Chapter 5 – Carrion

Noah

Holt’s sweats shred a step in front of me, and there’s a white wolf where he was standing, already moving.

He hits that thing like a truck, and it barely rocks.

He’s big enough to knock over anything with a spine. This thing just swings an arm as thick as my leg at his head, and he has to twist away in midair to keep his skull in one piece.

The crossbow’s up before I tell my arms to move, and I put a bolt clean through its throat from close enough to spit on it.

It doesn’t care. It keeps swinging at the wolf like I threw a pinecone at it.

Right. Wolfsbane’s for wolves. Silver’s for wolves. I packed for the wrong monster.

What have I got on me? Knife. Bolts. A lighter. I’d have to talk the thing into holding still while I set it on fire, and everything else is silver.

My flashlight’s lying in the leaves, so the whole fight’s lit from ankle height and the shadows are enormous.

Holt goes in low and gets his jaws around its knee. I hear the joint go, a pop and a crunch, exactly like twisting the drumstick off a roast chicken.

It drops onto the ruined knee and keeps coming anyway, like the leg was a suggestion it’s decided to ignore.

There’s no blood. A thick, dark ooze leaks out where his teeth went in, and that’s all.

I’ve gutted more deer than I can remember, and blood is how you know it’s working. What the hell is this thing running on?

It quits reaching for the wolf, plants its good leg and backhands him out of the air. The blow catches him across the ribs and sends him into a pine so hard the needles come raining down.

Earlier tonight he slammed me into a tree. I’d like to enjoy this, just a little.

I can’t, because he doesn’t get up.

It’s a second, maybe two. It feels a lot longer, and I’m scared for him through all of it. For the wolf.

If anything in these woods gets to kill him, it’s going to be me.

He gets up. He shakes it off and goes back at it with his lips peeled off his teeth, snarling so loud it echoes off the trees. I’m so relieved I’m annoyed about it.

Standing here having feelings about a werewolf isn’t helping anybody.

It’s been looking past him at me ever since it walked out of the trees. Even now, with a wolf tearing into it, its head keeps turning my way. I don’t know why. Maybe it likes its odds better with the human.

I hate that, but I can use it. If it’s busy coming for me, it isn’t watching the wolf.

I pull my knife, step into the light and bang the flat of the blade against the bow as loud as I can.

“Hey! Over here, you ugly fuck!”

It works. The thing turns away from the wolf and comes for me, dragging the ruined leg behind it.

That’s the opening I wanted him to have, and he takes it. He lands on its back and rips the other leg off at the hip.

It goes down face-first, and for one second I think we’ve got it.

It throws itself at me on its arms.

I drop the bow, duck under its grab and drive my knife up into its side, right where a kidney sits on a person. I twist it, which usually ends a fight.

It ends nothing. The knife’s in up to the grip, and the thing tips its head down to look at me like I knocked on its door.

It grabs me.

A hand closes on the front of my jacket, and the cold of it comes straight through all three layers. It drags me down to the ground and in toward its face, and its mouth is open.

I clamp onto its wrist to push it off. My sleeve’s still shoved up past my elbow, so it’s my bare forearm against its skin, and my ink goes ballistic.

At the birch it burned. This is like sticking my arm in a campfire. The heat shoots up both arms and into my chest, and the runes flare so bright I’m half blind.

Its arm doesn’t give at all. There’s no strain in it and no shake, none of what a muscle does when it’s working. It just keeps pulling me in.

Its mouth is full of brown, broken teeth, and it’s going to bite my face off. I can’t stop it.

Heidi will sit up all night waiting for a text that never comes.

The wolf crashes into it from the side and his jaws close on the arm that’s got me. My jacket tears, and I’m loose, rolling away through the leaves with my heart hammering.

I come up on my knees grabbing for the bow, because some idiot reflex still wants the answer to be silver.

It isn’t. I’ve watched it fail twice tonight. Quit reaching for the thing that already failed, Noah.

I get my feet under me and circle wide, where it can’t grab me, and I study what happens every time the wolf gets his teeth in it.

He opens its belly and nothing that matters falls out. He bites an arm half through, and the hand on the end of it keeps grabbing at him.

His teeth find its spine between the shoulders. Something grinds, and the whole thing jerks and stutters. Hit any animal in the spine and it drops right where it’s standing. This doesn’t drop, but it’s the first time anything we’ve done has mattered to it.

Is that it? It doesn’t care about the soft parts. It cares about the frame.

Maybe you don’t kill it at all. You take it apart until there isn’t enough left for the magic to work with.

“Hold the head!” I yell. “Pin it down and keep it still, I’m taking it off at the neck!”

My knife’s still in its side.

I brought exactly one knife, and I left it in the monster.

Getting it back means touching that thing again, and I really don’t want to. I plant a boot on its ribs and yank anyway.

The blade comes out black to the grip and stinking. The arm he hasn’t chewed through swipes at my leg and misses.

When I turn around the wolf’s got one paw on its chest and the other pinning its skull to the ground, with the throat stretched out for me.

He listened.

A wolf, an Alpha, the animal I’ve been hunting, and he takes an order from me like we’ve been doing this for years.

There’s no time to hate it right now. I’ll do that later.

I drop onto its shoulder with both knees and start cutting, and it’s exactly as bad as it sounds.

The skin’s gone hard and dark, and under it there’s black gristle that grabs at the blade. Its hands claw at the dirt while I work. He leans all his weight on it and growls.

Every stroke lets out a fresh blast of rot. I’ve skinned a boar in a sleet storm, and that was a picnic next to this.

Dad taught me to take a buck’s head off at the first joint behind the skull, so that’s where I go.

I saw down to the bone and work the tip of the knife in until I find the gap. I lean on the handle and twist.

The head comes off the spine with a crack, and the rest of it stops moving.

For a while the only sounds are me breathing too loud and the wolf panting beside me.

The head’s lying right next to one of its hands. Nothing on it moves. I keep the knife up anyway.

The wolf noses the body, then the head. A second later there’s no wolf, just Holt crouched there in nothing at all.

I look away on reflex and look straight back, because a corpse that walks is a better reason to keep my eyes open than a naked man is a reason to shut them.

I focus very hard on the body. The dead one.

“You’re bleeding.”

There’s a long gash across his shoulder where the pine caught him, and it’s already closing up while I look at it.

“I’m fine.”

He isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at the thing, and he’s got a face on him like somebody died, which, technically, somebody did.

“This is wrong,” he says.

“You think?”

“It smells exactly like that cut in the tree.” He finally looks up at me. “Whoever carved that birch had their hands on this.”

My ink’s been burning since the thing showed up, the same way it burned beside the mark.

“I figured,” I say.

“Yeah? How?” He tips his head at me. “You barely have a sense of smell.”

“Lucky guess.”

“You’re a terrible liar, Hunter.”

Maybe, but I’m not explaining my tattoos to a naked werewolf.

I pick the flashlight up out of the leaves and put the beam on the body, and I make myself look at it properly.

Anybody who hunts knows the difference between a carcass that’s days old and one that’s years old. A few days dead is swollen, soft and crawling with flies.

This one’s dried out. There’s soil packed into its ears and the creases of its knuckles, like it lay in the ground so long the ground moved in.

“It’s old,” I say. “Been dead a long time.”

“The person they dragged out here.” He says it carefully. “You said they took her alive.”

“They did.”

“Then this isn’t her.”

“No. This was in the ground long before any of them disappeared.”

That’s good news for about a second. If this isn’t her, she’s still out there somewhere with whoever did this.

I look past him at the birch.

Somebody’s kidnapping teenagers, and the same somebody has been out here digging up corpses. I don’t know what a witch wants with both, and I don’t like a single answer I can think of.

For three weeks I thought he was the scariest thing in these woods.

Turns out I wasn’t aiming high enough.