CHAPTER FOURTEEN
My mind eased into a slow consciousness. The heavy cloud that seemed to hang inside my skull didn’t dissipate but I found the strength to think past it. Where was I? There was nothing.
My eyes weren’t open. I had to tell myself to open them. With great pains, my left eye blinked open first, then my right. They focused on nothing, just the same blackness I had behind my eyelids. But as my thoughts became sharper, the blackness became shapes of things. It stung too much to take it all in at once but through brief glimpses I could make out a doorway, some shady things hanging from a wall.
Still, where was I?
Then it all came rushing back to me. Shan. The horse. Bird. Maximus. The fire. The coyote. The end.
Where was I?
My head snapped back and the world spun. I breathed in wildly. It smelled like hay and horses and some musty, herbaceous stuff. I couldn’t move my arms or legs.
The clouds inside my head moved and swirled into a spinning current of air. I fought against it and looked down at myself. I was sitting upright in a chair. My arms and legs were tied to it with leather straps. They didn’t cut into my skin but they were restrictive enough.
Something stirred to my left. I looked over and saw a figure standing in the doorway. There was very little light in the room but my night vision kicked slowly. It was a short figure. It didn’t move much. And near the top of it, yellow orbs glowed. I knew who it was.
Sarah.
And there was nothing I could do about it.
Sensing this, perhaps, she started walking towards me, step by step, her footfalls echoing throughout the room, which I guess was a tack room in one of the barns. I could make out a few western saddles on the walls, and when I thought about it, it felt like I was tied with reins.
“You’re awake,” she said. Her voice shot across the room yet seemed to come from nothing.
I didn’t have any snappy one-liners. I was frozen in fear. I could only process what was happening here and now. If I thought far enough ahead of what could happen….
“It’s good to be in present, Perry,” she said as if she were reading my thoughts. “Too many live in the future. If you keep living in the future, in what may be, then the future gets shorter every minute.”
She inched towards me until she was only a foot away. She leaned over and stared at me.
Though her face was hazy and grainy in the dark, she looked different. Her glasses were gone. And even though her eyes were the luminescent predatory shade of yellow, I could see she had nice, almond shaped eyes.
Wait, did this mean she could always see?
“In a way, I never was blind,” she said. As if things couldn’t get any creepier and disturbing, she was seriously reading my thoughts.
She straightened up and peered down at me. “Losing my sight was the best thing that ever happened to me. It opened my real eyes. The ones I had buried. The ones in your soul.”
She tapped her chest for emphasis.
“You see, I had forgotten the way. And it was almost too late. I lost all my faith in a reckless, false God that had turned its back on me. And why not? I turned my back on him. I lost my sight, but I gained so much more. I gained what I used to have. What I used to share with Shan. Something that, later, I was taught was ‘evil.’ But how could something that could bring my eyes back, be bad? No. It was everyone else who was bad.”
“Including your husband?” I said, the words coming out of my mouth like sludge. I wondered if that earthy smell that seemed lodged in my nostrils was peyote, or something else that was used to drug me earlier.
“Yes,” she replied matter-of-factly. “He was bad. He turned his back on the way and he made me do the same.”
You have free will, I thought, testing.
“I know I do,” she said without hesitation. “We all do. But to have someone you love turn…”
You turned.
“I did. For the better. If Will could just…see. He is the blind one. I can see everything.”
How long did you plan on torturing him this way? I thought.
“Until he gets it. You think this is all because of you? This was happening for years. These things take time.”
I really wanted to say something utterly cliché such as ‘you won’t get away with it’ but my humor wasn’t allowing it at the moment and anyway –
“I won’t be getting away with anything. There is nothing to get, except for Will.”
She started pacing back and forth, her hands behind her back. It almost seemed comical, like she was playing a part.
So many questions flooded through me. Aside from the big questions – as in what was going to happen to me, where was Dex, where was Bird and everyone else – I wanted to know how she thought she was going to resolve her own problem. As ridiculous as it seemed, I needed to know her logic. What did she want to achieve? Bird had said that some people got angry. Could it still be that simple? There was nothing simple about this situation. At all.
I braced in my seat, thinking she was going to answer that herself but she didn’t. She just kept pacing, mumbling to herself now. She was done reading my thoughts for the meantime.
I needed to think of a way out. Or maybe this was a decoy, for her to use my own thoughts against me when I thought she wasn’t listening.
She stopped pacing and faced me.
“Do you know why you are here?” she asked quietly.
I looked her in her animal eyes and shook my head.
“You think it’s because you’re…special’?”
I wanted to shrug but it seemed too insignificant for what was going on.
“You have a way about you. It’s useful. But you think too much. You want too much. Your ability to retract from reality is useful, but…we’d prefer someone who is a bit ‘all there.’”
I wasn’t all there? Maybe not at the moment when my thoughts not only seemed like abstract objects but were being read at the same time.
“He’ll be much easier,” she said. Her tone was tinged with menace.
He?
Without thinking, my arms and legs seized in their holds like I was some crazy attack dog held back by a choke chain.
“Yes,” she said. “We’ve been looking for someone else. Rudy gave Shan everything he needed. And Dex will give the same for me.”
How dare she even say his name? I wildly fought against the straps. What were they planning on doing to him? Was it too late?
The fear and anger that coursed through me was incomparable. If this were a movie, I would have broken through the straps in a Hulk-like manner and laid waste to Sarah. But this wasn’t a movie. No matter how angry I was, how badly I wanted to break free, I was stuck. I tried to move and squirm but the chair held on to me with the entire rein’s might. Sarah didn’t even flinch. She knew how futile it was.
“He won’t feel a thing,” she said, smiling. She kept grinning. Slowly, her teeth started to shift and elongate until they were too large for her mouth. They had become fangs and the rest of her face began to follow suit in a horrific display of shapeshifting.
First her jaw jutted out into a narrow point that strained her skin until it broke into bloody rivets, then her face began to spread wider, the sound of her jaw and cheekbones cracking into place filled the room, contorting and stretching. I could almost feel her skull splitting, the substantial sound of thick bone snapping. This was no scene out of Teen Wolf. This was the real thing. As real as it could be.
I looked down at her arms. I could see ripples of fur beneath her skin, like it was being caressed by underwater reeds. Soon the rippling stopped and the reeds started to poke through the skin; a demonic Chia Pet.
And soon, Sarah was a wolf, standing awkwardly. This was the end of me.
I closed my eyes.
Nothing.
I dared to peek.
It still stood there.
Then the fur began to retreat back into the arms and the canine jaw and head contracted quickly, as if it were sinking in itself.
But as Sarah began to revert back to human form, I realized it wasn’t going to be what I thought. Even from looking at the lower half of the transformation, I noticed she had on the same pants that I was wearing. And then it hit me.
I glanced up at her face. As the wolf disappeared and melded into human flesh, as the fur turned into ivory skin and as the canine eyes moved closer to each other, and the mane of hair was replaced by black, groomed waves, I realized…it was me.
I was staring at myself.
There was nothing else to think. There I was.
‘I’ smiled at myself.
“You’re in love with him,” the skinwalker me said, my voice exactly as it sounded in recordings.
She took a few steps back.
“If you’re lucky, he may get a chance to love you back. Before it’s too late.”
And with that, the skinwalker me waltzed out of the tack room and disappeared.
On the plus side, I was still alive. She could have killed me but she didn’t. And it meant that Dex was still alive. On the negative side, I was still tied up awaiting certain fate and Dex was about to meet his, most likely by the hands of someone he trusted the most.
No wonder Bird had said not to trust me. He knew. If only the old idiot had actually put enough energy to explain why, it would have made a whole world of fucking difference.
And then the spins came. Not just the spins that made my head wobble back and forth like I was having an out of body seizure, but the waves of paralysis that coursed through me. I went from feeling like I could rip out of the binds (which I knew I couldn’t) to feeling like I was frozen from the inside out.
Then the room started to move again in waves. But it wasn’t my head this time. It was figures and shapes coming out of the shadows. They were ghostly, transparent. Shapes in vaguely human forms. They hovered around me. I didn’t know if this was a product of going insane from the circumstances or the fact that I was drugged with peyote.
I looked at the objects. They hovered and quivered as if they were timed to an irregular heartbeat. Whether they were real or not, I didn’t have many options.
“Can you help me?” I pleaded, quietly at first, ashamed of my voice when there was no one around. I was talking to myself.
“Please? Can you help me? I need help.”
Tears pricked at my eyes and fell unaided onto my thighs. I started bawling. I couldn’t help it. I was so lost. I couldn’t do a single thing. I couldn’t even think.
I cried for a few minutes, feeling stupid and useless and a sorry excuse for a human being. The love of my life (OK, so there it was) was in grave danger and I wasn’t able to do a single thing about it.
I cried for a bit more until I noticed a change of energy in the room. I looked up through my tears. My vision was watery but I could see the figures were closer to me. I wasn’t afraid though. They didn’t mean me harm, whatever they were.
“Please,” I sobbed one last time, meaning every messy note I managed to get out.
I felt warmth around me which made me feel better. The warmth didn’t undo my straps though.
But they did make my fingers feel more agile. I started to strain my wrists behind my back, trying to loosen their casing. It worked in a sense. I worked out how I was tied to the chair. My hands were tied together but it seemed I was only connected to the chair on my right side.
I wondered if I had anything MacGyver-ish in my left pocket. I moved my hand around in that direction, still noting that the strange white figures were hovering nearby like blurbs on badly processed film.
I felt in my back pocket and my fingers reached something. It felt like a plastic bag. Was it a gum wrapper? Only MacGyver could make something out of a gum wrapper.
I coiled my fingers around it and brought it out of my back pocket. I leaned forward in my seat as far as I could, so that I was almost tipped forward and tried to look behind my shoulder. I couldn’t see what it was but it did feel like something soft and squishy had been encased in Saran Wrap.
I had no idea what it could be. And I had zero patience to slowly open the bag and figure out what it was. As soon as it was in my fingers, I ripped it apart.
I heard a faint puff of sound and felt a sprinkling of softness on my thumbs.
The white, weird figures suddenly retreated into the depths of the room and were gone. I didn’t know if that was a good sign considering they hadn’t done anything wrong but, regardless, the fact that I could the rip the bag made me realize I could reach the other hand with the other.
I concentrated as hard as I could, and even though it took a few wrong attempts, much like trying to do your hair in front of a mirror, I was finally able to get my left hand free from the straps.
I brought the hand forward and marveled at it. It was covered in a white powder, similar to talcum. I quickly made work of my other hand. I bent over and tried to untie my feet but the reins were too tight. I looked up at the wall and spied a saw hanging above the sink. I hopped awkwardly across the tack room floor, chair clanking loudly as I went. I hoped wherever Sarah and Shan were, they wouldn’t hear it.
I got the saw off of the wall and quickly put it to use against my leg binds. The supple leather snapped easily and soon I was free of the chair. I was still dizzy and disoriented but I was free and ready to go.
I stumbled across the room and into the barn. I heard the horses stirring nervously in their stalls as I ran past.
Seeing the cloudy moonlight at the end of the barn, I started sprinting for it. I entered the stormy air of outside. Nothing ever smelled as sweet. The wind was really blowing now and threw my hair behind me.
I narrowed my eyes against the flying grit and sand and tried to piece together where Dex could be. He went into the house with the sheriff, the last I saw.
They couldn’t obliterate everyone, could they? The house was the first place I would have to go.
I scampered across the dry paddock towards the Lancaster’s house, which still had the lights on. As I neared, I saw that all the cars had gone. That wasn’t a good sign.
I slowed a bit and tried to take everything into account as much as I could.
If everyone was gone, that probably meant that they were alive. Maybe taking Bird to the hospital? Would they leave without Dex though? They couldn’t, Bird wouldn’t let that happen. Unless Bird was so out of it…
I stopped a hundred yards from the house and instinctively crouched down, hiding myself.
So where was Dex? I didn’t have the luxury to examine all my options. All I knew was that –
A flashlight.
Off in the juniper woods, near the other barn, there was a light bobbing in the trees. It seemed to be searching.
I held my breath and listened. I didn’t hear anything. I started running towards the light as quickly as I could while keeping as low to the ground as possible. Given my height, it wasn’t that hard.
I was close to where the sheep paddock ended and the trees began, when I heard it. I paused.
It was me. It was my voice coming from where the flashlight was.
“Dex, help me,” it said.
I opened my mouth to scream “No!” but nothing came out. Instead, I heard my disembodied voice again coming from the trees.
“Dex, help me!” it said again, louder.
And to my horror, I heard Dex’s gruff rely, “Perry? Where are you?!”
This could not be happening. I started booking towards the trees at full throttle now, not bothering to hide myself anymore.
I entered the forest and came crashing through. I got a few yards in when my feet caught on tangled undergrowth and I went flying onto the ground. My jaw clanked against the ground and I bit my lip on impact. The metallic taste of blood filled my mouth.
Footsteps.