Ulyana Ivanovna met him when he returned. She pulled him to one side. “Your friend’s leg is infected. I’m sorry. I’ve cleaned it again and stitched it up, but he’s in a great deal of pain now—and sick and hot all over. I’ve used what I could from my plants, and it may clear the infection, but I don’t know.” Nikolas nodded his thanks, but he was cursing inwardly. His plan to move them on the next day, despite what they’d agreed, had now fallen through.
§ § §
Ben was sitting by the lake, throwing pebbles into the water. Nikolas sat down alongside him. Ben leant over and kissed him. “Good day at the office, darling?”
“One deer and one pig, no meetings and no emails, so a very good day. We got enough today to dry some of the meat and store it. How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good. So, if I put my hand on your thigh and squeezed, you’d be fine with that?”
Ben stared off into the distance. “You’ve spoken with Ulyana Ivanovna. It’s more than I can do. What did she say?”
“She promised you’d be fine by morning if you rest. You’ve done too much.”
Ben laid his head on Nikolas’s shoulder, and Nikolas put his arm around him. “I should wash. I must stink of the hunt.”
Ben shook his head then lifted his face for a kiss. “Distract me, yeah?” Nikolas gave him a quick kiss, but now the sense they were being watched took the edge off the pleasure. On the return to the camp, he’d debated long and hard about whether he should tell everyone of his strange encounter. He’d decided against it, but was still not sure this was the right decision.
Ben apparently sensed there was something wrong with Nikolas’s desultory kiss—Nikolas never needed encouragement if he thought something might lead to sex—and he held back. His eyes narrowed. “What?”
Nikolas sighed. “Let’s move back into the tree line first.” He helped Ben stand and limp to a pile of deadwood and then eased him down. He squatted in front of him, poking at the ground with a twig. “I believe our signal fire, or perhaps our hunting forays have been seen.”
Ben’s eyes lit up with triumph, but then he saw Nikolas’s expression. Nikolas told him the whole story. Ben obviously didn’t like it either. “Why wouldn’t they’ve followed your prints and spoken with you? It doesn’t make any sense. Do the others know?”
“Do you think I should tell them? That’s what I wanted to ask you. I don’t know what to do for the best. My instincts are screaming at me to get the fuck out of here as fast as we can.”
“Hey, you’re scaring the children, Nik. Seriously? You spooked?”
Nikolas made a face then glanced up at Ben. “This place, it’s beautiful but terrible at the same time. But now we can’t leave anyway.” He tapped Ben’s leg very gently. “We must tell them. I think we should be far more cautious what we do from now on. And maybe set guards tonight?”
“You’re kidding?”
“I think we should move Ulyana Ivanovna and Emilia in with us.”
“You move in with them for tonight. I might be restless anyway…” Ben tried to sound casual but failed miserably. Nikolas nodded. As they were now in the shelter of the trees and private, Nikolas took Ben in his arms. He rocked him for a while, stroking through his clean hair, which smelt of the fresh air and pine. He could tell Ben was in a lot of pain and his forehead was very hot. Although he implied he needed distracting, Nikolas knew Ben didn’t really want to do anything. Nikolas just held him and let him sleep for a while. At least asleep he was relieved of the pain.
* * *
It was a far grimmer group around the fire that night. No school camp songs now.
Nikolas told them of the footprints. He made light of what he’d seen and even lighter of what he thought, but essentially told them they might be trespassing on someone else’s perceived hunting area, and that they should be vigilant and not move away from the camp unless in pairs. Sitting around a campfire, illuminated, suddenly didn’t seem like such a good option to Nikolas.
Jackson and his friends talked about what Nikolas told them for some time. They couldn’t quite see it in the sinister light he had. They put forward a suggestion it could have been a woman from a village. She’d seen Nikolas, been rightly wary about approaching such a man on her own, and had returned home to bring others. Nikolas couldn’t find fault with their theory, other than knowing it was wrong. He was six foot four and didn’t want to meet the woman who had feet bigger than his and who was heavier than he was.
Jonas Terry was quiet on the subject of their mysterious watcher, and his sons seemed so under his thrall they didn’t contribute much either, but there was something in the old man’s looks toward the darkness that was unnerving. As Jonas Terry wasn’t allowed to speak to Nikolas, Ben asked him if he or his sons had seen anything that afternoon in their search for the cloudberries. The man’s eyes swivelled to Ben from the observation of the tree line, and he intoned, “Be well balanced, be vigilant and cautious at all times; for that enemy of yours, the devil, roams around like a lion roaring in fierce hunger, seeking someone to seize upon and devour.”
Ben blinked. “Uh-huh. Thanks.”
Ulyana Ivanovna was the only one who added anything useful and fortunately it was only Nikolas who understood it. She looked directly at him and stressed, “We must leave. We must pack up and go now.”
§ § §
Jackson agreed to take first watch, and Lucas volunteered to stay with him. They hunkered down a little way beyond the camp with some sturdy sticks. They’d wanted the knives, but Nikolas and Ben wouldn’t part with them. Ben had already taken himself into the shelter when Nikolas came back from checking on the guards, so Nikolas was able to skirt around the women’s shelter and head off into the tree line without being seen.
He stopped at the lake and covered his face and hands with mud then slid silently into the forest. He tracked back the way they’d gone that day, fifty feet off to one side. The forest was loud with noise at night. There was no moon. He was almost invisible. When he got back to the place where he’d seen the prints, he swung himself up into a tree and settled back to wait. He was good at waiting, good at long hours of appearing to do nothing, whilst planning, thinking, staying alert. He wished he had his sniper rifle. Hell, he wished he had his Kalashnikov. He pondered the weapons at the bottom of the lake, trying to work out a way they could dive deep enough to retrieve them. He had some idea about making an air tank from animal bladders and thought he might test it the following day. Then he thought about Ben for a while. It was possible if they built a stretcher, between seven men, they could carry him. Ben would probably have to be knocked unconscious before he’d get in it, but that could be arranged. He smiled, keeping his lips pressed together. He’d once been in a hide with a Spetsnaz soldier who’d smiled at something and a sniper had taken him out through the mouth, the glint of his white teeth giving him away in the dark.
His mind then wandered back to the cause of his current unease. He’d not told Ben the full story, of course. He’d never once told Benjamin Rider the full story about anything in his life. Why break a good habit now?
Nikolas had lived surrounded by this vast forest for three years, in one prison work camp after another, depending on the work that needed to be done. He’d listened to the rumours of the older men about things that weren’t right, things that were evil living amongst the trees. He hadn’t believed a word of what they revealed. He’d seen evil firsthand, and it’d come for him in the very tangible shape of a man with features that resembled his own. He didn’t fear the dark, and he didn’t fear Baba Yaga or things that went bump in the night.
Until, that is, the day he’d been cutting logs with a man called Victor Govorkov. Victor had needed to shit. He’d asked permission to leave the line. It was granted. A few minutes passed. A guard went to look for Victor, but he couldn’t be found. His escape was celebrated that night. Nikolas had joined in. An escape gave them all hope. The next day, returning to the line, they’d
found Victor. His head had been mounted on the stump he’d been cutting. His eyes had been removed, and his tongue split down the middle and pulled out like a snake’s. Nikolas had found him. Leading to and from the stump were moccasin tracks. Only prisoners wore moccasins, and Nikolas was pretty sure, even at aged seventeen, that this hadn’t been done by Victor’s fellow inmates.
He was never sure whether he was more scared or relieved that they’d not found the rest of Victor’s body.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Dawn came with a thick, low-lying mist that turned the whole world into a place of shadows and strange glints of light that moved like will o’ the wisp over swamp. Nikolas stretched his cramped muscles, warming them up before descending from the tree. Using the mist for cover, he returned to the camp. The two guards, Samuel Terry and Sean Sands, were asleep. The old cop should’ve known better. The boy he allowed some latitude. They shot Russian soldiers who fell asleep on sentry duty. He stepped over them and made his way to the fire and stacked it higher.
He checked on Ben and then the two women.
All seemed well.
§ § §
What. The Fuck!
Sean Sands tried to roll away from the kick, to no avail. He was being kicked! In the fucking ribs! Didn’t hurt less just because he had a few layers covering them! He grunted and rose slowly to his feet.
He might have known—the Russian—German. Whatever. Cunt.
He sized the blond man up.
Fuck but he was big. And you didn’t get those scars from counting your fucking spondoolies. A billionaire. It would make the Pope weep. All that, and a fucking billionaire as well.
But he was Russian and scarred, and Sean had been in New York during the takeover of the Russian mob. You didn’t want to mess with those fuckers. Take their kickbacks, do them some favours, but don’t mess with them.
He didn’t mess with Nikolas either.
He knew now he couldn’t take him.
He’d studied him all the previous day. Seen the way he moved effortlessly through the trees, tireless, alert, focused. Shit, he had hunted with his bare hands, a visceral connection between the animals and the death they’d been given.
So Sean knew there’d be no payback.
Not to the blond directly, anyway.
§ § §
Nikolas watched the various expressions flickering over the fat man’s face.
He read people quite easily and knew Sands loathed him.
If put to torture, Nikolas would probably admit he shouldn’t have hit him. It hadn’t been the best of introductions, and Sean Sands struck him as a man who would be very easy to win to your side. He was an opportunist, a fawning butt-licker, and butt-lickers were always useful. But the moment when that relationship could have been established was lost now. His fault, he knew. It was good to have a few faults you were willing to admit, as greater sins could then hide quietly behind, overlooked.
He was mulling over making an apology, however, and trying to get them on a better footing, when he heard a commotion from a little way further down the trail toward the camp.
Ruben Terry, just a darkened blur in the fog, was shaking his younger brother, Samuel, and shouting.
Jonas, their father, was gone.
Nikolas got the garbled story from the older brother.
Jonas Terry had taken his turn on watch with Ruben. They’d returned to the shelter together. Ruben had woken and found his father gone. He’d searched the latrine, the shoreline, only to return to camp to hear his younger brother’s confession that he’d been asleep on guard duty—that he’d only just been woken and shouted at by the big blond sodom—Ruben had broken off abruptly at that point but then he began shouting again at Samuel.
Nikolas calmed the brothers down and suggested the old man had probably woken early and decided to go foraging for mushrooms or cloudberries, and in the mist become disorientated. Ruben calmed a little but declared he’d go out and search again. Nikolas told him to wait a few moments, and he returned to check on Ben. To his relief, Ben cocked him a cheeky grin and pointed at his leg. “Not hot, not so swollen. I’m adopting Ulyana Ivanovna.”
Nikolas gave him a quick kiss. “We have a problem. Jonas Terry’s gone.”
“I heard. He’s probably—”
“Ruben’s been looking for over an hour. He wouldn’t have gone so far on his own in the dark, surely?”
Ben nodded and with Nikolas’s help emerged from the shelter and stood up. He could hardly see the others in the mist. “Should we go look for him?”
“I’m going to take Ruben, Jackson and Lucas. Sands is too slow. You stay here with him and Samuel and the women. Rely on Ulyana Ivanovna; she’ll not panic in a crisis.” He hesitated for a moment then turned back. “No heroics, Ben. I don’t want to put on your gravestone you gave your life for your fellow man. Do you understand me? That’s for tales of daring. You’re not on TV now. In my experience, heroes are people who don’t have the sense to duck when ducking is entirely appropriate.”
Ben snagged Nikolas’s jacket. “Take your own advice for once then, Nikolas Mikkelsen. No heroics.”
“Oh, I’m going to find myself a nice cave and curl up for a few hours sleep. I’ll be back when the hate preacher’s returned from converting some poor heathen bear.” They kissed briefly, and then Nikolas disappeared into the mist with his half of the group.
§ § §
After his good night’s sleep and relatively pain-free waking, Ben was in a far better mood than the day before when he’d let himself get spooked by Nikolas’s fears. He sensed there was something Nikolas wasn’t telling him, but, even so, what had been alarming with night approaching was now faintly embarrassing. Nevertheless, he took stock of their small camp and decided it wouldn’t hurt to be a little more organised, perhaps a little more tactical. He changed the layout, therefore, to a defensive one, using the walls of their shelters as barriers at the major ingress points. He armed each of his group with the meagre weapons they had—the slingshot, the bows and some sharpened sticks.
Just before lunch, the mist lifted. The sun came out, and suddenly the remaining menace of the day evaporated as fast as the vapour. Those left in the camp ate and did their camp routine. Ben was determined to keep everyone busy and their minds off what the others were doing, and weapons seemed the best way to go. They needed to improve their stock, so he set them all to sharpening sticks as best they could with a penknife and surgical blades. Ulyana Ivanovna took the bandages off Ben’s leg. It was ugly but it wasn’t puffy or leaking. She eased out the wadding and washed the wound once more with water as hot as Ben could stand, then they left it open for a while. Clearly, Ulyana Ivanovna hadn’t found much in her forty years of nursing that wouldn’t benefit from a little fresh air and sunshine.
§ § §
Nikolas and the other three men fanned out in sight of each other and moved slowly away from the camp. It was entirely possible the old man had suffered a fall, or even a heart attack. Jackson reminded Nikolas of the way the old man had been clutching his chest the other night. And he’d clearly been very stressed for some days now. Any minute, therefore, Nikolas expected to come across him, lying helpless, but they went some distance, calling, and didn’t find him. They returned and tried another direction. When the mist cleared, they were some way away from the camp to the north, an area Nikolas hadn’t hunted yet, but had scouted out. The ground was quite steep, rising to a prominent hill, and he’d climbed it to see if he could see any signs of a logging camp, maybe a village. There’d been nothing but trees.
Now they tracked warily through the trees at the base of the hill, until, coming out into a clearing, Nikolas stopped abruptly and held his arm out to hold the others back. Ruben pushed past him though then howled and stumbled. Jackson and Lucas glanced into the clearing and turned away sharply, Lucas gagging, hyperventilating. Nikolas went cautiously around the open space, staying under the cover of the trees until he reached the figure that had been hung
between two saplings, arms outstretched, Christlike. It was the old man. He’d been flayed. The ground around him was sodden with blood, but his skin was gone.
Nikolas glanced back at his companions. The two lawyers were holding Ruben, their faces averted from the terrible sight. Nikolas had a feeling the two men would never hunt for sport again. He pulled out his knife to cut the old preacher down and suddenly the head lifted. Blood-filled eyes glared manically at him. Nikolas stepped back, his heart thumping. The old man could not still be alive. It was utterly unthinkable. The mouth opened, just sinew and bone without the flesh that’d made it human, and the voice rasped out, “I’ve seen the face of the devil! He carries a scythe of blood!” He made a horrible sound, his eyes rolling until they fastened directly upon Nikolas. “The works of the flesh are manifest. Satan said unto me I have been patrolling the earth, watching, and they are as rubies. Rubies and pearls. Rubies and…” Nikolas held the agonised gaze as his knife eased the old man’s way more kindly toward a merciful God he may have come to doubt on this last day of life.
No one could survive what this man had endured and live for more than a few minutes. Nikolas didn’t want to be only a few minutes away from the men who’d flayed Jonas Terry alive. He sprinted back to the others. Ruben was hysterical. Jackson and Lucas were pale but clearly very keen to leave the area, too. “Father! You can’t just leave him like that! We need to bury him.” Nikolas squatted down by the preacher’s son.
The Bridge of Silver Wings Page 8