Moonburn (13 page)

“What are you?” I remained prostrate as he approached. My jeans and parka were not enough to protect me from the cold blanket of snow on the ground, but I forced myself not to move.

“What am I?” The man scratched his bearded chin as if the question intrigued him. “Maybe I am a ghost, eh? For a long time, I thought I was a ghost. But then, I was in a ghost-place. I forgot how it feels, to have skin and bones.” He rubbed his hands up and down the rough fur of his greatcoat, then grinned, a flash of white in his bearded face. “Maybe I even forgive you for hitting me.”

“I really didn’t mean to,” I said, adding, “I’m Abra. Do you have a name?” My friend Lilliana had once told me that a great way to diffuse hostility was to use people’s names to establish rapport. Red had taught me that all names retained some of their owner’s power, even false names and pseudonyms.

My companion smiled, as if he had caught me in a clumsy attempt at a trick. “You can call me Bruin, if you like. The pale humans called me that, back when they still told their stories about me.”

Bruin—the name for bear in old French and English folktales. I dimly recalled a tale in which Snow White had a sister, Rose Red, who wound up marrying a bear who was really a prince. Well, that was encouraging; maybe he wasn’t going to eat me, after all.

Bruin was still touching his hands as if he couldn’t quite believe that he had them. He threw back his head and laughed, a deep, husky sound from deep in his chest.
“Sacre bleu
, it feels good to be—How do you say it? Incarnate?”

“You’re manitou.” I said it softly, suddenly recalling Red’s wound. It occurred to me that I probably had heard some bastardized version of the Rose Red fairy tale, edited for children. The original story probably had a lot more blood in it.

Bruin looked pleased at the mention of the Algonquian word. “So we are not forgotten? There are so few of us left. I thought, perhaps, that your kind had stopped believing.” He hunkered down beside me, and his coat gaped open; beneath it, he was all naked, hairy, muscular man. “Maybe you would like to worship me, little human?”

“I’m really not the worshipping type.”

“I could change your mind.”

In the blink of an eye, Bruin melted into bear form again, and the powerful ursine odor of his fur sent chills down my spine. The innate human desire to curl into a fetal ball was warring with the lupine urge to assume a submissive posture. Lupine had bought me bargaining time, so I was going with that. The bear put his long nose down to my neck and sniffed.

“Ah, not human, after all. Wolf woman,” Bruin said. Or maybe he thought it; I didn’t see his mouth move, and his muzzle wasn’t shaped for human speech. “I have not met your kind in a long, long time.” He sniffed me again, and I had a chilling recollection of a news story
about a tame bear that had started licking its trainer’s face and then, without warning, had torn out his throat. “But you are more woman than wolf, I think.” I couldn’t help it. I giggled. It was partly a result of fear and anxiety, and partly because this ancient spirit beast delivered his lines like a bad B-movie actor. And while I wasn’t familiar with bears, I knew all about bad B-movie actors. “A very attractive wolf woman,” he added, a giant, glossy brown bear with a Quebecois accent so thick you could have served it on toast. Unable to contain myself, I giggled.

“You laugh at me?”

I shook my head, but the whole thing was absurd, a bear glowering down at me and speaking like Klondike Sam. I laughed harder. My whole life, I have had an inappropriate impulse to laugh under duress. Hunter used to hate it. At the age of sixteen, I nearly got knifed by a mugger for chuckling nervously when he demanded my pocketbook. But of all the times in my life when it would be a really, really bad idea to laugh, this one topped the list.

The bear reared back, and for a moment I thought he was going to bite me. But instead, he became a man again, his nostrils flaring, and he pressed his enormous bulk down on me, crushing me into the earth. I could barely breathe, and my labored attempts brought his gaze to my chest. His heavy, irregular features took on a sensual cast. “I could make you stop laughing. I could make you worship me.”

His mouth came down on mine, and he inhaled my breath. Dear God, he was going to rape me. The thought seemed to suck the strength out of my muscles, and with a jolt of panicked strength, I began to fight him, trying to wrestle my arms out from under him. He threw back his head and laughed, and I realized I was dizzy, as if I had just lost a great deal of blood. I looked into his dark
eyes, which gleamed like obsidian, and I felt so small and insignificant that it seemed ridiculous that a being as powerful as this would waste his time on a creature like myself.

“Not laughing now, eh?” Bruin looked down at me as if I were his own personal picnic basket, and he was just deciding what to consume first.

He began to lower his head, and I held my breath, thinking, How can I possibly satisfy him? Not with something so trivial as sex. And then I knew. I could offer up my life for his pleasure. And it would be my pleasure, too, a pleasure so great that the sacrifice would be its own reward.

A second before his mouth touched mine, I realized: That wasn’t my thought. And I remembered what Red had said the manitous would feed on. Sacrifice.

I gathered whatever saliva was left in my mouth and lobbed it at him.

Bruin twisted away with a hiss, as if my saliva had the power to repulse him physically. I spat again, and he gave a low bellow and fell back, which seemed like a victory until he fell on my leg, crushing it. I screamed and for a moment, I saw him standing there, blinking stupidly. For a frozen moment, I did something I hadn’t done since early childhood. I deliberately let my eyes go out of focus, making the bear dissolve into the shadows around him.
If I refuse to see you, you’re not there anymore
.

And then I heard an odd sound, like a high-frequency hum, and I focused again. Bruin appeared surprised by something. He looked down at his hands, and they began to blow away, as if an invisible wind were scattering him like dust. The hum grew subtly louder, and Bruin looked up at me, narrowing his eyes, as his arms and legs disintegrated, and then he was gone in a dark swirl, leaving me alone.

Or maybe I had been alone the whole time, hallucinating, in shock from the car accident.

Except I knew that I wasn’t dreaming. You’re a werewolf, my mother had said. Don’t you believe in the supernatural? I did now. And I certainly believed in manitou.

I crawled toward my handbag, which was lying a few feet away, trying not to imagine the damage underneath my pants leg. My right foot felt loose and liquid and unutterably fragile. There was a moment of panic when I couldn’t find my cell phone, and then my fingers closed around the smooth metal shape, and I murmured to myself, see, it’s going to be fine, help is coming. I flipped the phone open, leaking tears of self-pity.

There was no signal. Fuck. I imagined the news report: and as she lay dying in a ditch, cars whizzed past her, never hearing her cries for help.
Stay calm. Find the car
. That would make a better story; the intrepid young woman, her foot badly broken, still managed to drive herself to safety. Assuming I could find the gas pedal with the airbag lying all over the place.

I looked around me, trying to get my bearings. It was hard to tell without my glasses, but it seemed to me that the trees were taller, thicker, older than I remembered. I dragged myself back toward my car, then stopped. My trusty Subaru wasn’t there. And neither was the road. In its place, there was a small hill, no more than ten feet tall and some thirty feet around.

Okay, I was disoriented. I’d gone the wrong way. But if I climbed the hill, I’d be able to get my bearings. Assuming I could see that far without my glasses.
Don’t analyze. Act
.

Fighting back waves of pain and fatigue, and trying not to picture what I was doing to the fractured bone, I pulled myself up the incline. I noticed the unnatural smoothness and symmetry of the earth under my hands,
and thought: This isn’t a natural hill, it’s a burial mound, the kind some Native American tribes used to inter their dead.

Sweating profusely, my leg throbbing horribly, I reached the top. It took me a moment to catch my breath enough to sit upright, and when I did, I began to whimper. The road could not have been more than a few feet away, but it was nowhere to be seen. Instead, I seemed to be in the middle of a vast, primeval forest, filled with enormous oaks and chestnuts and elms, their bare branches interlocked like skeletal arms. As I watched, the trees budded, blossomed, and leafed up, a sudden and unnatural spring that filled the air with a fierce, almost overpowering sweetness. I recognized chestnut trees, but as far as I knew, no giant chestnuts had been seen in this country since the nineteen fifties.

Towering above them all was a cathedral of a tree, a giant chestnut almost a hundred feet high and some ten feet around. Its delicate, oblong, pale green leaves interspersed with creamy white blossoms, the tree looked like something out of a fairy tale.

And maybe it was a fairy tale, because as I had learned in school, these trees didn’t exist anymore. And neither did the vast elms I could see. They almost all died out earlier in the century, the chestnuts from a blight brought in from Asia, the elms from Dutch elm disease. Once upon a time, animals had relied on chestnuts as a major food source, and Native Americans and colonists had kept from starving by peeling and eating the sweet nut. Their wood had been used to build this nation, and nowadays most people didn’t even realize that they were gone.

I knew that the roots of the chestnut survived the blight, and from time to time, a small tree would emerge from the forest floor. But without another tree to cross pollinate with them, these young specimens were weak
and unable to flower. Which meant the majestic trees I was looking at couldn’t possibly be real.

And then I thought: Even if they are there, how can I see them? Without my glasses, I should only be able to make out what’s right in front of my face.

More frightened now than I had been with the bear, I checked my cell phone, but it told me what I already knew: I was out of signal range. A memory intruded: me, twelve years old, stumbling into my mother’s room. Mom, something’s wrong with the floor. And my mother, laughing at first, then alarmed: You didn’t eat those candy dots, did you?

Somehow I’d left reality behind again, and I was lost in a place where there were no rules and no logic and nothing to count on to keep me safe. And all around me, the snow fell in a steady rhythm that should have alarmed me more than anything else.

Instead, despite everything, it put me to sleep.

“It’s all right, she’s coming around now.”

I blinked, and for a minute I thought I was looking through the moonstone: everything was pale and hazy, with a faint blue shimmer around it. Then someone adjusted a hanging overhead light and I could see clearly. Red and Malachy were looking down at me. I was lying on an operating table. We were in one of the examining rooms, the one we used for the big dogs, mastiffs and wolfhounds.

“What happened?” I tried to sit up, and Red put his hand on my shoulder. “Easy, now. Don’t try to move just yet.”

“What’s going on?” My right leg was throbbing steadily, the pain seeming to wake up along with the rest of me.

Red put his hand on my head. “You had some sort of accident on the way back from your mother’s.”

Oh, God, the forest. The bear. “How did you find me?”

Red smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I tracked you down, of course.”

Forget foreign films and in-depth literary analysis. Sometimes dating a man with backwoods skills was truly rewarding. “Did I pass out or something? The last
thing I remember was climbing to the top of a mound and howling at the top of my lungs.”

Red exchanged a look with Malachy, who was wearing his white coat and looking even thinner than usual. “You’ve been unconscious for a while, Doc. We haven’t been able to wake you up, so Mal just shot you up with a little stimulant.” Red put his hand on my forehead, smoothing my hair away from my face. “I’m so sorry it took me so long to find you. I didn’t even know you were missing at first. Kind of thought you might be taking some time with your mom, and I didn’t want to crowd you.”

I tried to push my glasses up on my nose, then realized they were gone. “What are you talking about? How long did it take you to find me?”

Red looked over at Malachy again. “You’ve been missing a week, Doc.”

“What?” I stared at his blurry face in shock.

“I didn’t really worry till the end of the second day, and then Mal called to ask where you were.”

“I’ve been in the woods for a week?”

Red reached for my hand. I had forgotten how calming his touch could be. “If you’d just been lost in the woods, I would have followed your scent as soon as we located your car. But there’s old magic in the forest, and nothing messes with trail sign like old magic. You’d gone and wandered into the Liminal, so it was like all trace of your scent just stopped cold about six feet from your car. Even with the animals helping, all I could do for a long time was narrow down the search area.” He nodded to something in the corner, and I saw that our red-tailed hawk was there, perched on top of a cat carrier, which the young raccoon was trying to unlock with his nimble little fingers.