Huntress

by Christine Warren, Marjorie Liu, Caitlin Kittredge, Jenna Maclaine

  Irdu floated like a single claw, surrounded by men, and she tumbled through shadows hiding pale faces, and bottomless mouths that swallowed her whole. She could not fight their hunger—not even to run and hide—and in her dream she squeezed shut her eyes. As if not looking at them would save her.

  But it did not. Instead of seeing the men, Maggie saw herself—and her face was a mirror of their hunger, pale and haunted, and merciless. She scratched at her cheeks, and her nails were claws; and when she screamed, her voice merely groaned, an aching sound like the shifting grind of mountain stone.

  Behind her, Trace floated free of the darkness. She was younger, her brown skin as flawless as dark cream; only, her eyes were as black as ink, inhuman and cold, and her mouth was full of long white teeth.

  Things change, she whispered throatily. We can change. We can forget what we were meant to be.

  I am not this, Maggie told her.

  You don’t know what you are, Trace replied, and reached inside her mouth. She began to pull out her teeth. One by one. Sharp and white. Like a shark’s.

  Maggie stared, horrified. Until, suddenly, another presence entered her dream—someone solid and real—and strong arms slid around her waist, pulling her close against a broad, warm chest. Trace faded into the shadows, as did Maggie’s monstrous reflection.

  Do not be afraid, whispered a familiar voice. Maggie, I am here.

  Here, where? she murmured in despair, accepting him as though he had always been with her—her crow, who was now a man. What am I? What am I doing?

  Hunting, he rumbled. Hunting hearts.

  Maggie sagged within the circle of his arms. I don’t know what that means.

  His warm mouth brushed against her ear, and those arms turned her around until she placed her hands against a hard chest that was searing to touch and shockingly naked. She had never touched a man—not like this, even in a dream—and the sensation sent a jolt from her heart into her stomach.

  He kissed her cheek, and then her mouth, gently. “Never mind,” he said, his voice no longer echoing through her mind. “Maggie, rest. Go back to sleep.”

  “I am asleep,” she mumbled, wanting more of his mouth.

  “Yes, of course,” replied the man, after kissing her again, more deeply. Maggie’s hand slid around his chest to his back, tracing the hard line of his spine; and down, down even more, as she discovered he was truly naked, everywhere. She pressed closer, grinding her hips against the hard pulse of his body, and realized dimly that she was not standing, but resting on her side. The man made a slightly strangled sound, and kissed Maggie so hard that she sighed with pleasure.

  And then he disappeared, abruptly, and she found herself holding nothing but air. Awake, she listened to the rain drum against the old tin roof, her body still aching and her mouth still tender from kisses that had been only in her dreams.

  Or maybe they were not dreams. Maggie dragged in a deep ragged breath, curling around herself. She tried to remember those arms holding her, especially when thunder rumbled and lightning flashed outside the window, but it was the man’s voice that lingered instead. Warm, steady, and reassuring. Familiar now as her own.

  Mister Crow, she thought, sensing something behind her. She twisted, glancing over her shoulder, and found the bird perched on the edge of her blanket. Not quite looking at her. Tense. Feathers ruffled. She stared at him, remembering that man in the creek who had run from her. The man in her dream. Heat filled her cheeks.

  “It’s okay,” Maggie said weakly, just to break the ridiculous silence. She rolled into a little ball, and felt the crow settle against her back. He was a small, warm lump. An hour ago he would not have been noticeable, but now his presence burned.

  “I lied,” she told him, after several minutes of discomfort. “It’s not okay. I’m going insane.”

  We both are, replied the crow. Maggie hugged the blanket more tightly to her chin. It was still dark inside the house, but the rain had stopped, though not the thunder. It continued to prowl, a rolling, restless sound that throbbed through the night with an ever-deepening growl.

  Maggie sat up, listening hard, skin prickling. The crow fluttered his wings and, after one short bounding hop, flew through the dining room to one of the open windows. He perched on the sill. Maggie ran to the window after him and saw lights flashing along the road—a long line of them, one after the other.

  She hurriedly packed her things, but by the time she raced outside, the motorcycles had passed from sight. Maggie could hear them, though, growling beneath the thunder. She dragged her bicycle from the farmhouse and started riding hard, chasing them through the lingering fumes of their engine fuel. Faint light touched the eastern horizon, and stars peeked from behind fast-moving clouds.

  In the distance, at the crest of a hill, she caught the glow of headlights and watched as the motorcycles turned off the road, following a ramp that joined the long cement loop of the old interstate. Maggie’s heart sank. She knew where they were going. She had known since leaving home where this journey would end—in one of the dead cities.

  They might not have Trace. And if they did take her, she’s probably dead. There’s no need to do this.

  Go home, she told herself wearily.

  But those thoughts were like ash in her mind: dead and bitter and burned out. Her only instinct that felt right, and real, was the worst one.

  The crow swooped in and landed on Maggie’s shoulder, his wings buffeting her head. She did not duck away or flinch, but kept watching those headlights move farther away from her.

  “Mister Crow,” she said quietly. “I’m about to do something stupid.”

  The crow said nothing. She started pedaling again, and followed the men.

  There were always stories, always. Most everyone had something to say about the Big Death, but only a handful in Olo could talk about escaping the cities. Kids, and some adults, still paid attention with bated breath, but Maggie had stopped listening. She was no stranger to violence, but there was a wildness that crept into the eyes of the men and women who had survived those early evacuations that scared her. What was in their eyes, what went unspoken, was the real story. The rest was filler.

  As she rode her bicycle along the interstate, Maggie saw the evidence of other stories, twenty years dead. There was only empty road the first ten miles, cracked and pitted with shrubbery. Then a concrete barricade, shoved aside, presumably by the motorcycle men, who had disappeared ahead of her, hours earlier. Her tires rolled over abandoned guns, rusted by two decades of rain and sun.

  Beyond that, nothing but cars; more cars than she had ever seen, parked bumper to bumper. Small holes riddled the hoods of the vehicles nearest the barricade—bullet holes, she guessed—and for a moment all she could see were men in green uniforms and gas masks, standing on ladders behind the tall concrete walls, aiming their weapons and shouting—shouting at a roaring, desperate mob of men and women rushing from their cars, trampling one another.

  A loud shriek filled her ears. Maggie winced, then rubbed her head and her eyes. She found the crow perched on top of the blanket inside her bicycle basket. His black feathers were ruffled.

  Be careful, he said, tilting his head to stare at her. Your mind is sensitive. And this is an unpleasant place.

  “I’m fine,” she muttered, her eyes still burning, and then leaned over to gag as another image pushed flush through her head: a little boy, left alone in a backseat, sobbing helplessly while outside, men and women screamed, cut down by bullets. His face was red and dirty, his fear agonizing. Maggie pushed her palms into her eyes, groaning.

  Maggie, whispered the crow, more urgently. Shut it out.

  She shook her head, unable to speak, as the boy disappeared and was replaced by an elderly woman, sprawled in the grass outside her car, clutching her heart. A small dark dog licked her face. No one helped her. No one looked. The simple despair of being alone—that poor woman, dying and alone; that little boy, afraid and alone—sickened Maggie in ways tha
t bullets and disease did not. She could feel their fear and misery, and not just theirs, but everyone’s who had died in this place, on this road—hopelessness so thick in the air that every breath felt like murder in her heart.

  Maggie heard her name said again, distantly, and then warm hands took hold of her shoulders. She was so startled, so distracted by that unexpected touch, that all the pain flooding her senses receded just enough for her to gain control over herself.

  She began to twist around, and those hands tightened. Warm breath touched her ear, and her heart raced.

  “Maggie,” said her crow, no longer just a little bird. “Maggie, breathe.”

  It was impossible to breathe with him touching her, but she could not say that. Instead she nodded, bowing her head—those memories of the past threatening to devour her again. Tears burned her eyes.

  His hands tightened, and his warm mouth grazed the back of her neck, shooting chills and heat through her body. “Leave it alone, Maggie. Just let it go. You do not have to see what is there.”

  “I can’t help it,” she muttered through gritted teeth.

  “You can,” he said firmly, and his hands trailed closer to her neck until his thumbs skimmed the base of her scalp. His fingers squeezed gently, again and again, and the slow, easy strength of his hands kneading her shoulders sent such soothing heat through her that those ghostly feelings of despair faded away.

  She reached back and touched his right hand, warm and smooth with muscle. His movements stilled as she persisted and wormed her fingers through his, knotting their hands together.

  “Maggie,” he whispered, and before she could ask him a single question—like, What kind of oddness, exactly, was he?—he leaned forward, slid his large hand under her jaw, and turned her head. Then he kissed her.

  It was a slow, deep kiss. Maggie forgot everything but him, so wrapped up in the deliciousness of his mouth, she could not even open her eyes to look at his face. She tried, but everything was too heavy, and all she could do was to breathe and stay upright. She wanted to be back in that farmhouse with him, or home; anywhere but here.

  He broke away from her, making a small, frustrated sound. Maggie tried to turn with him, wanting to see his face, but all she glimpsed was a flash of shining black feathers, and then nothing. He was gone, and in his place flew a crow, wings beating furiously, ascending into the cloud-scattered sky.

  Maggie stared after him. Burned up, seared to the bone. But there was no man here now, just a bird, and she looked away, embarrassed and aching, sensing she was more than a bit insane.

  Think of Trace. Keep moving, she told herself, and began pedaling down the interstate. She passed miles of rotting cars, as far as the eye could see, all pointed in the same westbound direction. Both sides of the interstate were occupied, six lanes of traffic. It was a graveyard. She saw bodies in those vehicles, behind dirty tinted glass; desiccated remains, skeletons held together with only the thinnest, driest vestiges of flesh. She had no doubt what had killed them, and saw—as if time-traveling—flash images of men and women sitting behind their wheels, trying to stay conscious as blood trickled from their nostrils and ears, and pain crippled their joints.

  She blinked hard, sickened, and glanced through the windshields. She saw those people again, but dead for two decades now: sagging, locked inside metal coffins that Maggie doubted would ever be opened—not until folks forgot about the Big Death and stopped being afraid. Maybe never. The hanta-bola pox had disappeared, perhaps, but the miasma remained. She could taste, in these endless rows of cars, the bitter tangle of desperation that had led nowhere. Luggage still sagged atop the rusted roofs. She saw plastic toys in the road, unable to disintegrate. All those belongings: grave markers.

  The crow swooped in close, over her head. Maggie, look.

  Maggie stood on the pedals, staring at the horizon. The road curved, but not enough for the hills to obscure the wall of trees that cut across the cold distant line of the interstate. Beyond the forest, or within it, glittering towers rose toward the sky: steel and glass shining with shears of sunlight. She held her breath, coasting until her bike almost slowed to a stop, and then sat back on the seat and pedaled hard before she remembered that there … that there was death, and blood and loneliness, and men on motorcycles who hurt people. That was the forest, the city forest, and deep within monsters awaited.

  The interstate had been eaten by the forest. The road ended at the tree line, without evidence that it had ever existed. There was pavement, where Maggie stood with her bicycle, and then nothing but dead leaves and thick curling roots that supported massive trees, as though the concrete had been more nourishing than the soil; or the trees had grown from magic seeds embedded in stone. There were still cars in the forest, parked on the interstate that had been. Maggie could see faint outlines of them, like ghosts, but the trees had grown through and around the vehicles, crumpling steel. Naked branches were budding with green spring, and redbud blossoms floated in the undergrowth.

  Maggie had heard about the forests that had grown wild around the cities, but she never imagined what one of them would look like. The trees had a reputation that preceded them, told by the government men who rattled into town once or twice a year on their large gas-powered trucks, hauling clothwares and steelwares, and bringing news from three different coasts.

  No more cities, the men had said years ago. The trees have swallowed all the dead cities.

  But no one, as far as Maggie knew, had devoted much energy or thought into finding out why. Better things to do, after all. Like, survive. As far as most people were concerned, nature reclaiming places of so much horror, even with impossible speed, seemed preferable to the alternative: that the cities be accessible, and remembered. No one wanted to remember anything from the Big Death.

  The crow landed on the road and pecked at a dried leaf. Maggie glanced down at him. “This growth looks older than twenty years. Are all the cities like this?”

  All that I have flown over, he replied. And there have been many.

  “Doesn’t make sense,” she muttered. “Did the hanta-bola pox cause this? Did it … infect plants?”

  The crow jumped into the air and flew to the low-hanging branch of a squat, fat oak that looked as though it had grown in that spot for more than a hundred years. It was an unnatural disease. Even among my kind, we do not understand the how or why of it. But we do think it caused … this. There is no other explanation, and the disease was localized in the cities, even though it spread elsewhere.

  “Were you alive then? Did you witness the Big Death?”

  I lost family to it, he said, which surprised her. We were not immune, though we suffered less since we lived apart from humans.

  Maggie forced herself to breathe. “Anything else?”

  You could still turn back.

  She stared at him and thought about Trace. She touched the shark teeth hanging cold around her neck, and her other hand traced the head of the sledgehammer dragging on her waist. Messages floated through her mind; Irdu’s voice behind them all.

  A test of truth. Don’t give up if you want to find your teeth.

  I’ve got plenty of bite, she told him silently, and said, “I don’t see an easy way in. Not for motorcycles.”

  The crow launched himself off the oak branch and flew around Maggie toward her right. He landed more than thirty feet away on the ground, and hopped lightly ahead of her. She pushed her bicycle over and saw a narrow trail leading into the woods, and a long streak of lines as though tires had rolled through the leaves.

  Maggie hesitated, exposed to sunlight and miles of endless concrete, cars, and corpses at her back. The crow dove from the tree to the handlebars of her bicycle. He perched there, wings flared, staring into her eyes with familiar intensity.

  Fear knotted up her throat. “Well, you don’t have to come along, if you don’t want.”

  The crow said nothing, simply settling his wings against his back. Maggie brushed his chest with her knuckle
s and whispered, “I’m scared. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  Trace, she told herself. If it were you, she would never turn back. Even if she thought you might be dead.

  Heart thundering, Maggie rolled her bike forward, using her feet to push herself along. The crow rode on the handlebars. When she was inches from the edge of the forest, she stopped again, staring into the lengthening shadows and the endless supple variations of the trees. Sweat rolled down her back.

  “You and me,” she said to the crow; and then, feeling a bit pathetic, added: “Don’t leave me, right?”

  The crow leaned toward her, and when she held out her hand, he rubbed his beak against her fingers. Warmth tingled. Maggie smiled grimly. Not alone. She was crazy, but she was not alone.

  The golden light of sunset warmed her back. Maggie pedaled slowly into the forest, imagining robbers, and the dead; and other stolen hearts. Hunting hearts, she thought. She was hunting. A hunter.

  An hour later, Maggie found another barricade.

  SIX

  The barricade was lost in the woods. Maggie followed vainly the tracks and scuffs of motorcycle tires, and was finally forced to dismount and walk her bicycle. The forest swallowed everything within it, but as dusk spread into silver, the world seemed to sharpen, as though night allowed a deeper vision than day.

  Or perhaps her eyes were changing. She had noticed that. Shadows hid nothing from her anymore. Every day since leaving her junkyard in Olo, she had found herself able to do more, feel more, hear more. And all of it was familiar. She had been able to do these things before, she realized, but had made herself forget. Maggie simply could not understand why.

  She walked along the barricade, and found it almost exactly like the one on the interstate: tall, thick, and made of concrete. Sharp, rusted barbed wire coiled on top, and bullet holes had fractured the smooth, dark surface, along with the fading remnants of painted messages that were too obscured by vines for her to read.

  A piece of the barricade had been pulled aside and was bordered by the trunk of a towering maple tree. Maggie imagined voices whispering in the shadows of the undergrowth, but that did not frighten her. She had heard those ageless murmurs back home, in her dreams; in the other forest beyond the city, beneath the redbuds. She felt as though she had heard them always.