“Five of us, now,” Tara said. “Let’s push it. Let’s get it out of here and hunt it later.”
Ridley was <scared,> and thought of <Jennie and Rain.> Danny understood the fear he had, bringing a kid’s mind close to that thing. But not doing it guaranteed she’d be close for sure when the thing went further over the edge than it was.
“I don’t think it’s a rogue,” Danny ventured to say. “Part of it’s the same, but it’s not crazy. I don’t think it’s crazy.” A dreadful comparison occurred to him, and he unintentionally let it loose: <new rider with young horse, first ride, louder than anything near Shamesey; Jennie and Rain, louder than any horse in the camp. Brionne and the yellow-eyed predator.>
Tara, last person he’d have thought would agree, slid into that image with astonishing quickness and memories of <ruined shelter> and <nest. Bones with plaid cloth, near the lake.> “Smart like a horse,” she said. “Damn sure.”
“Paired with that?” Callie said in disgust.
“Nothing I want to see leave here,” Tara said, and intended <shooting it,> no question, while Randy Goss hovered in the low edges of the ambient, <scared,> and <sad,> and <homesick for Tarmin.> Danny knew that image of <Tarmin streets and the blacksmith shop and the house there,> the way Tara had to recognize it.
But Tara was trying to pull them together in <fighting the intruder,> which with Flicker’s essential skittishness had its difficulties. So he wanted it, in support of Tara’s effort, and Callie wanted it; then Jennie was there, fiercely so, and that spooked Ridley into a direct attack that wasn’t native to him: Danny suddenly felt what Ridley and Slip could be when Jennie was threatened, and all of a sudden the marshal and the preacher and the rest were clearing back from them.
But Randy stayed. <Randy> was there with them, <wanting Brionne, remembering Tarmin,> recalling <that night locked in the jail with the swarm in the streets,> all of it with an overlay of <anger> and <grief.> Randy didn’t want the <jail.> Randy wanted <Brionne at the breakfast table, Brionne playing checkers by firelight, Brionne throwing snowballs, younger Brionne in a red coat, running toward him through the snow.>
Glass shattered at that house. Wood broke. A throat uttered a sound not human. <Rage> came back at them. <Terror and anger.>
“It’s going up!” Callie cried aloud. “ It’s <heading for the roof!> Get a sight on it!”
Danny didn’t expect it to show on the street side of the building. But there, in the murky light that had been growing around them, he saw an upright darkness on the very crest of the roof, a darkness with something white hugged against it—with what a blink of snowflakes cleared into the sight of Brionne Goss in her nightgown standing on her own feet with the creature, balanced on the snowy rooftree of the doctor’s house.
He didn’t trust he could hit it and not spook it out of the sights of those with a chance. Tara, beside him, and Ridley, had rifles.
More than those two guns went off. A ragged volley made Cloud jump and him blink, and in the stench of gunpowder and the smell of snow around him afterward—there wasn’t anything on that roof.
“Did we get it?” Ridley asked. Randy’s shock was racketing through an ambient that was just them, now, nothing in, on, or beyond that house.
“Don’t trust not hearing it,” Danny said. “Not till we find it dead.” He rode Cloud forward, and the rest of them were with him,
Randy attaching himself close to Cloud afoot, and Tara and Flicker going on his other side.
That silence persisted. The doctor’s house stood adjacent to outbuildings, small sheds behind; but a warehouse roof came close, and he and Tara went down the alley it made, rejoining the others along the wall.
The post was absent from the rider-gate. Danny knew that from Ridley and Jennie and Callie. The post was still in the tunnel access, but that wouldn’t have stopped a beast on two feet, either—if it had had the chance to get in there, but none of them believed it had.
The marshal and his group came now and joined them as, in the very early dawn and among the shadows that still were left, they looked for footprints.
They didn’t find them until they went through the rider-gate. The tracks of one set of long humanlike feet and sometimes two, the second clearly human, went toward the den.
Shimmer was <outraged,> and Slip pulled the rest of them in, as a band of five horses went toward the den intent on <driving out intruders.>
But the tracks went around to the outside, to a rider-gate left standing open to the forest and the light coming through the trees.
Danny and Tara went out hunting straightway. But the trail, which showed blood now and again, went aside into the trees before it had gone a kilometer down the road, on a diagonal line down the mountain. The trail all along had been tending toward the south, toward the truck road, but now it left that. Cloud and Flicker were sure about it going into the trees, and downhill, after which, with the beast’s tree-climbing ability, it was capable of going cross-country and above brush and rock that would stop a horse.
So they both thought it more prudent to go back to the village and in a day or so, with full kit and enough gear to survive what began to feel like chancy weather, set out to warn other villages. There was nothing they could do chasing it now; and a great deal they could do by warning the other settlements.
Besides, with the beast’s talent for misdirection, and the possibility of a human mind helping it, they didn’t want to leave things in disorder in the village behind them—in case it didn’t find itself discouraged.
Guil and Carlo came in the early afternoon, with snow coming down heavily. Guil was decidedly hurting, Burn was exhausted, and Carlo had walked, so as not to overload Spook. Both of them had pushed things more than they ought.
They came in the village gates. In the middle of the street and in full view of the curious, Carlo slid down off Spook’s back and held out his arms for his brother, who until that time had held himself reserved and quiet. Things weren’t reserved or quiet for some time, then, in that quarter, among riders and villagers alike.
And introductions went quickly, rider-fashion, the ambient thick with self-protection and reserve for a moment, then warming up considerably. Yes, the Evergreen camp had known Guil’s lost partner, they’d liked Aby Dale, they trusted her lifelong partner; and they knew that the last Tarmin rider hadn’t survived by scanting duty, any more than Tara had done since her arrival at Evergreen.
They stayed villageside, all of them, including Guil and Carlo, with the horses, to survey the damage, to help the marshal sort out the dead and make sure the village felt safe. With the smell of blood on the wind it was certain in their minds and in the minds of very anxious villagers and winter residents that the wildlife would come back to the area, and relatively quickly if the beast hadn’t hunted it to nonexistence: Guil said the ambient had formed at their backs on their ride along the road like water flowing into a gap, as if wild things knew that a horse’s presence in this instance was an assurance of a worse predator moving out of the territory.
And in truth that night and the morning after there wasn’t a sign of it coming back—hard to imagine a creature you had to recognize in terms of the silence that went around it. Slink was the name some villager came up with for it, and it might stick, who knew? It was certain at least that the High Wild produced some odd creatures, some strange, some deadly, and that humans who’d come to the world had yet to see most of them.