"You get used to it. I told you, Victor. My family has been guarding this mountain for generations. I have a lot to protect, and it's my burden alone."
I felt it then. Overriding everything else was this deep resignation and determination. "You aren't alone anymore," I said firmly. "It's okay to let someone else take a bit of the burden."
"This is my fight, Victor. Whoever brought here you threatened what I protect," Thorn replied.
"It's sorta my fight, too, don't you think? Let's face it, Thorn; I've seen my fate. There's a chance that I'm not making it off this mountain alive," I hypothesized.
It wasn’t that I wanted to die. If the dream held true as it had so far, then it seemed inevitable. That part of my dream had always been crystal clear. I’d come here with the specter of my death hanging over me—not because I wanted to prevent it, but more to understand it.
"I told you what the river is. I haven't hidden what I protect from you."
"But you’re hiding other things. What are you hiding?" I asked Thorn, putting my uninjured arm up on the table and leaning forward.
He shook his head. "I'm hiding my family's secret guilt. The reason that we’ve protected this mountain for five generations."
As I looked at him, I felt frustration emanating through the connection. "You aren't alone. You may not share this heritage with the family that you have left, but you have me."
"Yeah," Thorn replied. "About that."
I eyed him warily as he rubbed his face. "What about that?" I pressed.
"I didn't just forget about you," he said. "Truth is, Victor…I made a conscious effort to forget."
"I don't think I'm following," I muttered as I eyed the man suspiciously.
"By twenty, I’d lost all of my family that understood me and shared my burden of duty. I lost all the people who knew the real me. I saw right then and there after my grandmother's funeral that I couldn't have a family. Everyone who knows about that mountain dies, Victor. I put up a block, and I forgot it."
"Why didn't I feel the connection?" I asked.
"Maybe you did," Thorn said, shrugging. "Half-remembered dreams or a sense of not belonging."
The old ache was there. The feeling of never having a place that was home to me. I nodded. "So, you forgot me," I said. "I get that. But I'm here now, and you remember."
"Yeah, I remember. I couldn't place it at first. You just kept appearing where I was, like the universe was screaming at me," Thorn said quietly. "And look what's happened to you while you’ve been here. This is why I put the block up."
"Well, someone wanted me here, and I suggest we focus on finding them," I argued. "But first, you need to let me in and tell me why your family guards this mountain."
Thorn's eyes held wariness, but eventually, he nodded. He got up and tossed his now-empty soda can in the trash. As he turned, he leaned on the counter. "My family came here when the settlers moved into the area. They were drawn here by the river. It beckoned them. It wanted my ancestor, a man named Morgan Durant, to come to act as its conduit to the other people. Morgan thought it was his divine mission to help people be one with the spirit realm. He failed to see until it was much too late that what was guiding him wasn’t the river but what dwells in it. The river ferries souls, but there are things—good and bad—that live in the river."
He continued sadly, "Morgan became something of a faith healer, and in the absence of a proper church or spiritual outlet, the people looked to him as a spiritual leader. A family's small child passed away due to yellow fever. It was rampant back then. At that time, the river ran very close to the surface and could be seen from a place called the Devil's Cauldron."
I recognized the name but kept silent as Thorn spoke. "People would go to the place where the river could be seen, and they’d pray to the spirits to give them things. The child's family begged Morgan to intercede with the spirits and to get them to release the child." Thorn closed his eyes. "Morgan had grown overly confident with the power that river had and his connection with it. He reached out to the river and called on the Singers to give the child back."
"Singers? Like Singers of the Cave, those Singers?" I asked cautiously.
"Yes. I'm just telling you how the story was told to me, mind you. It has been passed down for generations as a way to teach about the dangers of the river." He sighed. "Morgan called to the Singers, and the Singers answered. They came up out of the water. They were made of light and stars. Their song is said to sound like the music of the dead, calming and coaxing. They are the sound of music within the water."
"That's what I heard," I murmured. "What happened to Morgan?"
"Well, nothing right away. The people all thought the Singers were angels, but they aren't. The Singers made a bargain with Morgan on behalf of the child's family. The child miraculously returned to life when it touched the water. Morgan was heralded as a miracle worker." I could tell by the look on Thorn's face that he thought quite the opposite.
"What happened?" I whispered.
He took a deep breath. "The child was behaving strangely. The family begged Morgan to help, and when he spoke with the child, he realized that it wasn't the child at all. Whatever came out of the river wasn't a sweet child. Morgan refused to help and said the child needed to be returned to the river."
"Bet that went over well," I said.
Thorn gave a cold laugh. "Yeah. The family refused. They went to the river themselves. That's how it started. Morgan taught people not to fear the river, and people realized they didn't need Morgan. Morgan tried to stop them, but he couldn't stop them all. People would go to the opening at The Devil's Cauldron and others would lower them down into the water. They thought the river was granting them wishes."
"What was really happening to them?"
He sighed, folding his arms. "The river isn’t a real river. If you shine a light on it, it doesn't reflect it back."
"Like that shadow..." I ventured.
He nodded. "Exactly. I think that was a spirit that wandered away from the river. I had honestly never been confronted with one despite all the time I spent on the mountain. My father was big on wards. He used to make them for everything. It's entirely possible that he used to carry wards with him to keep them at bay."
"We could use some of those," I said, and Thorn nodded his agreement. "So, what happened to the people?"
"Damn, you remembered," he said with a grin.
I gave him a wink. "Nice try, though."
"The river exists on two planes—this one and the spiritual plane, by some fluke. It's not supposed to be accessible from this plane, but somehow it is. Living things can't exist in the river—not ones from this plane, anyway. When something living enters the river, it gets rejected."
"Wait, but the people came out of the river fine?"
He then spoke like he wanted to tell this part as quickly as he could just to get through it. "They looked normal. The Singers, what you hear calling you in the mines, are predators who have learned to cheat the system. See, before, they had to exist on whatever scraps the river gave them. They eat souls or the energy from the souls—I'm not really sure, to be honest with you. They lure people to the river, and they devour their souls while they’re in the water. My grandmother told me that that's what the Morlans are. I don't know why they’re called that or who named them, but they used to be people."
I shivered. "And because Morlans can shapeshift, they looked normal," I whispered.
"They look normal, but eventually a Morlan has to eat, and Morlans eat anything. Meat is meat to them." Thorn shrugged. "We had a lot of mental illness in the earlier parts of the century around here until the earthquake. Go figure, huh?"
"Yeah," I muttered. "So... when the river shifted, people couldn't get to it anymore."
"Divine providence," he said lightly, frowning. "Only people kept trying to find it. Digging, exploring the caves…and they’re not easily dissuaded with stories of fortune and glory leading them down into the dark."
> "So, your family protects the mountain to protect the people from the river," I said.
"Bingo. Don't we all feel better now?"
I rubbed my forehead with my uninjured arm. "Ask me tomorrow."
Oliver eventually showed up but was too nonchalant for his own good. And to my surprise, Thorn didn’t try to put his older brother on the spot. The blond had merely nodded as Oliver gave us a rundown on what the police were saying—which, admittedly, wasn’t much.
Donna's death had been ruled to be the result of natural causes. She’d been in the mine for a few days, so it was probably hard to tell the exact cause. I, however, was pretty sure it had more to do with the Morlans than hypothermia.
The first week of recuperation went swiftly enough. The second week dragged. Thorn worked a lot. I had no idea that being a musician required so much work until I watched him go through a week of answering phone calls, emailing papers, songwriting, and generally just trying to coordinate the band as they worked separately but together on what he said was an album they were putting together.
I tried to just stay out of the way. I got a good bit of writing done despite my injured arm. We watched hockey. The town was swiftly lulled back into its quiet routine, and all that nasty business with the mine cave-ins was forgotten.
The police were still seeking Robert for questioning. Darren had recovered enough to give the police a statement, but from what Oliver said, the man was only really saying that he and Robert had been mining for gold when they found Donna's body. It was sort of true, and the police seemed to be buying it. I was just frustrated that even though we’d come close, we still had no idea who Darren's boss actually was.
The door slammed, and I sat up straight in surprise at the kitchen table. "What the—?" I exclaimed as I put my hand over my heart. I set down the donut I’d been eating.
Thorn stalked through the front door and toward the back of the cottage. His ankle must’ve been better, the way he was stomping. A couple weeks ago he would have never been able to do that. He had been into town to see Oliver, and I wondered if they’d had another one of their continuous arguments. When he didn’t speak, I followed him into the study, where he grabbed his phone from the desk.
He turned around. "Realized I had forgotten it." He waved the phone at me before putting it in the pocket of his green coat.
I nodded. "Is that why you’re in such a good mood?" I asked the question cautiously, because Thorn's temper had been growing short of late. I understood his frustration. As healed as our injuries were, we still had further to go, and we were effectively out of commission until then.
"Partly," he said, sighing. "I'm torn about what our course of action should be. I know you feel you need to be on the mountain and part of me agrees, but the rest of me thinks you should be anywhere but on that mountain, Victor."
Thorn's voice held frustration, but he wasn’t angry. Despite the fact that he was calm and level-headed most of the time, we’d gotten into a few arguments while on our forced confinement at the cottage. That was natural, under the circumstances. I never was much for confrontation under any circumstances, however.
"I can see why you wouldn't want me there. Part of me doesn't want to go back there either, but I just want this all to be over. I'm tired of the nightmares hanging over me during my every waking moment," I said with a sigh.
"Let's go back, then. We’re well enough to manage," Thorn said with all the restlessness of one who had been caged too long.
It was tempting, I had to admit. "What are you going to do if we have to run?" I asked pointedly as I looked down at his cast.
"I'll hop," he said with humor and then demonstrated, which caused me to snicker.
"I had no idea you were a ballerina."
For a moment he stared at me and then he laughed. "Yes, I'm grace personified."
He looked like he was going to speak again, but there was a noise that sounded like something breaking in the front end of the house. I stepped back to let Thorn by as he went to investigate. The foyer looked normal. Turning into the kitchen, Thorn stopped abruptly, and I almost ran into him.
I peeked around him as he walked into the kitchen. There was broken glass shattered near one of the small windows over the sink. "What on earth?" I asked as I glanced around. Nothing else looked to be out of place.
"I’d say that perhaps something flew into the window, but what would it have been and where did it go?" Thorn pushed some of the glass around with his boot. "I don't see anything except glass."
I frowned. "Well, something broke it. Maybe the weather heating and cooling the glass caused some stress that finally shattered it." It sounded fairly reasonable.
"The temperature hasn't really varied much in the last month," Thorn reminded me. He stooped down and looked at the glass. "I don't know." Standing up, he shrugged, motioning for me to grab the broom.
I stopped when I reached out to grab the pantry doorknob. "Hey, Thorn...come here," I said quietly.
"What is it?" he asked. I heard the glass crunch under his boot as he made his way over to me. I motioned toward the door handle. It had deep gouges in it.
Our eyes met, and I reached out to touch the knob. Thorn put his hand on my arm and motioned for me to get back. I shook my head at him. We gestured back and forth in a silent argument, which ended with him throwing his hands up into the air.
Thorn reached out, turning the knob slowly. We both tensed, and then Thorn pulled the door open quickly. It was dark inside the small room; we could see that the light bulb, which should’ve been on, was hanging broken overhead. The floor was covered with shards of glass.
The light spilling into the pantry showed the room to be empty. "Some kind of animal trying to get in from the cold?" I asked hesitantly.
"So, where did it go?" Thorn asked.
We both turned around, but the sound of a box falling in the pantry demanded our attention. The box of dry rice lay on its side, where it had landed precariously. My eyes went up to where the box would’ve come from, and I stilled as I saw a small face.
"Thorn, I don't think that's an animal..." I said quietly.
The creature's long claws curled around the edges of the shelf it was on. I gaped at it, and it stared back as if contemplating me. I hoped that I looked relatively tasteless.
Thorn raised his hand to the creature, which shrunk back, as if it knew his secret. Maybe it did. It could have seen how Thorn had killed its brethren in the mines. Hesitating, he considered the creature and sighed. "I can't do it."
I nodded. "It looks almost human."
"Yeah. It's also afraid. I can feel it," Thorn said softly. "I wonder what it's doing here."
The logical bet would be that it was looking for a meal. People didn’t go to the mines much anymore, so maybe the creatures were branching out. "Looking for a meal, probably," I said as nonchalantly as I could.
Thorn looked at the creature, and it eyed the blond warily. They both seemed to be trying to decide whether the other was a threat. The creature climbed down from the shelf, and we both backed up a bit.
Its legs and arms looked to be about the same length. It was vaguely humanoid in appearance, about three feet tall from its feet to the top of its head. Its whole body was hairless, and its skin was a pale gray color. Its large eyes held dark abysses bordered by a rim of pale yellow.
I moved farther back as the creature stepped forward. It walked like a chimp, its large crescent shaped-talons scraping against the floor. It had a tail, which I hadn’t noticed until then, that twisted and curled in a snakelike motion as the creature walked.
I gave an involuntary shiver as I realized that it looked strikingly like something I had seen in an old book on demons that I read in my youth. Perhaps they were the root of the demon stories, I pondered.
The creature slowly came out of the pantry. Thorn said, "It's scratching the floor."
"Charge it for the repairs," I replied out of reflex.
The creature stopped and loo
ked at us. It put its foot down carefully and held its nails up. Thorn wondered, "Did it just understand us?"
"I don't know! Did you just understand us?" I directed the question at the thing. It blinked at me and then grinned, which I did not find comforting. Its mouth was filled with sharp, pointed teeth. "Okay. What do we do with it?" I asked Thorn without taking my eyes off the creature.
"Good question." He pointed at the pantry and said to the creature, "Go back to the pantry."
"Please," I begged, as if reminding a child of its manners.
Thorn amended, "Go back to the pantry, please."
The creature pondered us for a moment before it sat down. "It's definitely human and probably related to you," I said with certainty. I didn’t have to look at Thorn to know he’d just turned to glare at me.
I was about to say something else when there was a bang against the front door. The creature made a sound akin to a hiss, and Thorn and I turned in unison toward the door.
Thorn reached over and got my old donut and tossed it at the creature, which caught it with something akin to a purr. "Stay," Thorn said as it chomped on the donut.
I waited to see if the knock would come again. A moment later, there was a rapping on the door. I asked through the door, "Who is it?"
"It's just me. Oliver." I breathed a sigh of relief.
I opened the door to find the plump man waiting with a smile. "Sorry; we had a bit of excitement. Come in."
He shook his head. "There's no time. A call just came through the police scanners that there’s something going on at Maiden's Peak. Damn if I know what it is, but I thought you guys might want to go check it out."
Thorn came over to the door. I glanced behind him, but the creature was still sitting where we had left it. It hissed again toward the door, and I furrowed my brow in puzzlement.
"Give us a moment," Thorn said.
Oliver readily agreed and walked back toward Thorn's truck. I noticed then that Oliver's truck wasn't in the driveway. I whispered, "I don't think that's Oliver."
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