by Sarah Jaune
“I don’t know if it’s lit or not,” Eli said as he stared into the depths of the small potbellied stove later that evening. It stood in the tiny kitchen area of the cabin, pushed close to the wall. He’d loaded it with kindling, lit the match, and waited. Nothing. He blew a slow, steady stream of air into the open mouth of the stove and waited. Moments later, he caught the scent of burning wood. “It’s lit.”
“Good because these are skinned,” Ivy told him as she brought over a heavy cast iron skillet with two filleted fish laid out. The stove, which had a small pipe that vented towards the outside, also had a flat surface that was meant for cooking. “I’ve never cooked like this.”
“I haven’t either,” Eli admitted as he stood back so she could squeeze in through the crowded space. “I think as long as we don’t catch the cabin on fire, we can declare victory.”
Ten minutes later the cabin smelled of the simmering fish and Eli felt his mood lighten even further as he pulled down a couple of tin plates and searched the mostly empty drawers for some forks.
They ate in contented silence, sitting on the floor of the living room with their backs against the couch.
“I haven’t had fish this good in a long time,” Eli assured Ivy. “You did a great job with them.”
Ivy grinned as she stuck the last bite in her mouth. “My foster mother likes fish. She gets it whenever she can with the food rations. She’s been teaching me to prepare it.”
“I didn’t know that,” he said as he set his plate off to the side and stretched out on the hard, planked floor. He chuckled as he thought back to the two hours they’d spent at the river catching nothing.
She clearly read his mind. “Don’t gloat,” Ivy told him with a prod to his shoulder. “You do realize that if we weren’t magical, we’d starve? We are pathetic fishermen.” They’d left the hooks in the water, but to no avail. Eventually, they’d gone to Eli’s plan of calling the fish over and him plucking them from the water. It did feel a bit like cheating, but now that he’d eaten, Eli was getting over that.
He glanced up at her and laughed at her look of consternation, into eyes that sparkled in the dim light of the single overhead bulb and had to fight back the urge to suck in his breath. Ivy was pretty. Sometimes it snuck up and smacked him in the gut. He wasn’t sure what anyone else thought about her. His foster brother, Oliver, tended to be obnoxiously outspoken about pretty girls, and thus far, he hadn’t ever said anything about Ivy, but Eli didn’t care what anyone else thought. He didn’t mention it to Ivy, though. It would just be awkward and weird if he told her that she was pretty, and Eli really didn’t want to screw up his friendship with her.
They both had too many other things to worry about, like evading detection as a magical being. He wasn’t sure that was the main thing on Ivy’s mind at the moment. She looked so sad again, as she stared across the room. Wherever her mind was, it wasn’t there in that room.
“What’s up?” Eli asked her.
She shook her head and unexpectedly, her long tumble of hair fell down from the coil at the back of her head. It was so long, now, that it actually landed on Eli’s shoulder. “Sorry,” she muttered as she pulled her hair up and started working it back into a knot on the top of her head.
“Whatever,” Eli said dismissively. “It’s just hair. I keep forgetting how long it is.”
She stopped what she was doing and slowly let her hands drop, letting her hair tumble down like a curly rope that was more of a reddish gold in the dim light. Ivy ran the strands through her fingers and studied it as though it was something she needed to memorize. “It was my mother’s idea.”
“Your hair?” Eli asked in confusion.
“She said my father liked long hair,” Ivy admitted meekly. “She… she thought he might want me if I kept it long.” Her green eyes closed, and she bit her lips together into a thin line until Eli was sure they’d start bleeding. When she opened her eyes again, he was stunned to see they were dry. “He was never going to want to be my father. He was never going to love me, but I can’t seem to cut it off.”
Eli opened his mouth to say something. He didn’t know what he was going to say. There was no way to fix that kind of hurt. Her father had betrayed her down to the deepest levels.
He was not given the chance to respond. A shuffling noise distracted him, pulling his attention to the door that Ivy had barred when they’d come back from the river. Eli had teased her about putting the wooden blocks in place.
Ivy silently set her plate on the floor while Eli slowly pushed to his feet. They stood together, facing the door as blood started to rush through Eli’s ears until the grunts from beyond the door were almost drowned out. He stared, waited, through thirty seconds of something very large moving beyond the door.
Then all fell quiet.
Eli didn’t relax. He stayed where he was, absolutely certain that the creature beyond the wooden door was still there. Every second beat through his ears, a noisy cacophony of rushing blood from his pounding heart. He deliberately slowed his breathing down until Eli felt his heart rate stabilize.
BANG!
The door frame shuddered under a force that Eli knew had to be greater than any human. If he had to guess, he’d have said it must have been bigger than a bear, but he couldn’t imagine what could be on the other side of the door.
BANG! BANG!
He glanced to Ivy. “Do you think it will hold?”
“I have no idea,” Ivy whispered as whatever it was banged again. “Maybe we should have taken a gun.”
“Except that neither of us knows how to use a gun,” Eli said as he flinched at another bang.
So far the door was holding, even if the banging was causing the dust to shake from the joints of the walls so that a fine mist drifted into the air around them. They couldn’t open the door and they couldn’t just wait for the creature to break in. They were stuck.
The noises stopped for a count of five, then step, thud, thud, step, as whatever it was moved back from the cabin. Ivy let out a small sigh of relief a second before a huge, grinding, metallic crunch splintered the air.
Horror filled Eli as he realized exactly what had happened. Without thinking, he sprinted for the door, bent to grab the bottom board, and raked his hands up to throw all the wooden braces away from the exit.
Eli threw the door open and sprinted out into the fading light. “No!” he screamed at the creature that had raised its fist to smash into the hood of the jeep again. His outrage at the huge dent in the trunk of the jeep was momentarily distracted by what was before him.
Bigfoot. Sasquatch. Really giant dude. He couldn’t tell if it was a male or female, but what he could see was that it was at least twelve feet tall, and three times wider than Eli. If he had to guess, he’d have said male, though. From what Eli knew, the females were usually smaller. He was covered in a thick, dark fur all over his body, and his eyes were large and black. It stared at Eli and Eli stared right back, still fuming. Eli pointed to the jeep. “Why did you do that?”
For a single moment, Eli thought for sure that the huge ape-like manifestation was going to attack him.
It grunted and nodded its head towards the cabin.
Eli glanced slowly behind him to see Ivy standing in the door. He swung back to the Bigfoot. “You wanted her?”
It let out a low, snuffling growl, then thumped its chest and said, “Ghan.”
At least, Eli thought that’s what he said. “Your name is Ghan?”
He bobbed his head once, then pointed towards Ivy again.
“You wrecked my car because of Ivy?” Eli spluttered in disbelief, completely at a loss for what to do about the situation. He nearly said, ‘you can’t have her,’ but thought better of it. “Do you need help?”
Another nod.
The pieces started to come together in Eli’s mind. What they’d seen as aggression towards them had likely been no more than Ghan’s attempt to knock at the door.
A knock didn’t exactly so
und like a knock when one was twelve feet tall.
“Did you have to dent my car?” Eli asked in annoyance as he went over to pop the hood. It was a clean indentation that appeared to have stayed away from the engine, which was fortunate. They’d never be able to find spare parts out here. He climbed up onto the front bumper, held onto the hook with one hand and pressed until the metal popped out again. He grinned and hopped down, letting the hood slam shut. It wasn’t perfect. The paint was chipped, but it was better than he’d expected.
Eli turned back to Ghan. “What do you need help with?”
Ghan pointed towards Ivy, who still hadn’t moved from the doorway, then back down the path in the opposite direction from where they had been fishing.
He wasn’t sure what to do, but at the moment the Sasquatch wasn’t being aggressive. “What do you think?” he asked Ivy.
She hesitated only a moment before she closed the door and walked down to join them. “Okay, let’s go.”
It was probably a stupid idea, but most of their lives were spent in stupid ideas, so at least they were being consistent.
They walked for hours, through trails that Eli wouldn’t have been able to pick out without their guide. He wished they could speak to the Bigfoot, but it wasn’t possible. From what he knew, which admittedly wasn’t much, they only had a small number of things they could speak in English. From what he’d seen, though, Ghan seemed to understand them just fine.
“Are we being led into a trap?” Ivy asked him as the moon flooded down on them through the treetops above.
“Probably,” Eli said as he slowed to step over a branch.
Ivy ran into him. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” he said as he stepped over and waited for her to as well. “It’s best to stick close together anyway.”
They kept on until Eli knew it was after midnight. He was exhausted, and Ivy was definitely lagging behind him.
Eli kept as close to Ghan’s heels as he could, but every ten minutes or so the Bigfoot would surge ahead and Eli would have to call him back.
“I’m so tired,” Ivy groaned behind him. “Where are we going?”
The answer was not what Eli expected. A few minutes later, Ghan led them under a forked tree into a large cave that he would never have spotted if they hadn’t had a guide. It was warm in the cave, dry, but also with a very definite odor of fur. One large Bigfoot sat at a fire in the middle of the room, tending to it. He hadn’t realized, until that moment, that they knew how to create fire. Eli grimaced as he realized his education on these magical creatures was clearly lacking.
There were at least a dozen other Sasquatch in the cave, most of whom were sleeping. Eli saw at least two smaller ones that must be kids.
“Woah,” Ivy said as she stopped in the entrance.
“I’ve never seen this many in a pod,” Eli agreed quietly as Ghan motioned them over to a corner. He followed, hesitating a bit when he saw the mounds of straw that was piled in the corner. “Uh,” he paused when he saw Ghan gesturing for them to sit. “What are we doing here?”
Ghan shuffled from one foot to the other, then pointed to Ivy. The big guy hunkered down and drew a squiggly line in the soft dirt on the floor of the cave. At the end of the line, he drew a large circle.
“Is that a river running into a large lake?” Ivy asked as she studied the drawing.
Ghan grunted in agreement. Then, to the side of the lake, he drew another meandering line off to the side of the lake, in parallel to the first line he’d drawn. He pointed between the lines and made a connector from the lake to the second line. He let out a snuffle, pointed to the connector line, then swiped it clean.
Then Ghan looked up at Ivy and pointed at her.
“Oh,” Ivy nodded in understanding. “There is a lake connected to another river, and they don’t want them connected.”
The big guy grinned and nodded. He pointed towards the pile of leaves and animal furs again, then back at Eli and Ivy.
“I think that’s our bed for the night,” Ivy told Eli. He heard the forced neutrality in her voice.
He understood perfectly. It was going to be itchy, and they were likely to get fleas.
Great.
It wasn’t as bad as Eli had imagined. They settled down next to each other in the pile and found the animal furs, which Eli guessed were probably fox or rabbit, to be softer than they looked. It wasn’t nearly as comfortable as a bed, and he definitely missed the couch that was waiting for him back at the cabin, but they were here now.
“Do you ever wonder how we keep ending up in these situations?” Eli asked quietly as Ghan took over for the Bigfoot at the fire. Eli could see now that the fire keeper was older, with gray fur around his mouth. He didn’t move with the same vigor as Ghan had as he made his way over to his own pallet to sleep.
“I bet they keep the fire going at all times,” Ivy said sleepily. “They could get a stick relit, I bet, but it’s probably easier to keep this one going. But as to your question, I’m starting to think that magical creatures can sense our magic. They’re a bit like me that way.”
Eli nodded and shifted a bit as a twig jabbed him in the back. “I guess that makes sense.”
Her breath evened out minutes later, and Eli was sure she had fallen asleep.
They’d come to Yellowstone in order to get away from the horrible things they’d seen. Instead, they’d ended up in a position to help a pod of Sasquatch. Sasquaches. Saschatchi.
Eli had no idea what the plural of that word happened to be. Their language was stupid like that.
Ivy turned her face towards him, and he realized she wasn’t quite asleep yet. “Your obsession with your car might get us killed.”
He pictured the dent in the jeep and winced, but it quickly faded into a quiet chuckle. “Oops.”
CHAPTER 9
IN DREAMS
He dreamed in black and white. It was weird, but even in black and white he knew that the puddle on the floor was blood, and he was responsible. But Eli was paralyzed, staring at his hands that were black, coated. He tried to wipe them on his pants, but, no matter what he did, they wouldn’t come clean. Panic swelled inside of him as the metallic smell of the blood overwhelmed his nostrils.
It was a dream. He knew it was a dream, but it didn’t stop the screams that built in his head as he stared at his hands.
Blood. Blood. Blood.
My fault. My fault. My fault.
It bloomed in his throat, choking him with the unuttered sounds and the violence that wanted release.
“Elijah,” came a soothing voice from in front of him. In full color, a girl about his age with bright blonde hair that fell to her shoulders stepped towards him. She had on a blood red t-shirt that hung loose over her blue jeans. Her eyes were so beautifully, vividly blue that they shone brighter than anything. She took his hands as color spread up his arms.
“Don’t touch me,” he said as he tried to pull back from his twin. “I’ll get the stains on you.”
She smiled and bent to kiss his cheek. Her breath blew over his skin. “They are my stains as well.”
Eli looked down at her hands and saw them covered. “No, Beth,” he shook his head. “This is my mess to fix.”
“You and I are opposite sides of the same coin,” Beth promised as she held on tighter to him. “When you figure all of it out, you will see that. It’s time to wake up now.”
She threw her arms around him, knocking him to the ground.
Eli jumped in the bed, feeling as though his whole body had just dropped twenty feet. He gasped and stared around him.
It was light out now. He could see small shafts of sunlight forming ribbons in through the gaps of the trees at the cave’s entrance.
Ivy walked over and stared down at him. “Are you okay?”
He nodded, like he was, and pushed himself off the soft bed. “Yeah,” Eli lied as he gazed around the empty room. “Where is everyone?”
“Hunting, gathering,” Ivy answered as
she studied him. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Eli glanced down at his hands, but they were the normal color of skin plus some dirt from their long hike the day before. “Fine.”
Especially since there was no blood on his hands at the moment.
Ivy’s eyes told him that she didn’t believe him, but she didn’t push him over it either. She handed him something that looked suspiciously like a roll. It was toasted brown and still warm, but when he took it, he realized it was a lot heavier than bread. “What is it?”
“I have no idea,” Ivy admitted with a grin. “But it tastes amazing. Come on, Ghan’s waiting for us.”
It did taste amazing. The substance was like very thick bread, with a hint of butter and salt. It filled him in a way that no other food had before.