Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

“You didn’t see what he did to Gertie,” Nate said, and she held up a hand, but gently.

“I looked into his eyes,” she said, swallowing back the thought of fingers snapped at the bottommost joint, of intestines looped and gnawed, teeth marks like wolves’. “The real ones. And… that’s still a person. He’s scared.” She hesitated, gathered her breath. “This isn’t old times, where you could just hunt someone down by the river. The Mounties’ll come. They’ll have an inquest. And you know what that means.”

It’d change Sunrise. Knowing everyone by name, knowing their children. Leaving your door unlocked at night. The way a man like Mikey Blondin was bad, but roll-your-eyes bad, and how people didn’t get run out of town or live on welfare or huff rubber cement or sneak liquor before noontime.

It’d change everything.

“He knows something’s wrong,” she finished, weakly. “He’s terrified.”

“We could deal with an inquest later,” Fred Tutcho said, but his heart wasn’t all in. “He’s out there, and the kids—”

“You don’t want to do this,” Cora said, soft. “I will not let no wendigo or man or Raven make me someone I’m ashamed to be.”

A moment passed. Fred Tutcho let out a breath. He shook his head.

Johnny Red squinted at her. “So what then?” A real question, not a challenge.

“We heal him up,” she said, faltering now. She didn’t know what then. She’d never expected them to say yes. “We find a way to drive it out, or keep him tucked away until the Mounties get here. He was raised a white man. It’s like as he doesn’t know what’s happened to him.”

Georgie made a little noise of protest. “C’mon, Cor.”

She patted his hand, absently. “There’s knowing and there’s knowing, George.”

Johnny Red’s shoulders were tight-wound. “Cor,” he said. “You don’t do medicine.”

She didn’t, and Sometimes you don’t have to wouldn’t cut no ice with Johnny. Grandma Okpik had been the first and last in Sunrise and she hadn’t taught it; this wasn’t an old community, where people could say This is where my father’s house sat, or Here’s a spot cleared by ancestors. Nobody here passed down traditions. Sunrise had been built, deliberate and slow like a snow dune: people washed up from the highway between north Alberta and the city, smelling the bad coffee, the music, something. The right ones stayed.

“We’ll put the word out. Ask for help,” she said. “We’ve gotta try.”

Johnny Red looked at her for a long moment, then nodded once, slow.

“All right,” Mike Blondin said. “We’ll try not to shoot.”

“Thank you,” Cora said, and went back to washing dishes.

Johnny Red came into the kitchen a few minutes later. He bellied up to the sink beside her and dipped his arms in to the sleeve line. “You thinking something?”

“Yeah,” she said. “A bit.”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

“You trust me?” she said anyways.

He rinsed a plate. Set it in the rack. “Yeah.”

She nodded. “Okay.” Behind them was the hum of worried voices; the clink of cutlery both in the sink and outside. Her elbow brushed his as they passed plates and bowls from the battered aluminum sink to the draining board. Water splashed and rustled, and outside, the wind.

Behind it all a sound, faint and creaking, like the chopping of a whitebark pine.

Cora slid her hands out of the water, dusted them gently on the front of her apron. “Going for a smoke,” she said to Johnny Red, and walked slow and straight down the little hall past the kitchen that led to the storeroom door.

“She didn’t have any left. Wait—” she heard behind her, but she didn’t turn around.

When she passed the kitchen counter, she picked up a drying wedge of pomegranate and tucked it into her pocket.

She felt it right away in her kneecaps, her thighs: cramp and twist. The burn of cold so hard it wrapped your body like heat.

Storm coming.

She closed the storeroom door behind her cautiously, sharp for any unfamiliar sound. The wind scuttled ’round the corners, wearing the heart out of the buildings inch by creeping inch. She stumbled into her milk crates, swore, and righted the top one before it fell. Plastic scraped plastic, terrifically loud. She let it go with shaking hands.

“Aidan,” she said soft. Shifted her weight to her good leg, trying not to feel the burn. “C’mon, I know you’re back here.”

Something rustled behind the old stacked-up chairs. Silence.

“I can hear your heart,” she whispered.

The blow blacked out her vision for two long, falling seconds, and then he was on top of her.

Aidan was sobbing. He wept like an animal, his hips pinning hers, his hands groping for her flailing wrists to hold them down. She tried to push with her leg, but her leg wouldn’t work; the hurt turned to paralysis, muscles shutting down, giving up, playing dead. The back of her head felt bitter, bitter cold, and then it was nothing but pain; he must have hit her with something. He slammed her left wrist to the floor, and she gasped. It had only been his bare hands after all.

Too strong.

Oh, hell.

She screamed, and it was tiny; his chest was on hers too, pushing the air out, sinking the chill of every January night she’d ever known down through her ribcage, her bones. She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t get enough air.

“Why did you say that?” he said, and it took a second before she could make out the words through his shuddering, terrified tears. “Why’d you say it?”

“Say what?” she gasped, and his teeth glinted in the thin light. Man’s teeth, not a predator’s: dull and blunt and slow. It wouldn’t be quick or clean, this. It would hurt like five thousand years of Hell.

“Why’d you say you’d take care of me!” he burst, and his hands were moving wildfire, moving without will; they spread her own hand out, palm up, on the floor. The specks cleared from her vision, and his eyes were black, all pupil, black as a raven’s wing. “Nobody can take care of this —”

His voice failed. The hands grew steadier, firmer, and she hadn’t realized that they were shaking until they weren’t; that the look on his face had been the same that Jane Hooker’d worn when she talked about Gertie cut down. Broken in two, like a little child.

And now it was fading into something monstrous. Something not a person anymore.

“Aidan, stay—” she managed, and the smell of wind, the winter-mask that used to be a person’s face faltered.

“What?” he whispered, pupils shrinking abrupt and small.

Oh please. A plan. A bit of a plan.

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.