You just kill it, he thought, and charged in.
He closed with the dark shape, and then he was inside the circle of Darius’s arms. The smell of decay and rottenness and plain old Cree, plain old sweaty human, Jake’s smell or Darius’s or both, was cloying in Jake’s nostrils. He could not get a good grip; Darius’s torso was twisting and bulging, growing outward and upward into something else, a slithering presence, incredibly strong. For all of that there did not seem to be much fight in him. One quick swipe would be all it took. You killed it by killing it, that was all. It was the only way to make the source of your pain go away, the only way to conquer it.
Jake brought the knife up, his teeth bared.
Not your path, Jake. Deserae’s voice again, no longer warm but stern. Not yours.
He paused, the point of the knife inches from Darius’s navel. A vision of Rachel came back to him now, wiping the blood and mud from her face at the bottom of the chasm after Jake had tackled her, the sky above them laced with writhing tendrils.
Come on, Jake. Let’s go up.
He paused. The knife dropped a fraction of an inch. What would happen once he gutted Darius, if he succeeded in killing him? The presence would still have to go somewhere, would still have to run with something. And Rachel was still alive. She might not go willingly, but she would go with it. She would run until she, like Henry, dropped. Or threw herself into some awful death, as Warren had in the bonfire.
“What?” Darius’s voice was not much more than a snarl. “What?”
“Take me,” Jake said. “I’ll run with you.”
The shape with which he had wrestled went very still. Something—the back of a hand, perhaps—slid across his face, pressing against his cheeks, dragging over his nose. He could feel the trail it left behind, cool and wet, clinging to his skin. Darius seemed to have grown very tall in front of him, his arms not so much fending off Jake and his little knife as embracing him, pulling the killing hand in close. Now his grip loosened, and Jake forced himself to look up into those eyes, the same haunting look in them that he’d seen in the alpha female wolf, the cunning and bloodlust and inherent wildness all mingled together. But these were mixed in Darius with madness, with a savage inhumanity that made it difficult for Jake to speak his next words.
“Let her . . . let her go,” he said. “Take me.”
Darius paused, uncertain. This was different, different from Henry, different even from the offering of a child.
It doesn’t think I mean it, Jake thought.
He took the knife and pressed it against his wrist, the sharp blade biting into the skin. He drew the knife across his wrist and then held the wrist up, the dark blood bubbling into his palm. The dark shape above him groaned, then leaned down. Something that felt like a muzzle snuffled wetly into his hand, inhaling the blood. Carefully, Jake transferred the knife to his mouth, biting down on the handle. He could taste his blood on the handle, bright and coppery. He drew his other wrist against the blade, pressing deeper, and blood shot from the newly cut wrist into the air, then subsided. There was little pain.
Jake let the knife slip from his teeth. A multi-ended tendril, shaped like a child’s hand but matted with coarse fur, pressed against the burbling blood. The pattering sound on the grasses below him slowed, then stopped. The great shaggy head bent forward, whining. Far above him the wind whined in response, echoing the long, greedy call.
“Leave her alone,” Jake said.
There was no answer. He drew back, pulling his wrists free. The Darius thing moaned, a low and piteous sound.
“Leave her alone,” he said again. “Her and the children.”
It moaned again, something that sounded like assent.
“Say it louder.”
It looked up at him. The creature was no longer Darius, if it ever had been. It was a conglomeration of what had been Darius and what had been in the ground. The way it looked at Jake was similar to the way the rotten-looking black tendril had regarded him back in the valley, like an old despot, one that lives through others and despises them for it. It opened its mouth, and a single, strangled word came out.
“Ye-es.”
Jake’s vision was closing in, his head growing faint as his wrists started to ache. He could feel the presence drawing on his blood, ingesting it, making it its own. Soon he would be drained completely dry, and this—whatever it was—would lope off into the woods, recharged and freed. Perhaps Jake would run alongside it, for a while. Either way it would fulfill its part of the bargain. It would leave Rachel alone, would leave the children of Highbanks alone. For Jake had given willingly, and something told him this thing valued that above all else, the surrendering of one’s self, the giving over of your will to its own, to be a slave to its desire.
The Darius creature wrapped its arm, its tentacle, around Jake’s back to pull him closer. His pulse was racing, the pain intensifying as the creature sucked more blood from his wrists.
I’m sorry, Deserae. I’m sorry, Rachel. I’m sorry, Mom.
He was starting to panic as his life drained away. He didn’t want to die, he never had. He just hadn’t wanted to live. Jake tried to keep still, even as his brain and body began to fight against the Darius thing, to struggle to regain what was his. He pushed at the coarse hair, and his fingers plunged into a damp, twisting mass under the hide. There was nothing there to push against. He tried pulling back, and the tentacle wrapped around his body tightened, drawing him in, in, in.
He forced himself to stop resisting. There would be no pulling away, and in that instant of understanding Jake realized he had been right when he decided it was time to stop running. He had been right earlier when, hemmed in by Warren, he had charged forward. No matter what his choice was, he had to go straight into it. No more backing away, not even in these last few minutes he had left.
Especially not in these last few minutes.
“You want it?” Jake asked. “Take it!”
From deep inside himself he let go of all the pain he had held tight through the years. First was the rootlessness, the sudden orphaning when he had lost his father to the aneurysm, then his mother to Coop. Next were the long years in the military, the nausea and guilt and elation of his first kill, then the slow grinding away, the long months spilling more blood, all the blood soaking into the flinty earth, sanding the edge off his youth, blunting what had been bright and hard and sharp, leaving him calloused, indifferent. There was the terrible last night with Deserae, the twisted, blood-splattered steel, the torn fabric spilling out of the passenger seat. Then room 217, the steady beeping, the eyes vacuous and gone, her mind gone, the rest of her still tethered to a world she could no longer meaningfully exist in. He let the hurt and pain and shame and regret all flow out, letting loose all the controls he had placed around it, mentally cutting away ropes and nets, letting it all go from him into this awful subterranean thing inhaling his essence. It would have all of it.
It whined. It moaned. The suction on his wrists lessened, became hesitant.
Take it, Jake thought. Take my pain. Let it grow inside you like a virus.
He had one more thing to give this creature. The chronic mental and emotional pains were not all he had carried. For years now he had harbored his own infestation: the insidious bacteria lodged deep in his joints. He concentrated on the aching that was still there, insulated by the sharper pains in his wrists and his feet. Feeling the pull of the creature connecting to it, deep into his lymph and marrow, the tick-borne malady that caused so much pain that it had driven hundreds, if not thousands, of afflicted people to kill themselves.
The creature gave a strangled cry and staggered backward. Jake regarded it on wobbling legs, his vision blurring. It had expanded, Darius’s compact frame spreading out and becoming wispy and tall, the hair long and thick, the moldy patches digesting and changing his face, until what remained had only the vaguest resemblance to a human being. The legs seemed impossibly long—the lower body of a great runner. Darius’s brown
eyes now had a greenish tint, and of all his features, only the scar in his eyebrow remained, the patchwork of growth forming around the healed tissue.
But now that great, tall frame, which seemed as though it might continue to expand and expand until it filled the night sky, hunched over. It wrapped its arms around its stomach and bent at the knees, then contorted violently. It grabbed at a great knobby elbow, then its hairy shoulder, its teeth gnashing.
Jake could think of nothing to do with his wrists, so he pressed them together in a bloody smear, the sudden flare of pain making him focus. The creature was still twisting around and around, tearing at its own flesh, gibbering at the sky. Jake saw a thin line of reflected moonlight, the blade of his skinning knife. He needed to cut a tourniquet for his right wrist. The left was not cut nearly as deep, but he had found an artery on the right, and it was pumping out a steady stream of blood. He watched it, mesmerized, then leaned down to pick up the knife. He had already lost too much blood.
Lost lots of stuff, he thought. Never mind about that. The wrists, Jake.
He picked up the knife and it squirted from his blood-drenched hands. He scrambled after it, losing sight of the small knife and then finding it again in another spray of moonlight. It was almost impossible to grip, the pain and blood making the slender handle slip from his grasp time and time again. He felt something more than panic, something close to terror, run through him. It could not end like this, bleeding out while he chased his knife across the forest floor. A few yards away the creature gave a long and wavering cry, then fell to the ground, its great hairy feet thrashing in the tall grass.
Then Rachel stirred and sat up, blinking, just a few feet away. She looked from Jake to the struggling creature and then back to Jake. He held out his wrists, a mute gesture, more explanation than appeal. Blood splattered onto the tall grass, dark smears streaking down the yellow blades.
“Jake,” she said. “Your belt.”
He looked down stupidly. A second later she was there next to him, her fingers fumbling to unbuckle Henry’s simple leather belt. He held out his right hand and she cinched the belt tight around his arm, placing the end of the strap in his mouth while she unbuckled her own belt and placed it on his other arm. She took the loose end and wound it around his forearm, grunting as she pulled, then tucked the end under one of the loops. She peered at the wounds for a second, nodded to herself, then used his knife to cut several long strips from his shirt to use as bandages.
“It was in my head,” she said. “My body. I felt it, Jake. I tasted it.”
He murmured a reply and let his eyelids drop. She slapped him hard across the face and his eyes opened, her face coming back into focus. “No,” she said. “Stay with me, Jake. I can’t carry you out of here if you faint.”
There was a scuffling noise behind them. Slowly they turned to regard the creature, which had shrunk in on itself, the long legs and arms now contorted, bent at sharp angles. It was dragging itself along the ground, giving off a high, whining cry as it made for the far side of the clearing. It was mostly hidden in the tall grass, a dark shape scuttling back for the cover of the woods. Behind them, flashlights had slashed through the woods, men’s voices bouncing between the tree trunks.
“The knife,” he said. “I need to finish it.”
“I’ll do it.”
“No.” He held out his bandaged hand. Rachel ignored him and strode forward. She caught the creature at the edge of the woods, planting her boot in the middle of its knobby back. It seemed almost insubstantial, not much more than a great, fragile spider with several broken legs. It looked up at them, its green eyes full of pain and loathing, one of the tentacles waving weakly in the air. Rachel drew the knife back.
She can kill it, Jake realized. She can end it. It’s caught between forms, and the medicine I gave it was bitter. Bitter.
He strode forward and brought his bandaged forearm up, blocking the downward motion that Rachel meant for the back of the creature’s neck. She turned to him, ready to fight at first, and then perplexed when she saw his face and understood he wasn’t under its spell. He lowered his bandaged arm, the blood from his cut pattering slowly onto the grass. The creature was watching him, lips curled back to reveal its green-yellow teeth, fuzzy with mold. Rachel fell back a step, staring at the creature. She looked horrified, as though she had not yet seen what it was, had not truly understood what had been inside her until this very moment.
“Go, then,” Jake said. “You’ve taken it from me. Now run with it.”
It regarded him for a long moment, the hate and pain and anger in its expression mixing with something else. Not fear, not respect, but an acknowledgment, the barest tip of its misshapen head. One creature of the dark woods nodding to the other.
“Go.”
They watched as it dragged itself into the shadows of the trees, seeming to meld with the darkness. There were a dozen flashlight beams coming their way, the men in front already breaking into the clearing. Jake felt a surge of pride in the people of his hometown, people he barely knew, yet who were part of his family. They might not be coming for him, or not just for him, but they were coming. They were beating the darkness back into the night, bringing light with them. He tilted a little, suddenly dizzy again, and Rachel was there, under his shoulder, looking up at him with curiosity.
“Jake?”
He looked down. “I know.”
“It looked like you, Jake. For a second it looked like your face.”
“It’s okay.”
“Are you sure?”
He looked once more into the woods. His wrists were throbbing with a deep, biting pain. Every part of him seemed to hurt in some way and yet . . . and yet it felt different now. The sear of a clean cut. The knot of people had almost reached them, the flashlight beams dancing across the tall, blood-smeared grass.
“No,” he said. “But I have hope.” He looked up at the night sky, at the Little Dipper scooping away at the darkness. Rachel’s hand pressed against his lower back, supporting him. “I have hope.”
Chapter 18
He still hated the painting.
Jake stood in the hallway, looking at the red and blue abstract, the bright glare of color. He rubbed a finger over the bump of skin on one wrist, then the other. It was becoming a habit, the tracing of the scar tissue, as though the knobby skin and flesh were his very own rabbit’s foot.
He was the only one in the hallway except for a custodian, swirling his mop in a steady, monotonous swishing motion at the far end, and the occasional nurse. It was after visiting hours, but nobody seemed to care that he was here. He had signed in to the epidemiology lab three hours earlier. After his appointment, he had gone to the pharmacy and filled his prescription—extra-strength doxycycline—then hung out in the cafeteria, drinking black coffee through the dinner hour, until it was only he and an old man, eighty-five or ninety years old. The old man was staring at a newspaper, the sports section of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, but did not turn a page in the hour Jake was there with him.
Now Jake craned his head, listening for the beeping. He had things to say, and this visit was, if not something he had looked forward to, then at least something not as terrible as it had been before. Before, his thoughts had alternated between regret and the intense desire to end the beeping, to pick up a pillow and put an end to it, knowing he was too cowardly to do such a thing.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it free and looked down at the text.
You okay?
It was Rachel. She was in Arlington, and would be for several more months as her government contract wound down. There seemed to be waning interest in promethium, at least on the surface; the exploratory team’s trespasses had made the national news in both the United States and Canada. The Canadian Parliament had responded quickly and decisively, banning all mineral exports to the U.S. and declaring an area of a thousand square kilometers around Resurrection Valley to be the newly formed Amiki National Refuge, off-limits to timb
er harvesting and mineral extraction. Rachel, although she had been cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, was told she would face stiff civil penalties and jail time if she attempted to enter Canada again in her lifetime. She had laughed a bit at the restriction, much to the chagrin of the Mountie telling her about it, a dark-haired man with a serious gray jacket and black tie, a guy who looked more like an undertaker than an officer of the law.
“That’s fine,” she had said. “I’ve seen enough of it.”
The Canadian forensics team had gone into Resurrection Valley, removing the drill rig and the rest of the materials they had left behind. Jake and Rachel waited for their report, expecting to hear something about the devastation—perhaps something about the corpses in the valley, or Billy’s or Weasel’s body in the forest—but whatever the forensics team found remained secret. Or perhaps, Jake thought, there was nothing there of interest anymore. Perhaps it had all decayed, gone back into the earth. He’d heard some rumors about payments to families of the deceased, large checks enclosed in cards expressing sincere condolences. It all seemed not to matter very much anymore to him, although he knew Jaimie’s and Greer’s families were demanding more answers.
I’m fine, he texted back. The phone was new, the technology a bit jarring. The world had moved along while he was in the woods. Going in to see her now.
He walked through the door. Deserae had lost weight since he’d last visited her, her face hollow and sunken. Her eyes were closed and the hair along her temples had started to turn gray. She was a year younger than Jake. He pushed a lock of hair back behind her ear and took her hand in his own. It was cool to the touch, unresponsive. He listened to the beeping, he looked at her face. He felt the lifeless weight of her hand in his own. He was thinking of one of their favorite lines in literature, back when they were young and in love and would read to each other. His tastes were different from hers, but she had liked this book, had imagined herself with cropped hair in the Spanish countryside behind enemy lines, or sometimes as the stout, fierce woman dealing with her traitorous husband—a husband who had deserted them and betrayed them, and then, in the darkest part of his retreat, returned. Deserae would recite variations of the lines to him, usually in jest, and he could hear the lines from For Whom the Bell Tolls, her voice still with him. It always would be, and not so long ago he thought that was a curse. Now it felt like, if not a blessing, then at least a comfort.
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