by J L Aarne
“What is that thing?” Wyatt asked, deliberately not looking at the wolf again. “He’s huge. He’s—He walks in the daylight. How does he do that?”
“He’s not really afraid of the light like those others,” Silas said. “Not a night creature, just a rare creature.”
“And what—?”
“Amarok. He’s an amarok. Well, his father was. And he doesn’t kill people or lead them astray, he mostly minds his own business,” Silas said. “His and mine. He tracked me here. They’re smart. They used to say nothing can be concealed from the amarok. They know all your secrets.”
Silas yawned then winced at the pain in his side. “I thought I’d be heading home but it’s not looking like I will. Any time you want to let me go, I can get back up on this sofa and sleep some. Unless you’re kicking me and my friend here to the curb.”
Wyatt only considered it for a second and only because of Silas’s “friend.” Amarok might be a sweet animal without any ill intentions toward Wyatt or interest in consuming his flesh, but he looked like a monster and just looking at him made Wyatt’s insides kind of watery with fear. If Silas wanted to go on squatting in his living room there wasn’t much Wyatt could do about it because he now came with a ferocious protector.
“I wouldn’t do that. You’re still hurt,” Wyatt said.
Silas took his arm from around him and put his hands back to brace himself on the sofa and heft himself up. Then he slid over and flopped back on the throw pillows with a pained groan.
Amarok moved to the sofa to sniff him and Wyatt scooted away from the wolf. Then he didn’t know what else to do so he got up and went into his bedroom and lay down to be alone and think. He fell asleep and woke up later that evening when he heard the water in the shower come on. Wyatt rolled over and was met with two eyes glowing at him out of the dark.
Amarok licked the tip of his nose.
“Hey… boy… thing,” Wyatt said hesitantly.
He put his hand out and touched the big wolf’s head and when Amarok didn’t bite him but leaned into the petting Wyatt caught himself smiling. “You’re not that big,” Wyatt said.
Amarok chuffed in a way that made him think of laughter.
“Okay, you’re pretty big,” Wyatt said.
Amarok yawned.
Wyatt sat up and heard the shower running. In the kitchen, there was a bowl in the sink with a little milk in it and a few Cheerios that had escaped Silas’s notice. The shower turned off and a little while later Silas emerged freshly shaven and looking much better. He barely winced at all when he walked.
He took one look at Wyatt and shook his head. “You’re not wearing that. Go change.”
Wyatt’s mouth fell open in surprise and he looked down at himself. The way Silas said it made it seem like Wyatt had offended him with his perfectly innocuous green T-shirt and faded jeans.
“Why not?” Wyatt asked. “Are we going on a date or something?”
Silas smiled and pulled his hair back from his face, fastening it with a tie. “Something like that,” he said. “You’ll want black, or navy blue if you don’t have it.”
Wyatt eyed him suspiciously, but he went back into his bedroom to change. He threw on a dark blue hoodie over his light green shirt, changed into black denim and went back out into the living room to find out why it mattered.
Silas had a handgun out and was loading a clip for it. He snapped it into place as Wyatt came to stand there and watch him. He jacked back the slide, loading the chamber.
“This isn’t a walk or anything is it?” Wyatt asked. His heart had started picking up double-time as he realized what Silas intended to make him do. “I’m not going out there, Silas. I’m not and you’re still injured. You shouldn’t go out there either.”
“I’m fine,” Silas said. “Right as rain. Besides, we’re not looking for trouble, we’re just going to see what we can see. Get a feel for things.”
“I don’t…”
“Want to, yeah, I figured. But here’s the thing: you need to.”
Wyatt frowned down at the floor between his feet. No, he did not want to, Silas was right about that. The idea terrified him. He also did not appreciate one bit the way Silas said he needed to; like he didn’t have a say in the matter. He wondered why Silas cared about what he did or didn’t do, which was something he had been wondering about since he had met the man, and he was beginning to regret saving his life… just a little.
He rubbed his foot on the carpet and tried to remember the last time he had vacuumed it.
“But you’re injured,” Wyatt pointed out. Redundantly, it seemed, since if anyone knew how injured he was, it was Silas. “You’re all… clawed up and passing out and stuff. You can’t go out there at night. Now. I mean… yes, okay, you have a sword—or had a sword?—and you are very capable. I don’t even deny that, but look at you, Silas. You’re a mess. You could—”
Silas stood and pulled the bottom of his shirt up to show Wyatt his torso where the deadly harpy claw gouges had been. They were still there, but he had removed the bandages and cleaned them, and they were scabbed over and much, much smaller than Wyatt remembered.
“I’ll be fine. Thanks for your concern though,” Silas said, dropping his shirt back into place.
“You… But… but that’s impossible!” Wyatt said, pointing.
He forgot that Silas made him nervous or that he had a huge guard-wolf-monster watching his every move and stalked toward him, reaching for his shirt to lift it and look for himself. Calmly, Silas allowed him to do it. It was only when Wyatt stood there staring at Silas’s rapidly healing stomach, holding the hem of his shirt up, that he fully realized what he had done.
He let go and backed quickly away from him. “I’m sorry, that was so rude. I just… I can’t believe you’re… I mean, you fainted when we—”
“I did not faint,” Silas said, smirking as he pulled on his coat.
“I don’t understand you,” Wyatt said.
He slipped the gun he had loaded into one of his deep coat pockets. “What’s to understand?”
“Uh, everything?” Wyatt said.
“Right, well you go ahead and work on that puzzle,” Silas said. “Meanwhile, shall we go?”
Wyatt’s stomach did flip-flops, and he shook his head no, but what came out of his mouth was, “I guess so.”
Silas nodded. “All right then.” He headed for the door and Amarok rose to go with him.
Wyatt stood rooted to the spot, inwardly cursing himself both for being a complete coward and for agreeing so readily to go with him. “Let me just get something first,” he said.
He started to leave the room, but Silas called to him, “Do not bring a flashlight.”
“But, Silas, it’s dark out and—”
“That’s the point. Leave it here.”
“No, it’s—I need that.”
“I’ll protect you but leave the flashlights.”
While Wyatt appreciated the offer of protection, he still didn’t like it. Besides, Silas might be tough as nails, but he had also gotten his ass handed to him by a harpy not even twenty-four hours earlier and what was Wyatt going to do if something like that happened again? Silas couldn’t protect him if Silas was laying there dying with his body mangled by monsters.
“Can’t I just take a little flashlight?”
Silas sighed. “Fine. You can bring a little flashlight, but you have to leave it off unless you really are in danger.”
“But I—Okay,” Wyatt said.
It was the best he was going to get and besides, his idea of danger and Silas’s were vastly different. Wyatt was going to go with his own definition of danger because it had kept him safe all his life while Silas looked like he had been stabbed and bitten and clawed at a lot in his life.
He got a flashlight from the utility closet and it was a small one as promised. Small, but it had a bright light. Wyatt had bought it for a dollar at Walmart and it had been in his car until recently when he had replaced it w
ith a much larger one.
Silas and Amarok went first, and Wyatt meant to follow right behind and keep them close, but he halted just inside the threshold and could not make himself step outside. His heart was pounding, and he told himself to move, to pick up his foot and step onto the outside landing. Silas watched him, waiting, but he stood in the light of the patio lamp and behind him streetlights lined the walk to the parking lot. Beyond that there was pitch blackness and Wyatt imagined a thousand horrors waiting in the dark to jump out at them.
The first time Wyatt remembered seeing a night creature had been when he was three years old. His mother had tucked him in for the night, read him a story about a prince who lived on a tiny planet all alone, then she and his father had gone to bed. Wyatt, who could never sleep when it was dark, lay in bed awake. He stared out at the moon and the buildings across the street, he watched the lights in the tall apartment buildings go on and off, the shadows of people passing through rooms.
Then a face appeared in the window, nose pressed flat to the glass, eyes glowing like the thing had a fire burning inside it. It saw him looking, it knew that Wyatt saw it and it grinned. He still remembered that grin twenty-five years later and it still made his insides feel like there was a fist tightening around them. Sharp teeth, long and wicked like the teeth of a moray eel, lipless mouth that curled at the ends impossibly and stretched across its entire face, black, wet skin like a toad, thin, hooked nose, and on top of its bald little head it had perched a Seattle Seahawks ballcap. That was the most horrible part because even at three, that was the thing that made Wyatt believe it. That touch of the mundane, that pointless little detail, was something he could never have made up himself.
Wyatt knew that not all the things that lived out there were wicked, but a lot of them were. That creature, whatever it was, it had been evil and when it saw Wyatt seeing it, that creature had wanted to kill him. It hadn’t killed him only because Wyatt had screamed, and his parents had come running and then for years after that Wyatt would not go to bed without the lamp on and a nightlight in the hallway outside of his room.
Part of him was still waiting for that evil, dark-skinned little football fan to find him.
There had been the closet monsters after that and they were mostly harmless. Then there was Thorn, but Wyatt had always wondered if Thorn had been there all along and it had only taken him longer to make himself known. Thorn could be shy. When Wyatt first discovered the monster under his bed, Thorn already seemed to be attached to him.
There were good things and things that were not dangerous or murderous out there, but when he thought about the dark, he remembered that sharp smile and that face beyond the windowpane. He remembered it lifting a hand and scratching a finger down the glass, the shrieking sound that claw had made right before Wyatt started yelling for his mother.
When faced with the darkness, Wyatt became that frightened little boy again.
He looked at Silas helplessly and said, “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” Silas said. He walked back to stand at the bottom of the steps. “Nothing’s going to happen. You’ll be fine. Do you really think I’ll let anything happen to you? After everything you’ve put me through?”
Wyatt shook his head. “That’s not funny,” he said. “This isn’t funny. Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing, kid. All right, look, just step outside,” Silas said. “One step, let’s start with that.”
Wyatt wanted to slam the door in his face and lock it. He wanted to lock Silas and everything he represented outside then go back to the way things had been before he met him. He wanted to crawl back into his bed and lay there, maybe let Thorn hold his hand. He wanted more than anything to wake up and see the sunrise and his car parked outside in his parking space where it belonged, and to find the entire thing had been an incredibly strange lucid dream.
He wanted it so much that he put his hand on the door to close it. “I can’t, Silas. I can’t do this,” he said. “I told you I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“I know you think you can’t, and you’ve thought it for a long time, but I also know you’re wrong,” Silas said.
“No, I’m not like you. I don’t…”
Silas went back up the steps and stood on the other side of the open door from Wyatt. He put a hand out toward him, palm up for him to take it. For a long time, Wyatt only stared at it. He didn’t understand why any of it mattered to this person who was almost a complete stranger to him, but it did. Wyatt didn’t want to go outside into the dark, but he was someone that pretty much everyone in his life had given up on. His family still loved him, his sister was his best friend, but they had all given up when it came to this consuming fear of his a long time ago. He couldn’t be helped, they had decided, because he didn’t really want to be helped. They had tried over and over again, and they always ended up back where they had started. It was pointless. It was hopeless. Yet here was Silas, and he had known him a single day, and he was determined to… do what? Wyatt didn’t even know. Help him? Fix him? A little bit of both perhaps.
Wyatt didn’t think he could meet him halfway, not even close, but he could take one step. Then maybe he could take another.
He took Silas’s hand, Silas closed his fingers tightly around Wyatt’s and it did make him feel better. Not fearless, but less afraid. Silas’s hand was strong, fingers calloused and unyielding as iron bands. He was capable and confident and strong, and all the things that Wyatt was not and had never been. There was strength in that hand that said Silas could hurt him, but he held on in a way that said he would not.
“Do you trust me?” Silas asked.
He shouldn’t. He didn’t even know him.
“Yeah,” Wyatt said.
“Then come on,” Silas said. “Bring your flashlight. It’ll be okay.”
Chapter 6
It was not okay. It started out okay, but Wyatt took Silas’s hand and let himself be led out into the darkness knowing that it wasn’t going to stay that way because it never, ever did. He did not turn on his tiny flashlight right away, for which he was very proud of himself because the urge was there as Silas shut the door to his apartment and the shadows closed around him. They walked, and Silas was calm, as always, and Wyatt was doing his best impression of a calm person, but every step he took away from his front door was like wading through icy water.
Amarok walked beside Wyatt for awhile, but as they crossed through the courtyard with the apartment building where he lived behind them, the wolf wasn’t there anymore. He had drifted away at some point like smoke and for an animal that size, with such presence, to do that unnoticed made it a frightening thing.
They walked for what felt like a long time without either of them speaking. Eventually, Silas let go of his hand and Wyatt stuffed both of his hands deep into the pockets of his hoodie. In his right hand he still held the little flashlight and turned it in his fingers, waiting for anything to pop out at him and screech or snarl or cackle. No matter what Silas said, if anything did, Wyatt was ready for them.
They stayed on residential streets where it was darker and there wasn’t much traffic. On the side of the street opposite them, a dark figure walked on the sidewalk toward them, but it looked like only a man in a long coat. Some neighbor of Wyatt’s out for a late-night stroll. Only as the figure drew closer did Wyatt begin to suspect that there was something not quite right about it. He couldn’t decide what it was, then the figure lifted its head and looked at him across the street and its eyes glowed like red stoplights in its dark face. Its grey skin was charred and cracked and beneath the surface there was molten fire. Whatever the thing was, it wasn’t burnt, it was burning.
Wyatt felt Silas’s hand reach inside his left pocket and take his. He turned toward him, breaking eye-contact with the burning demon in a way that was like ripping off a scab. “Silas, do you see—?”
“I see it,” Silas said.
Wyatt took the flashlight from his pocket and pushed the bu
tton on the base with his thumb. The light came on, casting a narrow beam across the pavement.
Before the light could touch the burning man in the long coat, Silas snatched it out of Wyatt’s hand and turned it off again. “Quit it.”
“But you said—”
“I said if you were in danger. Are you in danger?”
Wyatt turned his head to watch the dark, burning demon man pass by them. It was once again looking down at the ground as it walked, all interest in Wyatt and Silas gone as it continued on its way. Behind It in the concrete of the sidewalk it left a trail of dark, dusty footprints.
“I guess not,” Wyatt said reluctantly, relaxing the slightest bit. He grabbed the flashlight back from Silas anyway, though he did not turn it on.
Silas started walking again and Wyatt had to either follow him or be left behind. He hurried to catch up.
“I don’t understand what you think I’m going to see that is going to change my mind about… well, about anything,” Wyatt said.
“I’m not trying to change your mind about anything,” Silas said.
“Then why are we doing this?” Wyatt asked.
Silas didn’t answer him, and they went back to walking in silence together. It was awkward, or at least Wyatt thought it was awkward. He was ready to scratch his own skin off in agitation while Silas exuded absolute zen-like calm. Wyatt found himself both envying him and hating him a little.
“Hey!”
“Oh, no,” Wyatt muttered.
It came from his right and close to the ground. The voice was small and high-pitched, like how a hamster might sound if it could sit up and talk. Or start shouting at him.
“Hey! Come on, look over here!”
