"But she's up and walking," Ghost said. He stood and sheathed his new knife, rubbing his hands together, and Jack saw that he was enjoying this. Playing with people's lives, toying with their thoughts and emotions — that was Ghost's food, and the fuel to his staggering, skewed intellect. "She opened the door to allow us in, and she seemed sickening, true. But she's breathing and moving, and still you wish to slice her throat."
Callie faced Ghost, swinging the rifle across one shoulder and resting her other hand on her pistol. "You move too," she said. "An' talk, grin, wallow in others' discomfort. Don't make you any more human."
Ghost raised an eyebrow, and Jack caught his breath. There it was: Callie's first overt observation of Ghost's mysterious, inhuman nature.
Ghost only laughed and turned away.
"Callie . . ." Jack began, but she shook her head.
"My mind's set," she said. "An' I'll do it alone. It's a favor to Truman, God rest his soul. He wouldn't want his wife's soul left wanderin'. Just . . . wait for me. Won't take long."
She walked away, disappearing around the corner of the hotel and leaving silence in her wake. Sabine and Jack looked at each other, but neither could speak. In the face of such horror there was nothing to say.
Chapter Ten - The Withering Land
Jack had been a wanderer since he'd learned to walk, partly because his heart had always been unsettled, but also because so many of the paths he'd taken had been through territory he had never wanted to cross again. If he'd made a list of these places, this riverside trail north of Dawson would have topped it.
He had been a slave here, on the journey northward. He had seen men murdered by the Wendigo, and later — on the return trip — he had nearly died at the cursed creature's hands himself. But he had survived. He had escaped Lesya's ancient power and her shrieking loneliness, and he had killed the Wendigo. He had faced the wild beast inside his own heart and had, if not tamed it, at least mastered it. Jack London had chosen humanity, and he had left the blood and brutality and the magic of the ancient forest behind him. While it was true that when he had finally sailed for home he had never planned to stay there for long, he had certainly never intended returning here.
Yet here he was, trekking along the bank of this tributary snaking north from Dawson all through the long hours of the summer sun, heading back into the forbidding wilderness where he had faced horror and wonder and Lesya's yearning, this time with new monsters to fear. No, he thought. Not just monsters. Evil. Callie had said it, and he believed it. Lesya and the Wendigo might be creatures of magic, but they were living things. They had been ferocious but not cruel, and did not fit neatly into humanity's notions of good and evil. The werewolves might have rejoiced in the hunt, but they were beasts; their only cruelty had been of the petty, human variety.
The vampires were sinister creatures unlike anything Jack had faced before.
It helped his conscience to think of that. If he could not have thought of them as evil and cunning and . . . other . . . his guilt over killing the only predator capable of stopping them would have gnawed at him so fiercely that he might have faltered in his purpose. The image of Belle Truman as he'd first seen her lingered in his mind. She had been under the influence of the vampire, her flesh and blood and soul tainted by the creature's bite. Callie had estimated that Belle had perhaps another night and day, even without any further leeching, before she succumbed to the dark influence of the vampire — her husband's killer. According to Callie, who had seen the process more than once, Belle would be in anguish as she withered away, if the vampire didn't finish her off first.
Her body's gonna give up on her, Callie had said. And when she breathes her last breath, the evil that thing put inside her's gonna drive her soul out, leavin' her mind trapped inside a monster's body. That's the horror of it, Jack. I've seen it in their eyes, right up close. Part of who that woman used to be is gonna be stuck in there, like a prisoner in her own body, unable to stop herself from the killing and from drinking the blood of innocent folks. And part of her's gonna like it. If we kill her now, might be we can save her that. It might not be too late for her soul to find its way to Heaven if we set her free. But once she's dead, she's damned to Hell, both her soul in the afterlife, and whatever sliver of her mind is left behind in her hungry corpse.
The words had haunted Jack enough that although he could not force himself to take part, he also could not bring himself to try to stop Callie when she had gone to hasten Belle Truman's death. He knew it had been a mercy, but it felt like a dark deed. And he'd had his fill of such things.
All through the long hours of the day they had trekked northward, stopping only for a brief and meager meal and to refill their canteens from the river. Louis, Vukovich, and the Reverend took the point, scouting ahead several hundred yards, always on guard for any sign of attack despite Callie's assurance that the vampires would not come out into the direct sunlight. Callie followed them, the previously loquacious woman keeping to herself, perhaps haunted by the deed she had committed. It seemed that with every day that passed since he had first come to Dawson two years before, Jack was forced to expand his understanding of what the world contained. Right and wrong weren't as clearly defined as they once had been, nor were man and beast. This morning, he'd had to consider carefully what constituted cruelty, and mercy.
Exhausted and hungry as the sun slid across the sky toward summer evening, Jack knew they had come far enough that they should begin striking westward to seek out Lesya's forest. Sabine looked pale and drawn, and it troubled him to think what effect moving away from the river would have upon her. He walked beside her, mentally urging her to lean on him though she seemed determined to make her own way.
From time to time Louis would drop back and check on them, and Sabine would insist that she was fine in a clipped tone that told a different story. Jack did not question her and neither did Louis. They had come all this way to find Lesya and discover if she could help Sabine sort out the mystery of her own origins, and they knew she would not turn back now.
Of Ghost, they saw little. He trailed them, watching their flank for any threat, but Jack thought he had other things on his mind as well. Despite his arrogance, Ghost had become a rudderless ship of a creature. His brother was dead and Jack thought maybe he was lost as to what his purpose might be in life. His bluster about wooing Sabine had seemed hostile at first, but now Jack wondered if it weren't simply the only way he could explain to himself what he was doing here with them. The other wolves, his former crew and pack, were attempting to relearn what it meant to be human, and he thought Ghost might be absorbing some of that search for redemption simply by being with them.
He wasn't going to push the issue right now, though. If there was a whole tribe of vampires out here in the wild, they would need Ghost's strength and ferocity. Jack had not wanted to admit it to himself, but with every mile they traveled from Dawson, and with every minute that ticked toward nightfall, he might have chosen a very bad time to try to tame a bunch of werewolves.
"This is difficult for you," Sabine said, her voice soft rasp.
They were walking along the river and as he glanced at her, she stumbled on a stone. He caught her before she could fall, steadying her and then taking her hand. Her question went unanswered for half a minute before Jack took a breath and glanced at her.
"Bad things happened here."
"The camp where the Wendigo attacked the men who'd enslaved you?" she asked. "It was nearby?"
He considered lying, but the love in her gleaming eyes stopped him. "We passed it a while back," he confessed.
"What?" Sabine said, her brows knitting. "How long?"
"An hour, I'd guess. Some of the stakes were still in the ground, where they tied us up. And the saddle where I carved a bit of a memorial on the way back."
She came to a halt, staring at him in confusion. "You're trying to protect me. But you can't help me with this and keep me safe at the same time."
Jack
looked away. Sabine might not remember all the millennia of her life, but still she had great wisdom and knew enough about the human heart. Of course she understood what he was doing.
"I just thought if we stayed by the river until the last possible moment — "
"If you can't find the way purely by instinct, we're going to need Louis and the others to find a trail to Lesya's part of the woods. Her trail or the Wendigo's, or yours, Jack. And those trails are more than a year old. If you get us lost, we're going to have to hike all the way back to that point and start again."
Jack exhaled. "I won't get us lost. We can strike west from here and I'll be able to sense her. To feel her place and the power around it."
Callie had paused, and now started back toward them. "What's the hold up, you two? If we're going to stop a bit, we ought to let your crew know."
"We should head away from the river now," Jack announced as the vampire hunter approached them, leather gun belts creaking on her hips. "Can you catch up with them and bring them back here?"
Callie frowned, studying them, understanding that there was something else going on between them but wisely not attempting to intrude. None of them had talked much over the course of the day, and it was not a time for intimacy. She turned and hustled along the river, moving quickly despite her heavy clothes and the equipment she had neglected to set down.
Jack felt a presence behind him, and he glanced downriver to see Ghost emerging from some trees and striding toward them.
"Well, which way?" Sabine asked. "If you can sense her, Jack . . . which way?"
Jack smiled at her tone. "You're not actually jealous, are you? You realize that she tried to keep me prisoner as some kind of slave husband."
Sabine ran a hand along his arm, meeting his gaze. "I just don't like the idea that you're connected to anyone but me."
Knowing full well that Ghost was approaching, Jack lifted her chin and gave her a gentle kiss on the lips. Sabine sighed with contentment, but still Jack could see how exhausted she was being this far from the sea.
The faster they found Lesya, the better.
Jack closed his eyes, ignoring Ghost's arrival at the river's edge, and reached his senses out into the forest to the west. He searched at first for some trace of Lesya's wild magic, the thriving power of nature that bloomed uncontrollably around her home. Instead, he felt only hollowness, as though the magic of the land had vanished. Even the ordinary nature of the wild seemed withered.
Confused, he began to reach out to the animals of the wood, searching for a bird or bear or fox whose essence he might be able to sense had been influenced by Lesya's magic . . . but he found none. He could reach further — and there must be animals near enough — but in the immediate vicinity, all of the wildlife had abandoned the woods and the river.
They've fled, Jack thought. Even the Wendigo had not driven the animals away, so this had to be something else.
"The animals are gone," he whispered.
"Perhaps the animals have good sense," Sabine said.
"Here!" someone called. Jack, Sabine, and Ghost all turned north in the direction of the shout. A small rise in the riverbank blocked their view, but a moment later the Reverend appeared on the rocky hill and beckoned.
"Come here," he said, now as quiet as he ever was. Jack had been shocked to hear the quiet man shouting. "You need to see this."
"What is it?" Sabine asked, her voice carrying along the river.
The Reverend looked grim, crouched, ready for a fight, as he called back a single word.
"Death."
When Jack crested the rise he had to blink several times to clear the ghost of memory. For a moment, he thought he must have wandered into the past like the hapless fool in some old fairy story. The gold stampeders had been camped near the river and the evidence of their efforts — supplies and packs and shovels and the pans they used to sift the river bottom for gold — were scattered about as though a small tornado had touched down amongst them and left the surrounding wilderness unscathed. The bodies were broken, tossed about like rag dolls in the hands of a tantrum-prone child. Limbs were twisted and snapped; some had been torn off. An arm lay half in the water, pale fingers appearing to twitch as the river tugged at them. A woman hung from the jagged branches of a nearby tree like a discarded puppet, her long, wheat-blond hair a veil hiding most of the damage done to her face.
"Son of a bitch," Jack rasped.
He took a step backward and shook his head. Despite the tableau of death arrayed before them, this was not the same kind of carnage wrought by the Wendigo when Jack had last been in this part of the world. There were dried brown spatters of blood on trees and rocks and soaked into the ground, but nowhere near enough blood for this many people. And while some had been mutilated, they hadn't been torn open the way the Wendigo would have killed them.
The corpses were fish-belly white, save for two black men whose skin had turned a chalky gray. The blood had been drained from them. The Tlingit vampire tribe had slaughtered them.
Ghost stepped up next to Jack. "A shameful waste of meat," he growled quietly.
Jack narrowed his eyes but did not rise to the bait — for he was sure that was what it was; Ghost trying to get a rise out of him. Louis, the Reverend, and Vukovich were down amongst the dead, picking through the remains of the camp to see if there was anything salvageable in the supplies. Jack knew they weren't looking for survivors; one look made it clear there were none. Instead, he imagined they were looking for coffee, and the triviality of the search made his stomach churn. Still, he supposed he ought to be grateful that none of them looked at the dead in the same manner as Ghost — as a potential meal.
Sabine came up behind him. She took one look at the murder scene and turned away, going back down the rise so as not to have to look too closely. Perhaps it weighed on her, he mused, the thought that they were putting themselves in the path of the vampires on her behalf. Or perhaps she found comfort being at the water's edge.
Callie had a scavenged shotgun over her shoulder as she trudged up the rocky mound toward Jack, Sabine, and Ghost, leaving the massacre behind. She set down a few items she had found and tossed the shotgun to Jack. He caught it, frowning.
"It ain't loaded with silver shot, but it might buy you a couple seconds if the time comes you need 'em," she explained.
Jack nodded his thanks, holding the shotgun tighter than necessary.
"An' there's this," Callie said, tapping a box with her toe. "We don't shoot them all, we can blow 'em up."
"Dynamite?" Jack asked. "You ever used it?"
Callie only raised her eyebrows at him, a silent, Of course. Perhaps one day he would ask her where, and when. She shrugged the pack off her back and started loading it with dynamite sticks.
"Did they leave a trail we can follow?" Ghost asked.
Sabine gave a tiny gasp of shock and glared at him. "You mean for us to follow the vampires? To what end?"
"A messy one, if we tried it," Jack said.
Callie grunted in acknowledgement. "Maybe so. But that's why I'm here, ain't it? To hunt these bastards. We kill 'em in their lair, it's gonna save a lot of lives in Dawson and probably plenty of other places."
Ghost lifted his chin, nostrils flaring, regarding them all as if they were children or fools. "I wondered if they'd purposely left a trail for us, to lure us in, but I'm in no hurry to go after them. If the vampires come at us, I'll eat their black hearts, and if young Jack's attempt to rehabilitate me starts taking hold, I might even be willing to track and kill them myself. But we're here for Sabine first. Anything else is secondary."
Jack wanted to kill him, wished that Ghost were among the dead in the camp spread out below them. Sabine and Jack were together. In love. But Ghost would simply not cease his attempts to position himself as her man. Did he really not understand that Sabine had figured him out, that she and Jack both knew that his behavior was more closely tied to obsession than love? Ghost had only a passing acquaintance with
morality. He had been helpful and amiable and almost gallant up to this point, but now cracks were beginning to show in his façade, and Jack's hope that he might be positively influenced began to fade.
"You're nowhere near human," Jack said.
Ghost gave a small laugh. "I thought we had established that fairly solidly in our past acquaintance."
"You understand what he's doing?" Jack went on, turning to Sabine, with Callie looking on. "He's been a monster so long he doesn't really understand the difference between right and wrong. He's just doing what he thinks you would expect of a good man."
Ghost continued to smile, but Jack could sense him bristling with a challenge. He turned in time to see the thickening of the hair on Ghost's face, the lengthening of his canines that turned his smile into a predatory grin.
The click of Callie's pistol echoed loudly around them as she cocked the hammer and pressed it against Ghost's temple.
"Your kind seems just as skittish around silver as the leeches," Callie said. "I ain't got enough ammo to deal with two kinds of monsters on this trip. Don't make me change targets."
Ghost's smile slid away. He didn't look at Callie, just kept staring at Jack.
"Bitch is going to regret that," he snarled.
Sabine slapped him, hard. Ghost roared and rounded on her. Jack shouted at him as Callie stepped back and leveled her gun, ready to fire. Alarmed by the noise, the other three wolves began sprinting toward the top of the rise, but they would be too late to help.
Ghost fumed, sniffed, and then shook his head, trying to contain his fury.
"Maybe the 'bitch' should pull the trigger," Sabine said. "Just in case."
Ghost flinched, as if Sabine had struck him this time. "You don't understand. You'll never live through this without me."
For the first time, Jack thought he saw actual pain — a sign of true humanity — in the monster's eyes.
"Why do you care?" Sabine demanded.
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