Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (10 page)

In winter, when someone died, there were three choices. You could
bury the body, burn it, or store it. Burial was preferred; it was some
religious thing for Hannah and Isaac. For Ellie, it was like, okay, whatever. But without backhoes, there was no way to dig deep enough for
a proper grave until spring. A shallow grave was like an invitation to
scavengers and—no one would say it, but they all thought it—maybe
even the people-eaters, if they got desperate. Or if the people-eaters
were like crows and would eat anything.

Cremation was a no-go. Isaac just wouldn’t allow it. That religion
thing again, or maybe it was his and Hannah’s hex-y magic stuff . . .
Ellie didn’t know. The only bodies they ever burned were the peopleeaters. But they hadn’t crisped a single one since before Christmas
because it was just too cold and Jayden thought the people-eaters had
all gone south where the pickings were better.

Which left storage: a place where, in the deep freeze of the Upper
Peninsula, bodies couldn’t, wouldn’t rot. No decay, no smell, no scavengers.

But I don’t understand.
Stunned, Ellie turned a cautious circle, sweeping her gaze from the ranks of crows on the death house’s roof to
the canopy overhead. The majority of trees here were hardwoods
and barren of leaves, their bare branches lacing together in skeletal
fingers. Some branches now were so weighed down with birds they
bowed.
Where did they all come from? Why?
The sound those crows
made was almost mechanical, like thousands of scissors snapping
open and shut. Yet the birds didn’t seem dangerous. Mina would’ve
growled or barked or something. But Mina wasn’t worried. She was
only . . . interested.

“Well, I’m not,” she said to the dog. This was way spooky. “We
should go back. We should tell Jayden . . .” What? Gee, there were all
these crows at the death house, and
she’d
been too pee-in-her-pants
freaked out to take a look?

Alex wouldn’t wuss out.
She tightened her grip on her Savage.
Tom
would go.
“All right, come on, Mina. We can do this.” Heart thumping, she
eased down the path as her dog matched her step for step. Ahead, the
birds milled, ebbing and flowing around the building like the waves
of a ceaseless black sea. At the edge, where the snow effectively ran
out and the crows began, she paused, then slid a boot forward six
inches. The crows swirled away. She took another slow, sliding step
and then another, as the birds first parted, then closed ranks after she
and Mina passed. The effect was eerie, like skating through a pool of
black mercury.
At the sliders, she paused. The doors weren’t locked. Isaac and
Hannah always said the hex signs were protection enough. But to get
in meant that Ellie would have to use both hands, and she wasn’t wild
about letting go of her rifle.
“Don’t let anything bad happen, girl,” she said to Mina. Hooking
the Savage’s strap over her right shoulder, Ellie wrapped her hands
around the wrought iron handle and heaved. The door let out a
grudging squall, its iron wheels grating against metal; the death house
exhaled icy air that smelled of burlap and pine tar. Nose crinkling
against the strong odor of resin, Ellie glanced up to check the birds. In
return, the crows cocked their heads, turning the black pearls of their

eyes to Ellie as if for a better look. Suddenly afraid to stare at them for
too long, she quickly dropped her gaze and stepped from the ramp
into the building before she remembered, too late, that all the birds
had to do now was surge in after her. But they didn’t. Clacking and
cawing, the crows rustled and bunched right up to the threshold. Yet
not a single bird took wing or hopped to catch up and follow her in.
Still, she slid the door closed, just to be on the safe side.

She waited a moment as her eyes adjusted to the sudden gloom.
The interior was huge, almost a cave with those stone walls soaring
to a ceiling of exposed beams of the same dark wood as the slider.
Directly ahead and in the center were wooden pallets, stacked three
deep and three high, the kind farmers normally used for hay.

Ellie knew the routine. After a corpse was washed and rubbed with
spice-scented oil, it was wrapped in a clean white sheet. Hannah
always placed a small spell bag on the chest before sewing the body
into burlap, on which she also painted a purple, five-pointed star. The
corpse was then laid so the head, supported by a small pillow, faced
east. The direction was important—some blah-blah about heaven
and resurrection—but Ellie had tuned out.
Her
dad died
waaay
east
of here and came home in the equivalent of a really tiny shoebox. She
sure didn’t see him coming back to life and walking through the door
anytime soon. Okay, it was snarky. Still.

After the ruckus outside, the death house was so quiet Ellie heard
her own liquid swallow. Far as she knew, nothing wrong here. Well, if
you didn’t count the bodies. Of the dead kids there, two were mauled
by people-eaters. But that left five who’d been fed poison because
they’d begun to turn. The next-to-last body was the old man with
Chris, the one whose neck had been broken by that swinging mace.

“So, now what?” she whispered, because it didn’t seem right to
talk any louder. At the sound of her voice, Mina anxiously shifted
her weight and then took a few hesitant steps toward the pallets. Her
nails ticked on stone. Ellie thought maybe she should call Mina back
but then thought,
Wait. See what she does.

She expected her dog to snuffle each bag. But Mina didn’t. Instead,
the dog went to the foot of the last pallet—and the body there, all
by its lonesome—before turning a look back at Ellie.
Well?
the dog’s
amber eyes seemed to ask.
Aren’t you coming?

Ellie wasn’t aware that she
was
moving or had even
thought
about
it until she felt the icy palm of stone on her knees as she knelt next to
Mina. The dog wasn’t really staring at the body so much as . . . well,
watching
it really, really carefully.
But looking for what?
Ellie let her eyes
drift over the bulge of the head, then sweep down to that shelf of feet
and toes. Nothing really to see. Her gaze crawled back to the slight
tent of that purple star over the body’s chest. She had no idea what
the hex sign meant, or what Hannah put in those spell bags—

In the next second, her thoughts whited out as Ellie finally
did
see
something that shouldn’t, couldn’t be.
When the star over the chest . . . moved.

Tom had no true memory of moving. But he must have, and very fast,
switching from skis to snowshoes and scuffing down in long, sweeping strides to wallow through snow, over rocks, and around broken
trees, because there was a jump in time, a bizarre stutter step like the
hitch of a damaged DVD, and then he was on his knees, at the ski pole.
His daypack and Jed’s Bravo were now on the snow, and he was chopping icy rubble with his KA-BAR. His breath came in harsh, sobbing
pants as he stabbed, working his blade to expose a silvered fiberglass
spear speckled with a stencil of cheery white snowflakes. When he’d
sliced enough away, he slipped his knife back into his leg sheath, then
wrapped both hands around the plastic grip and gave a quick yank.
The pole popped free. The touring basket was gone, but the hard
metal tip was still intact. From the length, he thought it must’ve been
used by a boy, or a tall girl.

It has to be one of theirs.
Sweat lathered his cheeks and trickled
down his chest. Craning a look over his shoulder, he eyed the swell of
land behind. He was in the fall line, and so was the pole. That meant
one of three things. In the worst-case scenario, the pole was swept
down here while its owner had still been on the rise. In the best case,
the owner made his skis and outran the avalanche but lost the pole
somewhere along the way.

And then there’s the somewhere-in-between
. He swept his eyes over
the flats, hunting for the telltale jut of a broken ski, maybe even
another pole.
He’s bombing down on his skis, surfing over snow, but then
the avalanche trips him up—

That thought skipped to a halt as his brain registered something
protruding from the snow perhaps six feet and change to his right:
a small brown hump, easy to miss because it looked so much like a
pebble.

Except it wasn’t. The sun was low enough now that the light on
the sparkling snow was ruddy, the color of new blood. He knew,
exactly, what that brown lump was.

A boot.
Tom’s breath gnarled in his chest.
It’s the toe of a boot, that’s
a boot, it’s . . .
“No, no! Alex,
Alex
!” Tearing off his gloves, he jammed his fingers
through a thin layer of crackling ice even as his mind screamed that
this couldn’t be her; that was insane. But here was the pole, and now
there was a boot, and they came for her, and so this
could
be her,
might
be, and he had to get her out, get her out get her out
get her out
!
Frantic, he clawed at the snow. In a few moments, the laces appeared,
and then a thin rime of blue wool sock. The cup of her heel was
solidly wedged in the deep cleft of two large boulders, and he could
tell that she’d come to rest at an angle, her head lower than her boots.
Unless it wasn’t Alex. Wasn’t that boot too big? And the ankle . . .
Thick, too large, but maybe that’s only the sock and the angle and . . .
“No, it’s you, it’s you, it has to be you, I know it. Oh God, Alex,
Alex,” he said, driving his hands into the snow up to the elbows. His
fingers closed around something stiff, wooden. A leg, and it was her
right; he knew that from the boot. There was a body here, and it was
Alex; she was down there; he knew it.
Unless . . . A great black swell of horror churned in his chest.
Unless this leg was
all
he would find. Anything powerful enough to
crater a rise and drive a monstrous sweep of snow and rock and trees
would have no trouble leaving a person in pieces, snapping bones as
easily as brittle twigs, strewing a leg here, an arm there.

Straddling where he thought her body must be, he began to piston his fists through the snow, driving them like jackhammers. He
didn’t dare use the KA-BAR. What if he hurt her, cut her? The snow
broke apart in chunks, compacted not only by pressure built up by
the avalanche’s momentum but its own weight. There were rocks
here, too, that he wrenched free and heaved aside. He couldn’t stop,
he wouldn’t, but oh God, he
wanted
to stop. He knew he should.