Owl and the Tiger Thieves

by Kristi Charish

  The wind picked up, and there was a scent in the air that grated on my nerves. I winced as a high-pitched screech echoed across the sand. Silence descended around the train station. The screech pierced the night a moment later—louder and closer.

  “Oh, I have a bad feeling about that,” I said. It smelled off. Captain couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong with the air either. He picked his nose up from the metal cup and sneezed three times before letting out a low inquisitive growl at the tracks.

  I checked my phone. No reception. I held it up for Artemis to see. We were in the middle of nowhere by a wood shack in the middle of a desert. There were no witnesses besides a few local passengers.

  “When does the train arrive?”

  Artemis’s eyes were searching around the station and the sand dunes now. “It comes when it comes.”

  “The schedule—”

  “There is no schedule, bur from the number of people, I’d say no more than an hour.”

  I let out my breath slowly, watching it condense in a cloud before me.

  The station’s halogen lights flickered. A young man beside us jumped. I wasn’t the only paranoid one here—or the only one that had heard the screech.

  “A hyena?”

  “There are no hyenas out here, and even if there were, they don’t sound like that,” Artemis replied.

  I frowned as I heard the rumble in the distance. I glanced down the tracks along with everyone else and saw a blur of white lights. They seemed awfully close considering how much farther away the train sounded.

  I stood to get a better look, and so did Artemis, looking whiter than he had a moment before.

  The scent of the air even changed. It carried a dry rot, not unlike death. I had the urge to run and hide. Every bone in my body—I stopped myself.

  The distant sound of the train was overshadowed by a hollow whistle around us, as if the night air itself were shrieking at us in warning.

  “Try and get reception again,” Artemis said.

  His expression was enough to stop me asking any questions. I pulled out my phone. Nothing, not even a browser. I shook my head. “It’s flickering in and out.”

  “It’s blocking it,” Artemis said, and jumped to his feet, fast. “This chill—it’s too cold for this time of evening. Hopefully just a ghost.”

  I’d had run-ins with ghosts before in Mr. Kurosawa’s casino. The powerful ones could interfere with electronics, lights, noises, even smells—but something about the way Artemis was standing, his face still white, told me that wasn’t what he was worried about.

  He nodded down the tracks. “We’ll see soon enough.”

  Others were noticing the whistling wind now over the sound of the oncoming train. A few people got up and stepped away from the tracks and station, away from the light and towards the dunes. Others stayed in their seats but looked uncomfortably undecided.

  The light was getting closer and brighter, though the sound of the train wasn’t nearly close enough. The wind picked up, stirring sand and clothes around the entire station.

  Ghosts had their bags of tricks, but this was on a scale I hadn’t seen before.

  A gust of icy wind stole a woman’s scarf, flicking the tails in her face before drawing it into the sand.

  Something crunched beneath my feet, and I glanced down at the ground. A thin layer of frost covered it, creeping up the toes of my boots.

  Artemis swore beside me.

  “What?”

  The passengers milling around the train station looked uncomfortably down the tracks. Cold descended icy, to the bone, and biting. The ones with wraps and light jackets clutched them tighter to ward off the cold. There was another strong gust of the wind that pushed through us, and then the light, which had been getting closer, flashed and sputtered out.

  The whispers that had buzzed through the group halted. There was a sense of foreboding in the air now, despair and something else—fear. An unnatural fear, descending on my skin like a clammy sweat.

  The man sitting beside me had lost his hat in the gust. It was a nice one, a fedora. It danced across the sand and over a dune, just out of reach. He hesitated to chase it, but it was within sight, a few paces away. He fought against the wind to reach it as it danced beyond him, then again, leading him farther and farther away until he was just over the dune.

  Over the wind we heard a bloodcurdling scream. I and everyone else covered their ears. Captain howled.

  A moment later the man stumbled back to the station, clutching his hat to his chest. His face was stretched in an expression of horror—and it glittered.

  He tripped over the edge of the concrete platform and reached for me. He was frozen, his face covered in pale ice crystals.

  Before I could get out of the way, he grasped my wrist.

  “He wants what you have,” he said, though it was a woman’s voice that spoke. “Give it to him, and maybe you’ll live,” and with that, the man collapsed, dead.

  Four bright white lights appeared above the dunes.

  “Shit,” Artemis said. “It’s worse than I thought.” He started to back away from the station and the tracks, in the opposite direction from the lights. “Everyone run! Hide in the sands,” he shouted as loudly as I’d ever heard him before he took his own advice. A woman screamed.

  “What the hell is it?” The ice cold prickled at my neck again.

  He shook his head as he hastened his retreat; everyone was running now. “It’s not ghosts!” he shouted over the wind that had renewed its assault over the station. “It’s wisps! Pick up the pace if you want to live, Hiboux.”

  Will-o’-the-wisps? Shit, that was bad.

  I grabbed Captain and picked up my pace. Artemis was already ten feet ahead. Behind me was pandemonium as everyone scattered.

  “Ghosts I could hide us from, even bargain with after they’d had their fill of scaring the passengers,” Artemis said in short breaths as I drew up beside him.

  He pushed me into the sand as one of the glowing white orbs flashed along the sand dune beside us. “Bury yourself,” he said, and began doing the same. “If we’re lucky, they won’t pick up on the heat.”

  Will-o’-the-wisps, or fairy lights, were ghostlike creatures; the difference was that wisps never played with their prey. Grad students in the northern bogs were warned never to stray from well-marked trails, and stories abounded of stray flashlights and lanterns amongst the trees, the odd call for help that sounded like a cross between a woman and a bird. Every few years someone ignored the warnings, and a grad student wouldn’t make it back to camp with the rest. He or she would be found the next morning, lying in a bed of moss, freezing cold and very dead. Wisps consumed the warmth and breath of their victims until there was nothing left but a cold, dead husk.

  But wisps were a cold-climate creature, native to the bogs and forests of northern Europe and Russia. What the hell were they doing in the African desert? “I’ve never heard of them screeching like that,” Artemis said. Or attacking their prey in a group like that. Wisps were dangerous as all hell, but they were lie-in-wait predators, not the kind that ambushed you.

  Artemis inclined his head. “That would be new.” He finished burying himself. I scrambled to do the same.

  White linenlike strands churned within the globes of light. There didn’t seem to be anything solid to them, just light and sheer strands.

  “Remember what I said about Rynn being a talented enforcer? Well, he always knew how to intimidate his prey. Do you know what he used to do when someone got away?”

  I shook my head.

  “It didn’t happen often, but if you got away the first time you could be guaranteed he’d send an even worse monster.”

  The wisps shrieked again.

  “They’re more like wild animals than soldiers. They’ll attack anything that’s warm and breathes, and, unlike ghosts, they’re impossible to control. They don’t think about anything except feeding and will inflict pain and misery on any superna
tural or human they come across.”

  There was shouting now. Some of the people who’d run into the sand dunes began screaming, and there was a flash of silver in what was left of the evening light. I winced at the bloodcurdling screams. Then silence descended again.

  A glowing light hovered over where I’d buried myself in the sand. It zipped past, then stopped and returned, circling over where the three of us were buried.

  It concentrated on the area where Captain and I were buried, the icy cold dripping off it and chilling the sands. There was no body that I could discern, only wisps of muslinlike tendrils that descended to lick the sand, more delicate and less well defined than those of a jellyfish. I held my breath as it hovered near my face.

  Oh man, I hoped Captain would keep quiet.

  The seconds dragged on like minutes as I watched the wisp inspect the sands over and around me.

  A train whistle sounded, nearer than it had been. It pulled the wisp’s attention away from me, and with a screech it signaled to its three friends. They responded with the same piercing shriek, nothing like the soothing female voices that supposedly lured travelers into their traps.

  Other people had heard the train whistle too and couldn’t resist. I heard their shouts as they ran for the tracks. The wisps couldn’t resist either. There was a buzz of activity before they bolted after the more obvious prey.

  I had to see what had happened, how close the train was. I counted to five and slowly sat up.

  The four wisps were closer to the tracks. I could make out the things’ silvery silhouettes, their flickering tendrils like swirls of white smoke. Two of them caught up to and pounced on a man, their high-pitched shrieks sending the remaining two into a frenzy. The screams of the man were bone chilling as he succumbed.

  I was out of my mind staying buried in the sand; the train was coming. The need to run, or at the very least do something, took over. I cleared away the sand—I had to run far and fast now. Captain let out a high-pitched, terrified mew beside me. He was on board too.

  A firm grip on my shoulder forced me back into the sand before I could bolt.

  Artemis.

  “Let me g—” A warm hand covered my mouth to keep me from screaming. It was the warmth that brought me back to my senses, penetrating through the icy cold that had gripped me and every other living thing near the train and the wisps.

  “It’s the wisps,” he said. “Powerful old ones can scare their prey into running.” He shook his head as he whispered, “I’ve never seen it on this scale before. Something is very wrong.”

  The people who had waited it out near the station were in full panic. A few ran back into the small station; a few crawled under it.

  “Not into the station, spread yourselves thin—there are only four.” He cursed under his breath as three of them were caught by one wisp’s tendrils. “Why is it your species never bothers to think when they’re scared?”

  But my attention was on something much more disconcerting: the train that was pulling into the station had stopped slowing down, even as the waiting passengers waved at it, the station night staff shining their flashlights.

  One desperate man stepped onto the tracks, waving two flashlights in a cross. The train sounded its horn once. That was all the warning it gave.

  Son of a— I closed my eyes as the train crushed him, then came to a grinding halt a hundred fifty feet later.

  In a morbid twist of fate, the train’s colliding with the man had resulted in his body jamming the track. There was a commotion on the cab as the engineers scrambled—arguing, I imagined, about who should get down.

  The passengers near the station lost no time climbing onto the train, their movement attracting the renewed attention of the four wisps, who had been feeding on their last prey.

  Other passengers who had been hiding in the desert either decided that they weren’t going to get another opportunity to escape or noticed that others were running and figured all they had to do was reach the train first.

  I concurred. I started for the train.

  “Wait,” Artemis said, grabbing the strap on Captain’s carrier. I hit the sand hard on my stomach. “And watch.”

  I did.

  One of the engineers managed to shove the other one off, then threw him a rake or hoe. He scrambled to pull the body out, acting like a maniac.

  Others had caught up to the train, and a flurry of madness ensued as they clambered onto the cars, grabbing whatever they could, even kicking at one another to keep their spot. One man grabbed a woman and threw her back into the sand along with a small boy, then took her space. No one tried to stop him.

  The woman and boy managed to climb up on another car, disappearing inside just as the wisps arrived, their screeches sounding across the sand dunes.

  “They’re fed now,” Artemis said. “They’ll be more powerful—and hungrier. They’ll never be satiated now. Now—run!” he commanded as the wisps clambered over a man they’d knocked off the train. The engineer hacked at the tracks with his rake.

  I grabbed Captain and bolted after Artemis. Down the dune I ran.

  I glimpsed a face I recognized from the station, a woman with a white shawl and a worn carpetbag. The carpetbag was long gone, but the shawl still twisted in the sand. She saw us run and must have decided that the odds of three surviving were better than one. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her scramble up from where she had fallen and run after us.

  A wisp crested a dune in front of us. The woman’s white shawl waving in the night sky, reflecting what little light there was—well, it was irresistible.

  Artemis knocked me down in the sand. I fell hard on my stomach, and Captain skidded to a stop beside me.

  “Are you out of your mind? The train is right there!” And if the commotion on top of the cab was any indication, it was about to get going.

  “Just wait,” Artemis growled.

  The wisp that had come to investigate bellowed high and sharp as it bore down on the woman. She screamed, and I could have sworn she picked up her pace.

  Bad luck, wrong place, wrong time—if she’d been ten feet in front or to the right of us . . .

  “She’s right there. Can’t you hide her?”

  Artemis’s hand clamped down over my mouth. “Keep quiet,” he hissed in my ear. “Wisps may not hold a conversation, but they react to sound like bloodhounds to a scent. I can barely hide you and me, and once she’s done with her, she’ll probably be able to sense past my defenses.”

  “You’re one of them! Isn’t there something you can do to stop her?”

  “I’m not Rynn.” There was uncharacteristic venom in his words. “I’m sorry,” he added in a softer tone. “It’s us or her. I wish it wasn’t so, but there’s very little I can do except hide us.”

  The woman was close now, still trying her damnedest to escape from the wisp. In a moment she would pass by, close enough for me to trip her.

  “I know what you’re thinking—don’t,” Artemis pleaded. “If you do, I won’t be able to hide you from the wisps. She’ll kill you, the woman, and everyone else here, and what for? To prove you’re not an asshole? All it will be is a waste—and you’ll never know if Rynn lives or dies in that armor because you will be dead.”

  I balled my hands into fists as the woman scrambled up the sand dune, close enough for me to touch her.

  And then she was past my reach, heading towards the tracks and the furiously working mechanic.

  The woman cast a glance over her shoulder at the oncoming wisp. It cost her; she fell on her knees. For a moment I thought she had seen me. Her eyes widened, and she reached her hand out towards me, beseeching me for help. Then the wisp was on her, a flutter of translucent white strips that wrapped around her neck like a noose. A layer of white frost crawled up her face, eventually covering her eyes.

  I couldn’t help. I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Worse, I hadn’t even tried. And I felt sick about it.

  I was thankful I couldn’t see any
of the other people who were screaming.

  “Now!” Artemis said, and we set off at a run for the tracks, ahead of where the train was. A few other stragglers ran to where the train was stopped.

  I saw what Artemis had been hinting at: the engineer had finally managed to free the mangled body. The train crept forward, the wheels crushing past the remaining debris—and the closest person still had a hundred meters of sand left. We had a hundred fifty, so we aimed ahead. The change in the four wisps at the renewed movement was instantaneous: they slid across the sands, glowing bright white. There were maybe four of us in total who had waited until the last minute. She descended on the first one she reached, a young Malian man. He tumbled head over heels, caught up in the translucent nets of white vapor. There was a quick scream that died in a gasp.

  A glance over my shoulder showed that he’d been frozen into a tangled, unnatural heap of limbs. The wisps rose back into the air and burned more brightly, as if they had found something they were looking for—and that was me.

  Shit. “Run faster!” I yelled at Artemis as two of them screeched and bolted across the sand for us. I forced my own legs to pick up the pace.

  We reached the tracks as the train started to pull forward, picking up speed with each meter. The wisps were close on our trail, icy cold creeping across the sands until frost slid down the tracks. Artemis pulled alongside the tracks and kept running. I could hear the train behind us.

  “Jump when I do!” he shouted.

  That was the plan? Fantastic, another thing I never ever wanted to have to do in life scratched off the list.

  The train pulled alongside, and quickly the engine car passed.

  “Now!” he shouted, and threw himself at a ladder before pulling himself into an open car’s belly.

  I meant to jump, I really did. I saw a shoe—and then the severed leg it was still attached to.

  Fuck me, jump.

  The train sped up.

  Shit.

  Artemis saw that I was still running alongside the train and swore. “Grab my hand, then,” he said, leaning on the bottom of the car and holding his hand out. “Jump on the count of three. One, two—”