Anything Can Be Dangerous (12 page)

“
Now the hard part,
right?”

* * *

Runny nose. Freezing ears. Chapped
lips.

None of the other pains compared to
the ache in Jacob’s feet as he plowed onward through the
dark.

Three hundred yards from the cliff the
wind picked up, coming out of the north.

“
Cover your face,” Jacob
said to Sadie as another gust hit them. He held up one hand to
shield his own face from the cold, and the suede material of his
driving gloves felt like stiff rawhide on his skin.

With the sun gone, the valley had
turned into a shimmering white sheet that glowed in the starlight.
The forest had before a black ring around them, with the only
sounds coming from their feet and the morose howl of the
wind.

Jacob was trying to think of something
to say when his wife beat him to it.

“
Look,” Kate cried. She
pointed through the flying snow.

Jacob peered past her, making out five
figures moving toward them. He refused to believe his own eyes at
first, worried the wind was playing a trick on them, but when the
black shapes moved closer he knew he wasn’t imagining
it.

“
I’ll be damned,” Jacob
said.

Both he and Kate waved their arms over
their heads, signaling the newcomers. Jacob counted five people,
their features lost in the dark. The shape in the lead waved once
in reply.

Jacob pushed on to meet them, a fresh
surge of hope charging his spirit.

“
Are we glad to see you,”
he said once they’d neared within speaking distance.

The men remained silent as they
approached. All five appeared to be American Indians, clad in
camouflage snow pants and jackets with bright orange hunting vests.
Rather than rifles or shotguns, however, they sported more
traditional bows and arrows that looked handmade.

Jacob adjusted his grip on Sadie,
smiling.

“
Hello,” Kate
said.

The quintet closed within ten feet and
came to a halt, watching Jacob and his family with unreadable eyes.
None of them spoke, not even to acknowledge Kate’s
greeting.

Jacob extended his hand. “I’m Jacob
Strode, pleased to—”

“
What are you doing here?”
the closest man asked. He was older than the rest, his face a
craggy landscape of wrinkles.

Jacob swallowed, wetting his throat.
“We had a bit of an accident with our car,” he explained. “A deer
ran into the—”

“
This is sacred ground,”
the man interrupted. “It is a spiritual place. You shouldn’t have
come here.”

Jacob exchanged glances with Kate.
“I’m sorry. We didn’t intend to trespass or anything. We’re just
trying to get to town.”

“
There are roads to town,”
the man answered.

Jacob swallowed again. He saw Kate
look to him out of the corner of his eye but kept his attention
focused on the tribesman. He shifted position, trying to free
himself from the snow hugging his legs.

“
Like I said, we wrecked
our car back there, and we haven’t seen any other traffic for
hours. You see, we were on our way to a wedding, so we’re not
really dressed for—”

“
You are not welcome
here.”

“
Please,” Kate cut in. “We
just need a cell phone or a radio, and we’ll—”

The elder shook his head. “Your white
man’s magic will not work here.”

Jacob blinked, catching another
shocked glance from Kate.

White man’s magic? Did he
actually say that?

“
This is a place of uneasy
spirits,” the elder went on. “You have disturbed them with your
presence, and for that you must die.”

Each word of the old man’s statement
resounded with perfect clarity in the open air, but Jacob
floundered for a response while he waited for the grin that would
put them in context. In contrast, the man’s expression remained
maddeningly impassive.

“
We said we were sorry,”
Kate said. “You don’t have to play games with us.”

“
Regret means nothing,” the
old man replied. “Only blood will cleanse your
transgression.”

“
This isn’t funny,” she
shot back.

The wind howled, stirring up specters
of snow that swirled around them. For a moment the distant trees
become lost in a white haze, and the rest of the world
vanished.

Jacob used the moment to turn to his
wife and slide Sadie into her arms. When he faced the hunters
again, he stripped off his gloves and dug his wallet out of his
pocket.

“
I have sixty dollars
cash,” he said, pulling the bills out to show them. He strove to
keep his voice level, as if the leader’s announcement never
registered. “I know that’s not much, but if there’s a bank in town,
I’d gladly pay you men one hundred dollars apiece to—”

“
Five hundred,” Kate
interjected. “We’ll pay you five hundred dollars apiece. It’s all
we have, but we’ll give it to you if you help us.
Please.”

“
Trade will not save you,”
the leader replied.

Jacob’s eyes flicked to each of the
men. They all shared the older man’s blank gaze, not one looking
even the slightest bit insincere. Their silent subservience cleaved
a new wound into Jacob’s resolve.

“
Look, we’re scared enough
as it is,” Jacob told them. “Why are you doing this?”

No one replied. Had someone sneered or
offered a comment, then at least he might have had a clue to their
intentions, but their incessant silence deepened his fear that the
old man wasn’t joking.

“
Is it a racial thing?”
Jacob pressed, searching for the source of the unspoken hostility.
“Is that what the white man comment was about? Because we’re not
like that.”

The leader’s stare remained constant,
his expression unyielding.

Jacob crammed the money into his
pocket. A flush of anger drove the cold from his cheeks.

“
Forget it,” he said.
“We’ll find our own way—”

“
Jacob,” Kate cut
in.

He turned to look at her, only to find
her attention trained on five more natives who’d approached from
behind. Like the first group, all of them wore hunting gear and
carried handcrafted weapons.

By the time Jacob faced the leader
again the other hunters had fanned out, joining with the newcomers
to surround them.

“
Come on, guys,” Jacob
pleaded. “Enough is enough.”

Ignoring him, the leader nodded to his
fellow tribesmen, and the men all readied their bows. They drew
arrows.

Kate gasped, moving closer.

“
Okay, stop this,” Jacob
demanded. He glanced back and forth, trying to watch everyone at
once. He shuffled his feet in the snow, hoping to bump into a rock
or a stick, anything he could use as a weapon.

“
This has gone way too far.
If you’re not going to help us then just back off and—”

But his words died off in mid-sentence
when he saw the hunters knock the arrows to their bowstrings and
pull back. The wood creaked as the pressure compounded.

Jacob froze, his anger turning to
terror.

Kate grasped his arm.

“
There is no fighting it,”
the old man said. “The spirits demand sacrifice.”

Jacob’s heart machinegunned inside his
chest, firing adrenaline to every muscle in his body. His hands
shook. His legs trembled. Sweat burned on his brow.

The valley surrounded them like a
wasteland, offering no shelter, no means of escape. The deep,
clinging snow assured that even the fastest lunge would prove
useless, and the nearest tree seemed a world away.

But not nearly as distant as reasoning
with the man standing ten feet in front of him.

Jacob met the elder’s emotionless
gaze.

“
Take me,” Jacob pleaded.
“Let my family go.”

“
Jacob, no,” Kate
cried.

“
Yes,” he said, stepping
away from her. “I’m the one who decided to cross here. Leave them
out of this. I’m begging you, don’t hurt my family.”

The old man’s eyes never blinked. His
pupils appeared huge in the gloom, and what Jacob saw welling in
their black depths drowned his last hope for salvation. Behind his
impervious expression of detachment, Jacob saw a glimmer of revelry
in the old man’s dark gaze, a sinister obedience to customs that
had been forged in another age and carried out over the centuries
with an unbending devotion.

“
The woman first,” the old
man ordered.

And with those words, Jacob realized
what had been nagging him ever since the hunters arrived: no steamy
exhalations issued from the man’s lips when he spoke. His chest
remained as still as the frozen valley floor.

Because he’s already dead,
Jacob thought. All of them are.

—
This is a place of uneasy
spirits—

Jacob’s mouth dropped open even as the
sound of bowstrings thrummed the air. Arrows hissed past on both
sides.

Half a dozen impacts issued from
behind, like fists hitting a pillow.

Moving with the tarry slowness of a
nightmare, Jacob swung around to see his wife falling backwards,
wooden shafts jutting from her torso and legs. She collapsed with
her eyelids peeled back in shock, teeth bared in a display of
animalistic horror. Sadie tumbled from her grasp, landing facedown
in the snow.

“
No!” Jacob
bellowed.

Something punched him in the
back.

He glanced down to see an obsidian
arrowhead poking through his coat, just over the right breast
pocket. Thin wisps of steam trailed from the blood smeared across
its surface.

Jacob glanced up, immobilized by
shock.

He saw Sadie, still stuck in the snow,
unable to move. Kate rolled toward her, reaching out, striving to
help the girl in spite of her wounds.

Then his eyes caught a flash of
movement from the hunters beyond his wife and child, and suddenly
five arrows stabbed into his legs.

The cold stone missiles punched
through his aching muscles with brutal force, ravaging his flesh.
Their sharp points chipped against bone.

Jacob howled in agony but lunged
toward Kate as he fell, now hearing the terrible chorus of multiple
knife blades as they were drawn from their sheaths.

The natives charged forward, casting
up a blizzard of snow with their footsteps.

Someone dropped down on Jacob’s back,
pinning him in place.

He struggled to free himself, but each
twist caused him to sink farther into the icy carpet covering the
valley, pressing the arrowheads deeper into his legs.

His breaths came out as a thunder of
pain and rage.

The weight on his back shifted and
someone snared his right arm, yanking it back. The steel edge of a
blade found the joint of one finger and sliced it from his
hand.

Jacob screamed.

Then again. And again.

The cold valley air struck the exposed
nerves like liquid nitrogen poured into his veins. Teeth bit down
on the open flesh and sucked his blood from the wounds.

“
Yessss,” an ancient voice
hissed with inhuman pleasure.

Jacob growled through the pain when
the attacker released his arm, watching helplessly from ground
level as one of the hunters seized Sadie by the leg and dragged her
away, a stone tomahawk clutched in his free hand.

Kate grabbed at the man, snatching a
leather strap from his boot before another native dropped to his
knees behind her. He tore off her hat and clutched a fistful of her
hair. With his other hand, he brought a gleaming knife to her scalp
and—

The top of the man’s head
exploded.

Even in his current condition of
unparalleled terror, Jacob flinched at the sight. The shattered
fragments of the hunter’s skull sailed through the air like
confetti, soon joined by the distant report of a
gunshot.

Jacob craned his head to one side and
saw four muzzle flashes blink on the horizon.

The headless attacker kneeling beside
Kate pushed to his feet, standing even as the bullets punched holes
through his torso and exploded out his back in great plumes of
dust.

The man didn’t stagger. Didn’t
fall.

He disintegrated.

One moment he appeared as a solid
figure standing tall; a heartbeat later he’d become a man-shaped
accumulation of twigs, dirt, and leaves that blew apart in the
wind.

The other natives had ceased in
mid-action, and now all turned toward the wood line even as a fresh
round of gunshots flashed from the shadows.

The tribesman looming over Sadie fell
backward, his chest torn open to expose a hollow space filled with
dried weeds and animal fur.

Another man’s shoulder erupted into a
cloud of brown pine needles and feathers.