Part 2

It stood on its hind legs, a grotesque mockery of a bear, towering and broad. But the anatomy was all wrong—the shoulders were too wide, the joints hinged with a sickening looseness. And then there were the eyes. Three of them. Two where they belonged, and a third, milky and hateful, set high in the center of its forehead. My stomach turned over, a primal urge to purge the fear rising in my throat.

It dropped to all fours.

I didn’t see it start moving; I only saw the blur. It tore through the underbrush, a juggernaut of muscle and fur. A massive birch tree stood in its path. The beast didn’t swerve. It slammed broadside into the trunk with a sound like a cannon shot. Wood exploded. Splinters the size of daggers rained down, pecking at my cheeks even from this distance. The tree groaned, the frozen wood shattering as it toppled, but the beast didn’t slow. It had halved the distance between us in a heartbeat.

Behind me, a car door slammed.

“Ruth, run!” I tried to scream, but it came out as a strangled wheeze.

She didn’t need telling. She was already moving toward the cabin, but she moved with a fluidity that didn’t make sense. She didn’t trudge through the snow; she seemed to glide over it, her legs blurring, kicking up a rooster tail of powder.

I was alone between the monster and the car. Between the monster and Calvin.

My hip screamed in protest as I hobbled forward, putting myself in the path of the charge. It was a suicide play, but the alternative was Calvin. I gripped my cane, the wood slick in my sweating palm.

The beast was a freight train of wet fur and rotting meat. I swung the cane from right to left, a desperate, blind haymaker.

It shouldn’t have worked. A piece of dried hickory against a thousand pounds of charging muscle. But when the wood connected with the side of the beast’s skull, a shockwave rattled my teeth. The cane didn’t break. It sank. I felt a sickening crunch, deeper and harder than physics should have allowed. A flash of amber light pulsed from the wood.

The impact didn’t stop it. The beast’s momentum carried it forward, its shoulder slamming into my chest like a wrecking ball.

I was airborne. A pine tree caught my back, knocking the wind out of me and sending me spinning face-down into a snowdrift. The world went gray. My legs were numb, useless. I could hear the heavy, wet thud of paws crunching snow, getting closer.

Get up.

I grunted, pushing myself to a sitting position. The beast was turning, spraying snow as it corrected its course for another pass. I raised my right hand to defend myself—and froze.

The cane was gone. Or rather, it was no longer a cane.

The wood protruded only a few inches from my clenched fist, but the rest of it was alive. It writhed like a serpent, coiling around my forearm, burrowing under the sleeve of my coat. I felt it against my skin—first ice-cold, then searing hot. It wrapped my wrist, spiraled up to my elbow, and shot back down toward my palm.

The wood liquefied. It sank into my flesh, splitting into five distinct shoots that raced to the tips of my fingers. My hand flashed neon orange, molten and bright, before the light died.

I stared at my arm. Where the cane had been, a complex, shifting tattoo of black roots now marred my skin.

The beast roared, snapping me back to the present. It lunged.

I didn’t have time to think. I raised my right arm—my tattooed arm—and the air pressure dropped.

“Daddy! Mommy!” Calvin’s muffled voice pierced the roar.

The monster’s ears flicked toward the car.

“No!” I screamed.

The distraction cost me. The beast swiped, a massive claw catching me in the chest, throwing me a dozen feet. I landed in soft snow, the powder cushioning what should have been a broken spine. I staggered up, gasping.

The world tilted. I sank into the white, my vision tunneling. Voices, dozens of them, clamored in my skull, a cacophony of whispers and shouts. Then, one voice cut through the static, vibrating in the marrow of my bones.

Get up.

The static collapsed. Clarity returned with the force of a slap.

I heard the gallop before I saw it. The beast plowed into me, driving me into the ground. The impact forced the air from my lungs. Heavy paws pinned my shoulders, claws digging through my coat, piercing skin. The weight was crushing. I was pressed a foot deep into the snow, staring up into a maw of broken, yellow teeth.

The stench was suffocating—rotten meat and old blood. Drool, thick and viscous, dripped onto my face. I gagged, coughing, inhaling the foul spray.

It lowered its head, jaws widening to clamp around my throat.

I ripped my arms free from the snow, ignoring the agony as the claws tore deeper into my shoulders. I jammed my thumbs into the beast’s two outer eyes, burying them to the knuckle.

It shrieked, a wet, gurgling sound. It thrashed, trying to rip its head away, but I held on, my grip enhanced by a strength I didn’t possess moments ago. Goo oozed over my hands. It reared back, raising a claw to eviscerate me.

CRACK.

The sound of a high-caliber rifle split the air.

The beast’s third eye—the center one—vaporized in a mist of red and gray. The creature went rigid, then collapsed, its massive weight falling dead on top of me.

I lay there, gasping, trapped under half a ton of fur and death.

Then the weight vanished.

I scrambled up, wiping gore from my eyes. The beast lay a few feet away, steam rising from its shattered skull. Ruth stood over it. She hadn’t just rolled it off; she had thrown it.

She stood holding my hunting rifle, her chest heaving. She looked at me, her eyes wide, pupils blown. She dropped the rifle into the snow and tackled me.

“Are you okay?” she sobbed, burying her face in my neck. Her grip was terrifyingly strong; I felt my ribs creak under the pressure.

“I’m… I’m alive,” I wheezed.

I pulled back to look at her. She was trembling. I reached for her left hand, intending to comfort her, but I froze.

Black lines, organic and intricate, snaked up her arm. They pulsed faintly.

“Ruth,” I whispered. “Your arm.”

She looked down, then at me. “I know. You too.”

We stared at each other for a second, two people standing in a graveyard of physics and reality. Then, simultaneously, we turned to the car.

“Calvin!”

Ruth moved. It wasn’t running; it was a blur. One second she was standing next to me, the next she was at the car door, fifty feet away. I limped after her, realizing with a start that my hip didn’t hurt as much as it should. The snow felt firmer under my boots, easier to traverse.

I reached the car as Ruth scrambled into the backseat. I dove in beside her.

Calvin sat in his car seat, looking frustrated. “I broke my crayon,” he muttered, holding up two halves of a blue wax stick.

Ruth collapsed over him, wrapping him in a shuddering hug. “Oh, baby. Oh, thank God.”

“Daddy, why is Mommy crying?” Calvin asked, his voice muffled by Ruth’s coat.

I looked out the rear window. The corpse of the three-eyed bear lay steaming in the snow.

“We need to go,” I said.

I scrambled into the driver’s seat. The engine roared to life, and I floored it. The tires spun on the ice for a heart-stopping second before catching traction. We fishtailed down the driveway, hitting the dirt road at forty miles an hour.

I drove like a madman. The cabin road was a treacherous chute of ice and packed snow that usually demanded a crawl. I took the corners at speed, the car drifting dangerously, but my hands felt steady. Hyper-aware.

“Did you get a owie?” Calvin asked from the back.

I glanced in the rearview mirror. Ruth had pulled back, wiping her eyes. She forced a smile that didn’t reach her gaze.

“No, sweetie,” she said. “Mommy’s okay.”

“Did Daddy get a owie?”

I touched my chest. The claws had gone deep, I knew that. My shirt was wet with blood. But when I probed the wounds through the fabric, the pain was dull, distant.

“Just a scratch, buddy,” I lied. “Daddy’s fine.”

We hit the paved road ten minutes later—a trip that should have taken twenty. I didn’t slow down until we were miles away, the adrenaline finally beginning to ebb, leaving a cold dread in its wake.

Silence stretched in the car, thick and heavy. Calvin had fallen asleep, his head lolling against the side of his car seat.

I looked at my right arm. The tattoo was stark against my pale skin. It looked like a root system, chaotic and wild, wrapping around my forearm and terminating in my fingertips.

I glanced at Ruth in the mirror. She was staring at her left arm. Her markings were different—more elegant, perhaps, but the structure was the same. A coil, a split, a merger with the hand.

“So,” I said, keeping my voice low. “How’d you get yours?”

Ruth didn’t look up. “Just as I pulled the trigger… my wooden bracelet. It felt like it came to freaking life. It squeezed my wrist, then… it just sank into my skin.”

“It was a hell of a shot,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve had that bracelet forever.”

“Marty gave it to me at the funeral,” she whispered. tears welling up again. “Said Daddy would have given it to me himself if he had been there.”

She leaned forward, burying her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook. It wasn’t just the shock. It was the confirmation. The nightmares of our childhood, the stories we had told ourselves were just stories… they were real.

I kept my eyes on the road, but my mind was back in the snow, feeling the weight of the beast, seeing that third eye.

“It was a chevadohv,” she said, her voice trembling but clear.

I gripped the steering wheel, my knuckles white. “What?”

“A chevadohv,” Ruth repeated, lifting her head to meet my eyes in the mirror. “That’s what Daddy called them.”