They had never forgiven him for blending so quickly into the city streets upon arrival from London, and a decently upper-class upbringing, he was sure of it. Why else send him . . . here. Here, where he’d already had several days of delay simply because the locals didn’t know or trust him, professing complete ignorance of the existence of any such person as Miss Mollie Prater.
Meanwhile, his day’s explorations revealed that the Pike County courthouse opposite his hotel held the crude records of the births of not one, not two, but seven Mollie Praters of the right age group. Not to mention the Molly Prater, and one Moly Prater he rather suspected was as much a candidate as the others. Not one of them lived in town; each and every one of them lived in a different holler, as if he could distinguish one of these innumerable wretched hollers from another.
Ethan made a disgruntled noise and stepped into the muddied street, glad that the strong spring sun of the region had dried a walkable path even if he’d packed—and worn—clothes meant for the more severe New York weather. He’d see if the hotel manager could be of any help. The man had become more cordial after several days of prompt payment for the tiny room he’d assigned to Ethan.
Otis was the manager’s name, and he greeted Ethan at the desk with something akin to true welcome, his wild old-man’s eyebrows twitching in a way that gave Ethan the impulse to flick them off Otis’s forehead and stomp them dead. “There’s been another one, did you hear?”
As if anyone else in this town would tell him anything, even for the pleasure of spreading gossip. Ethan shook his head. “Another what?” he asked, assuming it would be another in the Hatfield-McCoy feud killings that currently rocked the area. Roseanna Hatfield, modern-day Juliet, lived only a block away from the hotel.
“Set of beast murders, that’s what,” Otis said with a sense of triumph, seizing on this pristine gossip ground.
Ethan didn’t have to fake his surprise. “Murders? Here?”
Otis nodded, leaning over the high counter in a conspiratorial manner. “Worse than murders. Bodies all tore up in strange ways, and it ain’t the first time it’s happened these past weeks.”
“How many times, then? And the bodies . . . may I ask—”
“Four,” Otis said, holding up the requisite number of fingers. “First time, just one killin’. After that, it’s always been two at a time. And always at a gatherin’—it’s been a christening, a funeral, and two weddin’s, and didn’t that man-beast chase everyone into a palsy before doing the killin’. And them bodies . . . ain’t nothing like no one’s seen before. There’s the marks of the killin’, and then afterward. . . .” Otis leaned even farther over the counter, and Ethan automatically did the same, then recoiled as casually as possible at the man’s breath. “Afterward, the man-beast makes cuts in the poor soul’s back, and sucks out the innards!”
Ethan blinked. He remembered to put on a face of startled horror instead of intense thought, but his mind was already racing, filtering through hours of study and memorization. Raksha demon?
Except the Raksha was a fastidious diner who killed one victim at a time so as to be able to dine on the freshest possible tidbits. And those tidbits didn’t consist of innards but of two small identical glands sitting atop the kidneys.
He wished he had all his books with him instead of just a few crucial volumes, so he could check his memory. And he wished, dammit, that he could find Mollie Prater.
He had the feeling his time had just run out.
That her time had just run out.
* * *
Mollie drew her thickly knitted shawl more tightly around her shoulders, not so much in cold as in sympathy. Below the gathering, thigh deep in cold spring river water, Lallie Beamis and Gerrald Mullins stood shivering, listening to Preacher Peavey and waiting the shock of a full dunking baptism. Mollie shifted toward Harly, who tipped his head down to hear her muttered words. “Believe I would have waited till warmer weather to get so faithful,” she said.
Harly was quick about squelching his amusement with a stern whisper. “That ain’t respectful, Mollie.”
Her father turned around to eye them, so Mollie shut her lips on her reply. If Preacher Peavey caught wind of her disrespect, he’d feature her in a sermon quick enough. Then it would be her having to renew her faith with a dunking.
She heard a scuffling in the woods to the side of them where sycamores, willows, and raspberry canes lined the banks of the river in thick cover her gaze couldn’t pierce. It came again, and she thought there was a faint grunt as well; she stared at the spot, frowning. Harly gave her a puzzled look, and she kept her voice as low as possible. “Didn’t you hear—”
With a sudden bellow, something of gray mottled and flaky skin burst from the underbrush. Gasping, Mollie clutched at Harly; he gave her a little shove. “Run!” he shouted at her, but the creature was already loping manlike toward the small clutch of the Bolling spinster sisters, and Mollie couldn’t help a horrified stare as the sisters broke apart and ran screaming for their lives—Myrtle, the oldest of them, darted right for the river and fell in the water at the bank.
Oddly, the beast veered away from her, snarling and hooting and slavering, knocking elderly Mr. Carter on his back but not stopping to hurt him further. Instead it lumbered up the bank at Mollie’s own family, scattering them—and veered again, heading at the church where several families had taken shelter.
Mollie just stood there, so flummoxed by its massive man-form, by the odd twisty horns curling down the back of its misshapen head like hair, the odd, matted texture of its skin, the clumpy look of its hands . . . but somehow the thing that just plain turned her stomach was the weepy old scar tissue of its eye sockets above flat nostrils, looking like a man with his nose cut off. She gagged at the sight of it, and suddenly realized that Harly had all but scooped her up and run off with her. His fingers dug painfully into her arm as he tugged to no avail. “Mollie, you got to run!”
She crashed into the woods with no particular path to follow and someone’s dying scream at their heels. “Harly!” she shouted at his back, knowing that scream could have been her mommy, could have been her little brother. “Harly, we can’t leave them—”
He slowed. Stopped, and turned fiercely on her; it didn’t escape her how he’d stayed by her side, her and her stupid gaping self rooted to the spot. Now he said, “Mollie Prater, you got a case of the crazies? That thing’s worse’n a chicken-eating dog in a henhouse!”
“But—”
Nose to nose they were, all-out yelling at each other like they’d never done before, barely listening to each other anyway.
“But, nothin’! I go back there, it’ll be with a gun in my hands!”
Mollie cocked her head, held up a hand. “Harly, wait—”
“A gun in both hands—!”
“Listen!” she shouted back at him, practically on her tiptoes to put herself on a closer level to his.
They glared at each other in silence, and eventually Harly realized just that. The silence. No screaming, no inhuman hooting and grunting. “It’s gone,” Mollie whispered.
Harly only shook his head. He let her take his hand and lead him back toward the church, angling through the woods.
They came upon the body without warning. It wore Gert Peavey’s pretty flowered dress . . . its radically twisted head had no face to speak of. Two discreet blood trails ran down the exposed back. Mollie went silent and white, and looking at the thing that used to be the preacher’s wife, said hoarsely, “I got to find my kin—”
“Mollie!” Harly shouted, yanking her back and throwing himself out in front of her—between her and the beast thing, which crouched silently at the edge of the church clearing, blending right into the trees as it dipped its uncurled sixth and seventh fingers into the back of another limp body, routing around with concentration until the long-clawed fingers came up with a bit of reddish brown organ on them, a tidbit it licked off like a fastidious cat.
It hesitated, sniffed the
wind just once, and turned its blind face to them, for an instant—before it charged. Charged hard and true and shaking the ground with its steps, and to Mollie’s horror, Harly stepped out to meet it.
It slapped him away like a fly and came for Mollie.
Mollie, feeling absurd and small and terrified, snatched up a dead limb and stepped aside from the charge to whack the creature a good one, a blow that rocked her arm—and stunned the creature long enough for her to dart past and grab Harly as he stumbled to his feet—and this time they found the church path and they ran good and hard and long until Harly couldn’t run any longer.
He stopped, bent over with one hand on his knee and the other on his side where the awful inhuman man-beast had hit him, and he stared at her with a look in his eye that Mollie found just as alarming as the creature itself.
Then she followed his gaze, and discovered she still held the dead limb. Not any old dead limb, not of the size a bitty thing like herself ought to have been able to run with. A limb as thick around as her thigh, freshly broke from the tree; she suddenly felt the weight of it.
She’d torn it from the tree. She’d wielded it against the savage man-beast. She’d run with it, kept up with Harly, surpassed Harly. She stared at it.
He stared at her.
* * *
“—Mollie Prater,” said the whisper on the streets. “Trickle Creek Holler.” Loud enough for even Ethan to hear, to go to Otis and to hear the old man say it. “Mollie Prater. Whomped that creature with a stick and lived to tell the tale. Saved her man-to-be. An’ tomorrow they’ll be married.”
Tomorrow. He had to get there before the demon. Before more people died. Before they lost a Slayer who didn’t even know she’d been called.
* * *
Mollie wrapped a damp-palmed grip around her bouquet, only to have her mother gently remove it from her hands and set it aside. “You’ll bruise ’em,” Lila said, carefully tweaking a flower into place. It was too early in the season for much but tender early blooms, spring beauties with some phlox and bright yellow coltsfoot. “I swear, Mollie, when did you become such a fidget?”
Mollie turned to the wavy image in the speckled mirror, twitching at the blouse of her best dress, a blue-flowered print she’d only worn three times and which now bore slick satin ribbon bows at the cleavage and hem. Her hair was caught up in a ribbon of the same material, and her shoes were new for the occasion. She plucked at the bow by her cleavage and thought of Adalee’s sheets fresh-laid on her wedding bed.
Lila slapped lightly at her fingers. “Leave it be. Lord have mercy! Let those menfolk get theirselves ready out there before you pluck yourself apart.”
Lonnie and Ferd were out setting up sprays of bright yellow for-sythia and pussy willow branches, and her daddy had gone to fetch the visiting preacher. But Mollie, rather than put herself to work outside or in the kitchen, was relegated to the back room where her parents slept, hidden away until the moment of the wedding itself.
“I’d ruther be hanging laundry,” she said. “Or hoeing the garden. Or—”
“Harly will be here soon,” Lila said, betraying her own emotion as she fussed with Mollie’s hair—primping, touching, in the end not changing a thing.
Harly, and the cabin that would be theirs. Harly and the fresh-sheeted bed. Harly, with a baby at his knee . . . Mollie stopped fussing with her dress long enough to envision it, to play it out in her mind’s eye like pretty pictures. After today, her whole life would change, and she was ready for it.
Someone gave a discreet knock on the door, and Lila let out her breath in a gust of relief. “About time!” She scooped up the bouquet, pressed it into Mollie’s hands, and guided her daughter to the door with a firm hand betwixt Mollie’s shoulders. On the porch, they hesitated, looking out at the gathering that filled the front yard and spilled over toward the chickens and the toolshed. Neighbors, friends, family—people she barely knew, besides. People who needed a joyful thing after a hard run of tragedies. Adalee was up near the preacher; she gave Mollie a wave as though only the two of them could see it.
At the edge of it all, a city-looking man sat on a cranky-eared mule, a cap pulled down over his forehead and determination on his face; it gave him a jut-jawed appearance.
She had no idea who he was.
Let him enjoy the wedding if he chose. She forgot his strange presence and found Harly standing up near the preacher with a foolish grin on his face; the grin grew bigger when he saw her looking.
“Go on,” her mommy said in an understanding whisper, her nudge subtle against Mollie’s back. “Go be growed up, Mollie mine.”
Mollie stepped off the porch.
She couldn’t say then if time had slowed, or if it had sped up so fast. . . .
With a warbled hooting, the matted-skin beast-man charged from the woods and straight into the middle of the assembly. The stranger’s mule reared and dumped him; Harly shouted a command, and two of his cousins lifted rifles they must have had on hand against this very moment.
Mollie found herself over by the toolshed, having dodged easily through the panic of the yard, already eyeing the man-beast’s likely course. “Adalee!” she shouted, trying to grab the attention of her awkwardly pregnant friend—but Adalee stood dazed in the middle of it all, one hand on her belly and the other stretched beseeching in midair, as if it were making up its mind which way she should run.
“This doesn’t make sense,” someone muttered, and she knew without turning that those clipped syllables belonged to the stranger from the mule. “It’s blind, bloody blind, and it’s herding these people like cattle—”
She turned to glare at him. “You know about this man-beast?”
His shoulder was muddied from his fall, but his cap remained in place, its angle more rakish than before. He met her gaze without defiance or apology, although he pretty much owed her one or the other just for being here. “Raksha demon, actually,” he said, raising his voice above the sudden bout of screaming.
Mollie flinched against the toolshed, jerking around as Harly yelled, “Shoot it!” somehow knowing it was the wrong thing to do—and watched in horror as the man-beast bounded to Harly’s cousins and laid them both out with a single blow of enormous strength. Dead. Only a broken neck sat anyone’s shoulders at that angle—
“You’re the one who can stop this,” the man said, coming up closer behind her, his manner as familiar as if he’d known her all her life and then some. “You’re the only one.” His hand landed on her shoulder, a touch beyond familiar. “You’re the Slayer, and you were born to—”
She whirled around, catching him up by the throat with one hand, shoving him hard against the toolshed. His cap hit the ground; his face turned dark red. His struggles were useless. His booted toe hit her shin, and Mollie looked down.
She’d taken him right off his feet.
Despite the differences in their sizes, in their man’s and woman’s strengths, she’d taken him right off his feet.
She dropped him, aghast, the world swirling around her in a series of screams and hideous hooting and two already dead. “Mornglom dreams,” she whispered. Dark predawn dreaming of screams and roaring and startling smells. . . .
“It started a few weeks ago,” he croaked, relentless, one hand rubbing her finger marks at his throat. “You’re stronger, you’re quicker, you heal like a bloody miracle—”
“Shut up!” she shouted at him. “You’re tetched in the head, you don’t belong here—”
“Ethan. And neither,” said the crazy man, pointing to the yard, “does that!”
The man-beast. The demon. It slowed by the scattered chickens; it turned its blind face toward the center of the yard.
“Adalee!” Harly shouted, even as Mollie silently mouthed the same. “Adalee, look out!” He lunged into the yard from his safe spot behind a hemlock, throwing himself between the demon and Adalee. Mollie should have screamed, but it stuck in her throat, making her whole body quiver as the demon struck
Harly down and turned back to make the kill. To kill Harly.
“You’re the Slayer,” Ethan croaked beside her, but he needn’t have said a word. Mollie had already snatched the scythe from beside the shed and fit it to her hands, quickly realizing that the curve of handle and blade made it an unwieldy weapon. She stepped on the end of the thin metal blade, snapping off the narrowest part of the hook so the remainder was short and wicked and jagged at the end, and then she charged up to the monster from behind and whipped that scythe at the back of his legs with hours of weed cutting behind her every move. Weed cutting and something else, the speed and strength she shouldn’t have and yet did.
Stringy muscle parted with the creak of dry, tearing leather; the demon staggered. It left Harly and whirled on her, its curling-horn hair snapping to stand on end, its extra fingers straight and splayed and reaching for her.
She should have stumbled backward. She should have screamed or fainted or fallen back on her bottom, helpless in fear. She should have died.
She killed it.
Afterward came a complete and sudden silence, as if the whole world stopped itself to take note of her deed. Not a sob, not a cough, not a rustle. Mollie felt the stare of every single person there, people who had gathered for her wedding and found themselves at a slaughter. But she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the dead thing at her feet, not for the many long moments of silence. Then, finally, she dropped the scythe on top of it and turned away.
The movement became a signal; someone let out a sob and then everyone started talking at once. Mollie looked down at her own hands, expecting to find gobs of blood and killing gore. They were clean and ready to clasp her bridegroom’s. But as she finally raised her head and looked around, finding the members of her family—safe—finding Harly and Adalee—safe—and seeing that for all the fuss and screaming, no one after Harly’s two cousins had died, she saw too the first glimmerings of something that scared her more than even the demon.