Monsters (Ashes Trilogy #3)

Only then, somehow, the movie shifted in his mind. Instead of a crow, now Tom had a boy by the neck and the boy was bucking and fighting, but Tom was riding him, strangling him, watching the boy’s face turn purple, killing Chris Prentiss for what he’d done. This vision was so real, Tom could feel the frantic scratch and cut of Chris’s nails over his hands.

You can’t get away, Chris; I won’t let you go. I’m strong and I will kill you, I will crush you, I will make you pay for what you did to her . . .

A deep moan worked its way from Tom’s chest. God, killing Chris would feel good, it would feel so good, and, Jesus, he wanted that. This need to kill something was the claw of something new, scraping the cage of Tom’s ribs, raging to be born.

But I can’t let you out. Untangling his mind from the vision made the sweat pop on his upper lip. Got to hang on. Pressing a trembling hand to his chest, Tom felt for the two tags hanging from a beaded chain around his neck. One tag was Jed’s from Vietnam; the other had belonged to his son, Michael, who’d died in Iraq. Tom gripped the dog tags the way his grandmother used to clutch a rosary. Got to stop this. Can’t let myself get lost in this thing.

His tongue ached from where his teeth had sawed through flesh. He spat a coin of blood, watched it melt into snow stenciled in irregular stars from the birds. A lot of animals up this way, actually. His eyes drifted to some elongated, five-fingered splays that had to be raccoons, and then to a single deep trough scalloped from snow. Wolves, probably. They’d be heavy enough, and most packs went single file.

Crows, wolves, raccoons scavenging a meal. He swallowed against the rusty tang of his blood, then spat again. A lot of animals. His gaze skated over a smaller set of prints that looked almost like a dog’s. Foxes have been busy, too. No wonder. All these bodies, the lake was practically a . . .

“A buffet,” he whispered, and at that, his thoughts stuttered to a halt because he’d suddenly realized what kind of prints weren’t there.

Wait a minute. Blowing the mine was like kicking over an anthill. While a whole lot of Chuckies had died, the rest had dispersed, presumably heading north toward Rule. There’d been no activity at the mine since. But he’d been in a war zone. Survivors always came back to salvage what they could. Yet his were the only human prints around the lake—which made no sense. All this free food and nothing to stop new Chuckies from moving in, or the old ones from drifting back. Except no one had.

So where the hell are they?

Hoisting himself onto a flat-topped boulder, he glassed the shore right and left. No human prints at all, that he could see. He turned his gaze directly west. The sun was already midway to the horizon, its thin light beginning to curdle to the color of a fresh blood clot. His eyes touched first the debris-littered flat before shifting to the ruined trees. The night the mine blew, Chuckies had come from that direction. In his mind, he replayed what he’d seen as the mine deteriorated beneath their feet: those boys, black as ants, lurching across the snowpack. Five came on foot, but two had been on skis. Eventually, the Chuckies had opened fire and driven him, Luke, and Weller from the rise. But what Tom hadn’t given a lot of thought to was why those boys were headed this way in the first place. Why run toward a disaster? More to the point, what was up here that was nowhere else?

“Alex?” This was right; he could taste the tingle, feel the thrill work through his veins. “Jesus. You weren’t interested in us. You came for Alex.” That had to be it. Hundreds of tasty meals to choose from, but they came for Alex and only her. But how did they know? The whistle was his first clue, but he’d heard it after spotting the Chuckies, so it could only be . . .

“Smell?” The word came on a breath cloud. “You smelled her? Oh my God.” Glassing the flat, he jumped his gaze over the snow, sweeping left to right, following the natural lie of the land and that flood of rubble. “You were on skis. You came up the rise. You came right for her; you didn’t deviate, you didn’t hesitate. So if you made it, if you were in time, if you were prepared because you knew where she was . . .” He was shaking, his thoughts tumbling like those numbered balls they used for a Powerball jackpot. “You go down, you get her, and then you book, fast as you can. Just point your skis, get yourself in the fall line, and bomb down—”

The words evaporated on his tongue as his gaze snagged on something spindly jutting from a small mountain of debris. A branch? No. Too straight. What was that?

“Oh God, oh God, oh please, please,” he sang as he slowly feathered the focus. “Please, please, puh . . .” Something inarticulate, breathless, not quite a shout, jumped from his mouth. His heart gave a sudden hard knock he felt in his teeth. “Jesus,” he gasped. “Oh Jesus.”

Because there, fixed in the binocular’s sights, was the black handle and wrist strap of a ski pole.

23

In winter, when someone died, there were three choices. You could bury the body, burn it, or store it. Burial was preferred; it was some religious thing for Hannah and Isaac. For Ellie, it was like, okay, whatever. But without backhoes, there was no way to dig deep enough for a proper grave until spring. A shallow grave was like an invitation to scavengers and—no one would say it, but they all thought it—maybe even the people-eaters, if they got desperate. Or if the people-eaters were like crows and would eat anything.

Cremation was a no-go. Isaac just wouldn’t allow it. That religion thing again, or maybe it was his and Hannah’s hex-y magic stuff . . . Ellie didn’t know. The only bodies they ever burned were the peopleeaters. But they hadn’t crisped a single one since before Christmas because it was just too cold and Jayden thought the people-eaters had all gone south where the pickings were better.

Which left storage: a place where, in the deep freeze of the Upper Peninsula, bodies couldn’t, wouldn’t rot. No decay, no smell, no scavengers.

Yet now, at the death house, there were crows. But I don’t understand. Stunned, Ellie turned a cautious circle, sweeping her gaze from the ranks of crows on the death house’s roof to the canopy overhead. The majority of trees here were hardwoods and barren of leaves, their bare branches lacing together in skeletal fingers. Some branches now were so weighed down with birds they bowed. Where did they all come from? Why? The sound those crows made was almost mechanical, like thousands of scissors snapping open and shut. Yet the birds didn’t seem dangerous. Mina would’ve growled or barked or something. But Mina wasn’t worried. She was only . . . interested.

“Well, I’m not,” she said to the dog. This was way spooky. “We should go back. We should tell Jayden . . .” What? Gee, there were all these crows at the death house, and she’d been too pee-in-her-pants freaked out to take a look?

Alex wouldn’t wuss out. She tightened her grip on her Savage. Tom would go.

“All right, come on, Mina. We can do this.” Heart thumping, she eased down the path as her dog matched her step for step. Ahead, the birds milled, ebbing and flowing around the building like the waves of a ceaseless black sea. At the edge, where the snow effectively ran out and the crows began, she paused, then slid a boot forward six inches. The crows swirled away. She took another slow, sliding step and then another, as the birds first parted, then closed ranks after she and Mina passed. The effect was eerie, like skating through a pool of black mercury.

At the sliders, she paused. The doors weren’t locked. Isaac and Hannah always said the hex signs were protection enough. But to get in meant that Ellie would have to use both hands, and she wasn’t wild about letting go of her rifle.

“Don’t let anything bad happen, girl,” she said to Mina. Hooking the Savage’s strap over her right shoulder, Ellie wrapped her hands around the wrought iron handle and heaved. The door let out a grudging squall, its iron wheels grating against metal; the death house exhaled icy air that smelled of burlap and pine tar. Nose crinkling against the strong odor of resin, Ellie glanced up to check the birds. In return, the crows cocked their heads, turning the black pearls of their

mo ns ters eyes to Ellie as if for a better look. Suddenly afraid to stare at them for too long, she quickly dropped her gaze and stepped from the ramp into the building before she remembered, too late, that all the birds had to do now was surge in after her. But they didn’t. Clacking and cawing, the crows rustled and bunched right up to the threshold. Yet not a single bird took wing or hopped to catch up and follow her in. Still, she slid the door closed, just to be on the safe side.

She waited a moment as her eyes adjusted to the sudden gloom. The interior was huge, almost a cave with those stone walls soaring to a ceiling of exposed beams of the same dark wood as the slider. Directly ahead and in the center were wooden pallets, stacked three deep and three high, the kind farmers normally used for hay.

Except now, they held bodies. Ellie knew the routine. After a corpse was washed and rubbed with spice-scented oil, it was wrapped in a clean white sheet. Hannah always placed a small spell bag on the chest before sewing the body into burlap, on which she also painted a purple, five-pointed star. The corpse was then laid so the head, supported by a small pillow, faced east. The direction was important—some blah-blah about heaven and resurrection—but Ellie had tuned out. Her dad died waaay east of here and came home in the equivalent of a really tiny shoebox. She sure didn’t see him coming back to life and walking through the door anytime soon. Okay, it was snarky. Still.

After the ruckus outside, the death house was so quiet Ellie heard her own liquid swallow. Far as she knew, nothing wrong here. Well, if you didn’t count the bodies. Of the dead kids there, two were mauled by people-eaters. But that left five who’d been fed poison because they’d begun to turn. The next-to-last body was the old man with Chris, the one whose neck had been broken by that swinging mace.

“So, now what?” she whispered, because it didn’t seem right to talk any louder. At the sound of her voice, Mina anxiously shifted her weight and then took a few hesitant steps toward the pallets. Her nails ticked on stone. Ellie thought maybe she should call Mina back but then thought, Wait. See what she does.