The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist #2)(40)

Steady, steady, steady, I told myself. He isn’t a monster. He’s a man. He’s the doctor’s friend.

I gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile.

His reaction was instantaneous. With an explosive leap—too fast for the eye to follow—he rocketed into me, his bony shoulder slamming into my chin with the force of a battering ram. I fell back, black stars blooming before my eyes. A hand clamped over my nose and mouth. The other hand ripped my shirtfront, shredding the material with its splintered nails, slicing open the tender skin beneath. The hot breath reeking of decay first, then the scaly, pustulant lips pressing against the flesh directly over my throbbing heart.

Then the teeth.

It is called Atcen . . . Djenu . . . Outiko . . . Vindiko, the monstrumologist had said. It has a dozen names in a dozen lands, and it is older than the hills, Will Henry.

I kicked my legs, and sucked uselessly upon the palm pressed hard against my open mouth. My head lay outside the tent, and my vision was clouded with the numberless stars sparking cold fire, shimmering like the crystalline ice inside the desecrated temple of Jonathan Hawk’s remains. Orion, the hunter. My favorite.

Blood roared in my ears. My chest ached. My heart leapt; it pushed against my ribs, as if anxious for Chanler to ravish it. His mouth worked upon my burning chest; I felt the teeth scouring my corruption, desperate for the pure center.

It feeds, and the more it feeds, the hungrier it becomes. It starves even as it gorges. It is the hunger that cannot be satisfied.

In the ruined sanctuary, the bleating of the sacrificial goat. In the sepulchral silence, the calling of my name.

In its icy grip there is no hope of rescue.

Someone was sobbing; it could not have been me. Chanler wept into the wounds he’ d created. He consumed flesh and tears.

In the deepest of pits, my mother combs out her hair. The light is golden. Her wrists are delicate. I remember the way she smelled.

One by one the stars begin to loose from heaven’s grip; they fall into the golden light where my mother sits.

How could one so frail be so strong? My hands flailed uselessly at my sides. My heels dug feebly in the earth. I could feel myself flowing into him.

I am almost there, Mother. Through him I come to you, borne by the ark of his kiss.

In the blasted wasteland we hold our heads, confounded. We lift our eyeless sockets to the incurious moon. On the high wind rides the voice that calls our name.

The golden light is warm. It rushes into my eyes and fills me, and I am no longer afraid.

The butt of the Winchester smashed into the base of Chanler’s skull. The spindly neck snapped back. Warthrop hit him again with all his force. He dropped the rifle, grabbed him by the shoulders, and hurled him off. Chanler leapt; the doctor met the lunge with his fist, slamming it into the side of his friend’s head. Chanler collapsed across my jerking legs, his face wearing an obscenely painted mask of mucus and blood.

The doctor knelt beside me; his dark eyes replaced the stars in my sight.

“Will Henry?” he murmured.

He bent to examine the wound. I heard him hiss sharply through his teeth.

“Deep, but not too deep,” he muttered. “The real danger is infection.”

“The real danger . . . ,” I echoed weakly.

With a thunderous wallop and a riot of riven canvas and shattered wood entangled with skeins of frozen rope, the tent blew apart, its remains hurtling into the trees, as if driven by a gale. The doctor fell over me—and a shadow fell over us. It blotted out the stars. Its stench engulfed the cosmos. Pale yellow shone its malevolent eye. I looked into that eye, and that eye looked back at me.

I have no memory of the next few moments. There was the yellow eye . . . and then trees, brambles, rotting logs, the perplexities of knotted vine and shallow half-frozen streams, the crackle of breaking snow, the dervish of the maddened stars, as we ran through the forest, I in my weakened state following in the footsteps stamped into the snow by the weight of two men—the doctor and the unconscious John Chanler, whom Warthrop had slung over his shoulder. We abandoned everything—rucksacks, canteens, medical kit—even the rifles. They were useless against the thing that pursued us.

Outiko is not hunted; Outiko hunts, the ogimaa had said. You do not call Outiko. Outiko calls you.

The wind no longer sang high in the trees. It screeched. It keened. It wailed. The ground shook beneath our feet. The forest echoed with a rhythmic pulse, an ear-shattering pounding, the primal beat of Gaia’s heart.

I fell farther and farther behind. I couldn’t see them anymore, just their footprints zigzagging through the primeval morass. Behind me, uprooted trees toppled with snow-muffled thunderclaps, the high-pitched snapping of their boughs pitiful accompaniment to the bawling wind and the teeth-rattling cannonade of the thing’s pursuit. My stride became the stumbling semi-falling of a drunk; I went to my knees. Then up for a few yards, only to fall again. Let it take me, I thought. You can’t outrun it. You can’t hide from it. Kneeling, I covered my head with my hands and waited for the Old One to take me.

“Get up! Get up, Will Henry, get up!”

The monstrumologist hauled me to my feet and shoved me forward.

“You fall again and I’ll kick you there,” he shouted. “Do you understand?”

I nodded—and collapsed anyway. With a howl of rage the doctor yanked me back up, wrapped his free arm around my waist, and pushed forward, Chanler dangling over one shoulder, his recalcitrant ward hanging beneath the other. Thus borne down on one side with the burden he’d chosen and on the other with the one he’d inherited, Pellinore Warthrop carried on through the desolation.