The wind felt good against his face. The ground was solid and comforting. It didn’t take long for him to catch a scent that led him to a shack built within a stone’s throw of the lake on the edge of town. Henry couldn’t find an open window, so he scraped at the door until it came away from its hinges. The house was quiet enough to be empty, but there were others inside who stank of anxious perspiration. He could hear them whimpering to each other as they tried to hide in a root cellar beneath the kitchen floor. There was no money or valuables to be found, so he sniffed around the kitchen for something to eat. A few strips of venison still dangled from his mouth when he turned toward the scrape of old boots upon the floor.
“Get out of here!” a tall man in long underwear shouted as he stomped in from another room. The man put on a stern face, but was tussled after having been roused from his bed by the intruder. Angry eyes sighted along the top of the shotgun in his hands.
Giving in to his craving, Henry drove his shoulder into the man’s midsection and rammed him into a nearby table. The shotgun went off, but the only thing Henry felt was a thump against his chest as his feet scraped against the floor and his muzzle was buried into the gaping maw of the man’s savaged throat. The cravings were subsiding, but he kept pulling flesh from bone even after the man had stopped trying to defend himself. When he looked up, Henry could hear petrified sobs coming from beneath the kitchen floor. Scents of dried spices and preserves drifted up from that space, mingling with an aroma that was just as tempting as the sweat that had trickled so beautifully along the back of Tricia’s neck.
Henry pulled at the floor with his bare hands to reveal a woman and small child huddled against each other, surrounded by shelves of dusty jars. Spittle dripped from his lips to land upon the child’s brow as he peered down at them. Their screams were loud enough to sail across the lake as Henry jumped into the root cellar and turned it into a grave.
He was sleeping on a woodpile behind the third house he’d visited that night when the shadowy men found him. They surrounded Henry and knocked him senseless before the one with the beard showed up. Their net smelled different than the last time, and when they tossed it over him, every bit of strength was sapped from his body. He fought back using teeth that were crusted in blood, but the men’s weapons burned like lantern oil that had been dumped into his wound and touched by a match.
“How many did you kill, boy?” the man with the beard asked.
Covering his face with both hands, Henry squealed, “I didn’t mean to! I was hungry, is all. I was hungry. Just hungry. Just hungry.”
The man studied him with cold eyes and a face that didn’t show the first hint of fear. “Do you know what you are?” he asked.
“Bartlett’s my name. Henry Bartlett.”
“That’s who. I want to know what.”
Before he could try to put together an answer, Henry’s nervous stomach kicked up its contents, filling his mouth with the taste of meat that was stringier than beef and sweeter than venison.
One of the other men pressed a sharp wooden blade to his throat and snarled, “He’s a damn monster and he killed Avery. What else do we need to know? I say we finish him off and hang his hide from my barn.”
The bearded man pulled the other one aside and spoke to him in a harsh whisper that Henry could hear perfectly well, no matter how much the other man tried to cover it up. “We already did our worst and that thing still got away. Have you men even hunted a Full Blood? It ain’t like those devil hounds we tracked through the plains or the leeches we burned out of Fort Griffin.”
“You’re supposed to be the one with the answers, Jonah. Do you have one now or did we come all this way just to toss a net around this son of a bitch?”
When Henry caught the bearded one looking back at him, he quickly averted his eyes and scraped at the spot where the ground met the net. This time, however, his hands didn’t have the strength to make a proper trench.
“We don’t have the tools needed to kill a Full Blood,” Jonah said.
“Then who does?”
“Nobody in these parts. Maybe nobody in this country.”
“Damn it all to hell,” the third man bellowed as he pounded Henry on the side of the head with an angry kick.
“Stop it!” Jonah snapped. “Leave him be. Just because we don’t have the tools now don’t mean we can’t make some. And since this one here doesn’t seem fully grown yet, he may be the best test subject we could ever ask for.”
“To hell with your doctorin’,” the second man growled. “If we can’t kill it, we can weigh it down and drop it in the lake. This net of yours seems good enough to do the job.”
“No,” Jonah said sternly. “We’re taking him back to the reformatory. Help me load him into the wagon.”
Henry spent the next several days in an even smaller cage, jostling in the back of a wagon while chewing at the rusted iron shackles clamped around his wrists and ankles. When he was finally unloaded, he thought he would be meeting his Maker. Instead, he was introduced to a place called Lancroft Reformatory. The walls of the big house up front smelled like clean mountain rock, and the mortar holding the second building together reeked of sulfur and strange metals. When he saw Lancroft’s tall walls and ornate doors for the first time, Henry thought a picture from a storybook had somehow come to life. The closer he got to the castle, the more he thought he’d been granted a reprieve by the Almighty himself.
He was dragged through Lancroft’s doors by two of the men carrying sharp, magical sticks while Jonah strode ahead and quickly disappeared within another room. Inside, the temple walls were sandy and smooth. There were words chiseled into them that Henry couldn’t read, and when he reached out to touch one with a cautiously extended fingertip, a skinny old fossil of a man in a black preacher’s robe slapped his wrist.
“Hands to yourself, please,” the preacher scolded. “Do not disgrace the Good Word with your sinner’s touch.”
That talk didn’t bother Henry much, since he’d heard plenty of it when he went to Sunday mass with his pa. The big fellows shoved him with hands that weren’t quite as scarred as Jonah’s, or they sometimes pulled him by the chains attached to his arms and legs. If he looked to one side for too long, he got a quick swat on the back of his head.
“Eyes forward, please,” the old man behind him chirped.
His room was one of many off the short hallway in the southern wing. The doors were a lot thicker than the ones in that house with the root cellar beneath the kitchen. The floor was a whole lot sturdier too. Of all the doors along that hallway, only one of them was open.
“This where I gonna live?” Henry asked.
The old man tapped one of the big fellow’s shoulders, which brought the whole group to a stop. “See out there?”
Henry saw the preacher’s callused hand from the corner of his eye. When he looked in the direction the old man was pointing, he winced in expectation of another swat. The blow didn’t come, so Henry took a longer look. “I see the window,” he said.
The preacher lowered his hand and stepped forward. He reminded Henry of his grandpa. His grandfather was nice, but brittle.
“See outside the window? See what a beautiful sky the Lord has given to us this fine day? See the green grass?”
“Yes,” Henry sighed.
“This is the last time you will be seeing it as you are now. When you are deemed worthy to leave this place, my work will be done and you will see that grass again. You will look upon those hills with clean eyes and you will thank God for this chance to have your spirit purged before you are cast into the fiery pit for all eternity. Wouldn’t you rather serve your penance here than in eternal hellfire?”
“Yes.”
“Of course you would.” With that, the preacher nodded to one of the big fellows, who then took hold of the top of Henry’s head and twisted it sharply away from the window.
Henry’s first reaction came as naturally to him as pulling in his next breath. But before he could sink his fingers into the man’s throat, the chains around his wrists were pulled taut and one of the other fellows prodded him with a thorny club that drew more of Henry’s ire than blood. That was merely a prelude to the boot that thumped between
