I had a hard time envisioning Kase creeping into my room at night, but something about Willow made it all too easy to imagine.

  What could she possibly want with my jacket, though?

  I growled under my breath, resigning myself to being chilly until I found it.

  Before I left, I slipped my camera into a shoulder bag, my Leatherman in my pocket, and locked the door behind me. I definitely had no reason to trust anyone here.

  Even in the bright light of day, there was something about the Lodge that spoke of too-deep shadows. It was like viewing the world with a filter over my eyes, turning everything hazy and slightly gray.

  My stomach wanted me to pay a visit to Tater, but when I heard Mary’s laugh coming from the front of the house, my feet automatically directed me to the French doors leading to the lake.

  The last thing I wanted, while I was already off-balance from the dream-like insanity of last night, was to have either of the Society’s two leaders catch me off-guard.

  Instead I found myself meandering past the lake, retracing the steps I’d taken last night. A fifteen-minute walk brought me into the deep woods, and my breath rushed out in a laugh when I saw the first dilapidated house overgrown with ivy.

  I had strongly suspected I’d dreamed the whole thing, but the ghost town was here. I pulled out my camera, circling the first ruin and snapping photos of every angle. Birds chirped overhead, the sun held back by the thick canopy overhead and increasing the chill of the air.

  I’d moved on through nearly half the ghost town when I realized the birds had gone silent.

  As I came upon the ruins of the church, stone walls half-crumbled, glass buried in the dirt, something shifted within its dark interior.

  I walked around the church, finding the chalk circle. Deep imprints indicated where the monster had stood, the soil black where his blood had soaked into it.

  “You never told me how the Hunter managed to trap you in this,” I said lightly, snapping a few pictures.

  The shadow in the church rustled. “They used bait. I was… hungry.”

  “Wool? Silk?” I joked.

  The monster’s tone was dry. “Blood.”

  “Ah. And here I thought they might’ve left you organic Supima cotton.” My hands shook a little as I lowered the camera.

  “Hilarious.”

  “I joke when I feel threatened. It’s my defense mechanism.”

  The monster rustled again, this time in what sounded oddly like outrage. It was strange that every sound he made, I somehow felt what he was conveying with it, when I usually had to be staring at a person to read their intent.

  “You feel threatened by me?” he asked, his deep voice offended. “When I swore an oath to give you your life?”

  “Well, you have to understand,” I said quietly, “That I’ve never met your kind before.”

  I was a little afraid, yes. I almost believed his oath.

  But it also seemed akin to a gazelle trusting a lion.

  He made a hmm noise, and I felt him studying me from within the shadows.

  “Do you have a name?” I finally asked, when the silence grew too long to bear.

  The monster said nothing. There were no sounds. If I couldn’t see his dark form from the corner of my eye, I wouldn’t have known he was there.

  The silence went on long enough again that I raised my camera and began taking more pictures, surreptitiously angling some towards the church where he hid. It was too cold to stay out much longer; the involuntary shivers that had seemed tolerable at first were growing more frequent.

  “Toth,” he finally answered.

  I was glad my back was to him when he spoke. I flattened my lips before I burst out with the first thing to pop into my mind, which he was definitely sure to find distinctly unhilarious.

  Toth the Moth, I said to myself quietly, just to be sure I wouldn’t laugh. When I had myself under control, I checked my camera and found the SD card nearly full.

  “Thank you,” I said. “How did the Hunter ruin your wings? And why?”

  In the same way I didn’t understand the point of big game hunters—why kill something because it’s beautiful?—I couldn’t fathom why someone would destroy Toth’s wings.

  It was just destruction for the sake of destruction.

  Toth was quiet for a full minute before he deigned to reply. I thought he was mulling over his words, deciding how much to trust me.

  I hoped he would trust me enough. I would never sell him out to any hunter.

  “They are more than wings. They are my weapon,” he said gruffly. “To peer at them for too long would ensnare your mind, and weaken your body. If I were to flap them once with intent, I could start a wind that would become a deadly storm.”

  I was put in mind of the Butterfly Effect, and wondered if the person who’d coined it had possibly come across such a being as Toth.

  “And if I were to flutter them further, I could bend space around me, open a window through time.” I thought I saw him smile grimly in the corner of my eye. “The Hunter wishes us to be powerless against it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said honestly. “To be hunted for something you can do… I know how that feels.”

  “Do you?” Toth tilted his head.

  I don’t know what came over me. Maybe it was because he’d shared something that was clearly so intimate and personal to him, but I wanted to reciprocate.

  So I told him about my hands. About healing everyone around me. About how Miss Prynne had been willing to drag herself over broken glass for more.

  And how if anyone knew, there would be an army of Miss Prynnes tearing themselves apart to get to me.

  “So…” I licked my dry lips. “I do know. If I could give this power away, I would.”

  The monster had lapsed into a considering silence. Finally he said, “We have more in common than I would have believed. But we cannot give it away. We are born as we are, and we must live with it.”

  The minute that came after that could almost be described as companionable. I was content to fill up my SD card, enjoying the dappled sun, but there was one thing he’d said that had been preying on my mind.

  “Toth…”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s one more thing I want to know. When you said blood, did you mean…”

  The shadow in the corner of my eye tilted his head. “I meant blood.”

  “As in, human blood?” My voice squeaked, giving away a little of the fear I’d been trying to hide.

  There was a faint sound like a sigh. I couldn’t help but feel I’d disappointed him. “We are monsters, Elle. We feast on blood, we despise the light. What do you expect of us?”

  A shiver ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the temperature.

  We.

  We are monsters.

  Were there more like him out there? Or… other monsters, even deadlier ones, hiding in the shadows?

  Was he the exception or the norm for his kind?

  “I’m not sure what to expect anymore,” I whispered, my mouth dry, but when I looked back at the church, the shadow was gone.

  I hadn’t heard him leave.

  It took me less time to return to the Lodge, since I jogged the entire way. I refused to break into a full-out run. Predators liked it when their prey ran.

  I told myself I was just jogging to stay warm, but deep down I knew the truth.

  And I wondered if this was the truth my mother had always hidden from me.

  I was so intent on getting inside and checking the images on my card to see if Toth appeared on any of them that I almost bulldozed right into Kase.

  “Whoa there,” he said, holding his hands up in a friendly fashion. “Hey, are you okay?”

  I realized I was staring at him wildly, and made an effort to tone down my expression to something more neutral.

  He was wearing swimming trunks, the same pale beige as the rest of his clothes. Willow was behind him in a white swimsuit, singing under her breath to herself.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” I managed a smile. “Did you know there’s a whole ghost town back there? That wasn’t part of the tour.”

  Kase’s own smile looked frozen in place. “Ahh, that. Yeah. Mary and Joseph don’t really encourage anyone to go exploring there, it can be dangerous… but look, we’re going swimming. The lake’s warm, I promise. Why don’t you join us?”

  I had packed a swimsuit as directed when I first started planning this trip. And maybe, if I played nicely, Kase would be more inclined to answer my questions, because he sure as hell had dodged that one.

  “Give me five and I’ll be right down.”

  7

  Elle

  The bikini I had packed couldn’t have made me any more different from these people. I winced a little as I adjusted the black top, wondering if I was about to scandalize the entire Lodge.

  But it was all I had, and the last thing I wanted was to ask to borrow clothes from Willow. She was thinner than me, anyways, so it wasn’t like it would help.

  I yanked on an oversized T-shirt to cover my scandalousness and grabbed my camera, flicking through the last set of images. I frowned at them; the last set I’d taken, trying to see if Toth appeared, were all blurred out.

  Just like my selfie had been.

  Nope. That was a mystery for another day.

  I dropped the camera and hurried out, not allowing myself to think about it much harder than that.

  Kase and Willow were on the patio waiting for me, looking so weirdly alike with their blonde hair and pale clothes that I paused to examine them.

  Not for the first time, I wondered why everyone here looked the same, but none of them seemed to be related.

  Willow looked up at me, shading her eyes. “You don’t look much like Gillian,” she said, as though reading my thoughts.

  I stiffened, but she didn’t seem to mean anything by it.

  Not that I could actually be offended. It was true. I did not look much like either of my parents at all.

  The closest thing I could claim was the shape of my mother’s pixie-ish nose and gray eyes.

  Otherwise, I had no idea who in the family had possessed dark, flaming hair. At least Juno had gray eyes as well, although hers were a softer shade than mine, the mist to my steel.

  “I must take after my father,” I said, giving her a tight smile. It really wasn’t any of her business, and it wasn’t like she’d known what my father had looked like anyway.

  Willow blinked. “You mean Benjamin Gray?”

  Who the hell else would I mean? “Yes.”

  “Oh… I see.” She looked strangely doubtful, but Kase stood up and brushed off his immaculate trunks.

  “Daylight’s wasting, ladies,” he said, gallantly holding out a hand towards the lake.

  I followed them down, the cool stones under my bare feet belying their claim. It was cold out here, no two ways around it.

  I glanced out over the lake, a sudden chill washing over me. Willow’s shriek cut through the silence of the woods as Kase pushed her off the dock, but the sound barely registered in my consciousness.

  It felt like… the woods were listening. Like the world held its breath, waiting for something. A pressure in the air, a storm building… there was something about this place that made me feel like I was no longer on the Earth I knew.

  “Do I have to push you in, too?”

  I was yanked from my strange reverie and looked down at Kase’s dimpled face.

  I scoffed, pulling off the T-shirt and tossing it aside. “I think I can manage.”

  His eyes almost bugged out, and he froze in place. I felt horribly awkward for a moment, especially since I had zero interest in appealing to him. The bikini was a few years old, and I’d been too busy selling the house to worry about replacing it.

  Now I wished I had.

  As though to cover his embarrassment, he coughed and looked away, then turned and sprinted for the end of the dock, leaping into a perfect cannonball and swamping Willow.

  I was going to have to do the same thing. Odds were good they were joking about the water being warm; it was cold enough outside to not make any sense. I braced myself for the incoming icy shock, took a deep breath, and sprinted for the end.

  Kase had moved out of the way, and I leaped a full six feet to the dark water, toes first.

  It didn’t feel like landing in liquid.

  It felt like piercing a membrane, the water squeezing me as I plunged into darkness. Bubbles spumed violently around me, tickling my bare skin, and the sunlight overhead went out completely.

  I held my breath, still sinking, panic locking me up tight when I saw a glimmer below me.

  Far, far below me.

  In the pitch-black depths of the lake, something was moving.

  My body jolted into motion immediately. I clawed at the water, kicking my way upwards and releasing a cloud of bubbles. My lungs were already burning, the need to take a breath—to swim or run as fast as possible—consuming me.

  I broke the surface, spitting out water and dragging in a ragged breath, but the sun was still gone.

  There was no sign of Kase or Willow. No dock.

  The sky was full of stars, the dead of night, and they all swirled in a vortex, emptying in a vast dark abyss overhead.

  And the gently lapping surface of the warm lake was glowing in luminescent colors, violent and emerald smears of color sticking to my skin.

  I cut towards the shore, trying not to let cold panic infuse my limbs, and when I felt smooth pebbles underfoot I crawled out of the lake. My hair swung in wet clumps, glowing with the phosphorescent colors.

  The Lodge was… no longer the Lodge.

  I stared at the strange ruins where it used to be. Stone archways were arranged in a circle, and the forest was…

  It was primordial, ancient. I had never seen trees like this; they dwarfed giant sequoias, the veins in their leaves shimmering with flashes of pale green light.

  “Am I dead?” I whispered, pinching my arm hard.

  I didn’t wake up. The monstrous trees swayed gently; a ball of pale foxfire drifted through the ruins.

  I dug my nails into my arm hard enough to draw blood, and this insane dream still didn’t disappear.

  Maybe I had hit my head on the dock when I jumped. Maybe it’d fractured my skull and I’d drowned.

  But if I was dead, how could I still feel the warmth of the water? How could I smell the scent of ancient forest, sap so fresh it almost burned my nose?

  Slowly, I stood up, my ears pricked for the sound of predators in this prehistoric world—but surely, if I were already dead, I wouldn’t be worried about predators?

  There was nothing but the sound of wind and water, the rustling of the trees.

  It was like Earth had never existed.

  I took a step towards the ruins, then another. In this quiet, each footstep on the pebbles sounded as loud as someone clanging pots together.

  But nothing came to investigate.

  A small part of me was screaming to be cautious, but I was a long-time urban explorer. I couldn’t resist the call of the wilds around me.

  Where the patio should have been, I instead walked up a set of crumbling stairs that were primitive shale slabs, leaving dark, wet footprints behind.

  And where the Lodge had been, a large stone circle was set in the ground. The arches surrounded it, draped with lacy stone that almost looked like petrified spiderwebs. Foxfire orbs drifted through them aimlessly, but nothing else moved.

  The grass was tall and pitch-black, and I wouldn’t have walked through it barefoot for love or money. But nestled in it, close to the stone path, were beams of rotten wood. I knelt down, touching the edge of one such beam.

  The initials GM was carved in the wood. It looked like it was a thousand years old, the edges of the carving worn smooth.

  My breath caught, and I stood up again slowly.

  I was sure these were the ruins of the Lodge. And somehow, my mother had left her mark on them. I was sure that she was the one who had done it.

  It took me several minutes to convince myself to move further into the ruins. The stone circle was carved with symbols that made my eyes sting when I looked at them too closely, and I had to look up at the swirling vortex of the sky and blink tears away.

  But worst of all were the dark stains splashed across its surface. I was sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that those stains were blood.

  I had to get back to the lake. I was not dead, damn it.

  I was fully alive, more than a little terrified, and absolutely questioning my sanity.

  The woods were still silent as I turned back down the path I’d come, carefully descending the shale steps to the pebbled beach, but as I looked up from watching my step, I froze.

  The lake, which had been placid when I left, was now rippling. The luminescent film of green and violet swirled like a whirlpool, and then… stopped.

  I realized that it wasn’t just the strange algae glowing. There was something beneath it, pulsing with colors, rising to the surface.

  The massive form broke through, sending a glowing tide of water spilling back into the lake. My heart slammed against my ribcage, ice coursing through me as the shape continued to rise.

  I wondered if my mind was finally fracturing. The creature from the lake’s depths was only vaguely humanoid—a muscular torso, the thick arms and tree-trunk thighs of a man. The heavy cock swinging between his legs was just the cherry on top.

  But his skin was sleek and as dark as a moonless night, limned with gleaming, embedded lights. They flashed in a series of pulsing colors that were as mesmerizing as Toth’s wings: bright yellows, pale pinks, glimmers of a deep, bloody crimson.

  And then there was his face.

  I dimly realized I was shaking where I stood, caught like a deer by those eyes—narrowed and gleaming dark blue, over a fall of gently writhing tentacles that covered the lower half of his face.

  He took a step forward, the ground rumbling when his foot landed. Then another.

  This monster was at least twelve feet tall, able to crush me like a twig.

  But my fear overruled my sense of self-preservation. My feet absolutely refused to move, remaining planted firmly in the path of the monster.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30