I Was a Teenage Weredeer (The Bright Falls Mysteries Book 1)

by C. T. Phipps

  “Kelpie,” I said, blinking.

  “A water horse,” Jacob said. “A siren or nek. They’re big ugly masses of foliage and goo possessed by demons that turn into beautiful women or stallions to lure men to their doom.”

  “Women or stallions?” I asked.

  “Either would be very attractive to young men of my grandfather’s era,” Jacob paused. “Also, don’t make a joke about that.”

  I stared at him. “How could I not? I mean, the setup is right there!”

  Jacob’s voice turned low. “It also drowned your cousin.”

  All of the enthusiasm drained from my body in an instant. “I’m sorry, Grandpa. I’m responsible. I did it. I dared her to—”

  Jacob silenced with me with a light tap to my right ear.

  “Ow!” I said, rubbing my ear. “Not the ears!”

  “Jill knew how to swim like a selkie,” Jacob said. “There was no reason to believe that water was dangerous.”

  “There was a sign,” I said.

  “Did the sign say, ‘Do not enter this water or you will die?’”

  “No,” I said, trying to remember that day despite all the years I’d done my best to block it out. “I do, however, remember there was a family in the water. They were having fun. There were girls our age.”

  That was when I recalled the image of Jill, with pigtails and a Hello Kitty swimsuit, jumping in and swam out. What followed then were the screams and the cries for help. I remembered wanting to go in but being too afraid.

  So she died.

  I started crying.

  Jacob took me into a hug and held me for a few minutes. “It wasn’t your fault, girl. It was the monster’s. Just one of the things attracted to this place by those damned fools leaving the door open when they abandoned the Lodge.”

  I sniffled a bit and pulled away, wiping away my eyes and my nose. “Why is the Lodge abandoned? Surely you have to know.”

  “Because I’m an old Native American spirit?”

  “Because you were there when they left it,” I said, frowning.

  “Oh,” Jacob said, sighing. “Right.”

  “I doubt that.”

  Jacob walked over to his kitchen and his old-style fridge, opening it up to reveal nothing but beer and fish. “Want a beer?”

  “I’m eighteen,” I said.

  “So yes?” Jacob said.

  I sighed. “Sure, why not.”

  “You’re a quarter Canadian. You should be powered by this stuff.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Just get with the story.”

  Jacob handed me a beer imported from across the border and popped the top off of his with a partially transformed hand. Hooves were useful for removing bottle caps. “How much do you know?”

  “There’s an evil god messing with our town?” I said, though I didn’t use the word messing. I guess Emma wasn’t rubbing off on me entirely.

  “Not an evil god,” Jacob said, frowning. “At least not originally. Spirits have to rebirth themselves regularly with the seasons if they want to stay sane. Eternity is a very long time to live and you need to live many lifetimes if you want to understand it.”

  “Did you learn that as a ghost?”

  “No, from your mother during one of her long lectures about how weredeer religion was awesome,” Jacob muttered, rolling his eyes. “Seven kids and all of them into hippie New-Age mysticism and junk.”

  I was ready to mention he’d almost set me up in an arranged marriage before asking, “What does that have to do with the Big Bad Wolf?”

  Jacob smirked. “Is that what they’re calling it?”

  “What did you call it?” I said.

  Jacob frowned. “The Red Wolf. It was a spirit that lived in these woods and a powerful one. A god, but a benevolent one. It took the dhampir born from the mixing of vampires and humans under its wings and taught them how to change shape. It killed many enemies that threatened his people and often possessed leaders to rule wisely.”

  “That’s…scary.”

  “When you live in a world where people knew monsters were real, you often find the biggest monster you can find to protect you. It’s kind of like prison.”

  “Why did it turn bad?”

  Jacob took a long drink of his beer and stared at me.

  I took a sip of mine and almost choked on it. This wasn’t a Bud Lite, something all of my family agreed was terrible, but a thick, rich homebrew that probably contained way more alcohol than was allowed for a normal lager. I gagged for a full three seconds before coughing out an alcohol-fused breath.

  Jacob rolled his eyes. “Lightweight.”

  I glared at him. “I don’t drink. It’s not my thing, okay!”

  “It’s beer!” Jacob said, sighing. “Real beer! Deer beer! Show some Canadian pride!”

  “I’m American.”

  “Show some North American pride!”

  I sighed and took a much longer drink, not even bothering to taste. That proved to be a bad idea when I gagged.

  Jacob laughed. “Sucker.”

  I hated when he pranked me like that.

  “Love,” Jacob said, answering like he’d never stopped our conversation. “The Red Wolf saw the most beautiful child in all of Bright Falls and took her as a bride. He wore the skin of a man during that time and sired five children.”

  “I take it this story doesn’t end with a happily ever after?”

  Jacob frowned. “No. The bloodlines were to be kept pure back then. A weredeer and a werewolf woman was almost as much an abomination as an Odawa man and a white woman. I ended up better off than he did.”

  It took me a second to realize what he was saying. “They killed the Red Wolf’s children.”

  “Yes,” Jacob said, his voice low. “I wasn’t there, but I knew plenty of the people who were. Called many of them friend. They torched his house with the kids inside. Some didn’t know, but most did. Mob mentality. Like herd, only worse.”

  “It’s not a good idea to anger a god.”

  “No, it is not.”

  “What happened?” I asked, trying to imagine what I would do if I had godlike power and someone killed my family. I imagined it would look like Sodom and Gomorrah.

  “Bloodshed and horror,” Jacob said, giving a thousand-yard stare. “There’s a reason we don’t talk about it. No one had known Elroy Cornstalk was a god. Who would with that name? They knew afterward, though. Human and shifter both. After the murders, the Red Wolf turned vicious and made a demand that was burned into the minds of each survivor.”

  “Five lives,” I said, putting it together in my head. “It wanted five sacrifices from the bloodlines that killed his family.”

  “Yes,” Jacob said. “None of us would do it, of course, though it took a lot of negotiating to make sure every other clan didn’t start turning over each other’s kids. Your grandmother put the Red Wolf to sleep and we agreed to abandon the Lodge. It had effects on us. Fewer children were born, the prosperity of the town was affected, and the oldest among us were always tempted to contact him. That’s part of why Marcus O’Henry tried to wipe out the Dragon Clan. The Drake family had been involved and he tried to offer them up to the Red Wolf. He got four.”

  “Lucien,” I said. “He missed him.”

  Jacob growled. “That idiot awakened what had been sleeping peacefully. Then Victoria walked into its grasp.”

  “Why her?” I tried to make sense of it. “Why didn’t it just kill her?”

  “The woman he loved was an O’Henry.”

  “Now she’s a sacrifice,” I said, even more confused and disgusted.

  “And with him forever,” Jacob said. “But the next round of sacrifices isn’t done. The curse of the Red Wolf won’t end until two more of the families die.”

  “It has to be five in a row, huh?” I felt sick.

  “Yes. The Red Wolf is mad for sensation after having been a prisoner for seven decades. It was rabid for the atrocity committed against it before, but it should have be
en reborn a long time ago. That’s the other option to deal with it. Kill it and force it to reincarnate.”

  “You got any god-killing weapons around here?” I asked, only half joking. We were in the Great Woods, after all.

  “A true shaman can force a rabid spirit to reincarnate. Even one as powerful as the Red Wolf,” Jacob frowned. “Don’t ask me for more info. I hate this mumbo-jumbo.”

  “The Goddess couldn’t have sent someone who knew what they were doing?” I asked, only half sarcastic.

  My grandfather gave a half-smile. “The universe is a bit more complicated than that.”

  “Of course it is,” I muttered under my breath. “So I need to get Mom out here to stop it.”

  “No,” Jacob said, sighing before finishing off his beer. “Your mother won’t be able to do anything against the Red Wolf.”

  “Why? She’s the most powerful shaman in the town.”

  “And she’ll never be any stronger,” Jacob said, tossing the beer into a plastic rubbish bin from six feet away. “Your mother broke taboo during the Reveal. She violated her oaths and broke several sacred compacts. The Red Wolf would tear her to shreds.”

  I was confused. “What are you talking about? My mother, your daughter, is a saint.”

  Jacob didn’t answer for a moment.

  “Isn’t she?” I asked, my voice weak.

  “Remember, Marcus tried to break the curse before. That required a shaman to perform the sacrifices of the Drake family. Marcus could kill dozens of them in a single night, but he needed to perform the rites to break the curse.”

  I blinked then stepped back. “No, you’re lying.”

  “The Drakes weren’t a bunch of Girl Scouts,” Marcus said, defensive of his daughter. “They were a vicious group of gangsters and killers. Their youngest son, Lucien, would have grown up to be every bit as bad if not for Agent Constance Timmons and young Alex. Your mother was ambitious and eager to show she could break the curse on the town. The one Marcus tried to pass off as the work of a witch he’d crossed. The truth was he was covering up for the Lodge. There’s a reason only deer are allowed to learn magic. It’s to keep it all under wraps and the Red Wolf asleep. Your mother couldn’t kill a child in the end, though. That’s why Lucien survived and was able to flee into the woods. He doesn’t know about your mother’s involvement, though. Otherwise, I suspect she’d be dead.”

  I stared at him, too horrified to respond. “My mother is a murderer.”

  “Yes,” Jacob said. “She also did it for love.”

  I didn’t want to know who he was referring to. “Gods above and below. This is all her fault.”

  “Not all,” Jacob said, going to his wall of fishing equipment and pulling out a harpoon. It was a strange object for a rural fisherman to possess. “There’s plenty of blame to go around from the racist jackasses who killed the Red Wolf’s family to the mad beast itself. Good people do bad things.”

  “Then they become bad because of that,” I snapped, horrified. “Jesus, I just realized, I haven’t asked about Emma and Maria. Are they okay?”

  “You distracted the kelpie,” Jacob said, aiming the harpoon at the door before going to pick up a sheathed machete he’d hidden behind the other couch. It made him look like he was trying out for Extreme Murder Bass Fishing, a show that doesn’t exist yet but I’m sure eventually will. “They’ve fled deeper into the woods. You’ll be able to find them if you can get past the spirit hunting you.”

  “What are you talking about?” I shouted, having reached my breaking point. This was insane. I wanted out of the Great Woods and to get back home. If not for the fact that my friends were missing along with Agent Timmons, I’d click my heels three times and wish myself back to bed. That would work, right?

  “Probably,” Jacob said, tossing me the harpoon. It hit the ground at my feet. It didn’t register for a second that he was responding to my thoughts.

  “Please tell me what you’re talking about.”

  “The kelpie would just go after your friends then. It’s a spirit that can possess objects in the physical world to bring them to life. That means this isn’t a refuge from it. My house is protected as it’s a place you felt safe as a child and that is its own kind of barrier. But the moment you step out, it’ll be on us.”

  I stared at him then at the door. “Oh no.”

  “Yep,” Jacob said before adopting an Elmer Fudd voice. “Be vewwwy quiet. We’re hunting monster.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I stepped out of the cabin, hoping my grandfather would be there for me or the beauty of the Underwood. Instead, no, I was alone and back at the edge of the lake. I’d stepped out of the ruined cabin’s door despite Grandfather’s cabin being thirty miles away in the real world. The harpoon that had been in my hand was gone now, leaving no sign that my vision had been anything other than a pleasant dream or the hallucination of a deranged weredeer woman.

  Emma and Maria were nowhere to be seen. I was grateful that they weren’t corpses lying by the water. Of course, they could be in the water. I had to learn to stop thinking. Okay, I needed to examine the scene. There weren’t any obvious pools of blood and…um, I should have been looking for broken twigs and bent grass or something. If there were any grass that looked particularly bent, it eluded my skills, and there were twigs in varying states of disrepair everywhere.

  I probably shouldn’t have quite Girl Scouts after a month. I’m sure I’d be a master tracker now if I’d stuck with it. They went into the woods, right, or was that just Boy Scouts? There was nothing left to do but look to the water.

  I had not, before that moment, realized I hadn’t been looking at the water, that my eyes had been avoiding the single most obvious feature of the landscape as if it were as bright as the sun and would burn my eyes. It was nothing of the sort, of course. It was as dark as its name suggested. But still, I saw no signs of them. Or anything else. The water was flat, resolutely ignoring the breeze trying to make it ripple.

  Darkwater Lake wasn’t large enough that I couldn’t see the other side, even in the darkness, but it was large enough it would take someone quite a while to swim across. Not that I had any intention of going into the water. I’d come here with Jenny, daring her to swim in the forbidden water. Nothing had changed here that I could see. They’d never found the body, so it had to still be down at the bottom of the lake. Another thing I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about.

  I turned away from the lake as if that would keep me from my guilt. Then, steeling myself, I turned back. “I have to find some sign here, some pointer toward where… Oh crap, I can hear the water moving.”

  Reluctantly, I peered back over my shoulder. Not ten feet down the bank, the water was rippling as something dark and large rose up. It was large, black, and covered in silt and stank like rotting garbage. Once the water fell off of it, I could see it was a horse. Or something shaped like a horse. A real horse didn’t have glowing red eyes. It also wouldn’t seem to be made of water, plants, and detritus suspended in a horse-like shape.

  I remembered ‘water horse’ was another name for the creature in Scotland. Grandfather had called it such before. I was facing the kelpie in its true form. Even now, the vision of my grandfather was fading and I desperately wished he was beside me to fight this thing. There was no sign of his shade, if it had ever been there to begin with, and I was alone with what weapons I’d brought. I hoped my grandfather hadn’t brought me here to my death, but if he did, really, then it was only justice.

  Okay, I really needed to stop thinking like that. My friends needed me. Sorry, Jill, you’re going to have to wait for your pound of venison.

  “It’s been a while,” the kelpie said. Its voice was like a babbling brook, rushing out of its lungs like water instead of air. “But I knew you’d come back.”

  “I didn’t,” I said, wanting to back away, but the ridge around the lake made walking backwards dangerous. Besides, I wasn’t going to run away as much as I wanted to. I was
too terrified to. This was, literally, the creature that had haunted my nightmares for decades. Even if I had suppressed the particulars. “You must be smarter than me.”

  I don’t think that horses can smile, but I got the impression that it was doing so anyway. “Come, Jane, we have so much to talk about.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to look like a beautiful woman or something?” I said, speaking more in a whisper than my usual sarcastic tone. “I mean, I’d prefer for you to appear as Brad Pitt circa Troy or Link from The Legend of Zelda (don’t tell anyone else about that fantasy) but I thought most spirits loved tradition.”

  Good, yeah, that was sarcastic. Did it help me feel less scared? Not really.

  Crap.

  The kelpie wasn’t impressed. In fact, it looked amused, which was the worst emotion it could be expressing right now. “I can appear as a man or woman, but we have no need of illusions between us. You must tell me everything you’ve done.”

  I summoned my courage, what little I had left. “I want to know where my friends are.”

  The thought of Emma and Maria (though Maria was more like an acquaintance my brother had sex with—ew, bad mental image) helped me face my enemy. Turning to it, I managed to take a full half-step forward before stopping.

  “Friends?” the creature asked as if it was a word from an alien language.

  “The people I was here with earlier.”

  “The sacrifices you brought me? I gave them to Him.”

  I wanted to throw up. “You mean they’re dead?”

  No, God, Goddess, and Grandfather. Please, no. Please don’t let me have done it again.

  The kelpie stretched its head and shook it like a real horse. “I’m hardly the one to ask. What He demands is best surrendered to Him. Perhaps you could bring more. It’s been so long.”

  “I’m not bringing you anything,” I snapped at the creature.

  “Do you want another Gift?”

  My mind lurched as if trying to escape from my skull. There was something I wasn’t remembering. Something I didn’t want to remember. I heard myself asking, “Gift?”

  Memory wasn’t something humans like to acknowledge was as fickle as the weather and as substantial as a rainbow. In the 1980s, there was a satanic cult scare that involved child abuse and sexual molestation. As far as I knew, that was false despite the fact that there really were a bunch of demonic cults out there. The patients involved had created false memories through the power of suggestion by their therapists.