Feast

by Merrie Destefano

  And now, because of my transgression, I wondered what would happen to Elspeth. What Darkling or human would ever love or care for her, bewitching creature caught between two worlds—

  Bewitching me even now. Making me forget how much I despised humans.

  “How is she?” Sage landed with a gentle thump on the widow’s walk, then stood in the doorway to my room.

  “Sleeping,” I answered, as if it were a horrid thing. “Why didn’t you tell me that she sleeps?”

  Sage moved closer, her long dress whispering. “You wanted me to tell you what you already knew? That your daughter is half human?” Silver eyes glimmered, stared through me.

  “Why didn’t you teach her to hunt?”

  “We did.” She crossed the short distance to the bed, feet not touching the ground. A detail she forgot about from time to time.

  “She didn’t mask her scent,” I said. “She could have been killed—”

  “But she wasn’t. You were there to save her, to teach her. It’s time, brother.”

  “No.”

  “Elspeth is different from us. Her bones are heavier than ours.” Sage knelt beside the bed, ran a gentle hand over my daughter’s hair. “She can only fly for short distances and then she has to rest. Sienna and I took turns carrying her on the flight here. She’s not strong enough to return. This must be her home now.”

  “I told you. The humans—they won’t accept her.”

  “They’ve accepted you, my love.”

  “It’s not the same.” I turned my back on her, brooding, remembering, wishing I could change everything.

  “The humans haven’t accepted me,” I confessed then as I watched another car make its slow approach through streets drenched in cloud.

  “They fear me. To them, I am a beast.”

  Chapter 24

  The Land of Nightmares

  Driscoll:

  Dr. Ross Madera stood on the wraparound porch, one hand on the carved brass doorknob, as if dreading what waited on the other side. I could see him through the leaded-glass panels on the door, watched him shiver, as if pushing his ghosts behind him, as if shouldering his way through a large crowd.

  Sometimes the price of friendship is too heavy to bear.

  But I have no empathy for his choice of friends.

  The knob turned, almost on its own, as if the door itself willed him to enter. They waited inside—like a pride of lions: Ash’s clan, here for the Hunt. They had spread across the parlor and I was doing my best to crouch behind the desk and stay hidden.

  Ross stood in the doorway, now, fear on his weathered features. I knew that he barely made it from one day to the next and that thought alone made me smile.

  None of the Darklings bothered to hide behind human flesh when the door opened—they all kept their glowing eyes, papery skin, the wings that rustled and sang. Meanwhile, a single-note chant, poetic and hypnotic, circled the room, haunting and eerie in both simplicity and depth. I felt like I could listen to it for a thousand years and never hear it repeat, never grow weary of it. Sparks hung in the air, liquid, and fragrant.

  They were probably testing enchantments, holding time still.

  Ross took a timid step across the threshold. One of the females, wild and beautiful, smiled at him with silver-gray lips. It was Sienna, Ash’s cousin and one of Sage’s handmaidens. She walked closer, touched webbed fingers to the intruder’s brow.

  She was probing, looking for his secrets.

  I knew that Ross had enough secrets to satisfy even the most wanton Darkling. Tales of war in faraway jungles, short men with almond eyes, children who had banded together to carry death. Burning villages and rice paddies and protesters back home who hadn’t cared about the war. Helicopter blades that had sliced blue-black sky, a foreign language on the radio. Men who had tumbled down to the ground, far below—the imprint of Ross’s hand on their backs. Always and forever, falling. Always and forever, dying. The secret desire Ross had: to be shoved out of the door next, sucking night sky, praying to the god of gravity to be merciful and swift.

  Sienna smiled now, as if she had joined him in the Land of Nightmares. She drank in all of his pain and seemed to beg for more.

  “Sienna. That’s enough.” Ash’s voice sounded, somewhere up above. On the landing, perhaps.

  I flinched and huddled closer to the floor, peered from the side of the desk.

  But she ignored Ash. She traced a finger from Ross’s temple to his lips. There, she let it rest, eyes focused on his mouth, as if willing him to speak of it, out loud, the horrors of war, the sleepless nights.

  “What does it mean to not be able to sleep?” she asked, head cocked as if gazing down a microscope at some new form of bacteria.

  “Stop!” Ash was beside them both now. “This one belongs to me. He bears my mark.” He took Ross’s arm, lifted it, pulled back the sleeve to reveal a six-inch scar on the human’s forearm. “The Hunt does not begin until I say.”

  Then he pushed Sienna back, fire in his touch. Yellow flames licked her shoulder; they traveled the full length of her arm before disappearing.

  She cried out and shrank away from Ross. A hiss slithered from her lips, but she didn’t fight back.

  No one challenged Ash. No human. No Darkling.

  Ever.

  “Come.”

  Ash led Ross away from the flock of Darklings, up a stairway, to a room where they could talk. They turned their backs on the whir of leathery wings, retreating into the safety of friendship.

  And at the same time I retreated as well, through the kitchen and up the back stairs to my room. Maybe, if they couldn’t see me, I could be forgotten. I needed to hide. For there would be no safe place in all of Ticonderoga Falls once the Hunt began.

  Chapter 25

  Dancing Burning Beast

  Thane:

  The stench of fire and scorched flesh filled the room. Thin trails of smoke followed after Ash as he ascended the stairs, venom in his gaze when he looked back at us from the landing. Meanwhile, flames sizzled on my sister Sienna’s skin, bright and burning—a gentle, flickering, liquid heat. I watched her, my heart fascination growing.

  I hated the sun; her light blinded me.

  But this dancing, burning beast was different, this thing called fire, this smell of charred flesh.

  The Hunt does not begin until I say.

  But it had already begun, yesterday in the green shadowed wood, when my brother had killed that human male. The creature had died with a pleading whimper, all because River hadn’t been able to control his appetite. And now his body lay cold and alone beneath a shallow pyre of leaves.

  We had to dispose of the body, before one of the Blackmoors stumbled upon it.

  I reached for Sienna, urged her to come closer, then I soothed her raw flesh with an incantation. She shuddered and cursed as she leaned into my embrace, brother and sister-in-skin. At the same time, the human-named-Ross disappeared in the gloom upstairs, safe behind yet another closed door with my dear Cousin Ash.

  I rested my lips near Sienna’s ear, then whispered, “Perhaps you can harvest the human tomorrow.”

  She pulled away and shook her head.

  “You shouldn’t let Ash’s mark stop you,” I said.

  “ ’Tis the law,” River said. “We dare not cross him again.” My brother joined us, tall and weedy, thin of flesh but strong of sinew. His gaze flicked from Sienna to me and then toward the empty staircase. Perhaps making sure Ash was gone.

  “Wrong to break a blood oath, you mean,” I said.

  River nodded.

  “But haven’t you broken his law already? And isn’t that why we’re here? To live. To hunt. To find our own little patch of dirt like Cousin Ash. No matter what we have to do to get it,” I said, all the while watching the expression on Sienna’s face as she took a cautious step toward the stairs.

  “I’ve never seen such vivid, dark dreams,” she spoke with longing in her voice.

  “My pretty cousins.” I p
ut one hand on each of them, lowering my voice to a conspiratorial tone. “This right here, this could be our home. These humans could belong to us.”

  Sienna turned toward me, eyes like the golden fields of home, lips parted, teeth like porcelain daggers ready to hunt. “This land could be ours,” she agreed. “And that human, the one who dwells in the Land of Nightmares—”

  “He could be yours, my love,” I said. “And so he shall be. There’s just one thing that we need to take care of first. We can’t let our dear Cousin Ash grow suspicious too soon.”

  Chapter 26

  Glittering Machinery

  Ash:

  Ross Madera sat in a wicker chair before the fire, sipping a cup of tea. Outside, the fog spiraled, caressing the windows as if it longed to enter. Inside, the flickering fire colored the room. It accented the lines in Ross’s face, making him look older, more tired. Or maybe he had been slowly aging and I hadn’t been paying attention. Humans wear out much faster than Darklings. They are so fragile.

  “Is Elspeth still sleeping?” he asked. His hands shook slightly, but it was obvious he was trying to hide it.

  I nodded.

  He set his cup down with an awkward clatter, then he stood and walked to the window. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I hate coming here, especially when your family is visiting.”

  “Everybody has a side of the family they’re ashamed of. You just met mine,” I said, sifting through the human’s thoughts. All I could see was the war, bits of it strewn about the room, alongside the hand-carved Belter furniture and Tiffany lamps. A headless body here, an M–16 assault rifle there, a tank rumbling through the wall. I had to concentrate to sort reality from the waking hallucinations. “Did the nightmares come back last night?”

  This was what had brought us together, how we had become friends. I knew how to navigate my way through the horrors of the dream world, and Ross knew how to maneuver through the tangled mess of human civilization.

  “Not until I walked in here.”

  “I apologize for my cousin,” I said. “Sienna has a preference for bad dreams.”

  Ross flinched when one of the pine logs in the fireplace snapped and cracked, sent a shower of sparks against the screen. “I came to tell you that Elspeth should be fine—the dog doesn’t have rabies.”

  “I know.”

  “But there’s something that you don’t know.” He turned to face me. “Apparently that dog caught something from your daughter. He turned into a werewolf or a dog shape-shifter or something. You ever hear of anything like that before?”

  I ran my tongue over my teeth as I remembered another fog-shrouded wood, another country, another century. It had been a very long time ago, before I met Lily. A wolf had chased one of my brothers through the Black Forest, leaping, biting. Then later the local villagers had whispered tales of a wild beast that came out at night, a wolf that changed into a great hulking, shadowy monster. I, myself, had never seen it, but I knew that it was part of the Legend that had followed us throughout the centuries.

  “You’re not answering and that usually means I’m right,” Ross said.

  I crossed to the window, then stared down at the smoky mists. I tried to see the little cottage on the connecting green.

  “There’s something else you need to know.” He stood beside me now, shoulder to shoulder, like we were brothers-in-skin before a hunt. We were united from the many dream journeys we had taken together, a kinship that none of my clan would understand. “That woman, the dog’s owner—”

  Just then Maddie appeared, walking through the fog. The breeze cleared a path for her, fingers of white cloud trailing in her wake, as if she were created to dwell in a surreal landscape. Or as if she had created this one herself.

  “—She’s pretty famous, sort of a cross between Stephen King and Neil Gaiman—”

  I followed her with my eyes, felt hunger burning in my gut, even stronger than before. It was an unusual sensation, something I hadn’t felt in years.

  “—She just finished working on a TV series with Joss Whedon—”

  Maddie walked toward the forest, surrounded by wheels and spirals and sparks. A whole universe of transparent glittering machinery followed behind her, as if she were building a new world when she moved. My heart skittered in my chest, my blood burned. I could barely concentrate on what Ross was saying.

  “So, you better be on your toes during this hunt. I know things sometimes get a bit wild.”

  “Life and limb,” I murmured, repeating the Darkling creed like a litany. “We know the rules: don’t harm a human—”

  “Look, I remember what happened six years ago—”

  I still couldn’t bring myself to turn away from her, noticed again how beautiful she was, in form and thought, a ragged hole where her heart should be. Strange how humans wore their wounds on the inside, how they tried so valiantly to hide them. I unconsciously covered the ever-present wound in my side with a hand, knowing that it would never go away. It would be an eternal testimony to what I had lost.

  “—when they found Jim Hernandez out in the woods,” Ross continued, “half naked and mad.”

  “Moon madness,” I said. “Someone accidentally harvested too long. He recovered a few days later.”

  “All I can say is, nothing better happen to Madeline MacFaddin during this hunt or your sweet little mountain kingdom will come tumbling down around you. You’ll have the woods filled with humans, from Hollywood paparazzi to L.A.’s finest men in blue. All hunting for you.”

  A breeze cleared the fog a bit more, swept away another patch of haze, revealing a small crowd of teenage boys that loitered in a cluster of trees by the side of the road. All dressed in black and blue jeans, they stared at the cottage, at Maddie.

  “Damn. I didn’t expect word to get out this fast,” Ross said. “It was probably my receptionist. Two of those boys are hers.”

  “Why are they here?”

  “They’re her fans.”

  Just then Maddie noticed the boys standing by the road. She jogged out to greet them, laughed and signed a few autographs, then posed for a few group photos taken with a cell phone one of the kids pulled out of a back pocket.

  Then she waved good-bye and headed off, alone, toward the woods.

  Toward the Ponderosa Trail.

  Where just yesterday she had seen me in my true skin.

  Chapter 27

  The Safe and Narrow Path

  Maddie:

  A chill of mountain air, crisp and electric, flowed into my lungs. All around me, a battalion of nameless pines towered, trying to hide the sun between lacy branches. They swayed and murmured, threatened to swallow me as I stepped onto the path—so obvious yesterday, shrouded today as if dressed for the grave. I felt the promise of adventure, like a wilderness kiss, luring me closer.

  All this was necessary. To know my character. To meet him face-to-face.

  I hiked down toward the stream, surrounded by the primal fragrance of evergreen. Fog rolled between the trees, muffling all sound, covering my tracks, hiding any evidence that I had even been here.

  I found myself wondering if reality sometimes folded, if it could change into something malleable and indefinable, like liquid metal waiting for the mold.

  I knew there were things that lived in the dark, things that could never be fully understood. Things that wanted to lure you away from everything safe. Just like in the story of Hansel and Gretel, you could be surrounded by a dangerous wildwood, while a bear trap with rusty hinges waited for you to step off the safe and narrow path.

  If I hadn’t dreamed about a creature in the woods; if I hadn’t married the wrong man; if I hadn’t believed that I had the power to change people’s lives with my words.

  I shivered when I finally stopped and pulled out my iPhone to shoot some photos of the misty forest. Then I turned in a slow circle, video camera on, seeking any movement in the bushes. Nothing. It was all white transparent shadows and layers of pale green, shapes th
at hung solid, unmoving.

  Could that creature in the woods have been a chupacabras?

  Maybe there was a nest nearby, or a cave, a den where the creatures lived. Maybe there were babies that the flying beast had been trying to protect.

  I thought of Tucker, my stern warning for him to stay inside with all the windows and doors locked, Samwise there with him. I’d do anything to protect my boy. Was that the motivation behind these creatures? The primal instinct to protect their flock? I stopped, pulled a small notebook from my pocket and started jotting down ideas.

  Just then the wind shifted, lifting my hair. It spun the fog around me, hissed through the treetops and stirred the leaves that lay on the ground. A small pile of leaves turned into a miniature dust devil at my feet, swirling, moving.

  I glanced up. Then froze.

  There, at the side of the path, the fog and the leaves had been brushed aside, revealing a shoe and part of a leg, sticking out from beneath a shallow mound of leaves. And over there, poking out from the leaves was another shoe.

  Just off the path there lay a body, stiff and unmoving.

  Dead.

  Chapter 28

  Secret Message

  Ash:

  The Legend howled through the wood, leaked through the cracks in the walls and the crevices in between the windows. It called my name, so insistent and loud that I found it hard to concentrate. Meanwhile, a soft knock sounded on my sitting-room door, a sylvan voice on the other side, begging entrance, speaking smooth words of repentance. Sienna. She wanted in. Ross stiffened and stared at the door but didn’t move.

  I raised a hand of assurance. “She won’t harm you,” I told him.

  “Ash,” Sienna’s velvet voice called from the hallway, “I didn’t mean to frighten your human. I just—I just couldn’t help myself.”

  Ross took a step backward, closer to the window.

  “I would never take anything that belongs to you. I didn’t know he was yours.” Another soft knock. Rhythmic, part of a song. “Let me in. Please.”