by Lara Parker
With a sudden shuddering in his powerful limbs, the man-beast turned and bounded over the snow and into the dark. Before he was out of sight, he stopped and rose against the shining orb, the silhouette of a wolf, and he threw back his head and uttered a howl into the night, a howl answered by its echo, then silence.
Shaken by guilt, Barnabas turned back to the Old House. He was to blame! Quentin had been a man, a man lunging like an animal, a man—and then a wolf—a werewolf! Under the full moon, Quentin had changed into a beast. And he, Barnabas, was the cause. He had demolished the painting that protected the unfortunate man, and now a monster was loosed.
“Quentin?” a hysterical voice came floating through the trees behind the Old House. “Quentin, where are you? Are you there? Quentin?”
Antoinette was calling as she would a naughty child who had run off. She was following him into the woods, with no concept of the danger she was in. He could see her moving through the trees in her green robe, her face white in the moonlight, and her long tangled hair falling to her shoulders.
The hunger that rose up in him was like a shock wave pulsing through his body. She was coming to him, and he had only to take her in his arms. He moved like a phantom, his great cape floating over the snow, and when she saw him appear out of the mist, her hand flew to her mouth.
“Barnabas—my God! You scared the shit out of me!” Her coarse language took him by surprise. He had forgotten how common she could be. “What are you doing out here?” She looked past him. “Did you see—?”
“Yes. Quentin. I saw him run into the woods.”
“I have to go after him…”
“Why? What do you want with him? Here—let me—” He reached for her, but she snatched her hand away.
“What are you doing?” Her eyes gleamed and she frowned at Barnabas, obviously miffed at his attempt to restrain her. Distracted by a sound, she looked past him again into the trees. A gust of wind flew through the treetops, and clumps of snow fell from the branches, making soft plopping sounds.
“The storm, my dear, and the cold. You are not dressed warmly, and the woods are filled with drifts, you could become disoriented, freeze to death out here…”
“Oh, don’t be absurd…” She made for the forest, and again he moved to block her way and opened his cape, as if to protect her. He was near enough to remember her scent, a ferny woodland odor, and in the cold air she radiated a heat that was tantalizing. He was quivering with desire. She was so alive, so solid, and vibrant with energy. A longing to possess her now, this woman who had so infuriated him, to fold her against him and to quench his desperate thirst, drowned any lingering thoughts of his rival running under the moon.
She sidestepped to move past him, but he reached for her and took her arm. This time she stopped and looked at him, and then a strange expression darkened her face. “Barnabas? What’s wrong with you? Are you all right?”
“Of course…”
He knew what she had seen—a difference in him, a frightening difference, his skin smoother and whiter, his hair blacker, eyes bloodshot, and deep shadows in his face—like scars. But there was something else she saw, something in his presence, a calm foreboding. He must have seemed menacing with his darkened brow because she stepped back, drawing her arms across her breast. It was the first time he had seen her since his transformation, and he was more amazed than ever at her resemblance to Angelique, the same wide eyes.
“You … you don’t look like yourself,” she said. “You look … odd. Maybe it’s just the moonlight. Anyway, I have to find Quentin.” She was covering her trepidation, wanting to get away from him. “Something has happened— I … I have to go…”
“At least let me give you my cloak.”
She shook her head and backed farther from him, wary now, made uneasy by an intuitive sense of danger. Barnabas probed her mind; he could read her suspicious thoughts, her struggle to comprehend, and her fear inflamed him further.
“I insist. Wrap this around you.” The trees blurred as he reached for her and enfolded her, and everything went out of his mind. He felt her warmth as he drew her to him, and then her breasts as he swirled the cloak around them both. She squirmed in his embrace and cried out, “No! Barnabas! Stop!” but he smothered her, and in the darkness created by the hood he found her mouth and kissed her.
His heart was pounding in his ears as—just as he had planned every night in his casket—he thrust his mind into hers.
In the end it was all so easy. He could feel her giving in to him, becoming pliable, softening under his spell. When he felt she was deep in a trance, he kissed her again, and her mouth was as warm as wine.
She was trembling, both aroused and terrified, and when she looked up at him, his fangs descended. Her eyes flooded and she sucked in her breath, but still she clung to him. He lowered his mouth beneath her hair, and she shuddered when he found her. Her surrender aroused in him a vague contempt; nevertheless, bliss enveloped him as he drank.
The night exploded like a rain of hail, a rumbling growl, and then came a brain-shattering blow. Barnabas was struck on the back, then thrown across the snow where he collapsed against the trunk of a tree. A massive animal thick with fur leapt upon him and emptied his lungs of breath. Claws and teeth ripped his flesh, accompanied by menacing snarls. He cried out, tried to fend off the creature’s wrath, but for some reason his supernatural strength was not enough. He could feel his shielding arms split by hungry jaws clenching the bone, and then the same razor teeth gnawed his face. He was being eaten alive!
He made a desperate effort to lift into the air but he was caught, shaken, hurled, and the ground came to meet him in a furious crash. His body was broken, and before he lost consciousness, he saw the creature carry Antoinette’s insensible form into the Old House. He felt flickering in the back of his mind some canon of Transylvanian lore, so ridiculous that he had never given it much thought, since he never believed he would encounter it. Before his mind went blank and darkness shrouded his vision, Barnabas remembered hearing the ancient rune: Only the werewolf hath the power to eviscerate the vampire.
Five
The moment she stepped off the platform, Jackie realized that she had made a mistake. It was growing dark, and the snow was deep; it came up to her knees near the road, and, when she tried to walk into the woods, it sucked her boots into two feet of crunchy powder.
As she heard the bus grind away, she looked into the gathering twilight and saw a world transformed. Drifts as high as fences buried the familiar landmarks, and snow flowed between the trees like a crystalline lake, flooding the underbrush and obscuring all signs of a path. She stood for a moment, wondering what to do as her toes grew cold in her boots and her breath came in smoky puffs.
If she did not fly, she would have to walk all the way around by way of the road, but if she rose into the air, she would be visible in the bare trees to any car going down the highway. She sighed and looked into the woods where the snow had smothered the trail. Resigned to walking, she trudged down the blacktop, hugging herself, trying to stay warm, favoring a blistering heel. Her hands were cold, her books were heavy, and even though she was relieved to be off the bus, she still felt a hard pain beneath her ribs.
Along the edge of the road, huge cedars kept her company, bowed low under their heavy drapery like shaggy monsters that dragged their ruffled branches across the snow with a squeaking sound. No more birds, except as shadows, except as dark silhouettes, not the nightingale or the mockingbird, but crows, crying out, jeering, as they flew into the evening sky.
Which one is my soul flown from me? Which one, if one is, is my soul?
As she breathed in the smell of winter, the cold air struck her in the face and icy needles stung the inside of her nose. The forest was silent, no scampering creature in the dry leaves. Black trunks climbed out of the white earth, and their branches clawed the darkening sky where a bright orange moon was nudging the treetops. She stopped to listen to the stillness, but all she coul
d hear was her ragged breath and her own heart beating. Then a faint breeze rose up and there was a drumming from deep within the earth; the hesitant wind played minor chords though the bare limbs. She heard another sound that made her heart jump.
The bus had ground to a halt again. She could just make out the whine of its brakes farther down the road where she knew there was no stop, as there was none between here and the place a mile on where Highway 31 crossed over. She could hear boys laughing and swearing. Then the bus roared off again, and hoarse shouts floated on the air.
She was sure she could hear them coming down the road in her direction. She knew she could hold them off with a few hard phrases, without having to use any spells. But they would be alone, all four of them, in the failing light, far from town, and since they had undoubtedly smoked a little, they might get ideas if they didn’t have them already. A mist settled over her skin and her throat tightened.
Without thinking, she turned quickly and headed into the woods. She knew the Collinwood cemetery lay between her and the sea path. If she could make it as far as the graveyard, perhaps she could hide in one of the crypts. In no time she was floundering in the deep snow, scarcely able to pull one foot out before the next sunk in, and she was stumbling through hidden bushes and obstacles buried under giant mounds of white powder.
She could hear their slurred shouts, coming from several directions, as they seemed to have separated.
“You see her?”
“Naaah.”
“She gotta be here somewheres.”
Sing-songy now. “Hey, itchy-bitchy-witchy, where’d you go?”
“Here’s some snow she trampled!”
Trying to cover more ground, she pitched forward and fell, her books scattered, and her arms thrust into a deep drift. One hand jerked out without its glove, and she struggled to retrieve it. She gathered up her algebra book and her drawing tablet, which had fallen open at a watercolor she had done—of David—with a background of the sea at sunset, pink and orange clouds near the water. For a moment she thought she might swim into it and disappear, but she plunged on, her vision beginning to blur.
She heard the voices again—or was it the cries of the crows?—and fear shot through her. She leapt up out of one drift only to cave into another, each lunge more desperate. Then she seemed to be leaving them behind, their voices fading, until she heard a shout. They had found her trail.
Panicking, she looked up and saw the moon rising in the evening sky. Snow lay all around her. Where were all her familiars? Sleeping, hidden away, curled in the roots of oaks, small hearts beating softly, paws tucked, noses twitching. The world was locked up and silent, and snow sealed all the earth’s warm mouths. Only the trees remained in postures of prayer. Her throat swelled as she tried not to cry, but loneliness ached in her breast, and her eyes swarmed with tears. In order to be full one must first be empty. Oh, empty moon.
She could imagine their hands on her, too strong for her, pushing her down, and she felt cramping in the pit of her stomach that made her cry out in pain. She could protect herself, but it would mean a spell, and spells ripped her apart. Not only that, the magic called up the side she kept hidden, the one they had tried to blast out of her brain in the hospital. She shivered and gritted her teeth when she thought of the shock treatments. If she had to go through that again she would die.
But she could feel the anger boiling though her, and the forest became a swirling mass of shadows. Perhaps that’s what they wanted, to make her play her tricks, expose her and humiliate her. The witch they liked to make fun of but had never seen was bubbling inside her, ready to lash out at the world; the witch who took no insults, bore no remorse, and killed without regret.
I call on the powers of darkness, I summon the powers of night. An uncanny doppelganger—the twin she saw in the mirror. Was it a real part of her, something alive and vital? Or was her other self, nothing at all but an imaginary spirit dredged up by her damaged mind?
The boys were closer and she could hear the tramping sounds of their boots; in minutes they would find her. Bile flowed into her mouth at the thought of what they might do, and the lump in her throat was like a stone she could not swallow. They would do more than humiliate her. When the four of them got hold of her, they would hurt her in a way she would never forget. How dare they torture her! They were the evil ones, not her. She was panting and sweating, hot tears running down her cheeks. She bit her lip and tasted blood.
Then her books slipped out of her arms, and when she leaned down to pick them up, she saw her first sign, not the wood rat itself, but only its tiny footprints strung out across a flat space like a bead necklace in the snow and leading the way into the graveyard.
She looked up and sighed with relief to see her own raven on the branch of a bare-limbed hickory. He was black as India ink, fluffed and motionless, until he cocked his head and looked down at her with his red eye. She watched him for a moment, then started running, sinking in again and again, struggling to find footing under the snow, and dreading what she knew would come, was sure to come, as she searched the spaces between the trees.
She stopped and waited while the forest held its breath. Then, where there had been nothing, there was a slinking shape, the whisper of a coyote. The familiar shadow was weaving through the trees, head down, tail lowered, and the limber canine shape she recognized. The animal was panting, her rib cage moving in and out, paws curled under, ears flat, slanted ruby eyes, nose a piece of coal, and teeth glistening behind a red tongue hanging like a flame. There was one, and behind her, several more, barely visible in the gray light, but she could see their ears lift in greeting and their long tails sway.
Once again she heard the boys’ shouts, and the coyotes tilted their heads; their panting stopped. Already she could see the bright blood splashed on the snow; hear the growls and gnashing teeth, the uncomprehending, panicked cries. If it snowed again that night, the boys would be buried, not found for days, or weeks. She could imagine the Collinsport Gazette, with its garish headlines: WILD CREATURE ATTACKS LOCAL BOYS IN THE WOODS NEAR THE COLLINWOOD ESTATE. More trouble for David’s family. The police coming to investigate. Suspicion, rejection, and even greater isolation.
The command was on her lips. If she lit the flame, she would lose herself.
Then, far off, she heard the roar of David’s snowmobile and she almost wept in relief. She could hear it approaching the cemetery, a high whine that came and went in the cold air, and she began to run again in the direction of the sound. But it was still far away and she stumbled blindly in a circle, not knowing which way to go.
There ahead was the back of the cemetery surrounded by a tall fence of iron lances, and hoping the boys could not climb it, she took a chance and sailed like a leaf in among the tombstones. She listened for the sound of the snowmobile but heard instead the howl of a wolf echoing through the forest. The sound, desolate and mournful, made her body crawl with tremors. What was it? There were no wolves anymore—only her coyotes.
Something fluttered through the trees, and again she went rigid with fear: there was the silhouette of a cape flung out against the snow, a dark wing that moved through the graves. Closer now, she heard the howl of the wolf again, a wolf she did not know, a wolf she had never seen in her forest, its cry like the sobbing of ghosts.
The snowmobile’s whine pierced the air, and she scrambled up and ran toward the sound. Calling out, “David! David!” she could see the ski coming down the road, spraying snow in a great flume behind, its engine revving, and then she glimpsed it through the gravestones just beyond the front gate. Running, she cried again, “David!” but the roar blotted out her voice, and she reached the road just in time to see the sled disappear in a cloud of snow. She heard the motor cough, then clatter, as it died away in the distance.
She was choking on her tears as she staggered back through the markers, searching for a place to hide. One statue seemed to offer shelter, a marble angel that rose above a grave, and she crouched
down in the snow against the folds of its robe. When she curled in closer, she thought she felt the ground beneath her heave and the angel reach around her in a gentle embrace. She sighed and leaned back in the comforting arms, letting the tears flow, finding safety on a stone breast.
Her mouth grew sticky with a terrible thirst, and she cupped some snow in her hand and pressed it to her lips. Sucking the ice into her throat, she blinked when she noticed a small pool of melted ice that mirrored the sky. She leaned over to drink from it, and gasped when she saw reflected there a woman with yellow hair and turquoise eyes that blazed with fury. At first she thought it was her mother, but then she knew it was not. It was the secret in the glass—her own image looking up at her.
Her breathing grew ragged, and she backed away and turned to where she could see one of her feral friends poised on a snow-covered rock, ears pricked, nose quivering. And coming through the graves were the boys, laughing and floundering in the drifts, oblivious and obviously stoned, falling into flat areas where they cursed and threw smashed snowballs at one another like the dull and foolish children that they were. But they were nearly men as well, intent on their purpose, and their eyes were wild.
The flame rose up within her, this time more like a sword, razor-edged and glowing, and her scalp crawled as it squirmed with snakes. She was barely visible in the fading light. A bunch of dead branches was all they saw until they somehow sensed she was there, and they froze and stared, jaws agape, because she was waiting for them in a space between the trees. Circling her were ten snarling coyotes with red tongues and eyes like fire.
She was hovering three feet above the ground.
Her hair was tangle of black serpents coiling about her face. She swayed in the air, and her coat fluttered away from her feet. Black flames flickered in her cavernous mouth, and her eyes were like silver shards piercing the air. She fixed them with a gaze so venomous, it struck them dumb. At first they stiffened, afraid to move—their eyes wide with terror—and then they found they could not move, but were frozen into statues made of stone. Only their mouths opened and closed in an effort to scream. She made no sound but in their heads they could hear her voice hissing like an underground wind.
