William shook his head. This conversation had gotten deeper than planned.
“How can you not have a mom? What if you got sick? Who would bring you medicine?”
Nobody. “What about your mom? Is she nice?”
A small hint of a smile crossed Lark’s lips and twisted into a pained frown. He guessed she was trying not to cry.
“My mom’s very nice. She makes me brush my hair. And she holds me. Her hair smells like apples. She makes really good food. Sometimes, I come and sit by her in the kitchen when she cooks, and she sneaks me hot cocoa. It’s hard to get, because Uncle Kaldar has to bring it from the Broken, and we only get it when something big happens. Like birthdays and Christmas, but I get it a lot ...” Lark clamped her mouth shut and looked at him. “Do you know when your birthday is?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Did you ever get any presents?”
William sucked the air in through his nose. She asked bad questions. “I’m a monster, remember? The birth of little monsters isn’t something people celebrate.”
Lark looked away again.
Great. Now he made the kid feel bad. Nice going, asshole.
William reached over and touched one of the ropes holding a squirrel carcass. “Did you catch all these?”
“Yes. I’m good at it.”
Both rats bore bolt marks. She probably did shoot those. But the rabbit carcass was at least eight days old, and there weren’t maggots on it. William picked up the rope, pulled the rabbit up, and looked at it. His nose told him not to eat—there was some sickness in it.
Water rats were ugly, but the rabbit was cute. She wouldn’t shoot one. She probably just found the corpse somewhere. A changeling child wouldn’t have any problem killing a rabbit. It was good meat, slightly sweet.
William let go of the rope. “You’re planning to eat those?”
She stuck her chin in the air. He’d touched a nerve. “Yep!”
“All right. First of all, squirrels aren’t good to eat. The only thing you can make with them is stew, and even then, they’re bony and they stink. Rats, same. Don’t eat rats. They carry a sickness that will give you fever, cramps, and chills, and your skin and eyes will turn yellow. All these over there are too rotten to eat. That one over there has been picked on by birds, and that one’s got maggots. Your fish over there is hanging too close to the trunk and there are spots on it—that’s because the ants from that hill over there have been going up the tree and eating your kill.”
Lark’s eyes turned as big as saucers.
William pulled the rope, lifting the ermine thing. “Not sure what this is ...”
“It’s a Mire weasel. He killed those squirrels over there and ate their babies.”
That explained things. The weasel raided a nest and was punished. “I wouldn’t eat him either,” William said. “Unless I was really hungry. But since he’s fresh, he’ll do.”
He cut the corpse from the rope and laid it on the tree. “The reason you hang things is to drain the blood, cool them down, and keep creatures like that dimwit under us from eating your food. If you take a creature’s life to keep you going, you have to treat it with respect and not waste it.” He split the carcass. “The first thing you do is pull the insides out. That’s called dressing. Pay attention to the stomach and the guts, you don’t want to cut them. This right here is the liver. This dark blob is full of bile. You cut that open and the whole thing is shot. It’s too bitter to eat.”
He dumped the innards on the ground and shook the weasel to fling off any of the old blood.
“Now you skin it. Like this. If you leave a bit of fat on it, the meat won’t dry out. Also, you have to keep flies off of it. Steal a can of black pepper and sprinkle that on the meat. Flies don’t care for it.” He finished skinning and held up the bare carcass. “Now, you can cook it, or you can store it. If you want to store it, you can—freeze it—but I don’t see how you could here, so your choices are curing it or smoking the meat ...”
The tiny hairs on the back of his neck rose. He felt the weight of a gaze on his back sharp as a dagger.
William turned slowly.
Two eyes glared at him from the darkness between the branches of a pine.
“What the hell is that?” he whispered.
Lark’s voice trembled. “The big monster.”
The eyes took his measure. William looked deep into them and found an almost human awareness, a cruel and malevolent intelligence that shot a wave of icy alarm down his spine. He tensed like a coiled spring.
The diamond pupils shrank into slits, looking past William, at the girl in the branches behind him.
William pulled the crossbow from his back and locked the weapon’s arms.
The eyes shifted, tracking Lark. Whatever it was in the pine was about to pounce.
“Run.”
“What?” Lark whispered.
“Run. Now.”
William raised the crossbow. Hello, asshole.
The eyes fixed on him.
That’s right. Forget the kid. Pay attention to me. William gently squeezed the trigger. A poisoned bolt whistled through the air and bit below the eyes.
A snarl of pure pain ripped through the night.
Behind him Lark scrambled down the tree.
The creature didn’t go down. He hit it with a poisoned bolt, and it didn’t go down.
The eyes swung up, the bolt moving with them. He caught a glimpse of a nightmarish face, pale, hairless, with elongated jaws flashing a forest of teeth.
The beast bunched its powerful back legs and launched its enormous bulk into the space between them. William fired a second time and leaped to intercept it.
THE huge body hit William in midair. Like being hit by a truck. William slammed against the oak, the creature on top of him. The air burst from his lungs in a single sharp grunt. Pain blossomed between his ribs. Huge jaws gaped an inch from his face, releasing a cloud of fetid breath. Sonovabitch. William snarled and sliced across the beast’s throat. Blood poured.