Because You Love to Hate Me(86)

Indigo ran her hand down her arm. She did have goose bumps—I could see them.

“Yeah, the Hush Woods are an eerie place—people are right to stay away.” The wind swooped in again as I said this.

Indigo pointed at my forearm, and now I had goose bumps, too. I never get goose bumps. When that coyote pack was hunting near my tent in Oregon and howling in my ears all night long? I was calm as the night sky. When I stumbled upon a baby grizzly outside Banff, Canada, and had to scrabble thirty feet up a tree to get away from its mother? My heart barely skipped a beat.

Indigo tilted her head, and her cheeks fell into a ray of dying sun. Her hair almost touched the ground, and it was straight and natural and soft-looking. I watched her for a second, kind of awed by her beauty.

She batted her eyes at the sunlight, shaded her face with her hand, and looked at me again. “Did they really hang three women here?”

“Yes. My great-great-great-grandfather Jean George hushed it up, which is why this part of the Rockies is called the Hush Woods. But it happened. Ask anyone.”

“Why were they hanged?”

Indigo hadn’t said much so far and I was doing all the talking, and that was fine by me. I really didn’t want to ruin the nice, quiet moment by talking about the Beast, but dodging her questions was just going to make her more curious in the end. That’s how girls work.

I hooked an elbow around one bent knee and ran a hand through my golden curls. “It was during the Colorado gold rush. A group of good-time gals from the saloons formed a league promoting the rights of women. They wanted to vote and own property and get equal treatment. They held rallies and fund-raisers and tried to get laws passed, but behind their backs everyone called them the Valois Coven.”

The sun was dipping down, and it was getting chilly. I didn’t want to shiver in front of this new girl, but I was half naked and it was taking some concentration to appear indifferent to the cold every time an autumn Hush breeze blew down my spine.

“Go on,” she said, blue eyes sparkling. “What happened next?”

She was really interested in what I was saying. Of course she was.

“Well, fighting for women’s rights in a gold rush town made of ninety percent men is not going to end well. And it didn’t. The good-time women in Broken Bridge joined the coven—I mean, the league—and their numbers grew. And then a boy went missing. He was only fourteen, son of the mayor. They found the kid’s body in the woods a few days later, and it looked like it had been chewed on, and not by the usual critters like coyotes and wolves and cougars, but something else. Something more . . . delicate, and precise. Something had crushed his lungs and ripped out his damn heart.”

Indigo flinched.

“Another boy went missing, and then a girl. Finally, Jean George Valois had the three leaders of the coven arrested. He called in a corrupt priest to officially declare them ‘Night Witches.’ The whole town came out. They threw rocks at the women until they fell to their knees. And then they strung them up and watched them hang for sorcery and murder. Mob mentality. It’s a terrible thing.”

Indigo nodded, eyes big, too moved by my gripping story to talk, no doubt. I am a natural-born storyteller—one of the many talents that run in my family.

“Of course, hanging the lead witches didn’t stop the bodies from turning up in this forest. There were two more after the first batch. But J. G. Valois kept it out of the papers by shooting the only journalist in the Rockies reckless enough to investigate.”

Indigo flinched again.

Did I feel a twinge then? A minuscule twinge of regret? Maybe. But I was proud of being a Valois. So what if my ancestor hanged some innocent women a long time ago to keep the peace? Who didn’t have skeletons in the family closet?

Indigo was still just watching me with her big blue eyes.

“To this day, bodies are still found once in a while, chewed up and mangled.” I sighed and rubbed my palm along my jaw. “A decade will pass, maybe two, and people start dying again.”

Here it came . . .

“A Beast lives in these woods, Indigo. A Beast that hunts and kills humans. Whenever it rains too much, or too little, or whenever a bad flu sweeps through, or a wolf pack starts skulking too close to town, or when the moon shines too full or too bright, they say the Hush Woods Beast is back again and on the prowl. The Bellerose twins claimed to have seen it a few weeks ago, and I laughed it off, but then . . . ”

Indigo screamed.

I jumped to my feet, grabbed my bow, spun around—

Nothing.

I nocked an arrow, slowed my breath . . .

Nothing.

Nothing but sky and trees and ferns and quiet.

Indigo slammed her hands over her ears and screamed again. The sound was sad and soft and chilling. I got goose bumps. Twice in one day.

I moved closer to her and kept my stance low, my bow ready. “What’s wrong? What did you see?”

She just shook her head.

“Indigo, why are you screaming?”

She shook her head again. “The . . . the wind picked up, and suddenly I thought I could hear those women, crying out as the noose went around their necks. I heard them pleading their innocence while the crowd screamed for their blood. Then I heard a crack, and another, and another . . . and then silence.”

She smashed her hands over her ears again. “Can’t you hear it? It’s faint, behind the wind and the leaves. It’s like having a song stuck in your head. A haunting, terrible song.”