Just as suddenly, it was gone. It took the Yeti with it.
It did not, however, take his little pet. The brush to my right rustled and parted around a bald, filthy head. Handless hobbled her way into the open, settling on her haunches only a few yards from me. If I wanted, I could have reached out and touched her.
Even unarmed as she was-seriously, that joke never gets old-I wasn’t sure I could take her in the condition I was in. I rose to a half crouch, blade cupped gingerly in my flayed hands. “You let him die. You could have stopped me.”
She didn’t move. For long moments we stared at each other across the six feet of intervening space. Then her cheeks stretched again into the mockery of a smile. The unearthly gleam of her black eyes betrayed how much hate she had for me, for all the living, but I understood. The only thing she hated more than me was him. She was free now. Free to rip my throat out, eat my flesh, feed. But I think in the end, she wasn’t sure she could take me either.
She opened her mouth, and a man’s voice came out. “Well, this is quite a pickle we find ourselves in, isn’t it?”
I couldn’t help but chuckle a little, bleakly. “Yeah, you could say that.”
It was a woman’s voice next, someone elderly perhaps. “I just don’t know what I’ll do without him. He always took care of everything.”
She was doing it on purpose, somehow. Those echoes, those memories of long dead conversations, she was calling them up, using them to speak for her. “You go far, far away, where you can’t hurt anyone.”
A man’s voice again. “A growin’ boy’s gotta eat!”
I forced myself all the way to my feet. “If you hurt anyone else, I will come for you. I will end you. You know that.”
The next voice was John Wayne’s, or a really good impression thereof. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” Finally, she bared her rotting teeth at me in one last voiceless snarl, and started fading back into the trees. Her parting shot, though, chilled me to the bone. A deep gravelly voice emerged from the darkness. “You are to beink careful.”
Ivan’s voice. I’d know it, and his butchered English, anywhere. Somewhere, sometime, Handless had been close enough to Ivan to hear him speak.
About five minutes later, a bird chirped nearby, proving that she was truly gone.
I know I sat there for at least forty-five minutes, perched on the jagged pink boulders until my legs stopped shaking and my breath didn’t burn in my lungs anymore. Idly, I peeled the flaking black skin off my arm, the demon tattoo erased with the contract I’d fulfilled. The sky was growing light in the east, false dawn heralding the passing of another night.
And I was still here.
I couldn’t find the hilt of my sword, lost somewhere in the stones, but I carried the blade with me as I slowly picked my way down the rockslide. My hands were stiff, and the cuts across my palms seeped blood every time I tried to flex my fingers. I hurt everywhere.
I also had no idea where the hell Marty’s truck was. How far had I come in my flight through the trees? But the great thing about being on a mountain is that down is usually the direction you want to go. So I headed down, my exhausted feet stumbling more than once on the uneven terrain.
Eventually, I found the plucky little stream again, and by following it I found the clearing in the trees where I’d first called the Yeti. Even just thinking of him brought a sour film to the back of my throat, and I wished vainly for something to drink.
I’m not dumb enough to drink out of a mountain stream. Duh. But I could wash the blood from my hands there. For some reason, the thought of staining Marty’s truck with my blood was overwhelmingly unacceptable.
I knelt, noting which joints ached in all the wrong places. By morning, I’d barely be able to move. I dipped my hands into the ice-cold water, letting it run over the deep cuts and numb away the pain. I examined the injuries with a curious detachment, marveling that I still had motion in my fingers at all. I’d sliced my palms up pretty good.
Though… I gingerly wiped the caked blood off my left palm, letting the water carry away the grime, and realized that I couldn’t see a cut at all. Looking at my right, I found the same there, my palm unmarred. Where my knuckles should have been scraped and bloodied, I found unbroken skin.
“Oh holy…” So, Cam’s coin had worked after all. I knew I couldn’t leave it there in the stream for just anyone to find. What if someone noticed this little creek suddenly had healing properties? I dug in the icy mud for a few moments, trying to find just where I’d buried the bespelled quarter, but I had no luck. Hell, I could have been yards off, in either direction. I finally had to resign myself to leaving it, and hoping that the spell would wear off before anyone noticed.
The Suburban was right where I’d left it, when I finally managed to make my way to the right location. I threw what was left of my katana in the back, and deep down I mourned my loss. She’d been good to me. She’d been there with me since the very beginning.
On the passenger seat, Cole’s phone glowed, indicating a missed call and a waiting message.
“We’re fine,” were the first words out of his mouth. “Everyone’s fine, and we got Mira on the phone. She was at the amusement park. Can you believe it? Zane’s gonna be okay. Call me, big brother, soon as you get this. God, please call.”
I would. I’d call him as soon as I got off the mountain, preferably before someone arrested me for trespassing. As soon as my hands stopped shaking. Maybe when the full-body shudders subsided. Definitely after my vision stopped being all black around the edges.
But first, I was going to call my wife, and I didn’t even care what time it was back home.
She was expecting me. The phone rang only once. “Jesse??”
“Hey, baby.” I couldn’t help it. I had to smile at the sound of her voice, so thick with worry and tight with relief. “Did I wake you?”
Of course I hadn’t woken her. She’d been pacing the floors, for the thousandth or so time, wondering if I was alive or dead, if the next phone ring was going to be that call. “Goddess, Jess. Where are you?”
“Um… somewhere on Pikes Peak? I paid Viljo a visit. He says hey.”
“Are you all right? Cole said you were fighting.”
How did Cole know…? Oh yeah. The Yeti went bye-bye, and Zane’s tattoo flaked off. That’s how he knew. “Um… yeah, a little. It’s all right. I won.”
She took a deep breath, and I could hear the squeak of our bed as she sank down onto it. “How badly are you hurt?”
Good question. “Actually… not too bad. Gonna be a lovely shade of purple in a few hours, but nothing fatal. Nothing even debilitating.” Sore and stiff and bruised was way better than filleted and bleeding and dying. Infinitely better. Hell, compared to my usual adventures, I’d come out of this one the rosy picture of health.
“You’re sure? You’re not… you’re not lying to make me feel better?”
“No, baby. Promise.” Of course, I’d lied to her about other things. Omitted. Dodged. It was no wonder she thought I might be fibbing now. I deserved her doubt too much to even be hurt by it. “Physically, I’m fine. Swear.”
“And not physically?”
Ah, that was the question. For days, I’d buried my fear, crammed it down deep where no one else could see. I’d been running on adrenaline and instinct for three straight days now, wrapping myself in it like armor. But all of that was gradually washing away as I sat here, leaving me with nothing but belated terror. I rested my forehead on my knees when my vision started to swim again, my blood pressure humming in my ears. “It was him. It was the one in my dreams. He came back.” God… he came back. And if he could come back once, he could come back again. That certain knowledge sent shudders through my body so hard I almost dropped the phone. “Are you all right there? You and the kids? Nothing weird?”
Handless had been near Ivan. Which meant the Yeti had. It wasn’t unthinkable that he’d been near my wife and daughter too. Esteban.
Mira was exasperated when she answered. “We’re fine. It’s you I’m worried about. Do you need help? I can call Ivan, or Avery, or… Someone can come get you.”
