The Questing Beast (Veil Knights Book 4)

by Rowan Casey

  “Then I gotta go watch for them,” Perce said, voicing the plan forming in his brain, but keeping it simpler.

  “Too dangerous,” Dani said. “Three to one? And they could have magic powers, too. You don’t know.”

  “I’ll just watch, I promise,” Perce lied. He kept his thoughts as tranquil and placid as he could, visualizing a doe drinking from a quiet lake, so that Dani wouldn’t be able to read ill intent from him. He didn’t mean her harm, of course, but he did mean harm and knew it might reflect in his aura. He was just glad her power wasn’t reading minds.

  Dani stared at him for the space of three or four deep breaths and then shook her head. He knew he’d won.

  “Just watch,” she said. “See what they do. If things seem dangerous, get out and come back here to me.”

  “I promise,” he said again, bending down to kiss the top of her head. “Take those pills. I’ll be back in no time.”

  Perce slipped out of the house quickly, avoiding Sophie. He was tired of abrupt goodbyes and lying to people. He made his way back through the tiny town and entered the woods to the south of the lodge and campground. Creeping up on campsite nineteen, it looked as quiet as he’d left it. More campers were back as dinner time neared and there was a stronger buzz of life and activity. The hunters weren’t there. That was good. It meant Perce wasn’t too late.

  He found a good-sized spruce a safe distance from the hunters’ campsite and sprang up to the lowest branch. He hauled himself up into the tree far enough that he was hidden from view and positioned himself so he could see the tents of campsite nineteen. When the hunters returned, he’d be ready. Perce took a couple deep breaths of the warm summer air and relaxed into the tree. He was one with the forest, a patient predator waiting on his prey.

  Chapter Seven

  Dani tried to get up and join Bertha, Sophie, and the boys for supper, but her leg told her in very clear, painful terms that it wasn’t having any of that nonsense. Instead, she took another pain pill, hoping it would let her sleep instead of worry about Perce, and accepted a plate of chicken and garlic bread from a solicitous Sophie.

  She found herself dozing on and off, her dreams filled with red eyes glowing in the dark and the cold, cold water of the lake threatening to close in over her head.

  A scream woke her and Dani fought her way out of drugged sleep as Sophie ran into her room, blood streaming down her face.

  “Got to get out,” she gasped.

  “What’s wrong?” Though she knew, oh, she knew. She could smell the sulfur and felt the dark tension in the air. Dani pushed back the covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed, ignoring the ripping pain in her thigh.

  “Bertha went for the baby, I got the boys out, but…” Sophie’s words were cut off by a large man slamming through the door behind her.

  Sophie grabbed the wooden chair and tried to block the man but he swatted it out of the way as though it were made of foam and punched her in the face. She went down with a groan.

  Dani leapt at the man. she thought. The brother she’d put a knife to. Only her knives weren’t next to her. Stupid. She hadn’t really thought the danger would be here, hadn’t wanted to alarm her hosts. Mama would have been horrified at her lack of preparation.

  She slammed into him, striking at his throat and ears with hard, open hands. He grabbed her and headbutted her. Pain and red light exploded in her eyes. She couldn’t see for a moment and her arms didn’t seem to work. Rich rained down blow after blow on her head until she could do nothing else but curl on the floor, trying to protect herself.

  Her knives were in her pack, only feet away. If she could just get him to stop hitting her, if she could crawl past Sophie, if…

  “Enough,” said another male voice.

  Opening her eyes as the blows stopped, Dani saw one of the other brothers from the diner step into the room. Dark clouds of ill intent fogged both men’s auras, swirling shadows threatening to obscure their features from her gaze.

  “We need her alive,” the brother, Gary, said.

  “Which one?” Rich asked.

  Dani started crawling across the floor, trying to make it look like she was just putting distance between them and herself. She was getting closer to her knife. She could see the hilt of it in the pack leaning against the dresser. Her bow and quiver were there, too, but useless in this situation.

  “I don’t know. He said the woman. That we need the young woman. Jason is dealing with that old lady, but those boys both ran off. We ain’t got time to wait for an answer.”

  “Well, fuck,” Rich said. “We’ll bring them both.”

  Dani set her good foot against the edge of the bed and used it to launch her towards her pack. Agony ripped through her as she felt something give in her wounded thigh, but her fingers closed on the hilt of her hunting knife.

  A boot slammed down on her wrist. She heard the bone snap but her brain was already overloaded so it seemed more like something happening far away, to someone else.

  “No, you don’t,” the hunter said, and then he kicked her in the head and she heard and felt nothing more for a long time.

  Perce waited until the sun was a bloody smear on the horizon before he gave up his watch. He was more tired than he’d realized and was running on a handful of crackers and cheese. He also had to pee.

  So, he climbed down and did one more circle around the campground, listening and tasting the evening breeze for hints of sulfur. All was quiet. A few people had fire pits going; wood smoke and sizzling meat mingling made his stomach do its best bear impression.

  He relieved himself in the woods and then started back to Bertha’s. He and Dani would get some sleep, he guessed, and then maybe tomorrow they could come up with a new plan to find the Questing Beast. Though Perce wondered if in fact the legends were true, because if they were, the Beast would seek him out. Hunting it was his family curse and quest, after all.

  The house was dark, which was his first sign that something was wrong. The blood smeared all over the kitchen and dining rooms was his second. The smell of sulfur was strong amidst the sickly, sweet stench of drying blood.

  “Dani?” Perce called out as he drew his knife and ran toward her room. His heart was trying to punch its way out of his chest.

  Her room was empty. Her pack was knocked over, with her hunting knife half-unsheathed next to it. Blood spattered the bed and floor. The chair was smashed into kindling to one side of the door.

  Perce stood frozen in the doorway. She was gone. She was hurt and she was gone. He’d left her. They were separated, just as the Lady had warned him about and now Dani was going to die without him there to save her.

  A high keening cry pulled him from the room and down the hall to where the room that Bertha shared with the baby was.

  Carl was holding the toddler and trying to calm her as Oliver stood by the bed, pressing a wet cloth to a gash on Bertha’s forehead. Bertha’s eyes were closed but her chest rose and fell. She was alive, if unconscious.

  “Perce,” Carl said, the boy’s wide, hazel eyes shining with desperate relief. “Men came, bad men. Sophie made us run outside but they hurt Gran and Oliver won’t let me call the police. They took Sophie and Dani and we couldn’t do anything, we just watched.” The words came out in a tumble.

  “Bad men,” Oliver said, the first words Perce had heard him speak. “Evil. Police don’t help with evil.” His gold-flecked eyes carried the weight of someone much older as he looked solemnly at Perce.

  Perce stood in the doorway, looking at their expectant faces. He was the adult here. God help them all. This was no time for masks and games. Dani and Sophie were in danger. Those men had to be some kind of demons, Perce was sure of it. The sulfur, the way they’d subdued a whole house of people, the way they’d lost him in the woods. The ritual.

  The ritual. For which they needed a woman. Now they had the book and they had two women.

  Perce sheathed his knife, hoping that would calm the children. He took
a deep breath and moved over to the bed to feel Bertha’s pulse. She’d been hit hard in the head, multiple times from the bruising pattern.

  “How long ago?” he asked the boys.

  “A couple hours,” Carl answered. “We’d finished dinner and were brushing teeth.”

  Lydia, the baby, fussed again in Carl’s arms. Perce took her from them and laid her in the crib, feeling around the blankets for a pacifier. She accepted it and settled down.

  Two hours? He didn’t want to contemplate what could happen in two hours. How far they could have gotten. But how far could three men get with two women to carry? Perce didn’t picture Sophie or Dani going quietly, which meant they’d been hurt badly enough to not fight or were tied up or both. There’d been a lot of blood in the kitchen and the bedroom. Nausea twisted the pit of his stomach.

  “Carl,” he said, making decisions because he was the only one who could. “That doctor lives nearby, right?”

  “Two houses down, the yellow one,” Carl nodded.

  “Go get him.” Perce didn’t want cops either, they’d just complicate matters and the woods were dangerous with hell hounds and Lord knew what else. People going out on a search would muddy his trail and maybe get Dani killed. The hunters couldn’t do the ritual until the moon came up. That bought him some time. He hoped.

  Carl didn’t argue. He slipped out of the room and disappeared down the hall.

  Perce told Oliver to keep an eye on the baby and Bertha, and then he went to see what he could figure out from the evidence in the house.

  The blood was worrying, but it wasn’t quite as much as it looked like at first glance. It had spattered around a lot, probably from impacts, but it wasn’t enough combined to mean a person had bled out here or even come close. There was a partial boot print in the blood near Dani’s pack and that boot had picked up enough that he was able to trace it out into the hall. The thick knotted-rag carpet in the family room soaked up the bootprint blood and there was nothing after that.

  Perce returned to Dani’s room and noticed the closet door was open. It hadn’t been open the whole time she’d been in the room and Dani hadn’t put anything away in there. It wasn’t her style. The top shelf held an extra pillow and a single sheet that was half-hanging from the shelf. It looked like there’d been more sheets up there, or maybe a blanket. If the hunters had bound Dani and Sophie up in blankets, that would explain the lack of further blood trail.

  It made tracking them difficult, however. He returned to Bertha’s room.

  “Did you see a car?” Perce asked Oliver, wishing he’d thought to check the lodge parking lot before he came back. He hadn’t considered the possibility of them coming back for the car without going to their camp. He’d been playing stupid so long it seemed to be sinking in. That was a terrifying thought that chilled him as Oliver shook his head.

  “No car. They carried them. Wrapped up like this,” Oliver said, putting his arms around himself and tucking his chin in.

  “Wrapped up in sheets?” Perce asked.

  Oliver nodded. “Took them into the woods,” he added.

  So they hadn’t doubled back for the car. That was good. Moving on foot with heavy burdens through forest limited their head start considerably.

  “Sophie,” murmured Bertha. Her eyes flickered open as Perce went to the bed and caught one of her cool, dry hands in his own damp, hot ones.

  “Bertha, easy, the doctor is coming,” he said.

  “Baby?” she asked.

  “Lydia is right there, she’s okay,” he said in as reassuring a tone as he could manage.

  “Sophie, my baby,” she said. Bertha squeezed his hand.

  “They took her,” he said. “And my sister. But they were on foot. They can’t get that far.”

  “Where? Why?” Bertha said. “Carl?” She blinked rapidly, clearly having trouble focusing her eyes on his face.

  “Carl is getting the doctor. The boys are okay. I don’t know where,” Perce said. He wasn’t sure he could track them, either, but he didn’t add that. It was getting dark and he wasn’t familiar with these woods enough to try. Stumbling around with a flashlight would make him prime target for hell hounds and likely lose him the trail, if he found it in the first place.

  He heard Dr. Zhou and Carl returning before the door opened and then their steps came quickly down the hallway.

  “Bertha,” Dr. Zhou said as Perce moved aside. “What happened?” That question seemed directed at him, so Perce answered.

  “They were attacked by some hunters. They took Sophie and Dani.” He figured now wasn’t the time for elaborate lies. The boys would tell him the same thing anyway.

  “Attacked? Where are the police?” Dr. Zhou pulled gloves out of his bag, put them on, and then got a penlight out. There was anxiety in his voice and sweat beading on his brow, but the doctor’s hands were steady and his voice calm.

  “I need you to trust me,” Perce said. He backed off from the bed, not wanting to loom over the doctor and Bertha. “These men are very bad. They are the ones who shot Dani and I think they might be involved in those hikers getting killed.” He added that part on pure speculation, knowing that the hunters had been in Whitehorse the day before that, but unsure how they tied into the hell hounds and whatever larger demon lurked that had killed the moose.

  “Involving anyone else might get more people killed,” he continued. “I’m going to fix this, put an end to all of it.” Perce put all his bravado into his voice, trying to sound more sure and competent than he felt.

  The look Dr. Zhou gave him told him he wasn’t succeeding very well but the doctor held his tongue and got to the business of cleaning up the cuts and the larger gash on Bertha. She was looking more alert by the minute, which Perce figured had to be a good sign.

  Lydia had fallen asleep and the boys lingered in the doorway, watching with scared eyes. Perce decided to take them into the kitchen, forgetting for a moment the blood there until Carl froze, staring at it as he stuck his knuckles in his mouth.

  “Go sit on the couch. There’s nothing we can do for the moment. I’ll fix a snack,” Perce told the boys, not knowing what else to say.

  He stood in the kitchen at the sink and stared out the window into the yard. It was full dark now, as dark as it got in summer, which wasn’t the deep night he was used to in Colorado, but a more twilight gloom that tricked the eye into thinking the sunlight wasn’t far away. False night, like false dawn. He didn’t know when moonrise was. A thought occurred to him and he went back to where the boys sat silently on the couch.

  “You know where Bertha keeps her tablet thing?” he asked them.

  Carl nodded and jumped up, going over to the TV cabinet. He opened a drawer and pulled out the rectangular device.

  “I need to know when the moon rises,” Perce said. “Can the internet tell me? We can use the Google, right?” He was pretty sure that’s what it was called, the thing people used to search the internet with.

  Carl giggled. “Just Google, nobody says ‘the Google.’” The boy opened the tablet and pushed on a multi-colored round icon. He typed in Benderlake and moonrise and went to a website that pulled it up.

  “Four thirty-one a.m.,” Carl read off the website.

  Perce looked at the clock on the cable box. It was just past midnight now. He had better eyesight than most humans in half-light, but didn’t know if it was good enough in this gloomy half-night, especially under the trees where it would be far darker.

  “When is dawn?”

  Carl did some more things on the tablet. “Three forty-three,” he said.

  Not a lot of time between the two and he had no idea where the hunters had gone. All he could hope was that they wouldn’t move in the woods at night either, but if they weren’t human, all known quantities went out the window. What if demons could see in the dark? What if they didn’t get tired or were much stronger than regular men?

  His troubling thoughts weren’t going to save Dani. Perce thanked Carl and wen
t back to talk to Bertha.

  Dr. Zhou had taped the gash shut and was helping Bertha sit up and drink water as Perce entered.

  “Bertha says I should trust you,” the doctor said.

  “Thanks,” Perce said, surprised. He looked at the older woman and raised an eyebrow. She didn’t know him or Dani from Adam, not really.

  “Those men weren’t right,” Bertha said. “What’s been happening around here, it isn’t normal. I don’t know what you and your sister are caught up in, but I’ve lived enough of a life to recognize evil. We have stories about evil that can rise in the woods. My husband’s grandfather believed it enough he built a fort out there in the woods.” She waved a hand as though indicating direction through the walls. “Nobody remembers how his three sisters died. They said it was bears. But they died right there in that stone tower, torn to pieces by something beyond the white man’s understanding. We remember.”

  A chill went through Perce. “Where is the tower?”

  “Out to the west, a little over two miles perhaps. It’s hard to miss. Nothing grows there in a wide circle, just the bare stones. Nobody in town talks about it and even hikers seem to sense it isn’t safe and steer clear.”

  Perce shook his head, thinking about the blueberry bushes and the circle in the woods. He’d seen no tower. But maybe things weren’t always as they seemed. He’d witnessed Grimm’s illusory magic. He didn’t know if there were rules about how that worked, but it was clear that magic was real.

  So why not an illusion of some kind to hide the tower? It would explain the lack of a trail at the circle. It might explain why he’d been all around the woods here yesterday and found no sign of any such a thing. And if Bertha’s family story was true, well…demons might have been in these woods for a while now, or they might have been brought through the Veil somehow by her husband’s grandfather.

  Perce knew it was thin logic, but he’d take that over nothing at all. He had to save Dani. He had to save Sophie, too. Her family was clearly tied up in all this, even if they didn’t want to be. His curse and his quest had brought this upon the de Repentigny’s lives. He needed to fix it.