The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

Cora rolled herself hard right and jammed a knee up against his thigh. Those brown man’s eyes went wide — wide and betrayed — and his grip broke: just a man’s again, weak and changeable, not a monster’s anymore. Cora fumbled in her pocket, grabbed, slid out her weapon before the hand came down and smashed her skull against the concrete once, twice, three times.

She held on like it was the only thing left in the world.

There was a raven in the roof, shuffling its feathers, watching the wendigo in Aidan’s flesh pry open that hand, lean down close, bare his teeth. Its eyes were bright and staring. It was curiously silent.

The monster growled through Aidan’s throat. It flung itself down and bit.

Pain spiked through her fingers: second, middle, ring. They unclenched, unwilling, and then willing, and then she jammed a full wedge of pomegranate into his open mouth.

The seeds crunched between his teeth like bones, like something living. He choked.

She twitched out from under him, wheezing; she couldn’t roll anymore, couldn’t move right. Her leg was a dead weight, and her head wouldn’t lift. There was winter in her lungs, and she couldn’t cough it out.

“Once upon a time when the world was young,” she forced out, rattle-quick and low, because white-people medicine needed invocations, needed words, “a white girl ate six pomegranate seeds and was trapped down six months in Hell.”

His eyes went big. He knew this story, knew it to the bone. He spat, reflexive, and she let slip a grin through the tears. Too late.

“Now you’re bound to us,” she said. Her vision was blurring. She couldn’t see half of him, couldn’t see the dark that was from the dark that wasn’t. “See all those seeds? Each one’s a month. That’s how long you’re bound to me and this town.”

His mouth was stained red. Some of it was thin and some thick, drying. Some of it was hers: her hand stung, burned on three flat points on the ridge of each long finger. It’d all stain.

“Stay with me,” she said, and cradled her bleeding hand; tried to say it like Grandma Okpik, like medicine, like somebody who loved you. “Stay people.”

He opened his mouth, and the moan that came out was terrible, terrible, but not animal. Only the sound of a human being, pushed horrible miles too far.

“Good boy,” she whispered, and leaned back against the hard, freezing floor. There were footsteps somewhere outside, footsteps in the hallway she could hear now that the sound of trees falling, wood breaking, living things dying was gone. The raven’s eyes regarded her, black on black on black, and then one blink to the next, they were gone.

They broke down the door.

Shadows flicked across her vision: friends and neighbours, friends with guns. “Down!” Jane Hooker was shouting. “Stay down!”

“I’m done now,” Aidan sobbed, rocking, hands clasped over his ears, mouth torn and bleeding fruit and flesh and saliva. “I’m all done. I want to go home—”

“Don’t shoot,” Cora whispered.

And then Johnny was beside her, gathering her up and calling for Jane, for Georgie, for the doctor from Hay River. She blinked slow and long and his face was above hers, lined with stark terror. “He won’t be no trouble,” she managed, and Johnny Red looked like he was about to be sick.

“That was your plan?” he said.

“He needs a bowl of soup,” she told him, cradled lopsided in his arms, and the world went black as wings departing.

She came to in room five of the Treeline Motel, the last set of buildings standing before the end of roots and leaves and life and hope. Sunlight speckled across the ceiling, ice-light, winter-light, and the trees outside swayed quiet, and she was still alive.

She let out a sigh, long and shuddering.

Johnny Red was at her bedside in an instant. “You okay?” he said. His voice was snow-brush soft. He looked like he hadn’t slept for at least a day or three.

She licked her lips. Dry. “Who’s got the restaurant?” she croaked, and he went for a glass of water. He wet her lips, her bruised throat.

“Nobody,” he said, and there was a rawness in it now. “Talk to me.”

She stretched, cautiously; nothing broken. Jane Hooker’s careful hands would have made sure of it. Her eyes wouldn’t quite focus, but that was all right. There were three tidy, thick bandages wrapped about the fingers of her right hand. “I’ve had worse,” she said.

Johnny Red flinched. “Don’t tell me that.”

His hand slipped down to her good one. Held on. She didn’t shake it off.

“He’s outside.” Johnny’s mouth twisted with something: fear, anger, distaste. The edges of a terrible hatred. “Has been all day, and all yesterday too. Crying like a dog.”

“How much does he remember?” she asked after a second.

Johnny Red opened his mouth, shut it with a snap. “All of it.”

“Did Jane call the Mounties?”

Johnny’s expression went even flatter. “Not yet.”

Cora leaned back against the soft pillows; heard a half-wendigo voice sobbing, burning, asking Why did you say that to me? Why’d you say you’d take care—