Green eyes stared up at him out of a face gone deathly white, save for the scarlet acid burns standing out in vivid and ghastly contrast.
“What happened to Vivian? What did they do with her?”
“I don’t know. I swear.”
Zee applied a little pressure. Blood welled. Each crimson drop held the promise of revenge. “Tell me!”
“I couldn’t see. I was hiding!”
“Liar.” A little more pressure. His hands were shaking, torn between the desire to kill the man who had brought so much harm to Vivian, and the need to question him alive.
“I’m telling you the truth! They opened a door and threw her inside.”
“What was on the other side of the door? Did you see?”
“No, I’m telling you. All I saw was the door. That’s all I know. Please—get me out of here.”
Zee’s breath came in hard gasps; his heart was beating way too hard. How long did it take to recover from blood loss? Vivian would know. But Vivian wasn’t here, had been thrust against her will through some doorway into who-knows-where. The very thought filled him with rage.
A battle waged in his breast. Was he really obligated to rescue one such as Jared? It was a coward’s act to kill a wounded man, and yet some men needed killing. Deep in his soul he knew the right thing, much as he hated to admit it, and so he swung away and began to clean the globs of disgusting green goo off his sword blade by wiping it in the tall grass.
“Hey!” Jared called, an edge of panic in his voice. “You’re not really going to leave me here. Please.”
“Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. Don’t have much use for lying cowards.” But he sheathed the sword, turning back only to see that his enemy had stopped struggling and lay perfectly still, eyes closed, arms flung wide. Acid burns filled with a greenish fluid marred his face.
“Jared,” Zee said.
No response.
He nudged the fallen man with the toe of his shoe. No movement, no response. He shoved harder, shifting Jared’s shoulder upward. The arm and hand trailed behind, limp and useless.
“Oh, goddamn it.” Zee grasped Jared under the armpits and dragged him out from beneath the toad. Both legs were covered in green slime; the right was blood drenched, the pant leg torn to shreds.
Careful not to touch the slime with his bare hands, Zee sliced the remains of the pant leg open and shuddered in revulsion. Strips of flesh and skin hung loose and shredded. Retrieving the canteen, he poured precious water over the wound. As he sluiced the blood and slime away he caught a glimpse of bone.
The first-aid kit was useless; nothing in it even began to address the magnitude of this wound. Zee sliced a strip from the blanket with his sword. Not sterile, but it was all he had to work with. About the time he was done wrapping the wound, Jared’s eyes flickered open, unfocused and fever bright.
“Where’s Vivian?” he murmured, his voice thick and far away.
Awesome. Not only couldn’t he kill the sniveling coward, Zee realized he was going to be stuck with playing nursemaid. A slight hiss off to the right triggered his reflexes and he dove to one side, dragging Jared with him, just as one of the patches of green exploded into the air. An acid smoke rose up that burned in his lungs and set him coughing. “We’d better get out of here. Can you stand?”
“I think so.”
He towed Jared up onto his good leg, pulled an arm over his shoulder, and half-dragged him away from the clearing and into the closest path. Acid-tainted air burned in his throat and nostrils. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw a wave of peristalsis ripple along the toad creature’s belly, which had expanded into a tight balloon.
“Faster,” he gasped. The path was rough going, laced with roots and stones, barely wide enough for the two of them. If they could just make it around a curve about a hundred yards ahead, they’d be sheltered if that thing blew. Jared was a weight dragging him back, limping and unsteady. A hollow boom shook the earth beneath their feet and he abandoned running and dove off the path and into the undergrowth, pulling Jared after him. They fell in a tangle of arms and legs and lay still, listening to the splat of thick slime dripping off branches to the earth below.
“What the hell was that?”
“Toad exploded,” Zee said. “Come on, we gotta go before all that extra slime smokes us out.”
“Don’t know if I can—”
“You don’t have a choice. Come on. Crawl.”
The only thing to do was to work their way deeper into the underbrush. The path they’d been on was contaminated—he could see the puddles of slime already beginning to bubble and smoke—and there was no other path available.
Wounded and weary as he was, Zee goaded Jared deeper and deeper into the depths of the forest. What they would find there, he didn’t know, but they couldn’t go back and they couldn’t stay still and it was the only thing he knew to do.
Seventeen
Morgan had no trouble finding his way back to the old homestead. It was a wonder to him that his body remembered, by force of habit, the things that his brain had cast aside, that there was no indecision or hesitation about where to turn, even without signposts or recognizable landmarks. For some reason, the county had kept the road open—not maintained, by any stretch of the imagination, but at least it was clear of trees and brush. Two rough tracks led through a forest of pine and fir, interspersed with tamaracks, bright gold still but beginning to shed their needles.
There were a few rough dwellings along the way—trailers, cabins, even a yurt. No evidence of telephone or electrical wires, and he saw a homebuilt windmill churning on a hill. These were the homes of people who liked the solitude, who were most likely off the grid entirely. And this was good, because as long as he left them alone they were unlikely to report on his activities to the authorities.
The old homestead lay at the very end of the road, in an overgrown clearing. Forestland had encroached, but someone had taken the trouble to beat back a healthy barrier between house and trees. It made a sort of sense—somebody must own the property. It would have been sold or taken over. Just because they hadn’t chosen to rebuild didn’t mean they weren’t smart enough to maintain a firebreak between a tinder-dry old heap of lumber and acres of forested land.
As he got out of the truck a raven, hoary with age, glided over and landed on a nearby rock. It cronked at him, twice.
“Go away, would you?” Morgan snapped, but the bird cocked its head to peer at him out of one bright black eye and stayed precisely where it was.
Something about the bird was familiar, just as the turnoff and the road had been, and Morgan was pretty sure he had uttered that exact same phrase more than once during his childhood. Of course it couldn’t be the same bird, even though ravens were long lived as birds went. Still, his fingers went of their own accord to the carved pendant he had worn ever since he could remember, a raven in flight, caught in a dream web.
There was no comfort in that pendant. It was a reminder of his guilt more than anything else. Guilt that he was finally going to confront despite the deep dread that weighted every step, restricted every breath.
The house was still standing. He had maintained a secret hope that someone would have demolished it by now. The windows were broken, the shingles green with moss. Apart from that, it didn’t look much different than he remembered. His resolve failed, thinking about what awaited him inside, and he chose to allow himself a small grace and visit the barn first. As he made his way across the yard, the raven hopped and fluttered after him, never more than a few yards away, refusing to shoo even when he threw a pinecone at it.
When he reached the barn door he hesitated, eyeing the structure with some unease. The roof sagged in the middle, giving the whole thing a swaybacked look. The boards were gray and weathered and had warped and dried, forming cracks wide enough to slide fingers between. But it was still standing, and unlikely to come crashing down on his head.