He scuttled in the dirt in his desperation to turn around, and shot back the way he had come. He’d left Gerda alone. He shouldn’t have done that. Her tame wolf-cousins were long since dead, killed by the monster, and now Youngblood had left her alone.
Youngblood barreled out of the woods and into the open, into the blinding sun of the clearing, his teeth bared and his legs shaking. The man and his Gerda-pup stood outside the entrance to the tree den. He had a hand on her shoulder and she was making short mewling sounds, with her face in her hands. She was sad, that much he recognized, but she was not injured. Youngblood realized he was standing in broad daylight. He sneaked behind the man’s chopping stump and peered over its pock-marked surface.
The man pulled his she-pup close, wrapping his arms around her, and Youngblood could feel the comfort radiating from him. The man was sad too, because he felt his she-pup’s pain as his own. As Youngblood watched them grieve together, he connected with the man and his she-pup. Their pain and their love was the same as his. It was complicated in ways he couldn’t grasp, but at the center, their feelings worked the same way as his own. Now he understood what had made the tame wolf-cousins jump and bark and slobber over men.
Youngblood knew the sorrow of the man and his she-pup because Youngblood had experienced it when his uncles died. Youngblood’s own heart had felt as torn as their bodies had looked. Not two days after they were killed, the pack had split up, half of them following his father, and half of them following his oldest cousin. They had all run away, but Youngblood had pranced in place, much as the man and his she-pup now stood arm in arm, rocking gently. Youngblood had wavered back and forth, uncertain, as he watched his family fall apart.
He could have gone with either half of his pack. He wanted to go with them, and it had ripped him in half to watch them separate and flee. He howled for them to come back, because he knew he couldn’t leave, no matter how much he wanted to. If he left, the she-pup, Gerda would be killed by the deadwalker. He knew he could not stop the deadwalker by himself. He wasn’t even sure the pack could stop the monster. But he could not abandon the she-pup, leaving her with no one to watch over her, because his wolf instincts told him the deadwalker would come for her. He had returned to the bodies of his dead uncles and lain near them all night, begging his family with many long howls. They did not return.
The man and his Gerda-pup entered their tree den and closed it behind them. Youngblood felt something move in the dirt beneath his paws. He dug and unearthed two thin beetles. He gobbled them down before running for the woods. Their shells snapped between his teeth and flooded his mouth with a sour taste.
The Appalachian Mountains, 1912
Garret pulled himself up the wooded slope behind the Malvern’s mansion. He was on hands and knees. His breath came in white plumes in front of him. His body was responding slowly and shaking violently. His hands and feet were like bricks on the ends of his arms and legs, little sensation, heavy, mostly useless.
He pulled himself into the dark of Mrs. Malvern’s gardens. The marble statues she’d imported from Italy stood all around in the dim light from the mansion windows. Their usually beautiful bodies were twisted by darkness and frost into grotesque specters, contorted, frozen with fingers reaching for him as he crawled past.
His mind was sludge, driven by the need to find Molly, to make sure she was warm and cared for. He dug in a gravel bed at the base of a statue, trying to pick up a few pebbles, but his numb, stick-like fingers only pushed them around. Garret growled in frustration and fatigue and pain. He drove his flat hand into the gravel like a shovel.
One foot after another, he passed through the darkness along the back of the Malvern’s mansion, stopping below Molly’s dormer. He looked up, then down dumbly at the pebbles in his hand. He tried to seize one, but his fingers wouldn’t close around it. They wouldn’t close at all. They behaved as if they were dead, as dead as the twisted statues around him in the dark. Another heavy shiver wracked his bare torso. Where was his shirt? Where was the horse blanket?
He looked up at Molly’s window and cried out through stiff lips. If only he could grasp a pebble, one pebble and fling it at the glass, she would come. But he couldn’t. Garret hugged himself and wondered why he was suddenly lying on the ground. He wasn’t shivering anymore, that was nice.
A hand was on his shoulder. It was so hot it burned his skin. He yelped and pulled away. Molly was there, she was throwing a blanket over him and trying to get him to rise. Maybe for her he could do it. Maybe.
* * *
Molly shut the cellar door behind herself and turned in time to keep Garret from crashing into the turnip bins.
“Garret,” she said, grabbing him again. “Come with me Garret. Hurry, but be quiet.”
She looked at his face, turning greyish blue, his uncomprehending eyes. At least they stayed on her, and he seemed willing to follow her wherever she wanted him to go.
“Garret,” she said as she pulled him towards the back stairs. “Say something, you’re scaring me.”
Molly’s heart started to pound again when she wrapped her arms around him. He was cold as death, but he wasn’t shivering. She didn’t know what that meant, but it couldn’t be good. Her imagination, her only ally during life’s worst moments, suddenly turned on her, treating Molly to three different views of Garret’s blue corpse, lying frozen and dead in her yard, the cellar, and her bedroom.
Her bedroom? Was that where she was taking him? Where else could she go? Her father had told her mother what Garret had done. Her father might not want Garret to freeze, but her mother wouldn’t care. Not at this point. Not while she was drowning in the middle of her indignation and injured pride.
“Step up, Garret. We have to climb the stairs.” He’s cold as ice.
Lord, he was heavy for one so small. She didn’t realize how strong his skinny frame had to be until it wasn’t moving under its own power. The back stairs were dark, but Molly knew them by heart. Garret, however, did not. He kept falling against her, and against the wall. As they climbed, Molly became frightened as she had not been since she was a little girl. Frightened as she had not been, even when Charity died. Charity’s death had left her in agony, to be sure, but it had not frightened her as did the cold, weak boy beside her.
He was dying. And if he died, she would be alone. As alone as the last pine tree in a bleak tundra. Alone like the last blade of grass on the dead earth as the sun set for the last time.
“Garret, listen to me, we have to hurry. I have to get you warm.”
But if anything, he was gradually slowing. Somehow they made it to her bedroom door without being spotted. She opened it while Garret leaned against the facing.
She had just bustled him through the door when Bramley, who knew she was not allowed to leave her room, called down the hall. “Ms. Antonia, if you need something, I’ll bring it to you.”
She almost slammed the door, but caught herself, and tried to remember what she was supposed to feel like as far as Bramley knew. Angry, was that it? Yes she was supposed to be a sixteen year old girl, angry at her parents. “No I don’t want… Yes! I want a mug of hot cider! On the double, Bramley!”
She’d never spoken to him that way before. Whatever. She slammed the door and ran to her personal linen closet, ripped blankets and down comforters out and flung them on the floor. She turned to Garret, who was in the middle of the room. He had sunk to his knees. He was kneeling, but with his head and shoulders slouched. He was eerily still.
He was also a mess. Shirt gone, revealing his thin, muscular, blueish torso. His pants were ripped, no doubt from crawling through the woods, and he was bruised and cut and smeared with blood from head to toe. His hair was caked with it.
“Garret, stand up,” she said. He did, weakly, and she pulled off his one remaining suspender, dropping his bloody pants to the floor. His long johns were the most pitiful part of him. They were so old that they retained little shape, and they had been cut off to shorts, undou
btedly because what was below the knees had been little more than a mass of patches. What was left was also mostly patches, all of them badly stitched.
For some reason, despite the fact that he was beaten and bloody, the sight of the stitching on the patches hurt her heart worse even than his injuries. She had wondered if he maintained his own clothes. Now she knew. Garret, do your parents do nothing for you?
She guided him gently towards her bed. “Get under the covers.”
He did, awkwardly, and she had to help him climb into place so his feet weren’t hanging off the end.
“Up a little bit,” she grunted, pushing on his back. “A little more. There you go.”
She seized blanket after blanket from the heap in the floor and flung them over him until she was afraid the weight was going to smother him.
A knock sounded at the door. Heart in her throat, Molly flung herself across the room and against the door to keep it closed. Bramley’s concerned voice came through. “Ms. Malvern, are you alright?”
“Yes, yes,” she said hastily, standing and opening the door a crack. “I just, um, tripped and fell against the door.” Then she remembered she was supposed to be angry and sulky instead of scared out of her wits. She snatched the cup of cider out of his hand and slammed the door.
“Thank you Bramley,” she haughtily. Or maybe it was sulkily. Or maybe it wasn’t like either of those things. Anyway, he left.
She turned back to the bed and her heart stuttered. Garret’s face, the only visible part of him, was grey. His eyes were half open and glazed. She rushed to him. “Garret!”
He stirred.
“Garret, drink this.”
It took a while, but after a couple swallows of the hot liquid, he revived enough to down the cup. She had to get him warm right now. She caught sight of one of the books on her shelf. It was a survival guide which her uncle had bought for her. It contained trappers’ tricks for snaring animals and Indian tricks for making canoes out of next to nothing, and it was all quite boring, but she’d read it anyway to please her self-obsessed uncle. Now she was glad she had. Molly doffed her gown, leaving herself in next to nothing and climbed into bed with Garret. He had curled into fetal position, so she lay with her chest against his back and wrapped her arms around his chest. It felt like climbing into bed with a polar bear, only with no hair at all. Lord, the boy was as slick as she was, except a little hair below his naval, leading down beneath his long johns. She snuggled up with him.
Within a minute, he was shivering again, violently. A while later, the deathly pallor left his face and he began to feel warm to her. Somewhere between the end of the shivers and his return to human warmth, he fell into either a fitful sleep or a partial daze. Heavy with relief and weariness, Molly leaned to her nightstand and blew out the lamp.
Warm darkness covered them both, and the mound of blankets. Now that she was fairly certain he was going to make it, her fear of death could make room for fatigue and fear of tomorrow. He couldn’t leave right now, that much was certain, but if she couldn’t get him out of the house tomorrow without being seen, it would go badly. Terribly. She didn’t know what her father would do. His influence might be wide enough to starve Garret’s family before they could find their way beyond his reach.
She wrapped herself around him, one arm under his neck, the other around his chest, but no matter how tightly she hugged herself to him, it felt as if he was slipping away. She’d snatched him from death’s bony hands, but if she couldn’t stay awake and one of the servants came to check on her in the night, or if she didn’t wake early enough to get Garret out of the house before someone entered...
She clung to him and touched his jaw, his ear. As she ran her hand over his shoulder, down his arm, his chest and stomach, tears began to slip out, because she knew why she was doing it. She had to feel his warmth and life, needed to memorize everything about him, she had to make sure she never forgot the feel of what it was like to be with him. Because she might not have the chance again. She wasn’t thinking straight. She knew that. She was so tired.
“Garret,” she whispered, and pressed her cheek to the back of his neck. He stirred drunkenly and made an unconscious noise. She’d lost Charity. She couldn’t lose him too.
“Garret, please don’t leave me.” But she knew the choice would not be his.
* * *
Garret dreamed. In his dreams, he was with Molly and Sarn. Both of them together. He dreamed all of them were ageless. One moment Sarn was a toddler, taking his first step again, towards Garret, his pudgy arms outstretched for his big brother, his cheeks dimpled with the grin Garret hadn’t seen from him in so many years. Then Sarn was his current age, hurting badly, bleeding to death on the inside. Then Sarn was older even than Garret was now. They all lived somewhere far away, and Sarn had married and built a house beside Garret’s. Sarn had grown strong and more heavily muscled than their father.
Garret had married too. Molly was his wife. Her smile brought warmth to their little house. Her laugh filled it with love. Garret wept as he slept, inexpressibly grateful that she had agreed to be his.
The dreams turned darker. Garret saw a shadow growing around his little family. His and Molly’s children played in the yard, but under a descending darkness. They didn’t seem to see what loomed over them. Garret saw the darkness coming, heard it speak. He knew what it wanted. It wanted his firstborn, little Samuel, now a toddler who grinned like his uncle Sarn. Molly swept little Samuel up, grinning as she tickled his belly. None of them knew what was coming. None but Garret.
He snapped awake, soaked with sweat in the dark. He was groaning, while a hand covered his mouth. A desperate voice begged him to be silent. It was Molly. Garret pulled the hand away and sat up, gasping. “Molly? Molly, are you okay!” He nearly screamed it.
“Shhhh!” Her voice was near hysteria in the dark. “Garret, please be quiet!”
Garret became aware of pain. Lots of it, registering from all parts of his body, but it wasn’t important. Something was coming for Molly. Darkness was no longer the absence of light, it had become a predator. It was close. He could feel it, as a rabbit feels the amber gaze of a fox. It was very close.
It was above them, its massive weight pressing down on the roof.
“Molly!” Garret grabbed for her, but she had leaned away towards something. A match flared, then a lamp wick began to glow. Garret had to get her out of bed and out the door. He knew they couldn’t outrun it, but they had to try. Maybe he could distract it, buy her a few minutes.
“Garret!” Molly squeaked as Garret scooped her up and hauled them both out of the bed. “What are you doing?”
The door flew open and the light of three lanterns opened the darkness around them, disorienting Garret. He wasn’t in his bedroom, or his house, or the house he’d dreamed about. He didn’t know where he was. People started shouting, dark and light bobbed and thrashed together. A woman was screaming with rage, it sounded like Molly’s mother. Molly’s father was holding one of the lamps and bellowing commands to a small retinue of servants. Garret was still blinking in the light, and before he could figure out what was happening, someone snatched Molly from his arms.
Garret went wild with fear, plunged into the mass of people who were trying to hold him back. He had to find her. He had to get her out. The thing on the roof would kill her if he didn’t.
“Garret!” She cried somewhere nearby.
Mr. Malvern’s pudgy form was still behind the wall of dressing-gown wearing servants, who were coming at Garret from all sides. They had taken Molly away, and if she died it would be Garret’s fault for not taking care of her. Garret managed to fling one of the servants aside, but three more bore him to the floor.
“Let me go! We have to get out of here!”
Someone was stoking Molly’s fireplace to provide more light. The flames began to crackle, and the sound kindled a latent instinct in Garret. He’d never feared fire before, but now it frightened him as much as the thing abo
ve them. Generations of breeding reared up in him, telling him of death and destruction from the orange flames. He was trapped, and fire and death awaited Molly, and he was in pain. Wild strength filled his limbs.
Holding down a young man is one thing. Holding down a wild animal is completely another. Screaming and howling, Garret fought them all off. He flung Mr. Malvern, who was trying to block the door, aside. Down the dark hallway came Molly’s voice, and the voice of her mother. Though he didn’t understand the words, Garret recognized the tones in Mrs. Malvern’s voice. It was the sound of a parent, ready to do anything to save her child. Garret knew Mrs. Malvern wanted to protect her daughter, but the knowledge didn’t slow Garret. He shot down the hallway towards the lamp glow in which they stood. They were oblivious to the predator above them, and that made them all vulnerable. He had no idea how they couldn’t feel it, shifting its massively muscular weight across the roof, always keeping itself directly above Molly.
Molly was not going to die tonight. Garret knew no more than that.
As he moved into the light and grabbed her, he dimly realized that she was as naked as he was. They could easily freeze outside. There was no choice. The house was not a den of safety. It was a cage, a corner from which there would be no escape. The Predator had chosen this place, Garret knew, for he understood how predators thought. Mrs. Malvern screamed as Garret whisked Molly out of the light.
“Garret, stop!” Molly cried, “You’re making it worse!” As Garret hit the stairs, she slipped his grip, but instead of running away, she grabbed him by the hand and changed directions.
She was sobbing when she said, “We have to get you out of here.”
The words rung some sort of human bell within Garret. He blinked and took a deep breath as they crossed a hall and descended another set of stairs. Something had seemed so important a moment ago, but now he couldn’t remember what it was. Something had been driving him in terror, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember what it was. Something on the roof?
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