Devoted(55)
“They’re coming!” she shouted at Shacket. “They’re coming, you asshole, you’re finished, they’re coming!”
Shacket heard them, too, and he ceased forcing his way into the room, maybe only for the moment, maybe permanently.
Megan stood ready, acid rising in her throat, vision pulsing with the violence of her heartbeat.
60
Shacket in a fury, so strong in his becoming that he believes he can kill them all, the two cops responding and the bitch and the boy. He starts boldly toward the front stairs, but cunning tamps his fury down into rage, tamps rage down into mere anger, and instead he pivots and hurries along the hallway to the back stairs, plunges down them two at a time.
The response to the alarm might involve more than two cops. Even if there are only two, they’ll have pistols and shotguns, and they can call for backup. He’s better than any of them, but a pack of wolves can defeat a single tiger.
Across the kitchen, through the back door, onto the porch. The tempest welcomes him, as does the night, and he leaps off the porch, over the steps, into the yard.
They will mount a search. He might not be able to go directly to his Dodge Demon on the forest-service road and flee the area before they begin stopping cars on the highway, looking for him. He must be indirect.
There are no deer, no dummy boy feeding them apple slices, no moonlight emanating from things instead of being reflected by them, just the rampaging wind with the first chill of autumn on its breath and all around the forest, a citadel from which the night arose and to which it will return at dawn. He races across the deepest part of the yard, toward the woods in the west.
They will come into the forest with bright Tac Lights, seeking his spoor. But in his becoming, with his increasing night vision and enhanced sense of smell, guided by an intuitive understanding of the wilderness that no other man has ever known, he will be fleet when they are fumbling, confident when they are uncertain, and he will leave them far behind, lose them, and send them home defeated.
Among the trees, both by sight and smell, he quickly finds the wandering paths that generations of deer have beaten through the underbrush, their route marked by the scent of their shed hair and musk and urine and fecal droppings. The winding trail leads through pine, cedar, fir, buckeye, soon ascending to an outcropping of rock smoothed by millennia of weather. Beyond the rock, the trail resumes and in time descends toward a stream, where the crisp night air is redolent of sedges, mosses, wild onions.
What once would have been an arduous trek does not for a moment test his resources. His muscles stretch and flex with ease. As he moves through the wilderness, he is lithe and limber as he’s been before only in the dreams of his youth. He fears nothing, neither bear nor mountain lion, and he senses that his passage spreads fear through the hearts of all the creatures that live here, paralyzes the small animals that might be his prey if he chose to take them.
Wind rages less here on the floor of the forest than in its higher boughs, shaking down dead needles and pine cones and birds’ nests, the primeval equivalent of confetti to celebrate his passage.
His sense of dominion, of sovereign authority over all that he surveys, might be expected to slake the anger that has burned in him through the previous day and now into another. Instead, the farther he gets from his humiliation at the Bookman house, the deeper into the gothic spires of cedars and pines, the more the postmidnight darkness infuses itself into his blood. Anger escalates once more into rage, rage into fury. Escape accomplished—or the need for it forgotten—he stalks the night in hope of repeating the experience that had been more exciting and more satisfying than anything else in his life, sniffing the air for the wealth of information it carries, licking the darkness as he remembers that singular taste, gnashing his teeth and wishing they were sharper.
Bella on the Wire
Dogs of the Mysterium needed less sleep than ordinary dogs. They even required less sleep than the average human being.
Bella rose hours before anyone else in the Montell family.
She considered herself something of a guard dog.
From time to time, she practiced baring her teeth before a mirror. She scared herself a little.
She preferred to sleep in one of her beds on the ground floor, to more quickly become aware of any smelly intruder forcing entry.
No intruder had ever breached the sanctity of the Montell home.
That didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.
Although Bella was an optimist like all of her kind, she also knew that the world was awash in evil.
She could remain an optimist because she understood that the world was made exclusively for the innocent.
Rooms to house the wicked weren’t included in the original architecture.
Eventually, the world would be remodeled to restore it to its original purpose.
Now, in the early hours of Thursday, she rose from her bed in the kitchen and went into the family room and stood on her hind feet and used the wall switch to turn on the lights.
She had been caught at this a few times. The family thought it was cute.
Larinda, the oldest of the children, had said, She’s afraid of the dark. I don’t blame her. Just look at the news!
Sam, the next to the oldest, said, Boys aren’t ever afraid of the dark, though he always slept with a night light aglow.
Dennis, younger than Sam, said, Maybe we have mice, and Bella needs light to catch them.