Derek Landy - Demon Road

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 head 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—”