Chapter 5 – Carrion

Noah

The wolf hits it like a truck, and the thing barely rocks.

Wrong.

Two hundred pounds of Alpha at a dead run should fold anything with a spine.

This rotten thing takes the hit, slides back a boot-length in the dirt, and swings an arm the size of my leg.

The wolf has to wrench sideways midair to keep his skull where he likes it.

So that's the night I'm having.

The crossbow's up before I tell my arm to move.

Sometimes it feels like the only reliable thing I own. Silver tip, wolfsbane on the head, the whole bedtime prayer Dad beat into me.

I put the bolt through its throat.

It doesn't care.

Doesn't slow, doesn't flinch, doesn't bleed. The head grinds around on a neck that sounds like a boot in gravel, and two eyes find me and throw my flashlight’s shine back at me, flat and green and bored.

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

Eighteen years of training and the family curriculum somehow skipped the chapter on the unkillable thing in front of me.

Strongly worded complaint to follow. Soon as there's a desk to slam it on, and a dad to slam it at.

The flashlight's on the ground where I dropped it, so the whole fight's lit from ankle height.

Everything thrown up huge and sideways, the wolf's shadow climbing the trees, the thing's shadow towering over it, and me reduced to a useless silhouette doing calculations in real time.

I run the kit in my head and come up empty. Knife. Bolts. A lighter. There’s nothing in my bag that bites a thing with no nerves to bite.

The wolf goes in low and clamps his jaws around one leg.

I hear the joint give, wet, like a hand twisting a drumstick off.

The thing drops to one knee and keeps coming on the stump like the leg was a suggestion it's decided to ignore.

No spray. No fountain. Dead things don’t bleed.

Just that revolting smell, rotten and dug-up, and a slow dark dribble of something out of the stump like the inside of a downpipe.

I've opened up a lot of things in my life. Never watched one torn open and barely bleeding before.

Blood's the whole point. Blood is how you know it's working. This one's running on something that isn't in the manual.

Then it makes a move I'm not ready for.

It quits reaching for the wolf, plants the good knee, and backhands him out of the air.

Catches him across the ribs midleap and folds nine feet of white wolf into a birch hard enough to knock bark loose.

And my chest drops, which is the exact wrong reaction.

Alarm, where a smarter hunter sees an opening, because a smarter hunter spends that half-second putting a bolt somewhere useful and I just stand there caring whether the wolf gets back up.

He gets back up.

Obviously he gets back up.

Damn Alphas aren’t that easy to kill, and I shouldn’t be relieved that he’s okay.

I watch him shake it off and ready for another attack with his teeth out and a sound ripping from his throat that I feel in my back molars.

We'll be examining that little chest-drop I just experienced never.

Never's a good slot for it.

Filing's full anyway and no good will come from pulling that reaction into the light.

I have to think. I can’t just stand around being useless.

Silver's useless and the wolf's getting tossed around like a ragdoll, so the thing wants something it can reach. I give it the dumbest target available.

Me.

I step into the light, into its line of sight, and bang the flat of the knife on the crossbow twice. Metal clangs on metal.

Congratulations to me, the bait.

It turns and starts dragging its decomposing body toward me on the wrecked leg.

Behind it the wolf gets the exact opening I wanted him to have and rips the other leg out at the hip.

The thing uses its arms to catapult its body at me.

I can feel the air parting over my head as I duck low, slashing up with my knife.

The blade hits where I was aiming. Where a kidney sits on a person. I twist, making the move that usually ends fights.

It ends nothing here.

The knife sinks to the grip and the thing tips its head down at me, slow, curious, like I tapped on a door.

Then it grabs me.

A hand closes on the front of my jacket and the cold of it goes straight through three layers like they aren't there.

It’s stupid strong, picking me up effortlessly.

As my feet leave the dirt, I manage to get a hand on its wrist. I attempt to wrench it up, but it's like hauling on a fence post sunk in concrete.

There’s no strain in it, no shake, nothing a muscle does when it's working. The runes flare so hard my vision goes white at the edges.

So this is it. Strung up in the dark by a dead man's fist while my silver does sweet nothing in his side.

The wolf hits him like a truck.

I drop, the jacket tearing, air slamming back into me, and the two of them go down in a thrash of white and gray.

I'm on the ground reaching for the dropped bow because some idiot reflex still wants silver-tipped arrows to be the answer.

It's not the answer. Think! Quit reaching for the thing that already failed.

I force myself to stop moving and watch instead. Piecing together the signs. What works, what doesn't.

The wolf opens its belly and nothing that matters spills out.

He bites an arm half through and the hand keeps grabbing.

But when his teeth find the spine, when there's that grind of something structural, the thing jerks. Stutters. Loses a second of whatever's driving it.

There. That's the tell. Not the soft parts. The frame.

You don't kill it. You take it apart until there's too little left to hold the magic up.

"The neck," I shout.

I’m on my feet, the bowie knife with the longer blade in my hand. "Hold the head. Hold it still."

And here's the part I'll be chewing on the rest of my life, however much of it I've got left after tonight.

He listens.

A wolf. An Alpha.

The thing I've spent three weeks trying to put in the dirt, because it’s a monstrous animal that kills people for sport.

But here I am, barking an order into the dark and he plants a paw on its chest and pins the skull, giving me the clean line of the neck like we've worked together a hundred times.

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

I bring the knife down where skull meets spine and saw, and it's exactly as bad as it sounds.

Carving through gristle, not stopping until I'm through the hyoid bone and then the spinal cord.

The moment the head is severed from the body it suddenly stops moving.

For a second there's only my breathing, ragged and too loud, the wolf’s slightly slower.

The head's two feet from the hand.

Nothing on it moves but I keep the knife up anyway.

I’ve been wrong once already tonight about what stays down.

The wolf pads over.

Noses the body.

Noses the head.

Then the air thickens and folds and there's a naked man crouched in the leaves where the wolf was a breath ago.

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

I focus all my attention on the body.

"You're bleeding," I say flatly.

There’s a large gash on his shoulder, where the bark caught him, but it’s already knitting shut.

"I’m fine."

He's not looking at me. He's looking at the thing, and his face is serious in a way I didn’t think he was capable of.

No smirk. None of the usual arrogance.

"This is wrong."

"You think?" I ask sarcastically.

"Not just this thing. The smell. Under the rot."

I've been choking on the rot. I push past it.

And there it is.

The same wrongness that was carved into the birch.

I study the thing we killed.

I’ve seen enough dead to know the stages of decomposition.

This didn't die Tuesday with a cute phone in its pocket.

"It's old," I say. "Been dead a long time."

Dax goes still.

"The ones going missing," he says slowly. "They're disappearing alive."

"Yeah."

"So this isn't one of them."

"No."

And there it sits in the leaves between us.

Somebody's stealing the living off the edges of town.

And somebody's been out here digging up the dead.

We don't know yet if it's the same somebody.

Three weeks I believed the scariest thing in these woods to be him.

Turns out I wasn't aiming high enough.