by Abe Moss
“Jessup!” she called. “Are you—”
She gasped as something sharp glanced off the side of her head. She stumbled, fell on her butt, sliding down the hill a short distance. Then it came again. A batting of wings. A predatory croak. Claws raked through her hair. Talons. She put her hands up, tried to shield herself, and felt them in her arm. The creature’s barking mouth bit at her, clipped her fingers in its beak, drawing blood. Against the dark sky she saw it, hovering over her head in a storm of razor-feet and yellow eyes. An owl.
“Shit!”
The owl wrapped its talons around the handle of the knife in her bleeding hand and before she registered what was happening, the owl took flight and the knife was gone. The owl circled overhead, losing the knife somewhere she couldn’t see. She started to stand as it returned, barely a respite. She ducked away from it, stooped under the barrage of claws and beak bites. She fell to the ground. The owl squawked, wings beating the air in pursuit. She waved a useless hand behind her as she scrambled forward on her hands and knees, swatting toward the vicious bird above her head. It was relentless. It gripped into her shoulders, pressed off into the air, then returned with a swoop of its snapping beak. Blood trickled down the side of her face, warm and dripping. She screamed and the bird screamed back.
“Get away! Get—”
There was a loud noise. A pop. Three of them, one after the other. The howling wind muffled the sound, but it was unmistakable. And like that, suddenly the bird was gone.
Maria pushed herself up off the dirt. She turned to the car where Jessup stood, pistol raised in both hands, face drenched in sweat and shock. Then she spotted something else, movement through the bushes beyond the car, and it wasn’t an owl.
“Jessup, behind you!”
He turned, sweeping the gun in a sideways arc just as the wolf lunged. Its snarling mouth closed on his wrist and he fired a wasted shot into the hills. It dragged him to the ground with a shrill yelp.
Heart hammering, legs like jelly beneath her, Maria ran down the slope toward them.
With Jessup’s arm in its mouth, the wolf hauled him alongside the car, then around it, into the bushes out of sight. Maria bolted around the other side of the car. She reached through the broken passenger window and, figuring she’d grab a weapon from the purse on the seat, realized she didn’t have time to choose. Jessup screamed. Maria grabbed the entire purse. She ran toward them, legs kicking, gasping without breath. On the ground, in the blinding light of the vehicle’s headlights, the wolf dragged Jessup in a circle, then straddled him so that they were face to face.
Oh god, she thought.
She raised the purse up behind her head in her charge. The wolf’s ears perked. It looked toward her, toward the sound of her sneakers in the dirt. Hollering, Maria swung the purse by its handle like a morning star, and brought it down on the wolf’s snout. The wolf jumped sideways, sidestepped away from them with an irritated sneeze. Maria swung the purse a second time. The wolf reared back, opened its mouth. It snapped its jaws and seized the bottom of the purse in its teeth. They fought for it, pulling against the other’s weight—a deadly game of tug of war over Jessup’s body. The wolf grunted, panted, baring its teeth in a feral grin. Maria bared hers as well. The wolf thrashed the purse side to side. Some of its contents spilled out. More knives wrapped in towels. Its eyes flickered toward them as they fell to the dirt.
“Go, Jessup!” Maria shouted. “Get out of the way!”
Holding his gnawed wrist in his other hand, he scooted himself, kicking his feet as he moved out from under their standoff. The wolf watched him go with its yellow eyes, considering. Conniving. As soon as he wasn’t underneath them any longer, Maria let go of the purse. The wolf staggered back. Darting forward, Maria snatched one of the knives off the ground, flung the towel off from around its blade, and held it before her, glimmering in the light of the headlights.
“Yeah?” she screamed, and slashed the knife through the air. The wolf stepped back, sneering. It licked its lips. She lunged forward, the knife gleaming wildly. “I’ll take your other eye, too, you fucking…” She cut the air, stepping clumsily through the brush, heart beating out of her chest, up her throat like a hot stone. “You… you…”
Suddenly the wolf’s eyes diverted, fastened to something behind them. Maria continued tripping forward through the sage, brandishing the knife like a sword, as the wolf turned its back to her and fled. Another loud, jarring bang clapped the air. The bullet struck the dirt between the wolf’s galloping paws. Another shot. Another miss. A moment later and the wolf disappeared into the darkness of the rolling desert.
Panting, Maria turned to Jessup, squinting to see him against the bright headlights. He stood beside the car, shoulders heaving, just a tall shadow. She moved toward him. His hands trembled, still clutching the gun, his finger on the trigger, eyes fixed to the darkness beyond them.
“It’s gone,” Maria said. “For now.”
He held the gun raised a moment longer. His face was vacant. Processing.
“What was that?” he asked.
“It was them,” Maria said.
“That… that wolf…”
“The wolf.”
He blinked his eyes. He turned to see her, finally beginning to center himself once more. His gaze lingered on her throat, where she bore the scars of the monster in question.
“Yes,” she said. “The same.”
Maria retrieved the purse off the ground. She crouched and gathered the other spilled weapons inside of it. The purse, slightly torn on the bottom, was still useful, at least. She tossed it on the floor of the passenger seat, keeping it closer and more readily available, this time. As she did all of this, Jessup continued standing in place, idly searching the night’s horizon, likely imagining what other nightmares might be hidden in those hills, the things Maria described to him flashing vividly in his mind’s eye, more real than ever.
Giving him some time to think, Maria stood at the trunk of the car, hands on her hips, peering up the slope, thinking to herself as well. Over the noise of the wind, and the sound of a passing car on the road above, she heard something else. A voice. A wheeze. A moan. Without hesitation, she returned to Jessup. She grabbed the pistol from his hand.
“Is this still loaded?” she asked.
His eyes widened, awakened from whatever daydream he’d been in the middle of. “Yeah, should be. Why?”
She held the gun across her open palm, like a piece of alien technology she’d never seen before. She looked to the hill leading toward the road, the weeds and shadows concealing something inside them. Something injured and helpless. Something wicked and barely alive.
“I only need to pull the trigger, right?” she asked, and started toward the hill.
After a brief hesitation, Jessup’s hurried footsteps followed after her, scuffing tiredly in the dirt.
“Why? What are you doing?”
She held the gun at her side, finger resting gently on the trigger, the thighs of her jeans whispering with haste. Climbing the slope, the moans became more pronounced, just audible between the gusts of wind. Breathless whimpering. Rough and haggard. An old woman’s voice. Somewhere in the bushes.
“Maria?”
She paid Jessup no mind. There was no stopping what she’d set in motion. No turning back. She was bringing the fight to them, and they knew that now. Whatever time she thought she had was significantly shortened and she wouldn’t waste any more of it.
She climbed toward the sound of the voice. Somewhere in the brush. Getting closer. She gripped the pistol tight in her hand. She’d never fired a gun before.
Gasping for air, naked—her robes likely abandoned somewhere near the road in her transformation—Hiltrude lay on her back in the dirt, old and wrinkled and fat and true. She turned her head as Maria approached, and those callous, yellow eyes opened wide. Maria came to stand beside her, close enough to point the gun confidently but not close enough to be grabbed should the witch decide to surp
rise her. She looked upon the naked creature on the ground, bleeding from a hole in the chest. Hiltrude covered the wound with her hand, and after her brief moment of unconcealed fear, she smiled at Maria. A mouthful of nasty, rotted teeth.
“Oh my god,” Jessup said, coming to stand behind Maria.
The witch observed them coldly, still grinning. Chest rising and falling rapidly.
“Who… would’ve thought?” Hiltrude said, breath hitching. “Such a pretty little girl like—”
Maria fired a bullet into the witch’s smiling face so that it smiled no more. Her yellow eyes went dull. The hand over her chest fell away, wet with blood.
“Jesus…” Jessup said. “What is that thing?”
Now it was Maria frozen with a gun in her hand. She stared hollowly down at the witch’s corpse, waiting for something more to happen. Anything. But it remained as it was. A dead body in the desert. Nothing magical about it.
“The first of three,” she answered.
CHAPTER TWELVE
PAYBACK’S A WITCH
They left the body where it lay and tended to their wounds in the car before continuing on. Jessup’s wrist was badly bitten and bleeding, but still functional—enough to drive, at least. He expressed a concern for rabies, which Maria assured him wasn’t likely. Alcohol and gauze would do the trick, for now.
“We can get real help once this is over,” Maria said. “We’ll… go to an urgent care, or something…”
The guilt she felt for involving him was immense, and at the same time she knew they didn’t have the luxury of dwelling. Not to mention any thoughts of what they would do ‘once this was over’ seemed a little like getting ahead of themselves…
“You can still back out,” she told him.
“We’re almost there,” Jessup said.
“You can drop me off. Leave me at my grandma’s and go get yourself taken care of. There’s no reason why you have to be here for all of it.”
“Yes, there is,” Jessup said. He stared intently ahead, eyes distant. He’d become much quieter since their encounter on the side of the road. His mind was still processing, Maria could tell. There was no room for denial anymore, if he’d had any. “I said I would help you, and I’m still going to help you.”
“You’ve helped enough already. You really have.”
“If helping you all the way means you might make it out of this, then I’m helping you all the way.”
Maria didn’t argue further, though she could have. He denied it, but she couldn’t shake the feeling he was only doing this out of some half-baked crush he had on her.
“They’ll believe you after this,” Jessup said. He glanced toward her quickly, keeping his eyes on the road. “Your parents, I mean.”
Maria smiled weakly. She appreciated his looking for a silver lining.
✽ ✽ ✽
Maria suggested that once they arrived in Wellwyn, they would patch themselves up better at her grandmother’s, and take a closer look at the wounds on Jessup’s arm.
“I think I’m okay,” he said as he drove. “I’m more tired than anything…”
And god, wasn’t that the truth? Maria felt like garbage. Her body bumped and lolled in the passenger seat with hardly any strength or energy to sit straight. Jessup told her she could nap if she wanted, but tired as she was, napping wasn’t a possibility. Her anxious thoughts wouldn’t allow it.
Hiltrude was dead, and there would be hell to pay for it.
✽ ✽ ✽
It was still dark when they arrived. The town was just as Maria remembered it the year before. Small and empty and rather pointless. They followed the single road through, and Jessup had enough spirit in him left to remark that he thought the town was quite charming in its simplicity.
“I wish I could call it charming,” Maria said.
They drove past the motel and she was overcome with vivid memories she wished she hadn’t remembered—the moon so big and full that night, Michael in his pajamas, wading defenselessly into their clutches, and the moment she lost him, carried into the sky like a bad dream…
Her eye ached dully and she rubbed it, which only hurt worse, like rubbing a deep bruise inside her socket.
“You all right?” Jessup asked.
“Fine.”
“Where to now?”
He drove slowly, and Maria pointed out the sign which led to the small trailer park.
‘Sunny Oasis Park’.
“In there,” she said.
The headlights swept across all the quaint little trailers and mobile homes as they pulled in. Some of the windows were already alight with people awake in the early hours.
“That one,” Maria said, pointing to the green home. The windows were dark.
Jessup parked the car and shut off the engine. They sat in silence. Maria’s eye ached more now than ever. Itched as well. She gave a soft moan as she rubbed it, feeling Jessup’s eyes upon her in the quiet car.
“Let me see,” he said.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not. I can tell.”
“I’ll take a look in my grandma’s bathroom. I’m sure it’s nothing…”
He leaned toward her and she couldn’t hide from him. The look on his face broke her heart.
“Shit,” he said.
“Stop staring at me…”
“My god, your eye, it’s… it’s black.”
She could have guessed as much. While it’d been blurry before, now she wasn’t sure if she saw through it at all. It’d happened rather gradually.
“I’ll wash it inside,” she said, as if that would solve anything.
“Maria.”
Harvey appeared again, sitting in the backseat. Though she wished more than anything just to get out of the godforsaken car, Maria turned to see him, expecting nothing good.
“Something isn’t right. Be careful.”
Maria turned forward in her seat and peered through the windshield, head bowed, searching the dark trailer park.
“What’s not right?” she asked.
Jessup cocked his head, not following. “Huh?”
“They’ve been here already,” Harvey said. “They could still be here… I can’t tell…”
“What’s going on?” Jessup asked.
The windows were dark, and now that darkness seemed like something else altogether. With a seed of panic embedded in her brain, Maria bent and opened her purse on the floor between her feet. She pulled out one of the many knives.
“They were here,” she told Jessup, and opened her door.
“What? How do you know?”
She stepped out of the car, holding the knife low against her thigh. Jessup followed likewise, bringing his gun.
“Don’t slam your door,” Maria told him.
Leaving both their doors open, they headed toward the porch. The steps creaked under their feet. Maria glanced at the firepit below them from the top of the porch stairs, and was instantly filled with memories from the year prior. Memories of her family together one last time, before everything went to shit…
She stood at the front door. She placed her hand on the knob, readying to give it a turn, and the door pushed inward by her touch alone.
“Oh god,” she said aloud.
“What is it?” Jessup whispered.
She pushed the door. It opened smoothly into the dark front room. They stood for what felt like an eternity, staring into the unknown as it sank its worrisome hooks into their tired minds.
“What do you want to do?” Jessup asked.
She leaned into the doorway. She searched the shadows inside with her one good eye. Dead silence. She put one foot onto the rug just inside the door. Then, before stepping in, she asked aloud: “Ramona?”
“We should go,” Jessup said. “It’s not safe.”
“I know it’s not.” She observed the home’s dark innards a moment longer, letting the quiet settle over her. It wasn’t just quiet. It felt empty. “But I need to know…”
; She stepped inside and flipped the switch to the ceiling light. The light revealed nothing of concern, nothing out of place. Tidy as could be. No signs of ill fate here.
Jessup followed behind her slowly, each of them standing just inside the door.
“Maybe they’re gone,” he said. “Your grandparents, I mean.”
That was entirely possible, Maria thought. She hadn’t called to say she was coming, after all, so how could she have known her grandmother would even be home? Perhaps Paddy and Ramona were on a trip together, or visiting someone, or any number of things which might have taken them elsewhere. For both their sakes, Maria hoped that was the case…
She shivered.
“Ramona?” she called again, and looked toward the hallway, toward the closed bedroom door at the end.
“I didn’t see any other car parked outside,” Jessup noted.
“They park in the back,” Maria said, staring fearfully at the closed bedroom door. “My grandma drives a white SUV, I think.”
Taking the hint, Jessup hurried outside onto the porch. As he checked, Maria moved to the start of the hallway and listened. Nothing. Jessup returned quickly, and his voice was nervous.
“There’s a white SUV there, like you say. And another car. Must be theirs.”
She turned on the hallway light and went determinedly to the door at the end. She knocked, loudly.
“Grandma,” she said. “Ramona. Paddy.”
She rapped her fist harder against the door, hard enough that there would be no mistake. Now wasn’t the time to be polite. There was no answer. Holding her breath, she opened the door.
“Ramona…” she said again as she stepped into the gloom.
Her hand crept up the wall in search of the light switch. Part of her wished she wouldn’t find it. No light switch existed. But her fingers touched upon it, and she flipped it on, and the bedroom was lit in an amber glow from the dome ceiling light.
Paddy and her grandmother lay side by side under their bedcovers, asleep—at least they appeared to be. Maria went to their bedside. She stood by her grandmother, noticed the thick head of hair she’d grown in the last year, and put a hand to her soft, warm cheek.