by Kelley York
Whatever it is, the sound pulls me under while I’m mid-prayer to whatever God above that Preston is all right.
CHAPTER 25 – PRESTON
It’s pitch-dark out when Crane nudges me awake. I blink my eyes open, startled. The fog has let up a bit, revealing a nearly full moon that glitters off the water. More importantly, it reveals that the tide has receded a great deal, exposing rocks on either side of us. We can’t see how far up the shore it extends, but if the other option is simply to sit on our arses here…
It’s perilous going. Every sharp piece of stone digs into my feet through my shoes. Now and again, one dislodges under our weight. I slip twice. Crane is better balanced than me, but even he struggles, going at it largely one-armed. He staggers, tries to catch himself, and lets out a strangled cry as he does so. I hurry to his side and try to help steady him. He ignores the offered hand, but I can see his face is drawn with pain as he rights himself.
I have never felt so relieved to see a beach in all my life. The cliffs finally give way to a massive stretch of sand, leading up into the trees.
We’ve made it. We’re safe.
Well, safe from drowning, at least. Onto the next obstacle.
Namely, figuring out where we ought to go now. Crane tips his head back to squint at the sky, likely searching the stars to figure out directions. But the fog is still thick enough that little more than the moon is visible.
There appears to be a trail, however, winding away from the beach. It’s overgrown and looks rarely used, but it’s better than nothing. I imagine neither of us fancies spending the entire night outside, especially in wet clothes and with the temperature steadily dropping.
We walk for miles, it feels like, but I don’t know if that’s just the exhaustion and soreness making time slow to an agonising crawl. The entire time, I’m unnerved by the sensation that we are not alone, that something—someone—is watching us.
Crane comes to a halt before me, listening. “Do you hear that?”
I scrub my hands tiredly over my face. “Hear what?”
“That.” He pauses, turns, and begins to hurry slightly off the trail, crashing none too gracefully through the undergrowth and trees. Swearing, I stumble after him, nearly ending on my face more than once attempting to keep up.
The forest spills us out onto a larger road. It could very well be Sir Francis Drake, and if it is, then thank the Lord, it will lead us straight back to town. But what got Crane’s attention is a horse—Rogue—tied to a low branch of a nearby tree.
He hurries to her, scratching her neck, then goes for the saddlebags. He draws out his revolver from inside with a relieved sigh, sliding it into the holster on his hip.
I linger, hesitating. Surely, he has no intention of shooting me after he went through all that effort to rescue me, right? I wonder if that will change once we’ve made it to safety, once he has his notebooks and has no more need of us.
Still, something about this feels…off. Too convenient.
“Why is she here?” I ask of Rogue. “Who tied her up?”
“Don’t know, don’t care, and not sticking around to figure it out. Come on.” He braces himself and then heaves himself one-armed up into the saddle. I decide I’d rather not argue and risk being left behind, so I swing up behind him, awkwardly resting my hands upon his waist.
Crane wastes no time. He flicks the reigns, shouts for Rogue to move, and she promptly begins at a gallop down the road.
My heart is racing faster than she is. Why? What is it that I’m sensing that is not right? Benji would know. He’s better at these unsettling feelings than I am.
I’ve got a feeling that we are not alone. That something or someone is nearby.
I feel as though we’re walking right into a trap.
We get no more than a quarter mile up the road, rounding a sharp bend, when a thunder-like crack fills the air.
My ears ring. Crane swears as Rogue rears, further and further, until the three of us are crashing to the ground. I only barely manage to avoid having a twelve-hundred-pound horse crush one of my legs, rolling away as Rogue thrashes. Crane scrambles back, but not far, and the cry he lets out is one of anger and panic. I realise Rogue wasn’t spooked by the sound. She was shot.
The mare kicks and screams in pain. The bullet struck her in the throat, and the blood pouring out of her is coming far too fast for us to be able to do a damned thing about it. Crane kneels near her head, touching her cheek, whispering gently to her.
Never have I seen him like this. Distraught, afraid, wounded. Human.
I move to his side, wanting to help somehow, knowing by the sheer amount of blood that there is nothing I could hope to do. Perhaps if we had a doctor immediately, but…
“She’s dying,” Crane chokes out. He reaches for the revolver, having to use his non-dominant hand to wield it, and he hesitates, dark eyes tortured.
I’ve grown up alongside horses. Mum sometimes jokes I learned to ride before I learned to walk. Father also taught me early on that sometimes, the kindest thing you could do for an animal you loved was to put it out of its misery when it’s suffering. But it never got easier. It never stopped hurting.
It’s for that reason I gingerly take the gun from Crane.
He lets me. He holds her muzzle, speaks in hushed tones that seem to settle her fear.
I take the shot, and I make it count.
Rogue goes still. Crane presses his face to her mane, and I think I hear him crying. Or trying not to. I wish I could grant him time to grieve, but I cannot. The bullet that took her came from somewhere, and it’s with a sense of dread in my belly that I turn around full circle to scan the trees around us.
Hugo has made no effort to conceal himself. He stands ahead of us on the road, looking worse for wear, half-crazed with a sneer upon his face. His shirt is stained with blood. A wide gash mars one side of his face. Perhaps he had worse luck with the rocks than we did.
When I meet his eyes, his mouth curls. “Poor beast. Ain’t that a damned shame.”
Crane’s head snaps up at the sound. Every ounce of his distress morphs into unbridled fury. He lurches to his feet and snatches the gun from my grasp, marching forward and lifting it, not caring that Hugo, too, is still armed.
“I’m going to rip your fucking soul from your screaming corpse,” he rasps.
Hugo’s smile widens. “Are you now? ‘Cause it seems to me that my little setup worked.”
“If you wanted to play a game, then you ought not to have left my gun,” Crane snarls. He lifts the revolver, aimed steady and true at Hugo’s chest, and fires.
Nothing happens.
Hugo laughs. “That was my gift to you, Nate. Left you one bullet. You could’ve saved it for me, but I knew you’d use it on your stupid horse.”
I have gravely underestimated Hugo. I thought him a fool, and yet he’s laid out this trap for us for no reason other than to toy with us, to exact revenge. He knew exactly how Crane would react.
Swearing, Crane rams the gun back into its holster. He does not stop marching toward Hugo, even as the larger man lifts his own gun, aiming for one of Crane’s legs.
Now is the perfect opportunity for me to escape. I could vanish into the woods and find my way back to town, to wherever Benjamin has been taken. With any luck, we could lay low and then flee before Hugo has a chance to find us. We’ve completed what we set out to do; nothing is stopping us from getting on the next ship home.
Nathaniel Crane is the reason we’re in all this mess to begin with and I wonder if that does not cancel out the fact that he saved my life. There’d have been no need for it had he not hunted us down in the first place.
I wish more than anything I could bring myself to run. Yet I hear Benji’s voice in my head.
Save him.
God almighty, I am going to punch Crane when this is over and done with.
Hugo fires a shot. Miraculously, Crane pitches himself to one side and narrowly avoids it, reflexes sharper than I had anticipated. Hugo c
urses, re-aims, and tries to take another shot. Crane’s ability to dodge is almost inhuman.
That’s three shots. Three bullets.
How many does that gun hold?
I pick myself up and rush forward. Hugo is momentarily distracted with Crane, stepping back hurriedly as Crane approaches, knowing full well that if Crane’s hands come into contact with him, he’s as good as dead.
He fires again and this time, Crane is a tick too slow. The bullet grazes his thigh and he drops to one knee without even a cry of pain. Just a flesh wound, I think, but I haven’t the time to check. I charge Hugo. He turns, just in time to lift the gun, but he has no time to fire before I’ve thrown all my weight behind a fist to his face. Beneath my knuckles I feel the satisfying crunch of his nose. His head whips to one side and he staggers. Before he has a chance to orient himself, I lurch forward to hit him again.
This time he has the forethought to block with his free arm. When he attempts to raise the revolver again, I grab for it, fingers wrapping around the barrel, shoving it up so when he fires, the bullet goes uselessly skyward.
Hugo growls and slams his head into mine. The collision sends stars across my vision. I nearly lose my grip. Nearly, but not quite. If I retreat now, he’ll have a prime window of opportunity to put a bullet in me.
I twist the gun, bending his wrist at an odd angle. Just when I think he’s about to relinquish his hold, he juts out a leg, uses it to hook the back of my ankle, and pulls my leg out from under me. It’s all I can do to latch my hand into his hair and ensure that he goes down with me.
My back hits the muddy dirt road with enough force that it steals my breath a moment. Hugo’s fist connects with my face. Once and then again and again, until all I can taste is blood and dirt and rain. I try to get a leg up to plant a foot against his stomach but cannot get enough purchase in the mud to do so. Finally he pulls back, and he still has that godforsaken gun in his hand. He shoves it against my chest, just above my heart.
If there was ever a God in the heavens above, I’m praying now that Hugo did not have a means of reloading this gun.
It clicks.
I let out a shaky laugh, coughing on the metallic taste of my own blood.
Not even because he isn’t so smart after all, but because Crane has come up behind him, eyes alight with fury, and he locks an arm around Hugo’s neck. Hugo’s eyes fly open wide, mouth agape as though to cry out. He grabs at Crane’s arm, claws at it, to no avail.
The trees rustle with shadows and thousands of whispers. The colour of Crane’s eyes shift, black to corpse-white, and the dead grow restless.
I choke on a gasp, scrambling away, not wanting to be caught up in whatever is happening. Hugo convulses. Gasps. The colour drains from his face as swiftly as the life leaves his body. His massive arms twitch, slacken, and drop to his sides. Crane releases him; he slumps to the ground, a husk of a man.
“You killed him,” I manage, voice scarcely above a whisper.
Crane straightens up, staggers back. He doesn’t answer me. Instead he collapses to all fours, clutching at his chest, gasping.
I push to my feet, swallowing hard. “Crane?” He doesn’t respond. Cautiously, I inch toward him. “Nathaniel?”
He shudders, claws at his shirt, his throat, wheezing. Before I can decide whether to reach for him or not, Crane’s body goes rigid, tremoring with tension, and he begins to cough. A heavy, wet sound. Droplets of blood fall from his lips, all but disappearing into the mud.
Then he stills. Even his ragged breathing quiets. I can quite literally feel the wrongness of him, that what I am looking at is no longer Nathaniel Crane, but something else with his face.
He slowly sits back on his haunches, then rises to his feet, no longer hindered by the injury to his arm or leg. When he turns to face me, his eyes are still those of a corpse, yet deep set in his pupils sits a pinprick of red that takes me back to Mordaunt’s ghost howling at us from his graveside.
I step back, a lump in my throat. No, no, no. This is not what was meant to happen. Crane tried to take Hugo’s spirit the same way he took Philip’s, the same way he almost took Carlton’s, and something has gone horribly wrong.
“Crane. Nathaniel. Listen to me, if you’re in there…”
His mouth pulls back into a snarl with a low, guttural growl that sounds more beast than human.
The moment I see him poised to lunge, I run.
I leap over Hugo’s body, rushing down the road, back the direction we rode on Rogue earlier. A furious howl fills the air, nearly paralysing me into losing my footing in the mud.
There is no way I can outrun him. I’m too exhausted, and he no doubt has plenty of energy to wear me down. But I need to buy myself time to think. I rifle through what James told me about Evenbury and Reverend Thomas, about the spirits possessing live people. This is the same, is it not? Which means if I can exorcise the ghost from Crane…
And yet, how?
Aunt Eleanor went over many things with me, but it wasn’t as though anyone wrote down a rite of exorcism for me to keep in my back pocket.
Prayer, though. I can do that.
And the crucifix. Alice’s necklace, still around my throat, the metal pendant pressed against my skin. I am not defenceless. I can do this.
I round the bend, ducking off the road into the trees. I press my back to the base of one of the tall red trunks, catching my breath. Crane’s footsteps rapidly approach, and he stops in the middle of the trail, realising he’s lost me. He throws his head back and howls again, nearly stopping my heart in my chest.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
Deep breaths.
Benji expelled those spirits at Carlton’s home. I can send away a single spirit and save Nathaniel Crane. I must. Failure is not an option.
I remove the necklace from my neck, wrapping the chain about my fingers. Mustering my resolve, I inch back around the tree, watching him, waiting for him to approach close enough that I can make a grab for him. Damn it all; I wish I’d had the foresight to check Rogue’s saddlebags for rope, or knives, or anything else that might have aided me in this fight I didn’t know I was going to engage in.
When Crane passes as close to my hiding spot as I think he’s going to get, I lurch around the tree, throwing my arms around his shoulders and shoving the cross against his chest.
“God the Father in heaven, have mercy on us. God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us. God the Holy Spirit, have mercy on us…”
Crane tries to rip away from the cross, but only succeeds in backing into my arms, allowing me to tighten my hold on him. He shrieks in fury and pain, thrashing like a trapped animal. He claws at my arms. When that does not get me to release him, he ducks his head and sinks his teeth into my forearm, hard enough that the words catch in my throat and makes me gasp in pain. The thick wool of my overcoat is the only thing that prevents him from drawing blood.
I choke out the next lines of the prayer. Crane begins to sag in my arms, relinquishing his bite on me, howling and screaming.
It’s working. Isn’t it? I think that it must be.
It has to be.
In a burst of defiant energy, Crane reaches behind him and grabs hold of me—my hair, my shirt. He doubles forward, yanking me, hauling me off my feet and over his head, throwing me to the ground before him. The words are pushed from my lungs and I wince, the crucifix cutting into my palm.
Crane looms over me, teeth bared. He’s going to rip my throat out. Could do it without a second thought, and that is how Benjamin will find my body.
I shove the cross up against his jaw, desperation flooding into my voice.
“You do not belong here!” I shout. “Nathaniel Crane, take back what is yours!”
When he tries to jerk away, my free hand shoots up and grabs a fistful of his hair, holding him in place. The sheer strength coiled in his limbs makes even that difficult, but it’s working. He twists to try to free himself even as I begin to speak my prayer again.
“Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, spare us, O Lord. Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, graciously hear us, O Lord...”
He’s in pain. Or Hugo’s spirit is, I am not sure which and it does not matter. What matters is that he’s being rendered unable to attack, and if there is anything left of Nathaniel inside of there, he needs to fight to regain control.
He rasps out a single word—“No!”—and gasps, open-mouthed and retching, and I watch in horror as shadowy, bony fingers reach out from his mouth, followed by an entire hand and an arm and—
Some unearthly spirit crawls its way from Crane’s lungs, smoke and shadow, a malformed, writhing creature that half slithers, half crawls a few feet away, steadily gaining more and more of a solid form.
It looks like no one, and yet I know precisely who I’m witnessing.
Hugo.
Crane has not moved. He’s trying to get to his feet, ends up on his side in the dirt, panting. The thing that used to be Hugo is still recovering, but it turns, red pits where its eyes used to be shining bright, lips pulling back to reveal a set of blackened, sharp teeth. It growls, low, reverberating through every bone in my body, and it looks more beast than man.
The fear shakes me out of my shock. I grab Crane, hauling him to his feet, shouting at him that we need to go and we need to go now. He clutches at my shirt, his legs not cooperating as we stumble off into the woods.
I move as swiftly as I can with Crane’s nearly dead weight hanging off me. I don’t know what direction we’re headed, how far from the main road we’re traveling, but for now I just need distance. Distance, and a few moments for Crane to get himself together. He’s got to know what to do about this, doesn’t he?
