Page 25 of Hunted in the Shadows
“Theissueis you can’t control yourself. If you were an actual hunter, you’d be a goddamn liability,” he gritted out.
“Enough. Lay the hell off her,” I snapped.
Silence stretched following my words, like all the air had been sucked from the clearing. I shot a withering glare at Cliff. He faltered as our eyes met, the anger fleeing his expression as he glanced back at Sylvia, then to me again. I couldn’t see her face, but a new tension radiated off her in waves.
“Let’s focus on getting the hell out of here,” I voiced firmly.
Cliff swept a hand through his hair, the cropped blond strands damp and plastered messily against his forehead. He nodded wordlessly, pulling a black tarp over the remainder of our arsenal and reaching up to slam the trunk shut. With each of us burdened with a bag, we had the essentials that we couldn’t risk being flooded with water.
We turned, and Sylvia’s fae light followed our movements as we gathered our bearings. Finding the slope of the road, we started forward. The mud sucked at my boots with every step, slowing our progress to a miserable trudge.
“You have the energy to keep that up?” I asked Sylvia, nodding at the light. I tried to keep my tone level, but I swore she could hear the protective thoughts swirling in the back of my head.
“Do you have to ask every time?” She sounded so weary. “It’s not a difficult spell. I won’t melt from the effort. When we get to the next town, obviously I’ll—”
A sudden lurch in the water jolted through the darkness—behind us.
I whipped around, my heart pounding. Cliff already had a small blade in his hands, scanning the shadows. The water’s surface was jarred by the constant rain, making it nearly impossible to discern the source of the movement.
“Fucking stars, it’s—something’s—” Sylvia stammered, her voice coming out in short, urgent bursts.
My blood went cold. Any comforting notion of a wild animal moving through the storm vanished; Sylvia’s sense for non-human creatures was never wrong.
A faint collection of bubbles gurgled up from beneath the tossing tide. Sylvia’s pale blue light couldn’t penetrate the depths. I staggered back in the water a few steps, my mind conjuring images of bony hands seizing my ankles anddragging me down, down—
A shadow surged beneath the water, zagging toward the submerged wreckage of the Pontiac, perhaps for cover. At the same instant, Sylvia gave a harsh cry, and a gale of ice shot through the blackness. The frost connected like a bullet, crackling as it spread a thick layer of ice over the water, three feet in diameter.
We stood, waiting for the mysterious presence to retaliate. Cliff and I looked behind us, mindful of every crackling branch. It wasn’t uncommon for monsters to travel in packs. As I made a slow circle of my position, I began to form a contingency for how to protect Sylvia’s life while her wings were soaked. She couldn’t fly, which meant she couldn’t leave my side.Fuck.
A tense minute passed, with only the faint roll of thunder and the steady drum of rain mingling with our heavy breathing.
Finally, Sylvia slumped against me, a rush of air escaping her. “It’s gone—whatever it was.”
Mild relief washed over me. Not for the first time, I wished I shared her supernatural sense for the mere comfort of confirming that we were alone again in the marsh.
“Rougarou?” I asked, my stomach knotting at the very idea of facing the haggard, werewolf-like creature in this state. I exchanged a harrowed look with Cliff, who seemed to share my mixture of relief and persisting dread.
Rougarous were smaller than their urban counterparts, but what they lacked in size, they accommodated with speed and savagery. I’d heard of a family of hunters in the South who had devoted themselves to keeping Rougarou numbers in check over the last two decades. Still, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of belief that some poor soul had been taken victim to the curse.
“I don’t think so,” Sylvia said. “I mean, I can’t be sure. It felt like… glamour. Almost likefaeglamour.But—that’s impossible. No one would be able to fly in this weather. They’d drown in minutes.”
Still, uncertainty lilted in her voice like she wasn’t quite convinced. She moved her fae light higher, scanning the web of tree branches overhead, curtained by swathes of moss that swayed in the urgent breeze. I half expected to see dozens of tiny, winged silhouettes peering down at us like dark sentinels where her light touched.
But like the water, the branches were vacant. The emptiness began to feel like a mockery, raising hairs on my arms that refused to quell.
I peered all around us, paying special attention to the submerged section of the car, where something could easily take refuge out of sight. I pulled out my flashlight to sweep a second beam over the rain-pelted water, but nothing stirred.
“Let’s go,” Cliff’s voice carried over the storm. “No need to sit around and wait for it to get desperate.”
Sylvia put up no word of protest, still scanning the unsettling gaps of inky darkness that lay beyond the glow of her spellwork.
7
Jon
After a miserable half hour, the trees became less crowded, but the road was a nightmare to follow under the rising water. For all I knew, we had veered in the wrong direction. Even between our flashlights and Sylvia’s glow, we could only discern more darkness ahead of us.
We all nearly jumped out of our skin when my beam caught faded white boards and a colorful glint of stained glass.
