A Call of Vampires (A Shade of Vampire #51)(80)

“Need your glasses?” Angie offered with a smirk.

“Just pass me a long stick,” Lauren muttered, staring down.

Angie and I left the water and hunted around for a broken tree branch until I found one that seemed thick and long enough to be useful. I chucked it toward Lauren, and then Angie and I turned away from the water and began drying off.

Lauren’s shriek a minute later made us whip back around.

“What the—” She swore.

“What?” Angie and I called, staring at her as she splashed toward us, her eyes set on a patch of water about five feet away from the rock where we’d kept the bottles.

“I dislodged something!” she panted, still backing away from whatever it was she’d spotted in the water.

I was expecting it to be a leech, or a group of them, but then I saw it. Something was rising from the depths of the creek. A long, dark shadow at first, but as it broke the surface, it was… My eyes bugged. It took my brain several moments to put a name to what I saw.

“A wing?” I blurted.

It was a huge, black, shimmering thing—several feet across—with protruding veins and a startlingly pointed tip. It looked like… some kind of giant, prehistoric bat wing.

Angie was already wading into the water for a closer look, passing Lauren and grabbing the stick. By the time she reached the thing, Lauren had climbed out of the water and snatched up her glasses so she could see in detail past more than a few feet. Angie used the stick to guide the wing to the bank, and once it was close enough, I wrapped the edges of my towel around my hands to act as gloves and kneeled over the edge. I gingerly got a hold of the edge of the wing and, in spite of how offputtingly heavy it was, managed to haul it up onto the grass. We gathered around it, our mouths hanging open.

“It must’ve been stuck between some rocks on the riverbed,” Lauren breathed.

“What is it?” Angie mused, bending down. She cautiously poked a bare finger against its leathery surface, and it gave way at her touch. Her nose wrinkled. “Ew… Feels supple.”

I hesitated to ask why that might be. Was there some kind of rare bird species inhabiting this area that could have shed such a thing? If there was, I sure didn’t want to come face to face with it. Now that the thing was out of the water and I was looking closer, I could make out the reason the tip looked so sharp—there was a gnarly hook attached to it… It looked predatory.

Our gazes slowly raised, in unison, to the treetops above the creek, as if expecting to suddenly spot the owner of the wing perched among the branches and glaring down at us with red demon eyes.

Lauren gulped. “I, uh, think Mr. and Mrs. Churnley should see this.”

“I agree,” Angie said, her voice slightly hoarse. “If there is some kind of weird animal living around here, they ought to know.”

Our eyes returned to the wing, and silence reigned once again. Judging by my friends’ expressions, it wasn’t just me who found the idea of lugging this back with us through the woods, bringing it back home, creepy.

I cleared my throat, realizing we had wasted too much time already. Perhaps it was just my imagination, but the atmosphere suddenly seemed a lot darker than it had only a few minutes ago.

“Let’s get going,” I mumbled.

I slipped on my shorts and top over my dry-ish swimwear, and we hurried to pack up our things—Angie and Lauren not bothering to waste time drying off, just wrapping a towel around themselves. That left my towel and two of the other spare ones we’d brought with us to use in carrying the wing. We wrapped them around our hands to prevent direct contact. Angie lifted our bag over one shoulder, taking her turn to carry it, and we gingerly grabbed hold of the wing and started to tug it away from the creek.

I knew I was stupid for getting spooked over this—there was probably some perfectly rational explanation for what the wing was—but somehow I couldn’t shake the feeling of eyes watching us as we trekked our way back home.





Chapter 3


“What on earth?” Mrs. Churnley gasped.

We reached the house just as the last slivers of light were disappearing from the sky. Panting and sweating, we lugged the wing into the center of the kitchen/dining room and dropped it on the wooden floor. My hands were aching from having clutched the thing for so long; extra strain had been applied from squeezing tightly to keep the towel in place.

“Yeah… We really don’t know,” Angie said, wiping her brow with a towel.

Mr. and Mrs. Churnley rose from the table where they’d been sipping iced tea and hovered over the wing, their faces set in utter confusion.

“Any clue what it is?” I prompted.

“It looks like a giant bat wing!” Mr. Churnley exclaimed, voicing my initial impression of it, his eyes bugging with awe.

“Where did you get it?” Mrs. Churnley demanded, bending down and slowly reaching out to touch it.

“Lauren, uh, excavated it from the bottom of the creek,” Angie replied, the shadow of a smirk on her lips.

“My, my, my,” Mrs. Churnley blustered. “I have absolutely no idea what it could be, or why it would be sitting at the bottom of the water. It definitely does look like a wing, though.”

“I’ll go visit Mr. Doherty tomorrow,” Mr. Churnley said, making his way back to his seat, his eyes remaining glued to the specimen. “Bring him here to take a look at it.”