“I’ve threatened worse.”
“Worse how?”
“Just worse.”
She sighed. “Fine. Don’t elaborate. How are we supposed to find him, anyway? What if he isn’t in Springton anymore?”
“We’ll find him,” said Milo. “We’re on the blackroads now.”
“The what?”
“Guy I knew once called them the blackroads – roads connecting points of darkness, criss-crossing America. Stay on the blackroads and you’ll eventually meet every unholy horror the country has to offer. It’s a network. Some people call it the Dark Highway, or the Demon Road. It’s never the same route twice and there are no maps to guide the way.”
“Then how do you know we’re on it?”
“I’ve travelled it before. So has this car. You get the feeling for it.”
Amber looked at him for a quiet moment. “Sometimes I think you just make stuff up.”
MILO PULLED THE CHARGER up to a pump at a truck stop and Amber was allowed out. She stepped on to the forecourt and stretched, arching her spine and feeling it crack. The afternoon wasn’t much cooler than the afternoons she’d endured in Orlando. It was hot and the sun was bright and the air was laden with moisture. A truck roared by on the road, rustling the trees on the far side and kicking up mini-tornadoes of dust that danced around Amber’s bare calves.
The place was pretty run-down. Desperate blades of grass surged from cracks in the ground like drowning men in a sea of concrete. A long building with a sagging roof and dirty windows identified itself as a Family Restaurant. The letter E was missing from the sign outside, turning EAT HERE into EAT HER. Amber turned her back on it.
Beyond the fence there was corn, miles of it, and a clump of sorry-looking forest behind the truck stop itself. An old Coca-Cola billboard was rusting and peeling on a metal strut.
“Hey,” said Milo, and she turned and he tossed her the baseball cap over the roof of the car. “Head down at all times. Just because you can’t see a CCTV camera doesn’t mean it can’t see you.”
She pulled the cap low. “You really think my parents would be able to find me here? In Florida, okay, they probably have cops and officials doing whatever they want, but we’re not in Florida anymore.”
“Your folks have been around for over a hundred years,” Milo said, sliding the nozzle in. “Let’s not underestimate how far their reach spreads.”
The gas started pumping and Amber headed round the side of the station, following the sign for the restroom. The clerk, a bored-looking guy in his fifties, didn’t even glance up as she passed his window.
The restroom was empty and relatively clean. The early evening sun came in through the three windows up near the ceiling. Amber chose the only cubicle with a toilet seat, and when she was done she washed her hands in the sink. The mirror was dirty but intact, and she took off her cap and looked at her reflection. Butterflies fluttered deep in her belly.
You just decide you want to shift, and you shift, Imelda had said. Amber decided she wanted to shift, but her body ignored her. She tried again. She tried to remember how it had happened in Imelda’s apartment, how it had happened when she’d bitten that finger off, but she couldn’t even come close to replicating those feelings.
Did she even want to? What if she shifted and she couldn’t shift back? What if she became stuck as a demon, unable to revert? No matter how much she tried to cover up, someone was bound to see, and then word would reach her parents and they’d come after her, the predators after their prey.
Amber looked into her own eyes. She hated being the prey. She commanded her body to change and this time it obeyed.
The pain blossomed and she cried out, and even as she was doing so she was watching her reflection. Her skin darkened to a glorious red in the time it would have taken her to blush. Her bones creaked and throbbed and her body lengthened – her legs, her torso, her arms. Her feet jammed tight in her sneakers. She was suddenly tall, suddenly slim. Her face was longer, her jawline defined, her cheekbones raised and sharpened. It was still her face, but her features were altered. Her lips were plumper. Her brown hair was black now, and longer, the tangles straightened.
Dizziness, an astonishing wave of vertigo, nearly took her to the ground. She gripped the edge of the sink, kept herself standing, unable and unwilling to look away from the beautiful demon in the mirror.
And she was beautiful. Her skin, though red, was flawless. Her teeth – pointed now, and sharp like fangs – were white and straight. Her raised cheekbones changed everything. Only her eyes had stayed the same. She was glad about that.
And, of course, there were her horns. Black horns, like ribbed ebony, curling out from her forehead and sweeping back. Breathtaking to behold.
Although her shorts looked shorter on her longer legs, they were now baggier, and threatened to slip off her hips. She pulled the neckline of her T-shirt to either side, revealing hard black scales that travelled across her shoulders.
She looked at her hands. They were small no more. They were good hands, strong hands, not small and weak like they had always been. Her fingernails were black, but there was something else, an itch in her fingertips. She curled her right hand and her nails lengthened to claws so suddenly it actually frightened her. She gripped her right wrist with her other hand, not trusting this new and alien appendage not to suddenly attack her. She concentrated, and the claws retracted at her command.
“Awesome,” she whispered. This was how it was meant to feel, she was sure. Shifting was supposed to make her feel strong, and powerful, and confident. Not scared, not like she’d been in Imelda’s apartment. Not panicked, like she’d been when she’d smashed that boy’s jaw.
Brandon, she reminded herself. His name was Brandon.
Then the door opened, and a broad woman in a trucker’s cap barged in, making it halfway to the cubicles before she even noticed there was somebody else there.
Frozen, they looked at each other with wide eyes. Then the trucker spun on her heel. Spun to flee. Spun to call the cops. And with the cops would come her parents.
“No, wait!” Amber said, lunging after her. She caught the woman before she reached the door, pushed her a little harder than she’d intended. The trucker slammed into the wall.
“Sorry,” said Amber, “sorry, but—”
The trucker took something from her belt. A clasp knife. She flicked it open and Amber held up her hands.
“No, wait, I’m sorry, please—”
But the trucker was too scared, too adrenalised, to listen. She rushed forward and Amber backpedalled, losing track of the knife. Immediately, she felt her skin tighten. Her hip hit the sink and the trucker stabbed her right in the belly.
Amber gasped, more from shock than pain. She expected the pain to follow. The trucker stabbed again, and again.
Still nothing.
Amber got her hand up, dug her fingertips into the trucker’s face, and forced her back. Her other hand grabbed the woman’s knife hand, gripping the wrist, keeping the blade away from her. It suddenly became clear to Amber that all she had was strength. She had no idea what to do next.
The trucker was more streetwise. She slammed her free arm on to Amber’s elbow and punched her. It wasn’t a particularly strong punch – she was obviously right-handed and she’d been forced to punch with her left – but her fist still connected with Amber’s nose and tears still came to Amber’s eyes. Anger flared, and she pulled the trucker in and threw a punch of her own. Her fist, which had grown black scales across the knuckles, collided with the trucker’s jaw and sent her spinning into the far wall. The knife fell as the trucker hit the hand-dryer, its roar filling the room.
The trucker regained her balance, her eyes focusing once more. Amber stood across from her, only dimly aware that she was snarling. The woman broke for the door.
“I said don’t!” Amber shouted. The trucker got to the handle and was pulling the door open when Amber reached her. She got a hand to the woman’s he
ad and bounced it off the door, slamming it closed. Amber pulled her back like the trucker weighed no more than a child, and threw her against the cubicle wall. It caved in under her weight and the woman crumpled to the floor. The hand-dryer deactivated.
Amber stood over the trucker to make sure she wasn’t getting up. After a moment, Amber frowned, and knelt by her. She felt for a pulse. Couldn’t find one. Alarmed, she rolled the woman on to her back, only then noticing the steady rise and fall of her chest. Amber checked the pulse again, searching for a few seconds until she found it.
She stood, and lifted her shirt as she turned to the mirror. Her belly was covered in those black scales, like armour. Even as she watched, though, they were retracting.
The trucker moaned.
Amber bolted into the sunlight. A car passed on the road and she dropped to her knees behind a pallet of chopped wood wrapped in plastic. When the car was gone, she was up, running bent over, making for the shelter of a parked truck, then the trees beyond.
She plunged into the shade and kept going, the trees quickly becoming a wood. Her horns bounced off a few low-lying branches and she ducked her head as she continued, following the sounds of water. She walked for a minute or two, and then light dazzled her eyes. For a heart-stopping moment, she thought the Shining Demon had come for her, but it was only the sun glinting off the surface of a slow-moving river.
Amber looked back. Listened. No sounds of pursuit. No cries of alarm.
She lifted her T-shirt again. The black scales were gone. Her belly was flat, toned, and uninjured.
She pulled off her clothes, left them in a pile and examined herself. Her arms, though red, were devoid of any black scales. She could see her muscles now, rolling beneath her skin. She held her right arm up and curled it, popped her bicep, and laughed out loud. She was strong. She was seriously strong. She had a strength that belied even her new and impressive muscles.
When she’d punched the trucker, scales had grown up over her knuckles. That time, their growth had been natural, instinctive. This time, she closed her fist and concentrated. The skin around her knuckles tightened, and black scales pushed their way, painlessly, to the surface. She focused on her hand now, and felt the skin tighten and watched the scales spread.
She held both hands out. Black scales grew, covering her hands and forearms. She looked down at herself. Her feet were now encased in them. Then her legs. Her belly and her chest. Her neck. Amber took a breath and closed her eyes and felt her face tighten, and the scales grew to cover her head.
She opened her eyes. Her eyelids hadn’t grown scales, and neither, thankfully, had her nostrils or mouth – though when she tried opening her mouth wide she found she couldn’t. She tapped her fingers between her horns and along her scalp, feeling the scales that had flattened her hair.
She walked to the river and gazed at her own rippling image.
Clad in her armour, she smiled.
She turned her fingers into claws, taking a moment to appreciate just how big, and how monstrous, her normally small hands had become. Then she went to the nearest tree, hesitated, and drew her fingernails across the trunk, leaving four deep grooves in her wake.
She did it again, faster this time. Then again. And then she slashed at the tree, carving out narrow chunks. If she could do that to a tree, what could she do to a person?
The thought disturbed her, threatened to dim her smile. But she shook it off, stepped back and leaped, her hands digging into the tree, and she climbed like she was born to do it. The tree swayed outwards and she went with it, until she was hanging over the river. Practically upside down. Amber laughed, exhilarated. Even her feet seemed to be digging in. Then she made the mistake of glancing at them.
Her feet were misshapen things, her toes as long as her new fingers, and every one of them curled around the tree.
The shock, the panic, the idea that she had deformed herself beyond repair, shot through her and her feet returned to normal and so did her hands. She fell, crying out, twisting in mid-air and then landing in the water.
The scales retracted as soon as she was submerged. When she’d regained her wits, she powered to the surface, already calming. She trod water for a bit, waiting for her heart to stop hammering so hard, then lengthened out and swam for the far side, marvelling at how effortless it all was. A few strokes and she was there. She turned, swam underwater the whole way back. Her fingers brushed silt along the riverbed.
Amber spent another few minutes just swimming. Skinny-dipping. She laughed as she did the backstroke. She’d never been skinny-dipping in her life. She’d never thought she’d ever get the chance. She never thought she’d ever have the confidence. And now here she was, in all her red splendour, in a river somewhere in Georgia. Were they still in Georgia? She wasn’t even sure. That just made her laugh more.
The laugh died when she got the feeling that she was being watched.
She looked around. She could see no one in the woods on either side of the river, but the feeling didn’t go away. She swam back, hesitating before pulling herself out of the water, then moved up on to the grassy bank towards her clothes.
She was halfway up when she saw the face staring at her through the foliage.
AMBER DARTED BEHIND A tree, as much to hide her nakedness as her black horns. Behind cover, she cursed silently, and immediately started looking around for an escape route. There was no way she could get away without being seen. Her only hope was that the person, whoever it was, would be freaked out enough to run away, but not freaked out enough to report the sighting.
She saw the face again in her mind. Shaggy hair – light brown. A boy. No, a young man. Maybe eighteen or nineteen.
“Hello?”
Amber stiffened.
“Hello? Miss?”
She shut her eyes and didn’t reply. Silence, she decided, was her best option at this point.
“I know you’re there,” the boy said. He had an accent. English? Scottish? “I saw you run behind the tree. You know I saw you. I don’t get why you’re pretending you’re not there.”
No. Irish. That was it.
“This is getting a little bit silly,” he continued. “This is like when my little cousins play hide-and-seek and they close their eyes because they think that makes them invisible. You … You’re not closing your eyes, are you?”
Amber hesitated, then opened her eyes, and cursed silently again.
“I didn’t mean to peek,” he said. “My name’s Glen. Glen Morrison. I was just passing, and … Well, no, that’s not strictly true. Sorry, I don’t want to start off on a lie, you know? The truth is, I’ve been sleeping here for the past few nights. In these woods. I’m temporarily between abodes, and my financial situation is not what one might call robust. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, though. I’m not lazy. I didn’t come over to your country to scam the system or anything like that. I do have prospects. Well, I had prospects. It’s a very long story, and I wouldn’t want to trouble you with—”
“Glen,” Amber said.
There was a pause, and then, “You’re talking!”
“I am,” said Amber. “Glen, I’m naked.”
She could practically hear him nod. “I noticed. I mean, oh God, I mean I couldn’t help but notice that you were … that you had no … that you were, uh … oh man, what’s the word?”
“Naked,” Amber prompted.
“Yes, thank you. Naked. You are naked, yes.”
“And since I’m naked, Glen, I find having a conversation with a complete stranger a little weird. You know?”
“Oh, I do,” Glen said, with an assurance that made it sound like it was a situation he found himself in regularly.
“I’m not sure that you do, Glen.”
“Probably not,” he admitted. “But, if it makes you feel any better, you don’t have anything to feel embarrassed about.”
“You’re not helping, Glen.”
“Sorry. I like your horns, though. Is that rude? Can I say
that?”
“Glen … would you please go away?”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh. But … Yeah. I mean … right. Sure. Of course. You’re naked. You want to be alone. I come along, you feel self-conscious. Obviously. That’s natural. That’s perfectly natural. I’m intruding upon your special me time.”
“And when you go away,” Amber said, “could you please not tell anyone about this? About me?”
“Sure,” he said, sounding disappointed. “Okay. Well, I suppose I’ll just … head off, then.”
“Thank you,” Amber called.
She waited to hear his retreating footsteps, then waited a bit longer.
“Glen,” she said, “are you still there?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “Listen, I don’t want you to think any less of me, all right? But … but I may need to check your clothes and steal any money you might have.”
Amber’s eyes snapped wide. “What?”
“I just don’t want this to make things weird between us,” he said, and then came the sound of rustling fabric as her shorts were lifted off the ground.
“Do not rob me,” she called.
“I’m really sorry.”
“Do not frikkin’ rob me, you little creep!”
“I feel really bad about this.”
She pictured him rifling through her pockets, his grubby little hand closing around the roll of cash she’d put in there. She concentrated on growing those scales again, and felt her skin begin to tighten. Then she heard a sharp intake of breath. Glen had found the money.
The scales didn’t cover her entire body but they did enough to protect her modesty. Anger boiling, she lunged out from behind the tree, but her horns got tangled in the branches and her feet flew from under her, and she crashed heavily to the ground. She felt some of the scales retract. Glen stared down at her, open-mouthed.
“Wow,” he whispered.
She snarled, showing him her fangs, and his eyes went wide. He dropped the money and spun, but Amber was right behind him, faster than he could ever hope to be. She grabbed the collar of his jacket and he shrieked as he was launched backwards.