“Are you still bleeding?”
He didn’t answer.
I grabbed his hand. Blisters bulged on his skin where the thorns had punctured it. The wounds still wept gray blood. The toxins from Nick’s magic were eating them from the inside out.
Desandra turned to me. Open gashes weeping gray blood marked her furry arms.
Behind us something screeched. The long ululating cry rose above the rooftops and hung somewhere between the sky and the city, braided from hunger, predatory glee, and mourning, as if the thing that made it knew exactly how horrible it was. Only a human being could be so self-aware. It chilled every bone in my body.
Ascanio whipped around. “What the hell is that?”
That was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
“Can you walk?” Robert asked.
Derek staggered up and swayed on his feet.
I grabbed Cuddles’s reins and walked her over. “On the donkey.”
“I can walk.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Robert snapped.
“Get on the donkey. We don’t have the time for this shit.” I glared at Desandra. “You, too.”
Desandra vomited again. The stench hit me. My stomach tried its hardest to empty itself. I choked down the bile. “Obey me, damn it. Now!”
Desandra staggered to Cuddles and climbed into the saddle. Robert picked Derek up as if the seven-foot werewolf in warrior form weighed nothing and lifted him into the saddle like he was a child. Cuddles flicked her ears, unperturbed by two werewolves on her back.
Behind us, the howl rose again: heart-wrenching, hungry, filled with despair. Closer this time.
The trash on both sides of us moved. Dozens of small creatures dashed past us, their glowing eyes wide. Oh crap.
Cuddles brayed and dashed up the street, carrying the two werewolves with her. Robert, Ascanio, and I chased her. Pain stabbed my side with each step, as if my cracked ribs had turned into spikes and pierced my insides. I clenched my teeth. Fuck it. I’d beaten a lot of pain before; I would beat this one, too.
Behind us, a forlorn cry shook the night. I turned to look over my shoulder.
A colossal creature moved through the trash canyon. It towered even with the garbage walls: giant, white, with fringes of coarse pale hair along the back of its enormous arms. Its pelvis sat low to the ground, its arms disproportionately long and armed with long, garden-shears-sized claws. Its bones pushed against its skin, its stomach so sunken in that if I had seen it in the wild, I’d think it was sick and starving. Its head was round and pale, sitting on a short neck. Its face might have had a distinct bone structure at some point, but all of its bones seemed to have melted into the skull to make room for its wide mouth. Its lips were missing and the rows of long sharp teeth in its mouth jutted, exposed. Its nose was little more than a bump with two holes, but its eyes, three inches wide and sunken into their orbits, looked completely human.
The moon broke through the clouds, its light illuminating the abomination. The creature’s white flesh glowed, translucent, and within it I saw its pale lungs and pink stomach, and, in the middle of this mess, cradled in the cage of its ribs, a darker, humanlike shape, as if the beast had swallowed a person whole and the corpse became its heart.
Goose pimples ran up my arms. I had seen one before in photographs but never in real life.
Ascanio shivered and shifted shape, so fast he was a blur.
“A wendigo,” Robert whispered next to me.
“Run!” I sprinted. “Ruuuun!”
We charged down the street. My cracked ribs set my side on fire. Speed was our best chance. There was no place to hide on Garbage Road. We didn’t have the numbers or the means to kill it, and every second we spent fighting would cost us time we didn’t have.
Legends said that wendigos haunted the winters on the Atlantic seaboard in the States and Canada, feeding on the Algonquian tribes. According to the Native American myths, those who reverted to cannibalism eventually transformed into a wendigo, doomed to a never-ending hunger for human flesh. I had never fought one, but I’d talked to a man who had. The wendigo couldn’t be reasoned with. Their hunger overrode all else. They would devour their prey even as they themselves were being cut apart, and the only way to kill one was to dismember it and burn the pieces. If you didn’t, it would regenerate in minutes, knitted together by magic.
A wendigo wouldn’t just show up in Atlanta on its own. We were too far south, and even if it had somehow arrived, once it turned, it would have gone on long eating sprees. We would’ve heard about it. This was Hugh’s import. A special present just for the Pack.
“Faster, faster!” Robert snarled.
I couldn’t go any faster. I glanced over my shoulder. The wendigo was closing the gap.
Ahead Cuddles stopped and brayed.
Ascanio dashed forward and whipped around. “It’s blocked!”
A massive industrial Dumpster lay on its side, blocking the path. At least eighteen feet long and filled to the brim with bricks and concrete. One of the Warren’s gangs must’ve set it here to trap passersby so it would be easier to rob them. We had to go around.
The wendigo opened its jaws and let out another scream. It was barely two hundred yards away.
I grabbed Cuddles’s reins and pulled her, trying to get her up the trash slope. Cuddles brayed and stopped dead.
Robert grabbed the reins next to me and pulled. “Come on.”
Derek slid off the saddle and screamed, “Stop, you moron!”
I whipped around.
Ascanio was running toward the wendigo, his knives out.
No, no, no, you stupid idiot!
My body had moved before my mind realized I was running after him.
The wendigo paused, scooped something from the trash, and shoveled it into its mouth. The huge teeth scissored and a piece of a wooden beam fell from its mouth, sheared clean.
Ascanio leaped and carved at the wendigo’s legs, his knives a whirlwind. The creature howled.
I sprinted so fast, I was almost flying.
Ascanio whirled around the wendigo’s legs like a dervish, slicing and cutting. Pink blood sprayed the trash piles. The wendigo’s left ankle gave out and he dropped to one knee.
Run faster, damn it, I had to run faster.
Ascanio backed up toward me to avoid being crushed. The wendigo’s hand snapped, shockingly fast, and closed about the boy. He jerked him up and smashed the bouda against the ground.
Oh no.
Robert shot past me and leaped onto the wendigo’s face, his claws slicing.
The wendigo jerked Ascanio up, oblivious to the wererat clawing its face, and smashed him against the ground again. Bone crunched. The wendigo raised its hand. It was blood-red. The claws raked Ascanio’s prone body. If I didn’t stop it now, it would kill him.
I stopped to inhale some air.
The creature bent down . . .
“Aarh!” Stop.
The power word tore from me in a rush of agony. The wendigo froze. Robert froze too, the claws of his left hand buried in the wendigo’s face, his right arm raised to claw at the creature’s human eye.
Four seconds. That was how long the spell would hold them.
A furry shape leaped from the right above me, sailing through the air, arms raised, a tomahawk in his right hand. Derek landed on the wendigo’s face and carved at its neck with his axe.
I shot forward and sliced the tendons on both hind legs.
Desandra swept Ascanio up and staggered back, stumbling.
The wendigo shook. Derek chopped into it again and again, casting off a pink mist of blood.
The spell broke. The wendigo crashed down and I carved its side open, thrusting through the ribs into the spongy lungs within. Regenerate that, you sonovabitch. Slayer thrust through thick muscle, and a wet pop announced the stomach rupturing. The reek of acid and sulfur washed over me. Blood wet my hands, gushing down the wendigo’s side.