms seeped blood every time I tried to flex my fingers. I hurt everywhere.

  I also had no idea where the hell Marty’s truck was. How far had I come in my flight through the trees? But the great thing about being on a mountain is that down is usually the direction you want to go. So I headed down, my exhausted feet stumbling more than once on the uneven terrain.

  Eventually, I found the plucky little stream again, and by following it I found the clearing in the trees where I’d first called the Yeti. Even just thinking of him brought a sour film to the back of my throat, and I wished vainly for something to drink.

  I’m not dumb enough to drink out of a mountain stream. Duh. But I could wash the blood from my hands there. For some reason, the thought of staining Marty’s truck with my blood was overwhelmingly unacceptable.

  I knelt, noting which joints ached in all the wrong places. By morning, I’d barely be able to move. I dipped my hands into the ice-cold water, letting it run over the deep cuts and numb away the pain. I examined the injuries with a curious detachment, marveling that I still had motion in my fingers at all. I’d sliced my palms up pretty good.

  Though . . . I gingerly wiped the caked blood off my left palm, letting the water carry away the grime, and realized that I couldn’t see a cut at all. Looking at my right, I found the same there, my palm unmarred. Where my knuckles should have been scraped and bloodied, I found unbroken skin.

  “Oh holy . . .” So, Cam’s coin had worked after all. I knew I couldn’t leave it there in the stream for just anyone to find. What if someone noticed this little creek suddenly had healing properties? I dug in the icy mud for a few moments, trying to find just where I’d buried the bespelled quarter, but I had no luck. Hell, I could have been yards off, in either direction. I finally had to resign myself to leaving it, and hoping that the spell would wear off before anyone noticed.

  The Suburban was right where I’d left it, when I finally managed to make my way to the right location. I threw what was left of my katana in the back, and deep down I mourned my loss. She’d been good to me. She’d been there with me since the very beginning.

  On the passenger seat, Cole’s phone glowed, indicating a missed call and a waiting message.

  “We’re fine,” were the first words out of his mouth. “Everyone’s fine, and we got Mira on the phone. She was at the amusement park. Can you believe it? Zane’s gonna be okay. Call me, big brother, soon as you get this. God, please call.”

  I would. I’d call him as soon as I got off the mountain, preferably before someone arrested me for trespassing. As soon as my hands stopped shaking. Maybe when the full-body shudders subsided. Definitely after my vision stopped being all black around the edges.

  But first, I was going to call my wife, and I didn’t even care what time it was back home.

  She was expecting me. The phone rang only once. “Jesse??”

  “Hey, baby.” I couldn’t help it. I had to smile at the sound of her voice, so thick with worry and tight with relief. “Did I wake you?”

  Of course I hadn’t woken her. She’d been pacing the floors, for the thousandth or so time, wondering if I was alive or dead, if the next phone ring was going to be that call. “Goddess, Jess. Where are you?”

  “Um . . . somewhere on Pikes Peak? I paid Viljo a visit. He says hey.”

  “Are you all right? Cole said you were fighting.”

  How did Cole know . . . ? Oh yeah. The Yeti went bye-bye, and Zane’s tattoo flaked off. That’s how he knew. “Um . . . yeah, a little. It’s all right. I won.”

  She took a deep breath, and I could hear the squeak of our bed as she sank down onto it. “How badly are you hurt?”

  Good question. “Actually . . . not too bad. Gonna be a lovely shade of purple in a few hours, but nothing fatal. Nothing even debilitating.” Sore and stiff and bruised was way better than filleted and bleeding and dying. Infinitely better. Hell, compared to my usual adventures, I’d come out of this one the rosy picture of health.

  “You’re sure? You’re not . . . you’re not lying to make me feel better?”

  “No, baby. Promise.” Of course, I’d lied to her about other things. Omitted. Dodged. It was no wonder she thought I might be fibbing now. I deserved her doubt too much to even be hurt by it. “Physically, I’m fine. Swear.”

  “And not physically?”

  Ah, that was the question. For days, I’d buried my fear, crammed it down deep where no one else could see. I’d been running on adrenaline and instinct for three straight days now, wrapping myself in it like armor. But all of that was gradually washing away as I sat here, leaving me with nothing but belated terror. I rested my forehead on my knees when my vision started to swim again, my blood pressure humming in my ears. “It was him. It was the one in my dreams. He came back.” God . . . he came back. And if he could come back once, he could come back again. That certain knowledge sent shudders through my body so hard I almost dropped the phone. “Are you all right there? You and the kids? Nothing weird?”

  Handless had been near Ivan. Which meant the Yeti had. It wasn’t unthinkable that he’d been near my wife and daughter too. Estéban.

  Mira was exasperated when she answered. “We’re fine. It’s you I’m worried about. Do you need help? I can call Ivan, or Avery, or . . . Someone can come get you.”

  “No, I’ll be fine. I’m gonna . . . just sit here a bit and catch my breath. Then I’m gonna go hook up with the guys again. We’ll be home either late today or tomorrow, okay?”

  “You call. You call every time you guys stop for something, all right? I want to know that you’re coming home.”

  “I always come home, baby.” Oops. There’s that lie again. “Hey, I hear you got Zane all patched up.”

  “Oh, yeah. Cameron seems to have some basic magical ability. Enough that it worked. You’re going to have to explain all that to me when you get home.” She didn’t want to talk about Cam and Zane, I could tell that much. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked one more time. “Jess, if you need help . . .”

  “Baby, I’m fine. And you should get some sleep. Anna’s gonna drag you out of bed in a couple hours whether you want to or not. I’ll see you both soon.”

  She heaved a heavy sigh. “I . . . Be careful, please. Come home.”

  “I will. Love you, baby.”

  “I love you too, Jess.”

  I hung up the phone and tried to muster the energy to get to my feet. The sun rose while I sat on the ground leaning on Marty’s dented fender. It lit the world in shades of fire. It was beautiful.

  20

  There was a variety of interesting headlines in several news-type publications in the days and weeks following my pseudovacation.

  The first one made national news, all the way from Fort Collins, Colorado. Apparently, an oxygen tank exploded in a storage room at the local hospital, damaging a hallway and causing the evacuation of the entire facility. Everyone was so thankful that it wasn’t a tank in a patient’s room, and that the injuries were minimal. No one could figure out just why the tank exploded, or what it was doing in the storage room where it didn�
�t belong. Investigations were ongoing.

  It took Cole a week (and most of a six-pack) to tell me what really happened.

  “You’re going to think I’m insane, big brother,” he mentioned quietly one night. “Absolutely out of my ever-loving mind.”

  The Yeti had walked right into the ER in his human guise, like he owned the place. At his heels were two of his minions, scuttling along like the good little pets they were.

  “It was like nobody saw them. Like they couldn’t see them.” Cole shook his head. “Why could we see them, and no one else?”

  “People see what they want to see. You guys kinda had it crammed down your throat.” Really, I had no idea what I was talking about. Philosophy I could explain. Mystic shit, not so much. Despite my eerily accurate dream, I was not a magic user. I knew this. I believed this. So what the hell had happened to me up there?

  “Anyway . . . I saw him come in, before they saw me, and I yanked the curtains shut around Zane’s bed.”

  They’d retreated out the backside of the ER, into the maintenance hallways of the hospital, wheeling Zane’s bed between them. Duke padded along silently, like he understood the risk they were taking.

  Why no one stopped them, I don’t think any of us will ever know. At Will’s direction, they turned away from the patient room elevators and toward the operating rooms. There was only one way in or out down there, to keep it sterile, and Will figured there’d be fewer innocents present so late at night.

  They might have gotten away clean, if the bed’s wheel hadn’t gotten caught on a sharp corner, jostling it. In his pained delirium, Zane moaned.

  Demons track by sound, or so Axel said. I think he must have been telling the truth, because all it took was that moan, several hallways distant, to alert the Yeti and his zombie pets.

  “We tried to stay ahead of them, but the kid was half awake by that point, and kept hollering. They came right to us. We could hear their claws, scrabbling on the floor tiles.”