Wings to the Kingdom (Eden Moore #2)

A crash course would have to suffice.

Weeeoooooo, weeeeoooo. Pop.

He swung the flat, round head slowly back and forth, waving it a few inches over the turf. The head hovered like a UFO, grazing the grass tips. It breezed to and fro, left to right. The machine talked as it swayed.

Pop pop pop. Vvzzzzz. Weeeoooo.

Weeeoooo.

Pete began having fun with it. He pretended it was music. Made some steps, keeping time.

After a few minutes, he homed in on something solid. That’s how it felt, anyway, and since his first trip with the detector was an experiment and a crash course all in one, he decided that further investigation was in order.

Lacking anything else to mark his target, he dropped the metal detector with the round end flat on the promising spot and returned to his bag. From inside he withdrew a small garden shovel, and then went back to the possible lucky spot. With one foot on the shovel’s metal edge, he pushed the blade into the ground—just an inch or two. He didn’t want to disturb anything important, and he didn’t know how far down the important stuff might lie. Small shovelfuls, then. An inch or two deep. A gentle toe-push forward.

But it was getting hard to see.

Pete left his little hole and went back to the bag, where he pulled out the flashlight and turned it on. Night hadn’t fallen hard yet, but the trees hanging over him cast a shadow, and the first fuzzings of a gray-white fog were beginning to pool near the ground.

With the help of the light, by the time it was perfectly dark Pete had unearthed two bottle caps, a dozen earthworms, and one shapeless, nubby lump that might have been an old piece of lead shot. Then again, it might have been anything.

Pete thought he should quit while he was ahead. He could always come back. He had plenty of time. The outing had not been altogether useless; he knew what to expect, now. He knew what to listen for. Next time, he could really get started.

Both of the bottle caps and the odd lump of lead went into his front pocket, but the worms he left where he found them—turning the earth back over them and patting it with the back of the shovel.

He straightened up and stuffed the shovel and detector back into his duffel bag, fiddling with the light as he heaved the pack onto his shoulders.

“Hmm,” he grunted.

More than darkness filled up the spaces between the trees. Suddenly and slowly, the dense stew of fog had arrived full force, swallowing the forest, the fields, and everything else. The light wasn’t going to be a whole lot of help.

But Pete knew what they said about how you don’t drive with headlights bright when it’s foggy. He aimed the beam towards the ground. That was enough to see his feet, and a patch all around them. It wasn’t particularly scary, being engulfed in the pale, humid air. If anything, he found it reassuring.

Given how little he could see, the odds of being spotted and stopped were next to nothing.

Not by any park ranger or cops, anyway.

His brain choked on that thought for a moment, and he almost ran headlong into a tree. At the last second he sidestepped it, and shook his head back and forth hard. Against his better judgment, he lifted the light and pointed it around him at chest level. Nothing but blank whiteness reflected back.

Through the thick screen Pete spied a couple more tree trunks all around him in every direction. He was only a few yards from the Dyer’s cabin. He ought to walk free of the trees any second.

But the next dash of stumbling steps only brought Pete into more trunks, and more fog, and more twiggy grass.

“Well,” he said aloud, mostly to hear his own voice. “Well. It’s okay anyhow.”

Any given direction gone far enough would bring him into either a clearing or suburbia, so being lost wasn’t such a concern. That’s what he told himself. That’s what kept his hands steady as they clenched the flashlight. The important thing was to not accidentally walk in circles.

He shifted his shoulders, and the pack creaked. Its contents clanked together.

Otherwise, there was no sound.

Even his breath came without a huff or a wheeze. Even his feet did not rustle. Only then did Pete realize he’d stopped walking. He was holding perfectly still, perfectly quiet. Flashlight pointed at his shoes. Listening for all he was worth.

He squeezed his eyes into a frown, squinting to make out anything at all beyond three feet away.

“This must be…” He’d prepared to make an observation to himself about the way blind people feel, but the internal warning system that had immobilized him forced his jaw to close.

He must have heard something and not realized it. He must have seen something and not noticed. Something must have yelled “danger” to his most primitive wiring, but Pete didn’t know what it was.

Other trespassers, possibly. Other vandals.

Or something else.

Pete tossed his head again, trying to shake a thought loose. Other people didn’t bother him much. If he met any other people, then that was okay, since anyone else out there at that time of night was likely to be as dishonest as Pete was, and would understand that nobody wanted a ruckus. But he didn’t like the idea of any something else.

Between the fog, the leafy canopy, and the late hour, Pete Buford now found himself in proper all-the-way dark.

“This sucks,” he wanted to say, but didn’t.

To his left, and up through the trees, he heard a leaf crunch.

All the baby-fine hairs on the back of Pete’s neck began to rise, and his arm hairs followed.

From near the same place, but maybe closer, a stick broke.

He was being watched. He knew it, as surely as he knew he wasn’t supposed to be on the battlefield after dark, and as surely as he knew that he would be going back to jail if anyone with a badge found him.

Through the wispy places where the white blanket thinned, he thought he saw a light—just for an instant. But it was gone as soon as he’d registered it.

Another cluster of leaves crumpled beneath something heavy. Definitely closer. Not Pete’s imagination.

There it was again, the telltale wink.

Not a ghost, Pete told himself. Not a ghost. Ghosts don’t have feet to break twigs. Ghosts don’t step hard enough to mash leaves. Definitely not a ghost. Definitely just some other person.

A louder crack popped through the silence. An acorn, or a bigger stick. Something small and crunchy giving way beneath something bigger and denser.

Another person who had a right to be there—somebody like a cop or a ranger—would have identified himself by now. He would have told him to come out with his hands up. Keeping this in mind, Pete did the bravest thing he’d ever done. With great deliberation, he swiveled his flashlight and pressed the lens into his chest, cutting off its illumination. A dull red ring marked where the circular head crushed against his shirt.

When he looked out again, he knew he was not alone.

A yellow-green gleam the color of a margarita peeked out through the low-lying cloud, or maybe there were two gleams. Maybe they were eyes. The matching lights disappeared in a slow contraction, then returned—reinforcing Pete’s initial impression.

Surely not, he thought.

When the blink was finished and the lights burned again, Pete was all the more certain that these were no eyes. They hovered too high off the ground. Any head that would host them must belong to a giant seven or eight feet tall. But somehow this assessment didn’t soothe Pete any.

A name was floating around in his skull, itching to surface. A label for this giant thing, invisible through the fog, rattled about in Pete’s chattering mouth.

There’s no such thing. There’s no such thing as Old Green Eyes.

The lights went out, or the eyes closed. The red circle on Pete’s chest was the only glow. He clutched the flashlight hard, jamming it against his rib cage—not quite brave enough to lift the light again and scan the trees.

An owl. Maybe.

A stick broke with a crackling snap. Farther to the left. Nearly behind him.

Owls don’t walk around on the ground, do they?

Leaves rustled, as if a low branch were being nudged aside.

He was being circled. Stalked.

“Who—who’s there?” He gulped. He cleared his throat and said it again, clearer. Louder. “Who’s there?”

The question echoed back to him, reflecting off the fog like his flashlight beam. Who’s there?

“This isn’t funny.” His voice made him bolder, hearing the normal sound disturbing the perfect quiet. “Hey. This isn’t funny.”

In his ears, his heart beat hard. The throb sounded deep, and slow, and heavy with bass. But that didn’t seem right—the steady pump and rhythmic, weighty pulse. Pete could feel his heart knocking against his sternum not far from the flashlight he still hugged close. His heart did not sound slow. His heart did not sound steady. It sounded like a wounded animal thrashing in a cage.

Still the thick pounding filled his ears.

Not mine. Not mine.

A scuffing noise, like a foot dragging through dirt, scratched itself out over to Pete’s right.

“You stay away from me!” Pete ordered, clutching the light against his chest. “You’d better do it! I’m armed!”

The dual glow burned again, closer still and very, very high for a pair of things that resembled eyes. One word came back in a hiss of an echo: armed. A rushing fuzz like TV static rose up hard and filled Pete’s ears.

A gust of wind crashed against Pete’s side, shocking him into motion. He nearly dropped the flashlight, but caught it and pointed it at the ground. One foot in front of the other, he began a terrified dash, but a tree older than his grandparents reared out of the cloud. He plowed into the trunk face-and shoulder-first.

Armed.

Dazed but afraid, Pete straightened himself up, ignored the wild blue pain in his shoulder, and spun the light around.

Armed.

The eyes soared forward, dipping down as if their owner was diving towards Pete’s head. He screeched and staggered over a tree root and around a trunk, struggling to put that trunk between himself and the incoming horror.

“I’m not armed, not armed!” he repeated, gasping as he ran. The way the word kept floating back to him—it made him wonder. “I’m not armed. I was lying! Leave me alone. God, let me go. Leave me alone!”