the top of my bag and did her best to look cute and wheedle crumbs. The manager blinked at the ferret and then made a point of not seeing her as she handed over my plate.
“You might want to sit in the corner by the computer desks,” she said, “so nobody gets freaked-out by your . . . toy.”
“Thank you. That sounds fine,” I replied, taking the plate and sitting where she suggested, far from the window and slightly screened from the other patrons. I supposed she was concerned for her foodhandling license, or possibly the reaction of other customers—some people mistake ferrets for rats and that wouldn’t do her business any good. If it hadn’t been so cold, I could have eaten outside, but today I would have frozen, so I was grateful for the woman’s restraint and generosity. Once we were in our corner, I fed Chaos part of the meat from the sandwich. I’d have to give her some more food and water when we were somewhere more appropriate, but for now it was adequate to convince the furry kneesock that she wasn’t hungry enough to eat my purse.
The Veela Café was just off the major intersection of the original downtown. The buildings were old brick and masonry from the days when Port Angeles was a thriving customs port exporting lumber and minerals from the hills. The customhouse had long since moved, the lumber was protected forest, and the minerals were mostly gone, so the businesses that now occupied the old buildings ranged from the traditional to the bizarre. My little coffeehouse was sandwiched between a fancy seafood restaurant and a shop that catered to fans of the Twilight books and films. Across the street was the venerable Lincoln Theater—now showing second-run films and community production plays—cheek by jowl with a Chinese restaurant of the red-paint-andgilt-trim school. The eclectic collection made me smile a little even though the businesses were outnumbered by For Lease signs. County seat or not, Port Angeles, like a lot of towns on the Peninsula, was struggling under the unstable economy. It was a little depressing. By the time I’d finished eating, I was more than ready to head into the hills and look for the house. The ghost images in the corners of my eyes were growing dimmer and that worried me. While phantoms do fade over time or simply go away, they rarely do so at such a discernible rate of decay; they either linger and dwindle or they go completely in one fell moment.
Anxious to find an explanation for the vanishing spirits, I cleared up quickly. Then I put my notes and the ferret away, returned to the Rover, and pointed it up the road to Lake Crescent.
FIVE
Highway 101 hadn’t changed since I’d driven up and down it a few days earlier, but I found myself alert for signs of the strange and ghostly. Not that they would be easy to spot through the glass and steel of the truck, but I felt unsettled by what I’d seen so far and the information I’d gathered. I kept expecting something else weird to happen.
Perhaps that was why I noticed the creatures beside the road. I knew that deer, bears, and the rare mountain lion lived in the Olympic National Forest. I’d seen plenty of deer on the previous trip and they didn’t have any real fear of people—which wasn’t too smart of them, considering that they weren’t immune to bullets or speeding cars. They came right down into the ditches on each side of the road to graze the early plants that struggled up where the frost was thinnest next to the heat of the tarmac. At first, that was what I thought the things walking around on the other side of the road were—some kind of deer.
They walked on four legs and they had black horns, but deer aren’t white all over like these things and their faces are long and narrow with the horns near the fronts of their skulls. These creatures were hard to keep my eyes on; I felt an unnatural desire to turn my gaze aside, and that alone gave them away as something paranormal. I wanted to get a better look, but I admit I was a little scared and wanted to observe them with caution.
The road was a single lane in each direction, but the verges were broad enough to pull into if you didn’t fear the ice, so I stopped the truck on one of the wide spots and turned in the driver’s seat to look back at the cluster of three large, white-hided, crook-horned things on the other side of the road. I couldn’t tell too much about them through the glass, nor could I tell whether the area had the same strange, colored patches and lines of energy that I’d seen at the lake before, so I cranked down my window and peered at them through the Grey.
The ground seemed dappled with colored shadows that moved and re-formed without a visible source, the uncanny puddles of energy pooling most thickly near the white creatures. At first, the beasts ignored the Rover, continuing to walk a ragged circle around something in their midst. Their shape and movement had given me the impression that they had four legs, but when one of them reared up to bat at whatever they were surrounding, I realized they were two-legged creatures with a bent, brachiating posture. Their unusually long forelimbs ended in hands that sported black claws that dripped colors in the Grey. The one that rose up stopped walking and kept its weight on three of its limbs while it swiped with the fourth and made a shrieking noise like a heron caught in a wood chipper.
The thing they circled lurched aside, and another of the white creatures screamed at it and poked it back into the middle of their circle with its own raised forelimb. Their motion reminded me of school yard bullies shoving a smaller child around during recess. I opened my car door and stepped out onto the icy ground to get a better view, letting myself slide a little deeper into the Grey in hopes of figuring out what these things were.
One of my feet brushed a strand of wayward energy as I put it down. The third white creature suddenly jerked its head up in my direction, snorting as if it could smell me. The other two ignored it for a moment while they kept on tormenting their prey, shoving it back and forth while the third stared toward me.
Even at the width of the highway I could see that its eyes were tiny black coals under a heavy brow ridge, the kinked black horns growing out from its forehead like a cat’s whiskers. It had the jaw of a bulldog and a complement of sharp, hooked fangs. It squealed and rose onto its haunches to slap at its nearest fellow, thin strands of red light flaying outward from its claw tips.
Suddenly, all three white things were staring at me and sitting stone still. Their quarry, forgotten, slumped to the ground in a mist of miserable green and scuttled away into the trees. It looked like a person dressed in black, but it moved like a spider along the strands of the energy web, and the sight made me shudder. On the seat behind me, Chaos exploded out of my bag and bounded toward the open door, scrabbling up my back and onto my shoulder. She made a harsh hissing noise into my ear and I jerked my head aside, breaking eye contact with the monsters across the street.
They let out a collective bark of excitement and leapt forward. A whining sound, like a generator winding up, vibrated through the Grey. Chaos barked back and tried to jump to meet them. I cursed and snatched her out of the air, diving back into the truck as the three . . . things halved the distance between us in two bounds. I slammed the door shut behind me. I shoved the ferret into my sweater and mashed down on the door lock—I wasn’t sure how much like hands those big white paws were, but I didn’t want to find out.
I’d just snapped the seat belt closed around me and the wiggling ferret and was twisting the key in the ignition when all three hit the outside of the Rover, rocking it hard. The engine caught and I yanked it into gear. The wheels thudded down again onto the dirt, throwing the truck forward and onto the road. Ice from the roadside spattered onto the surface. I tromped on the accelerator and felt the truck shudder before it dug into the road and leapt forward, racing up the hill toward Lake Crescent with the white things chasing after us.
I passed a sign for a general store with an arrow pointing to the right before I even registered the clearing it stood in. I didn’t turn or stop. I figured it was safer to try to outrun the creatures than possibly drag them into the path of innocents. A few yards later, I glanced in the mirror and saw no sign of the white things. I dropped my speed a little to make a curve, half expecting them to bound out of the trees, but they didn’t reappear. I didn’t take the turn to Lake Sutherland but drove past, heading for the stretch of road next to Lake Crescent where the cliffs press in on one side and the lake on the other; the monsters would have to come out of cover there if they were still pursuing me.
The road remained empty behind and ahead. The white creatures had vanished into the forest.
I pulled into the first driveway I came to and turned the truck around before unbuckling my seat belt and removing the very agitated ferret from my clothes. Chaos glared at me and chittered her disgust. “Sorry, but you looked like you wanted to go have it out with those things and I don’t think you would have won that fight.” The ferret just wriggled around in my grip and scratched at my hand. I fought with her for a moment but managed to get her snapped into her harness and leash before stepping out of the truck for a breath of air; the fuzz butt
