by E A Comiskey
Her soft chuckle crawled across his skin and into his ear. “Okay, then. Drastic measures.” Her teeth grazed his neck, then tugged on his nipple. Her tongue drew a path across his belly and moved south. Now, at least part of his body was awake and ready to do something. She chuckled again. “Wakey, wakey, Finn O’Doyle.” She took him into her mouth and he moaned and arched up under her.
When he lay breathless and spent, his eyes finally opened. His limbs under his control again, he asked, “What time is it anyway? It’s got to be after midnight.”
“Mmm. Probably.” She stretched out on the warm rocks under the moon.
Reality crashed down on him. “Shit! How are we supposed to get back home?”
“Same way we got here, I suppose.”
“Run? At this hour?” He sat up and looked around like he might spot an unexpected taxi cab waiting for them.
In one swift motion, she rolled onto her knees, pushed herself up, and slung one leg over his so she straddled his lap, her perfect breasts pressed against his chest. “We could stay here all night, I suppose.”
There was an astonishing stirring in response to her words. Good Lord! He’d gone back in time and become a teenager again. He gave her round little bottom a firm squeeze and lifted her off. “You’re a temptation, for sure, but we can’t sleep out here.”
“Why not?”
“Snakes? Scorpions? Coyotes? Because I have a pillow top mattress at home.” He stood, and his muscles flexed and moved with newfound strength. “Plus, I’m not tired anymore.” It was the truth. He wasn’t just awake. He practically vibrated with life. Once, in college, he’d done a line of cocaine and he’d felt invincible. Two friends had to convince him he couldn’t fly. But they’d been wrong. He was sure of it. “Let’s run.”
Her eyes twinkled. “Yes. Let’s.”
Was there no limit to her vitality? He hoped not. There was no limit to his. He would race her ten miles home and then he would take her again on the pillow top mattress.
The expression on her face convinced him she knew exactly what he was thinking, and there was no doubt in his mind she’d go along with the plan.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Richard
Dawn crept over the horizon, casting a sickly yellow pallor across the world. Richard sat, leaning against the ugly brown headboard of the bed, watching the room brighten. Breathing hurt. Exhaustion pressed him down onto the mattress. His left eye was swollen nearly shut. He couldn’t remember hitting his face. Still, for all that, he couldn’t sleep. The moment on the roadside played in his mind on an endless, maddening loop.
With one hand on the open door of the rented vehicle, staring at the spot where Stanley had been sitting, the world had shrunk down around him.
The Devil took Stan.
Good. Let her have him.
He got me into this mess in the first place.
This has been the greatest adventure of my life.
There are only twenty-two days left in the moon cycle.
Who will kill the skinwalker?
I’m going to fall.
I need my walker.
I’m too old for this.
Burke almost died.
How would I tell my daughter her child is dead?
She’s not dead.
Stan might be dead.
Not dead.
Taken by The Devil.
Will she come back?
How do you fight The Devil?
Oh, God! Burke almost died!
The Devil took Stan!
There are only twenty-two days left to kill the skinwalker!
Burke almost died!
Burke almost died!
Burke almost died!
“Grandpa?” Burke had gripped his arm, gentle but firm. “Come on, Grandpa. Let’s get you in the car.”
He let her guide him toward the passenger door, but he didn’t get in. “I should have never called you,” he said.
She smiled, but the corners of her mouth turned down. Her eyes sparkled with tears in the dim moonlight. “Everything’s going to be okay. Come on. Let’s get away from this place.”
They’d ridden back to the hotel in silence. She’d chosen to lay on the bed next to his, rather than in the other room.
“We shouldn’ta left him,” he forced the words out into the dark space between them. Speaking hurt a great deal.
“He knew she was coming, Grandpa. He gave himself up.”
He pushed himself up, hissed in pain, and fell back against the mattress. “What are you talking about?”
“He planned the whole thing.”
It didn’t make sense. He gave himself up? Why would he do that? He’d been running from her for years. Why now, when he was so close to bagging the one creature that had eluded him for so long? “But…the skinwalker.”
“He knew that he couldn’t fight The Devil and the skinwalker at the same time. He made a choice and gave himself up so she would no longer be a distraction from the hunt.”
“So now what? The skinwalker gets away?”
“Of course not. Stanley wouldn’t want that.”
“Confound it, kid, I don’t know what in tarnation Stanley wanted, but he’s gone and balled it up good now.” Hot anger bubbled up and burned away the sadness. He welcomed his old friend, preferring rage over the desire to curl up and cry like an infant at his mother’s breast. “We don’t even know how to kill the stupid thing. This one needs a wooden stake, that one needs an iron bullet. What’re we s’posed to do? Just start throwin’ stuff at it till it up and dies?”
“Grandpa, we have the book. We’re the hunters now.”
Her words shocked him into silence. His mind, a buzzing hive of urgent questions just moments earlier, was now silent as the grave. Eventually, her breathing slowed and became heavy and he knew she slept.
Blast Stan Kapcheck! Stinkin’, smirking, cocky, over-dressed coxcomb! In the entirety of eight plus decades, no other man had made Richard’s blood boil so. No doubt, he’d die from an aneurysm and it would be all Stan Kapcheck’s fault.
A single tear escaped and made a quick fugitive track down his cheek.
For the first time since Barbara died, he prayed.
***
Burke made another trip to Dollar General and returned with enormous sunglasses that hid the worst of her bruises, a bottle of Miralax, and a jogging suit for Richard.
He handed the Miralax back to her. “I said prune juice.”
“They didn’t have prune juice. This will do the same thing.”
“It’s not the same. Prune juice is gentle. This stuff will tie me to the pot all day.”
“Fine. Choose to suffer, then.” She tossed the unopened bottle into the little grey trash can in the corner.
“I’m going to look like a fool in these clothes,” he said.
She turned to go into the other room, calling over her shoulder, “You’ll look a lot more foolish in your boxer shorts.”
“Dagnab, smart aleck kid,” he mumbled, gingerly pushing himself to his feet. He’d had to swallow three times the recommended dose of Ibuprofen before he’d been able to stand up and walk without wincing. No doubt about it, he’d developed a nasty hitch in his get along. He managed to wash up and dress himself. He stuffed his dirty clothes in the yellow plastic bag and when Burke said it was time, he was ready to go.
He rode in the car, his fingers tapping out an unsettled rhythm on his thighs.
Burke’s long nails clicked on the steering wheel.
He forced himself to still.
“Grandpa, Stanley—”
“Stan Kapcheck’s a vain old fool who’s like to break an arm pattin’ himself on the back. Now he’s got us both mixed up in this—”
“Stanley saved your life. He’s a good man.”
With dawning horror, he stared at his granddaughter. “You’ve got a thing for that old fart.”
Her immense sigh could have powered a sailboat. “I do not have a thing for him, Grandpa.
I can respect a man without wanting to go to bed with him.”
He clamped his mouth shut and stared out the window. In his day, women weren’t so crass, but he supposed if he said anything about it, he’d be in trouble for that, too.
“Stanley and I talked the night you and I argued,” Burke said.
Richard held himself together with wishes and spit. The mention of the argument was a shot straight to his heart. He pressed his lips together, hard. There would be no more tears from him, that much was certain.
“I wanted to leave. Or, well, I thought that’s what I wanted after we argued, but I didn’t. I came back to the hotel and talked with Stanley.”
Stanley was good at talking, Richard thought. If he had a special talent, it was wagging that silver tongue of his. “So, you stayed for Stanley’s sake,” he said.
“No, Grandpa. I stayed for my own sake. Just like you came on this trip in the first place for your own reasons. You didn’t really care about saving some author you never heard of.” Her voice had a hard, angry edge to it. She stopped for a moment, and when she went on, her tone had softened a little. “We’re not so different, you and me.”
Richard studied her, the young, exotic-looking, self-made millionaire, dressed in fashionable clothes and looking forward to another half century of life. Aside from a shared relationship with his daughter, what did they really have in common?
As though she’d read his thoughts, she said, “I’m alone, too, you know. Do you realize that I was the same age when Greg left me that you were when Grandma died?”
He hadn’t realized that. He’d not really given it much thought. He’d only met the boy twice. His granddaughter’s husband had been rude and abrasive the first time, and the second time, he was a downright horse’s backside.
“It’s not the same, though.”
“No. Not the same. Your wife loved you with all her heart until her very last breath and then left you alone, wishing you’d find happiness again, whereas my husband took the time to tell me I was an insufferable bitch and he hoped my female parts would shrivel up and rot in his absence before he walked out with my favorite set of luggage and set up house with a twenty-two-year-old underwear model from Sweden.”
Did he know that’s what had happened to the girl’s marriage? It didn’t seem like he did. He’d been told she was divorcing and made his own assumptions. He’d never bothered to ask why.
“I made a fortune in my twenties,” she went on. “The plan was to retire young and stay home to raise my babies, never worrying about money the way my parents worried. So, I retired, and before I got pregnant, I was single. The market changed. Technology changed. What I did was groundbreaking when I did it. By the time Greg left me, what I’d done was as obsolete as vacuum tubes in a television.” She signaled and carefully passed a school bus lumbering along in the right lane.
Richard glanced at the speedometer. The needle hovered at just over eighty. He started to point it out, but memory of how frustrating her slow puttering along had been stilled his voice. A higher speed meant fewer hours in the car, and since it was impossible to find any position less painful than another while strapped upright in the seat, he entirely favored a shorter trip.
“I was just like you,” she said. “I was sitting in a comfortable chair, entertaining myself to death. The only difference is that I picked books and you picked The Weather Channel.”
“Nothing wrong with The Weather Channel,” he mumbled.
“Nothing wrong with books,” she answered. “A good book is part of a good life, but it’s not a good life, all by itself.”
She didn’t seem inclined to say any more.
Richard shifted, trying to ease some of the pain in his side. Movement only made it worse. He produced the bottle of Ibuprofen from his pocket and took two more. Sitting very still, waiting for the drugs to produce some result, he thought about Burke’s words. It was one thing to be waiting out your days when you only had a few days left. Doing the same at her age was a whole different ball of wax. The pity that crept into his heart was foreign. He was used to feeling sorry for himself, not for other people.
Unbidden, Stanley’s grinning face came to mind. Where was he now? What was the witch doing to him?
We were good together, Stan had said.
“What if Stanley don’t want rescuin’?”
Burke glanced over at him. “Why would you say that?”
“Well, The Devil. She’s evil, sure, but she’s not too hard on the eyes, you know.”
“She’s The Devil, Grandpa.”
“Yeah. There’s that.” He began to tap on his legs again. “So, what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to do what Stanley would have wanted us to do, what Grandma would have wanted us to do.”
“Which is?”
“We’re going to slay the monster, trap the Devil, and rescue Stanley.” When she looked at him again, a smile played across her battered and swollen face. “We’re going to live every single day on purpose. We’re going to turn our lives into a grand adventure.”
The contagious smile caught, and he felt his spirits rise as though they were being tugged up by the curving corners of his mouth. “We’re gonna be hunters.”
“Both of us,” she said, and leaned forward to fish in her huge black purse, coming up with the battered leather book. “Maybe you can find something in here that will help us.”
He slipped the glasses from his pocket and perched them on the end of his nose. In his hands, the book fell open to the last written page. On the thin page there was a single entry in Stanley’s neat, precise printing.
The Devil is on our trail. She can be held off, but running from her is a distraction from capturing the skinwalker. We will divide and conquer. -SK
Beneath that, in a pretty, looping script were the words, I am a hunter now. I will slay the skinwalker, but I pray I will not have to do it alone. -BM
There was a red and white Bank of America pen in the ashtray. Richard took it in his hand and pressed the tip to the paper. His handwriting wasn’t what it once was. The tremors of old age had given it a strange, warbling look. Trying his best to hold the pen steady, he made his own entry.
As long as there is strength in my body, I will hunt at my granddaughter’s side. She will not slay the skinwalker alone. -RB
He capped the pen and put it back where he’d found it.
Burke’s hand found his arm and gave it a gentle squeeze. They’d probably be killed doing this, but they’d go down on their own terms. Death was going to have to drag them out of this world by force.
He leaned forward and started reading the diary, picking up where he’d left off.
***
Richard had never seen a town like Santa Fe, New Mexico. He imagined that when Coronado pictured the future it might have looked like this pristine city of modern adobe houses with manicured lawns surrounded by snow-capped mountains. If Burke had told him they’d driven into a foreign country, he wouldn’t have found it hard to believe. The streets grew more and more narrow and twisted as they approached the center of town and then widened once more on the other side of the city.
He held the book in his lap. He knew what they needed to do. He had no idea how they were going to do it.
They were climbing now, following a twisting path into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Burke had told him that Stanley’s last bit of instruction was to find Jeremiah’s cabin. When she pressed Stanley to tell her who Jeremiah was, he simply insisted that he was a friend who had what they needed to defeat the skinwalker.
Eventually, she slowed to a stop in front of a dirt track that led farther up the mountain. “I think that’s his driveway.”
Despite the bright cerulean sky above, night appeared to have settled within the close confines of the high desert forest. Shadows ruled the rough little road, dancing like teasing imps before them.
“Reckon we should go up there, then.”
Burke tapped the steering wheel
. “Yeah.” The car didn’t move.
“Better to do it before dark,” he said.
“You got the gun?”
“It’s in my pocket.”
“Maybe you should take it out.”
He didn’t argue. The weight of it bolstered his courage.
“Make sure the safety is off,” she said as she pressed the accelerator and urged the car forward.
The light died away as they entered the canopy. The gnarly tips of branches scratched and tapped at the windows, where a thin film of frost formed with unnatural speed.
“This is so weird,” Burke whispered, leaning forward over the wheel, her attention unwavering from the path before them.
“Dark as pitch and colder than a witch’s tit in a brass bra,” Richard agreed in similarly hushed tones. He switched off the revolver’s safety.
The road took a sharp turn to the right and led to a wooden bridge so narrow it was impossible to drive across. Burke shut off the engine and the two of them sat staring at what lay on the other side of the deep arroyo.
A cottage with a thatched straw roof stood in a beam of sunlight that shone down on it like a spotlight. Roses climbed the side of the little stone structure. Little decorative windmills and suncatchers, ceramic gnomes, and trees made of old bottles and rebar sprung up in a sprawling garden of vegetables, wildflowers and towering sunflowers. A cobblestone path led from the other side of the bridge straight to the arched wooden door.
“How does he grow tomatoes in this dry, rocky soil?” Burke asked.
Richard turned toward her, agape. “You’ve lost your danged mind.”
“I’ve been trying to grow tomatoes for ten years. I’ve got the richest, blackest dirt in North America. The climate is perfect. I plant them and fertilize them and water them and every year they sprout up and die. Those tomato plants are flawless.”
Richard rolled his eyes. “No wonder you and Stan got along. You’re both a few pickles short of a barrel.”
She finally turned toward him. “You don’t have to be so critical of a thing just because you don’t understand it, you know.”
“I understand that any person who looks at that there bit of witchcraft and has gardening tips as the first thing that comes to mind is a few blasted pickles—”