Full Wolf Moon (31 page)
He kept pushing. No, not his pain. Something else. The pain wasn't his. Something else was trying to bind him, clinch him back into nothingness. And then suddenly, it all felt familiar.
No! he wanted to scream out, but his voice came to his ears like a blood-curdling howl. No! he cried again, but his voice was still lost in the howl of the beast.
Now he began willing with all his might, recognizing the searing agony in his leg as his ally, not his enemy. And he somehow managed to think, Roll over! Roll over! Expose the belly!
He willed a sense of pressing backward, felt the denseness pressing back, trying to suffocate him, bind him into motionless and sweet oblivion. Again! Push! A leaden thump vibrated through him, he sensed himself listing as though he had fallen on his side, felt hot, molten agony spread through his leg and knew he had fallen against the wound. He blinked, tried to peer through his thick liquid vision and thought he glimpsed Doris Tebbe staring at him, terrified and unsure, her bow drawn hesitantly.
Then she dropped it altogether, reached behind her, and came back with a fist full of arrows, her eyes afire.
Yes, he thought, yes! But he lost the reason for him thinking that way, what had he intended to do? His vision darkened, he felt the pressure close against him, squeezing out breath, squeezing out thought and memory. He pushed again and remembered. The belly. The belly!
He could see stars now wavering in his vision, he could see the tops of trees. He must have rolled, he must have made it onto his back, and he saw Doris hovering above him -God! How her eyes burned!- her arms raised, her fingers clutching all those arrows. But he had to remember one more thing, something very important before he was gone, if he didn't remember now, he may not ever...
The Chosen One. The Chosen...
/ / / /
Doris struck. She plunged the arrows deep into the beast's soft, exposed belly and blood erupted like lava, surging hot over her hands, pelting her face. Her scream was lost in the screams of the dying beast. But they were human. They sounded like her own.
The beast gnashed toward her, just missing her fingers as she tumbled backward. Then came a shudder. One lone, quaking shudder. The beast lay back, amazingly gently, its hind legs sagging, one foreleg curling across its chest. The ribs heaved, froth and a noisy gurgle bubbled out of its gaping mouth. A final shudder evaporated into the cool night. All movement ceased.
Doris sat where she had fallen, her breath shallow and quick as she stared at the blood- soaked thing, the beast's essence glowing under the moon. David was suddenly at her side.
"That was a stupid thing to do, stupid!" he scolded in a shaky voice.
Still dazed, Doris turned her face to David, who added quickly, "Don't move, don't talk. You've got blood all over your face."
"Will it hurt me?"
"I don't know. Just don't taste it." David whipped off his headband, unknotted it and mopped at Doris's face and hands. "Stupid thing to do," he repeated. "You should have let me shoot. You put yourself right in my line. You could have been bitten."
"You weren't hitting anything. You can't hit the broad side of a barn," she said, the stun still in her voice. Then, "Oh, God...Joy."
"What?"
"The girl. See about the girl."
"Aw, the child," David said as though struck suddenly ill, and abandoned Doris to bend over Joy's limp form. He held the little hands in his own and shook his head. "She's dead."
Doris moaned and almost rested her arms on her knees, wanting to cradle her head there. But she smelled the blood on her sleeves and leather arm brace and had to settle for pressing her forehead into her palms. But looking into them reminded her with a jolt.
"David!"
David looked up from his task. He had pulled the dead girl from her contorted position and was laying her gently on her back, chanting something low.
"My pentagram, David. It's dark."
David left the child's body to look. Then he plucked at Doris's bloody sleeve. "The blood's losing its luster, too. Perhaps it's the fading of the beast."
"Perhaps? Don't you know?"
He looked up at her through his eyebrows. "It's not like I do this for a living."
"David, the pentagram was dark before we killed the son-of-a-bitch."
"Are you sure?"
"Well...my palms were dusty. I'd just used the dung and sage. I...I just don't know."
David leaned back on his heels, looking unsure and Doris again glimpsed the small, blood-soaked body of the child.
"Oh God. Joy. How could it go for a child, David, a little child?"
David swallowed. "The pattern fits. Youth is a very rich feed for the beast."
"We can't just leave her like that," she said.
"We have to leave her like that," David replied. "We can't take her with us, Doris. And even if we had the tools and time to bury her, it wouldn't be the best thing for her. Or her parents. She wouldn't be found so quickly. Besides, we're going to have our hands full, carrying the beast."
Doris stared at the healer in disbelief.
He said, "It's not over yet. The beast is dead, but Max is still in danger. Come here."
David led her past both the beast and Joy's body to gaze toward Tulenar. Streams of light betrayed the paths of search parties and motor vehicles fanning the area.
"I don't think we can get back to the shack in time to do this," David said. "But we may be able to wait out the moon's setting if we can find seclusion before the searchers make it through here."
"Do what, damn it, do what?"
"Bring Max back! If we miss the timing, he dies as surely as the beast."
Chapter 39
One and One Half Miles South of Tulenar Internment Camp
Pre Dawn. Full Moon.
They couldn't risk leaving an obvious trail by dragging the beast, tearing a gash through the dry needle carpet of the forest, smearing blood on the earth as they trudged along. Clumsy and repulsive as it was, there was no choice but to hoist the carcass onto their shoulders.
David bore the haunches and supported the imbedded arrows. Doris didn't envy him that post, or the crucial responsibility of keeping the silver in place. Even as the beast had lain dead in the scrub field, the blood had stopped flowing, lost its luster. But the wound still oozed around the bundle of arrows. The soft flannel of David's shirt was black with gore.
Doris took up the head. Her shoulder braced the beast's own, one foreleg sagging across her chest, the other thumping her upper back. The eyes, milky with death, stared toward her own. The tongue lolled under her chin, the fangs exposed, threatening to graze her jaw every time she stumbled.
Several times, the weight of the beast brought one or the other of them to their knees, leaving them sucking desperately at the cold, night air. Upon the final collapse, Doris rasped out, "We can't go much farther, David. Our lungs will burst. Or our hearts. Either one."
But before the healer could reply, a sound stifled them both: Distant, floating toward them on the breeze, an eerie, mournful baying. Bloodhounds. Doris was the first to struggle upward, but David followed quickly.
"They're still far away," David said. "We can make it. We have to make it. Look up."
Doris did. The moon was below the treetops now, well on its way to setting.
"Just a little further," David urged, "and you'll turn right."
They shuffled onward for an impossibly long time, surely longer than Doris thought she could bear, until at last David panted out, "Off to the right ... here..."
Doris heaved in that direction, pleading like a child, "How much farther?"
"Just go. Just keep going..." But it was David who collapsed. The sudden loss of support dragged Doris with him beneath the beast.
She wriggled free, gaging on revulsion, then moved back to help David pull away. They both sat panting until the deep, throaty baying of the hounds jolted them again. Were they closer? Or was it Doris's exhaustion that made them seem so?
"This will have to do," David said, mopping his brow on the only clean patch of sleeve he had left. "We've done all we can."
He looked up at the moon, then at the dead beast. "Help me shove the wound into that patch of light."
The light David spoke of lay against the beast's barrel chest. Together, they pushed and hauled until the beast's belly and groin were exposed to the pale glow.
"All right," the healer said. "Listen carefully. The silver must be pulled out just before the moon sinks below the horizon. Just then. Too early, too late, and we've come this far for nothing. When the searchers happen upon this place, they'll find the remains of an enormous animal they'll probably identify as wolf."
He stopped talking and gazed at Doris wearily. "If they do, that would probably save those boys, you know. It will back up what the Tamura twins said. They'll easily match the beast to the dead child's wounds. The rest won't be hard to piece together."
Doris shook her head. "I know what you're saying. Not on your life, not now." Her palms were sweating and she rubbed them together before looking at her pentagram again, still dark as a bloodstain. "I want the honors. I want to pull out the silver."
David didn't answer right away.
"Please."
"Are you certain?" he asked her.
Doris nodded.
The baying seeped through the conifers again. Definitely louder. And now Doris could hear the reedy echo of human voices behind the hounds.
David looked up at the moon. "Damnit all," he said, "the moon's still too high."
Even so, the healer moved toward the beast's head and wrestled its bulk into his lap. He nodded toward the arrows.
"When I give the word, one, smooth motion," he said. "Every piece at once. But, for now, wait. All we can do is wait."
Wait. An eternity. The moon seemed to deliberately hover over the hill tops, cruel in its reluctance to sink. Doris moved toward the belly, but realized that she was blocking the light from the wound when she did. She would have to position behind the beast's back and reach over to grasp the arrows. She knelt in place, arching over the beast, so tense she could barely breathe. She steeled herself, nodding to David's instruction, listening intently for the hounds.
She wasn't prepared for the human voices, so close it was if they s were speaking over her shoulder.
David's own voice came as a hiss. "Down!"
Doris collapsed on her side, the beast's spine pressed against her belly. David was flat on his back, having sprawled with the cumbersome head still in his lap. God, the voices! They sounded like they were everywhere!
Doris's chest ached with the wild thrashing of her heartbeat. She could hear a soft, shuffling noise, like multiple boots scuffing through the pine needle carpet. And, always, the voices. She rolled her eyes toward her forehead, in the direction of it all, but the search was taking place just beyond her range of vision. Then a torch beam swept above her, off to her left, grazing trees midway up the trunks.
Doris stiffened, her mind stiffened, as the watch went on insufferably. When David at last tapped at her hand, it was all she could do not to cry out. But she realized who it was and turned to see him motioning skyward, moving only his wrist and index finger. The moon was at the horizon.
Doris heard voices past her head. She saw dark shadows against the misty gray background of forest in the moonlight, moving slowly beyond the bulk of the beast, perhaps thirty feet away. People were everywhere. Their search beams blazed out ahead of them in harsh, yellow shafts, stabbing into the night, striking against the trees, skittering across the ground.
The moon, now, seemed all in a hurry to set.
Two beams, from opposite directions, flashed directly over Doris, almost catching the beast's silvery fur. She looked down toward the wound, and could tell that the moonbeams had mercifully shrunk so that the fur's shimmer was reduced to a dull gray.
She looked to the moon once more. It was halfway past the horizon. David tapped her hand again, mouthed out carefully, "On ... my ... word."
She understood, scooted carefully lower, toward the arrows. She could see some of their shafts where the belly was lax and sunken, but couldn't tell if the moonlight still touched them. The voices ebbed and flowed around her, surged so close at one point she could not suppress a whimper. She squeezed her eyes shut her as though she expected to be struck. David tapped at her head. When she looked up at him, he motioned toward his eyes as if to say, watch me.
She nodded, glanced once more at the moon. Three quarters set. Her eyes flew wide toward David who was looking skyward, his fingers touching Doris's hairline...
Someone shouted.
David jerked his face toward Doris and as he stabbed his fingers against her head as he hissed out, "Now!"
Doris rose over the beast. Through the thunder of her heart, throbbing even in her eyes, she saw the last of the moonlight fading off the wound. She clasped her hands, vice-like, around the arrows and pulled.
She fell backward with her own momentum, but she knew she had them all, she knew it! The bloody arrows scattered around her like tinder sticks. She heard a great, wet sucking, like someone long buried and struggling upward for air.
She heard the shouting again and picked up some of the words ... "This way ... girl ... hurry!" There was a great scuffling all around, but it was clearly moving away from them, the attention of the searchers being drawn toward the other side of the hill, toward Joy and the scrub field.
The beast's carcass was quaking, the wound throwing flecks of thickened blood everywhere. His expression awestruck, David sat upright again with the beast's head still in his lap. The creature's jaws opened wide for another long, moist gasp of air.
No! he wanted to scream out, but his voice came to his ears like a blood-curdling howl. No! he cried again, but his voice was still lost in the howl of the beast.
Now he began willing with all his might, recognizing the searing agony in his leg as his ally, not his enemy. And he somehow managed to think, Roll over! Roll over! Expose the belly!
He willed a sense of pressing backward, felt the denseness pressing back, trying to suffocate him, bind him into motionless and sweet oblivion. Again! Push! A leaden thump vibrated through him, he sensed himself listing as though he had fallen on his side, felt hot, molten agony spread through his leg and knew he had fallen against the wound. He blinked, tried to peer through his thick liquid vision and thought he glimpsed Doris Tebbe staring at him, terrified and unsure, her bow drawn hesitantly.
Then she dropped it altogether, reached behind her, and came back with a fist full of arrows, her eyes afire.
Yes, he thought, yes! But he lost the reason for him thinking that way, what had he intended to do? His vision darkened, he felt the pressure close against him, squeezing out breath, squeezing out thought and memory. He pushed again and remembered. The belly. The belly!
He could see stars now wavering in his vision, he could see the tops of trees. He must have rolled, he must have made it onto his back, and he saw Doris hovering above him -God! How her eyes burned!- her arms raised, her fingers clutching all those arrows. But he had to remember one more thing, something very important before he was gone, if he didn't remember now, he may not ever...
The Chosen One. The Chosen...
/ / / /
Doris struck. She plunged the arrows deep into the beast's soft, exposed belly and blood erupted like lava, surging hot over her hands, pelting her face. Her scream was lost in the screams of the dying beast. But they were human. They sounded like her own.
The beast gnashed toward her, just missing her fingers as she tumbled backward. Then came a shudder. One lone, quaking shudder. The beast lay back, amazingly gently, its hind legs sagging, one foreleg curling across its chest. The ribs heaved, froth and a noisy gurgle bubbled out of its gaping mouth. A final shudder evaporated into the cool night. All movement ceased.
Doris sat where she had fallen, her breath shallow and quick as she stared at the blood- soaked thing, the beast's essence glowing under the moon. David was suddenly at her side.
"That was a stupid thing to do, stupid!" he scolded in a shaky voice.
Still dazed, Doris turned her face to David, who added quickly, "Don't move, don't talk. You've got blood all over your face."
"Will it hurt me?"
"I don't know. Just don't taste it." David whipped off his headband, unknotted it and mopped at Doris's face and hands. "Stupid thing to do," he repeated. "You should have let me shoot. You put yourself right in my line. You could have been bitten."
"You weren't hitting anything. You can't hit the broad side of a barn," she said, the stun still in her voice. Then, "Oh, God...Joy."
"What?"
"The girl. See about the girl."
"Aw, the child," David said as though struck suddenly ill, and abandoned Doris to bend over Joy's limp form. He held the little hands in his own and shook his head. "She's dead."
Doris moaned and almost rested her arms on her knees, wanting to cradle her head there. But she smelled the blood on her sleeves and leather arm brace and had to settle for pressing her forehead into her palms. But looking into them reminded her with a jolt.
"David!"
David looked up from his task. He had pulled the dead girl from her contorted position and was laying her gently on her back, chanting something low.
"My pentagram, David. It's dark."
David left the child's body to look. Then he plucked at Doris's bloody sleeve. "The blood's losing its luster, too. Perhaps it's the fading of the beast."
"Perhaps? Don't you know?"
He looked up at her through his eyebrows. "It's not like I do this for a living."
"David, the pentagram was dark before we killed the son-of-a-bitch."
"Are you sure?"
"Well...my palms were dusty. I'd just used the dung and sage. I...I just don't know."
David leaned back on his heels, looking unsure and Doris again glimpsed the small, blood-soaked body of the child.
"Oh God. Joy. How could it go for a child, David, a little child?"
David swallowed. "The pattern fits. Youth is a very rich feed for the beast."
"We can't just leave her like that," she said.
"We have to leave her like that," David replied. "We can't take her with us, Doris. And even if we had the tools and time to bury her, it wouldn't be the best thing for her. Or her parents. She wouldn't be found so quickly. Besides, we're going to have our hands full, carrying the beast."
Doris stared at the healer in disbelief.
He said, "It's not over yet. The beast is dead, but Max is still in danger. Come here."
David led her past both the beast and Joy's body to gaze toward Tulenar. Streams of light betrayed the paths of search parties and motor vehicles fanning the area.
"I don't think we can get back to the shack in time to do this," David said. "But we may be able to wait out the moon's setting if we can find seclusion before the searchers make it through here."
"Do what, damn it, do what?"
"Bring Max back! If we miss the timing, he dies as surely as the beast."
Chapter 39
One and One Half Miles South of Tulenar Internment Camp
Pre Dawn. Full Moon.
They couldn't risk leaving an obvious trail by dragging the beast, tearing a gash through the dry needle carpet of the forest, smearing blood on the earth as they trudged along. Clumsy and repulsive as it was, there was no choice but to hoist the carcass onto their shoulders.
David bore the haunches and supported the imbedded arrows. Doris didn't envy him that post, or the crucial responsibility of keeping the silver in place. Even as the beast had lain dead in the scrub field, the blood had stopped flowing, lost its luster. But the wound still oozed around the bundle of arrows. The soft flannel of David's shirt was black with gore.
Doris took up the head. Her shoulder braced the beast's own, one foreleg sagging across her chest, the other thumping her upper back. The eyes, milky with death, stared toward her own. The tongue lolled under her chin, the fangs exposed, threatening to graze her jaw every time she stumbled.
Several times, the weight of the beast brought one or the other of them to their knees, leaving them sucking desperately at the cold, night air. Upon the final collapse, Doris rasped out, "We can't go much farther, David. Our lungs will burst. Or our hearts. Either one."
But before the healer could reply, a sound stifled them both: Distant, floating toward them on the breeze, an eerie, mournful baying. Bloodhounds. Doris was the first to struggle upward, but David followed quickly.
"They're still far away," David said. "We can make it. We have to make it. Look up."
Doris did. The moon was below the treetops now, well on its way to setting.
"Just a little further," David urged, "and you'll turn right."
They shuffled onward for an impossibly long time, surely longer than Doris thought she could bear, until at last David panted out, "Off to the right ... here..."
Doris heaved in that direction, pleading like a child, "How much farther?"
"Just go. Just keep going..." But it was David who collapsed. The sudden loss of support dragged Doris with him beneath the beast.
She wriggled free, gaging on revulsion, then moved back to help David pull away. They both sat panting until the deep, throaty baying of the hounds jolted them again. Were they closer? Or was it Doris's exhaustion that made them seem so?
"This will have to do," David said, mopping his brow on the only clean patch of sleeve he had left. "We've done all we can."
He looked up at the moon, then at the dead beast. "Help me shove the wound into that patch of light."
The light David spoke of lay against the beast's barrel chest. Together, they pushed and hauled until the beast's belly and groin were exposed to the pale glow.
"All right," the healer said. "Listen carefully. The silver must be pulled out just before the moon sinks below the horizon. Just then. Too early, too late, and we've come this far for nothing. When the searchers happen upon this place, they'll find the remains of an enormous animal they'll probably identify as wolf."
He stopped talking and gazed at Doris wearily. "If they do, that would probably save those boys, you know. It will back up what the Tamura twins said. They'll easily match the beast to the dead child's wounds. The rest won't be hard to piece together."
Doris shook her head. "I know what you're saying. Not on your life, not now." Her palms were sweating and she rubbed them together before looking at her pentagram again, still dark as a bloodstain. "I want the honors. I want to pull out the silver."
David didn't answer right away.
"Please."
"Are you certain?" he asked her.
Doris nodded.
The baying seeped through the conifers again. Definitely louder. And now Doris could hear the reedy echo of human voices behind the hounds.
David looked up at the moon. "Damnit all," he said, "the moon's still too high."
Even so, the healer moved toward the beast's head and wrestled its bulk into his lap. He nodded toward the arrows.
"When I give the word, one, smooth motion," he said. "Every piece at once. But, for now, wait. All we can do is wait."
Wait. An eternity. The moon seemed to deliberately hover over the hill tops, cruel in its reluctance to sink. Doris moved toward the belly, but realized that she was blocking the light from the wound when she did. She would have to position behind the beast's back and reach over to grasp the arrows. She knelt in place, arching over the beast, so tense she could barely breathe. She steeled herself, nodding to David's instruction, listening intently for the hounds.
She wasn't prepared for the human voices, so close it was if they s were speaking over her shoulder.
David's own voice came as a hiss. "Down!"
Doris collapsed on her side, the beast's spine pressed against her belly. David was flat on his back, having sprawled with the cumbersome head still in his lap. God, the voices! They sounded like they were everywhere!
Doris's chest ached with the wild thrashing of her heartbeat. She could hear a soft, shuffling noise, like multiple boots scuffing through the pine needle carpet. And, always, the voices. She rolled her eyes toward her forehead, in the direction of it all, but the search was taking place just beyond her range of vision. Then a torch beam swept above her, off to her left, grazing trees midway up the trunks.
Doris stiffened, her mind stiffened, as the watch went on insufferably. When David at last tapped at her hand, it was all she could do not to cry out. But she realized who it was and turned to see him motioning skyward, moving only his wrist and index finger. The moon was at the horizon.
Doris heard voices past her head. She saw dark shadows against the misty gray background of forest in the moonlight, moving slowly beyond the bulk of the beast, perhaps thirty feet away. People were everywhere. Their search beams blazed out ahead of them in harsh, yellow shafts, stabbing into the night, striking against the trees, skittering across the ground.
The moon, now, seemed all in a hurry to set.
Two beams, from opposite directions, flashed directly over Doris, almost catching the beast's silvery fur. She looked down toward the wound, and could tell that the moonbeams had mercifully shrunk so that the fur's shimmer was reduced to a dull gray.
She looked to the moon once more. It was halfway past the horizon. David tapped her hand again, mouthed out carefully, "On ... my ... word."
She understood, scooted carefully lower, toward the arrows. She could see some of their shafts where the belly was lax and sunken, but couldn't tell if the moonlight still touched them. The voices ebbed and flowed around her, surged so close at one point she could not suppress a whimper. She squeezed her eyes shut her as though she expected to be struck. David tapped at her head. When she looked up at him, he motioned toward his eyes as if to say, watch me.
She nodded, glanced once more at the moon. Three quarters set. Her eyes flew wide toward David who was looking skyward, his fingers touching Doris's hairline...
Someone shouted.
David jerked his face toward Doris and as he stabbed his fingers against her head as he hissed out, "Now!"
Doris rose over the beast. Through the thunder of her heart, throbbing even in her eyes, she saw the last of the moonlight fading off the wound. She clasped her hands, vice-like, around the arrows and pulled.
She fell backward with her own momentum, but she knew she had them all, she knew it! The bloody arrows scattered around her like tinder sticks. She heard a great, wet sucking, like someone long buried and struggling upward for air.
She heard the shouting again and picked up some of the words ... "This way ... girl ... hurry!" There was a great scuffling all around, but it was clearly moving away from them, the attention of the searchers being drawn toward the other side of the hill, toward Joy and the scrub field.
The beast's carcass was quaking, the wound throwing flecks of thickened blood everywhere. His expression awestruck, David sat upright again with the beast's head still in his lap. The creature's jaws opened wide for another long, moist gasp of air.
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