Freeks(77)

Yet I couldn’t help but feel like all this confidence in me might be misplaced. I didn’t feel powerful or capable or even really understand what was being asked of me.

“Mara, I see the worry on your face.” Mom gently took the crossbow from me and set it on the table, along with the bolts. “You can do these things, because you must.”

She put her hands on my face, both in a gesture of comfort and to force me to look her in the eyes. “Something very bad is coming for us, and you must be strong to survive. You are strong, qamari, and you will not waver.”

I swallowed hard, and the record began to skip, stuck on the line don’t fear the reaper. My stomach turned sour, twisting bitterly inside me.

“What?” Mom asked, her eyes narrowing. “What do you feel?”

I shook my head. “I don’t … I don’t know.”

“You sense it,” she insisted, and I could feel the acidic churning of my stomach growing. She dropped her hands from my face and looked to the window. “It’s here, isn’t it?”

No sooner had she said that then I heard Gideon let out a battle cry.





47. demonology

I grabbed the satchel and dropped the strap across my chest, and then I picked up the crossbow. I didn’t rush out—not yet because I didn’t know what I’d be running into—so I stopped at the door to the Winnebago and looked out at the campsite.

Hutch stood on the steps of his own camper, brandishing a sword, while Luka attempted to pull him back inside. I couldn’t see Gideon, not at first, but then Roxie lit up the sky with a fireball, burning white hot inside her hands.

For a split second, I saw it—the creature that had been stalking the camp. The fire seemed to warp around it, reminding me of a documentary I’d once seen about black holes. The light was pulled into it, and it was the bending that gave it its shape. The absence of light, like a shadow come alive—blurred edges and formless, but not.

It was like it had a cloak of nothingness camouflaging it. I knew that it had substance. I had the seen the talons of its feet. I knew it was more than a shadow—it was something real that could be killed.

“I’ll kill you, you bloody bastard!” Gideon roared, and he fired the cursed Luger at the demon shadow, but then it was on the move.

There was a blur of black in the darkness, and the trees of the swamp rustled and moved. Gideon ran after it, into the swamp, and I knew that if he went alone, we’d never see him again.

I threw open the camper door and ran out after him. My mom was screaming my name, and I suspected that she was giving chase, but I didn’t slow. If I waited any longer, any signs of the creature—and Gideon—might be gone.

Into the forest I plunged, chasing after shadows in the dark. The moon was hidden behind clouds, giving me nothing to guide my path. The only thing I had was the twisting pain in my stomach—the pain seemed to intensify the closer I got, so I followed the hurt and ignored the branches scraping at my legs and arms, as if grabbing at me.

“Enough!” Gideon shouted, and his voice echoed through the trees, so I couldn’t tell if he was a few feet to my left or twenty feet to my right, or maybe somewhere else entirely. “Leave us be! I will not let you hurt my people, not anymore!”

The gun went off three times, loud blasts shattering the night, and I put my hands over my ears. When I removed them, there was nothing. Even the wind through the trees had fallen silent.

Mara! a voice shouted, coming from within my head and all around me. I turned to look for the source of the sound, and then I saw her.

Blossom. Her frizzy brown hair appeared nearly translucent, but I could still make out the spattering of freckles underneath her eyes.

You need to get out of here. Blossom’s voice was in my head, but her mouth wasn’t moving. She only stared at me with wide dark eyes. If you want to live, you need to run. NOW.

So I did. I burst forward, pushing back through the trees in the direction I thought was the camp, but I had no sense of anything. Being in a strange forest in the middle of the night was disorienting, but I had to keep running as fast as I could.

Behind me, the branches and trees crunched and snapped as the creature tore through them. I didn’t scream—there was no one who could come to help me, and I didn’t want my mom or Roxie rushing in after me and getting themselves killed. The only thing I could do was run faster.

Then the ground gave way beneath me. The tall grass and thick forest made it hard for me to see where I was going, and it was already too late when I felt my foot squelching down into the dense mud of the surrounding swamp.

I fell forward roughly and lost my grip on the crossbow. It slid out of my grasp, somewhere in the underbrush, and I didn’t have time to search for it. I had to climb to higher ground, but the mud was swallowing my legs.

The creature was close enough that I could smell the sulfur on its breath. I could hear the beast behind me—it made a strange high-pitched guttural sound, like a demonic squeal of delight.

Grabbing a broken branch, I turned around to face the creature as it tore through the trees toward me. I brandished the branch like a weapon. If I was going down, I was going down swinging.





48. death

I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there, standing right in front of me. Its breath felt hot on my skin, and it would only be a few seconds before it tore into me.