by E A Comiskey
“No.” Stanley set the coffee down carefully on the cheap nightstand. “It’s been trapped in whatever purgatory it exists in for twelve years. If you had only twenty-eight days of freedom out of every four thousand or so, would you waste a single hour cowering for your safety?” He sighed and shifted in bed, drawing the covers a little higher toward his chest. Since they’d managed to cool him off, he seemed to struggle to stay warm. “No. It won’t hide. I rather think it will relish the fight. It will prepare for us. Lay some sort of trap. We must be ready for anything.
“Are you certain you know where to find it?”
“We’re certain it’s latched onto the writer,” Burke said. “We’ve been out to his house, but we didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.”
“That makes sense,” Stanley said. “What would you see? A man sleeping his last days away, his energy robbed by a foul witch. No one would suspect a thing. That’s why this beast is so hard to find. Is the house isolated?”
“Very.”
“Good. Then we’ll go there and do what we must.”
“You going to be all right to do this with us?” Richard asked. “You look like you went twelve rounds with both hands tied behind your back.”
“Truth be told, I feel much the same, but have no fear, Dick. I’m not down for the count just yet.”
Burke planted her feet on the floor and leaned her elbows on her knees. “Tell me we did the right thing, Stanley. Tell me we did what you wanted when we came after you first.”
He held out a hand and she moved to the bed and cradled it between both of hers.
“I can’t tell you that’s what I wanted. It wasn’t what I intended. I meant to go with her and be done with this life. I’ve lived twice as long as I should have. I’m tired, dear girl, and I thought I could just give myself up and die. You two have already proven you’re up to the task of replacing me as hunters.”
Tears spilled down Burke’s cheeks. Richard stared resolutely at the little grey dust ball in the corner of the carpet.
“What I wanted was to move on and leave the work of dealing with the skinwalker and every horrid thing like it to someone else. In short, I wanted to indulge myself like a selfish child.”
“I’m sorry,” she said through tears.
“Nonsense. I wanted those things because I was an ignorant fool. I was in Hell, Burke, and the two of you saved me. It was…” his voice cracked. He cleared his throat and continued, “It was quite unpleasant. You brought me back to a place where there is hot coffee and good friends and important work to be done. I owe you a great debt of gratitude.”
Richard wiped the back of his hand across his nose. “Or maybe we’re all just even now.”
“Maybe we should stop keeping score,” Burke suggested.
“I think you’re both right,” Stanley said. “Now, if you’ll indulge a weary old man, I’m going to take a nap. Burke, dear, would you be so kind as to go into town and fetch me something to wear? I’m not sure I should head out into the world in threadbare underthings.”
“Of course,” she said.
Richard stood and crossed to the window. Outside, an elderly couple walked toward a car. A young man swam alone in the pool. He could be anybody. The thought came again that not a soul could be trusted. He didn’t know what to do with that truth, but he held on to it. It felt important. He mustn’t forget it in a senior moment.
Burke leaned against the wall next to him. “If we had a week to let him heal, I’d feel a lot better about this.”
He watched the man reach the side of the pool, gracefully flip in the water and swim toward the other end with long, powerful strokes. “If a bull had batteries, his horns would blow.”
She sighed. “Seriously, Grandpa. I’m just saying, I wish—”
“Wish in one hand and poop in the other. See which one fills up faster.” He had enough doubts of his own. He didn’t want to hear hers. “Stan needs clothes. You going or should I?”
He hated the wounded look in her eye, hated what it said about him. He didn’t know why he snapped at her like that. She deserved better. It was just that his nerves were raw and his mind was chaos. His body hurt everywhere. For the first time since he left his walker on the roadside, he missed it. The magic that had carried him along for the last several days had waned, leaving in its wake an exhaustion that sank into the marrow of his bones. If Stan had been living like this for over a century, Richard could hold no fault in him wanting it to be over.
With his shaking hand, he reached out and patted her arm. “Don’t mind me. I’m just tired. Think I’ll rest a bit, too, if that’s okay.”
“Sure, Grandpa. You’re all right, though?”
“Yeah. Fine. Just tired, is all. After a nap, I’ll be fit as a fiddle.”
She left, but Richard couldn’t sleep. Over and over, he kept thinking how exactly like Barbara the creature had appeared. It could become anyone. Anyone at all.
Chapter Forty-One
Burke
Tuesday, the earth slowed. Time moved at a snail’s pace, and Earth took ten times longer than usual to make the journey around the sun.
Burke inventoried the weapons in the trunk of the Cadillac and surfed news sites on her phone, looking for unusual stories that might lead them on to another hunt. If she had something to think about, something beyond the coming night, maybe she wouldn’t feel like climbing the walls of the dark little hotel room.
Stanley chided her. “You must not force the hand of Fate, Burke. A hunter will be led from one quest to the next. If you were meant to know your next destination, you’d know by now.”
An hour later, her grandfather barked at her, “Sit down. You’re like a one-legged man in a jumping contest, makin’ me nervous with all that fidgeting.”
She looked at her phone. It was nine o’clock in the morning. “I’m going to the gym,” she announced and, without waiting for a reply, left. In a room off the hotel lobby, she found a treadmill and set her pace at a comfortable five miles per hour to warm up her muscles.
Too many days had passed since she’d run, not counting the moments she’d been running for her life. The rhythm of her feet, thumping against the belt, and the soft whir of the motor was fantastic therapy. Her breath came steady and even.
In with the good, clean, and positive. Out with the bad, toxic, and negative.
She increased her speed until she was racing at ten miles per hour, then added an incline. Sweat beaded across her forehead and ran down her neck.
“I am powerful,” she whispered. “I am fast. I am strong. I am unstoppable. I am a force to be reckoned with.”
After a while, she slowed back to five miles per hour, and eventually to a three-mile-per-hour walk. Finally, she stepped off the machine and spent longer than she ever had stretching every muscle in her body, luxuriating in the strength and flexibility she’d developed in the past few years.
Then she lay prone on the floor, listening to her heartbeat slow to a normal pace, keeping her mind focused on the intricate workings of her body.
With her emotions under control, her fear checked by her sense of empowerment, and her appetite heightened by the exertion, she meandered back outside and up the stairs to the hotel room.
Her grandfather was staring out the window.
Stanley was watching soap operas.
Her eyes fell on the clock. Nine forty-seven. “Oh, dear God,” she grumbled under her breath before going into the bathroom to try to kill another thirty minutes in the shower.
Surely, the day would never end.
Chapter Forty-Two
Finn
Sara held the water glass with the bendy straw close to his lips while he sipped. “I might step outside for a bit while you rest, if that’s okay,” she said. She set the cup down on the nightstand and dabbed his lips with a washcloth before placing a soft, chaste kiss there.
“You don’t need my permission. You should go.” He hated the sound of his voice, weak and tremulous.
It took all his strength just to stand for a single moment or two now. There was no way he’d last more than a few days. There was no point in making her endure his wasting away.
No point, at all, yet he was infinitely grateful when she said, “Don’t be silly, Finn. I’ve told you a hundred times. There’s nowhere else I want to be but right by your side.” She kissed him again. “Rest. I’ll be back in a little while.”
Infinitely grateful, he nodded and watched her blurry form move around the room, changing shirts, tying shoes.
“Sara?”
She stopped. “Yeah?”
“You’re not poisoning me to death, are you?”
If she was offended, it didn’t show in her girlish giggle. “Aw, Finn. Don’t be so silly. Why would a girl like me ever hurt a guy like you?”
“Sorry. It was a stupid question.”
She leaned over him to give him another kiss. “Rest,” she said again, and then she left.
Feeble as he was, it didn’t escape his notice that she hadn’t really answered the question.
Chapter Forty-Three
Richard
Under the colorful vault of twilight, the three hunters made their way out of the hotel room and across the parking lot.
One of them was dressed like Wyatt Earp in high-waisted, button-front trousers, one knee-high boot, a striped shirt and leather suspenders. His other leg was encased in a hard, plastic boot and he hitched along, leaning heavily on a cane.
One of them wore sweats and sneakers and maintained a careful, shuffling gait.
One of them, tall and slender, held her chin high as though daring the world to defy her, and stayed a step behind the other two like a mother hen guarding her chicks.
The two men went to the Cadillac.
Burke turned toward the SUV and stopped. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Gettin’ in the car,” Richard said, yanking the passenger door open.
“You can’t be serious,” she said.
They both stared over the canvas roof at her.
“You’ve been down the road to O’Doyle’s ranch. It’s barely more than a donkey trail. The SUV is going to handle it much better than that antique.”
“I’m grateful for the transportation your vehicle has provided,” Stanley said, “but there’s something to be said for style.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Also, there’s an army’s worth of weapons in the trunk,” Stanley said. “We might need them.”
Richard had to admire the way he’d played his trump card.
Burke rolled her eyes but offered up no further argument. Rather, she retrieved the ax from the SUV and put it in the back seat next to Stanley. She took the keys from him, moved the can of gas and the box of matches to the trunk, and started the engine.
The powerful V8 roared to life.
“Would you mind terribly putting the top down?” Stanley asked.
“Oh, good Lord,” Burke mumbled.
She lowered the top.
“Can we go slay our dragon now?” she asked.
“I’m afraid that isn’t possible,” Stanley said.
They both turned to stare at him, agape.
“Well, there simply aren’t any dragons left in North America. I haven’t slain one since I was a boy in England. We’re going to have to settle for a skinwalker, I believe.”
Burke rolled her eyes again.
“Dang fool,” Richard mumbled.
His mood had started low that day and only sank lower as the hours passed. He’d woken from an afternoon nap to find Burke unpacking the ridiculous, old-fashioned clothes she’d purchased for Stanley the day before. She claimed that’s all she could find in Tombstone and she hadn’t felt up to driving past the writer’s house alone to get to Sierra Vista. Of course, there was nothing for Richard, which meant he was stuck wearing the cheap sweats that had been washed in the hotel bathtub.
He’d spent half an hour sitting on the pot with nothing to show for it but feet that were full of pins and needles. As if it weren’t hard enough already to walk with some measure of dignity.
After all that, a dinner of greasy chicken strips and fries that had been laid out on the little hotel-room table looked less than appealing. Did no one in the southwest sell prune juice? Or did Burke not care that his belly was swelling up like he was about to enter his second trimester? He was sure he’d asked for prune juice more than once.
To top it all off, after dreaming about her all night, he couldn’t close his eyes without seeing Barbara, beautiful, young, vibrant Barbara, wearing clothes made to fit a smaller woman, pressing her warm, soft body against his.
Not Barbara. The monster. The creature that could make itself look like anyone.
He watched the world roll by as they passed through a few blocks of town and took the turn onto Charleston Road. On the eastern horizon, the full moon peeked into view, and by the time they crossed the dry wash, the desert was bathed in silvery light.
Burke made the turn into the writer’s driveway and inched the vehicle along at a crawl. They entered the clearing at a pathetic roll, slower than Richard’s average walking speed. And that wasn’t saying much, at all, these days. She didn’t stop until the chrome bumper overlapped the edge of the brick patio.
Finn O’Doyle sat in a patio chair under the night sky, sipping a long-necked bottle of beer. His hair, now more white than dark, fell across his forehead, a mess in bad need of a trim. One elbow rested on a glass top table. Long legs were stretched out, crossed at the ankle before him. His tired eyes watched them draw near, but he made no effort to stand. Richard wondered if he could stand. He looked more like one of the residents at Everest than a man in his prime.
He looked just the way Barbara had in her last days. His heart lurched at the memory. He couldn’t wait to see the monster dead.
The monster who could choose any form it wanted.
“That could be anybody,” Richard mumbled to himself.
“What are you talking about? That’s O’Doyle,” Burke said.
“What?” It took a moment for him to realize he’d spoken out loud. “I know that’s O’Doyle. I was just thinking about that skinwalker. It could show itself looking like anybody in the world.”
“Which means,” added Stanley from the backseat, “we can’t be sure that’s O’Doyle.”
They all stared through the windshield at the man. He took another sip of his beer and stared back with raised brows.
“Now or never.” Burke threw the gearshift into park and burst out of the car like a scared cat, hitting the ground so fast she stumbled a few steps. Richard and Stanley scrambled to join her.
“Finn O’Doyle, right?” she asked.
One side of his mouth curved up in a crooked smile that had undoubtedly melted more than a few female hearts. “You found me.”
“I…” Burke started to speak again and lurched to a stop.
“We’ve come to mount a rescue operation,” Stanley announced. Richard looked over his shoulder to see Stan behind him leaning hard on the axe in his left hand. The steel head pressed against the sunbaked earth—the world’s most disturbing walking aid.
“Oh, good,” the writer said. He took another sip of beer. The bottle tapped against the glass table when he set it down again. The clatter contrasted sharply against the silence of the night. “I’m happy to know that an old man with an axe is here to rescue me. Thought maybe you were going to chop my door down or something.”
“The woman we saw you with in Murphy’s last night, she’s not what she seems,” Burke said.
The muscles in Richard’s thighs twitched—his body’s way of demanding action. Run forward and kill him. Run away and find help. Move. Do anything, for cripe’s sake.
Too many choices. He stood there trembling like a daisy in a hurricane.
The author nodded. “Sara. Yeah. She’s something else. Definitely more to that girl than meets the eye. See how old I look? I bet I’m no older
than you, but I’m pretty sure she’s trying to kill me. Probably too late to do anything about it now, though. Should have listened to my gut two weeks ago, the day she showed up the first time.”
Richard wiped his sweating palms against the soft cotton of the sweatpants.
Stanley hitched past him to the edge of the patio, using the axe for a cane. “I wasn’t going to mention it, but you do appear to be a bit under the weather.”
Finn shrugged. “Women.”
Richard watched the bizarrely polite exchange with growing incredulity. Did Stanley and Burke not realize that a man his age could drop over and die at any moment? Especially when his heart was pounding out a rhythm to beat the band. He couldn’t take much more of this. The kid was still young enough to think she had forever, but Stanley ought to know better. Time was precious. Wasting it by pussyfooting around like this was sheer nonsense. “Could be your little girlfriend isn’t poisoning you. Could be you look like hell ‘cause the witch is a demon from Hell,” he blurted.
O’Doyle regarded him, showing no sign of offense. “Could be.” He finished the beer. “Women,” he said again. “Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t kill ‘em.”
“We’d like to speak with her, please,” Stanley said. “Would you be so kind as to call her out here?”
The writer folded his hands across his stomach. “Three strangers show up at my house in the night, carrying an ax, and ask me to call a young lady outside to speak with them. Would you do it, if you were me?”
Chapter Forty-Four
Finn
At some point after the first time he wet the bed, Finn had decided to go along quietly when death came. What was there to live for anymore, anyway?
The next deadline? He was washed up. His world-building days sold to The Devil for a place on the best-seller rack.
The next race? He could barely walk. There would be no marathons in his future.
The next girl? No point thinking about the next when he probably wouldn’t survive the one he had now.
