Baptisms of Fire and Ice Read online

  She did all of these things without being harassed, by either people or things falling from the sky. After she arrived at the dumpster in one piece, she threw the heavy trash bag into the opening at the top with a grunt of exertion. Then she felt that little buzz of satisfaction that always welled up when you successfully took out the trash.

  See? she chided herself. You have nothing to worry about. It’s all said and done, and a month from now, this whole nightmare of a day will just be recent history.

  Pleased with herself for braving the “scary” world outside her apartment, she turned around to head back up to that apartment. Where she would settle down for an evening of stimulating mental exercises that would keep her mind off the world’s latest trauma.

  Analyzing the essay on Don Quixote by that long-winded Oxford dean—one of Professor Murphy’s assignments, of course—would do the trick. She’d spent two hours on it yesterday, and only managed to understand the first three pages out of twenty-seven.

  If I get that paper into my head, she mused, I won’t be able to fit anything else in there. Not fear. Not sorrow. And certainly not paranoia.

  Chuckling to herself, Adara started up the exterior stairs.

  That was when she heard the scream.

  Chapter Five

  Adara’s feet moved without her command. She leaped off the step, dashed across the grass, and plowed through the gate onto the sidewalk. A dozen mental alarms screeched at her to run away from the echoing shriek, to retreat to the safety of her apartment and lock the door tight. But a strong sense of obligation overrode her intense fear, even as anxiety shot through her veins and made her heart beat wildly.

  Because the scream emanating from down the street belonged to a child. A young child. A little girl. A little girl who sounded like she was all alone.

  I remember this, Adara thought as she sprinted down the street, her bare feet rubbed raw by the concrete. I remember being alone and scared. Remember the feeling of helplessness. Remember the feeling of hopelessness. Remember how close I came to dying because no one was there.

  Adara had been eight years old the day the EF3 tornado struck her hometown in South Carolina. Her father had been called into work for an emergency meeting, and he asked their next-door neighbor, an elderly woman named Mrs. Appleby, to watch Adara for one hour. One hour. Just one hour.

  It had taken only thirty-seven minutes for something to go horribly wrong.

  Mrs. Appleby gave Adara a PB&J sandwich and plopped her down in front of the TV to watch cartoons. Then she noticed the wind was picking up, peeked through the curtains and saw the black clouds rolling in. She instructed Adara to sit tight while she walked home to put away some patio furniture and close up her garage so nothing would be lost in the oncoming storm.

  Mrs. Appleby never returned.

  In the time it took her to fold up her patio chairs and stick them in her garage, a massive tornado formed on the front of the storm and mowed down everything in its path for eight straight miles. It tore through Adara’s neighborhood with the force of a freight train. When the awful roar of nature’s fury faded into the distance, twelve houses were gone, nine others were damaged, and six people were dead. Mrs. Appleby was one of them.

  The tornado had badly shaken Adara’s house and caved in part of the roof. Adara had spent five hours hiding under the couch in the living room, clutching her stuffed rabbit, screaming and crying. Until her father was finally able to claw his way through the carnage and recover her.

  Those hours had been the most terrifying of her life. Before she woke up in that pond surrounded by corpses.

  I can’t let another little girl go through that, she resolved, cutting across the ashy front lawn of the house next door to the one from which the scream had originated. No one deserves to go through that, especially not a child.

  A solemn voice in the back of her mind tried one last time to convince her to turn back. It reminded her of how she’d felt earlier, overwhelmed and emotionally numb, due to the sheer amount of pain that she could do nothing to soothe. It told her that this incident, whatever it was, would be the same, that she would be able to effect no positive outcome.

  She silenced the voice with a growl. She’d spent half the day hiding away from the world and doing nothing to assist the terrified people of the damaged city she now called home. Because practically, there was little a PhD candidate in comparative literature could do to improve this situation. And if she stuck her nose in where it didn’t belong, she might do more harm than good.

  When it came to normal situations, Adara was pragmatic enough to grasp when she should stay on the sidelines and when she should act. She would do what she could when it made sense for her to do something. No more, no less.

  Right now, despite the lack of normality, it made sense to her to try and help a child who was injured or scared or both.

  She jumped a low hedge that separated one lawn from another and landed on the grass beyond with a puff of ash. The scream had emanated from the back yard of this property, which was offset from the front by a wooden fence that ran all the way from the side of the house to the hedge. A gate with a padlock was set into the fence, but the padlock was hanging open, the gate cracked an inch.

  Adara darted to the fence, tugged the padlock free, yanked the gate all the way open, and hurled herself into the back yard.

  The bulk of the back yard’s space was occupied by an in-ground pool whose water had been stained that deathly shade of gray that now shrouded most of the city. The lounge chairs laid out around the pool had been overturned, their cushions badly torn, white stuffing scattered across the concrete pad around the pool. The large outdoor dining table with an umbrella set at one edge of the patio had been shattered, and the shards of glass that littered the ground were speckled with some kind of phosphorescent orange liquid.

  Both the wooden boards of the patio and the concrete pad around the pool had been scored with long, ragged marks that almost seemed to have been made by claws, they were so evenly spaced. And last but not least, something had torn the door off the wooden shed where the homeowners stored their pool supplies, rubber floats and foam noodles spilling out into the yard in a colorful heap. The shed door was lying on the opposite side of the yard from the shed itself.

  All of Adara’s bravado vanished like a wisp of smoke. This mess looked like the work of a large animal. A bear, maybe, or a wolf. Neither of which she could handle without a shotgun or a hunting bow.

  She had one of each, but they were stowed away in her hiking supply closet, and had gone unused and uncleaned since the last hiking trip Adara took with her father. Even if she had time to run back and grab them before whatever was in this yard noticed her, they’d probably fail to work properly, and she’d end up getting mauled or eaten anyway.

  Adara froze in place and scanned the entire yard again for the animal that seemed hell-bent on destroying everything the homeowners needed to enjoy their pool. Thoughts racing, she wondered how the animal had managed to climb the fence and get into the yard in the first place. She also wondered why an animal had roamed this far into the city proper.

  The largest wild animals Adara typically spotted in Edgerton were fat squirrels who scavenged from park trashcans, and the occasional opossum that nibbled on the cat food left out by animal rescue groups. The last time Adara had seen a bear, she’d been on the Appalachian Trail, high up in the weathered mountains of western Virginia.

  The impact event must’ve spooked the local wildlife, she rationalized, made them act in abnormal ways.

  A tactical retreat was in order, she decided, when the animal didn’t emerge from its hiding place after fifteen silent seconds so tense that Adara could’ve sawed through the air. She would scuttle on home, and once she was safe behind her tall metal security gate, she would call animal control and report this situation.

  They probably wouldn’t be able to deal with it today—there were likely hundreds of dogs and cats on the loose after the impact
event scared them silly—but at least they would be aware. They could report the problem to the public to warn them away from the neighborhood.

  Adara took one slow step backward. Then another. Then another. Creeping toward the corner of the house to hide herself from view of whatever was in the back yard. But when she was three paces from being veiled, a sudden, horrible thought made her stop in her tracks:

  What happened to the little girl who screamed earlier?

  Adara had been so stunned by the state of the yard, she’d forgotten the original reason she rushed over here shoeless and unarmed. Puzzled, she scrutinized the yard once more, searching for bloodstains around the pool or on the patio. But there were none.

  Maybe the girl had fled inside the house through the sliding-glass patio doors. If that was the case, however, Adara couldn’t check on her without making a substantial amount of noise. And that might set off the animal again, this time with Adara in its sights instead of patio furniture and pool noodles.

  I’ll go around to the front, she thought. Knock on the door and see if I can get the girl to answer. Hopefully, she got inside before the animal hurt her.

  Plan adequately revised, Adara resumed her retreat.

  One step. Two steps. Three…

  Just as she was slinking back behind the side of the house, she heard a sound. A faint rustling noise on the opposite side of the pool, inside the shed. Plastering herself against the house siding, she stayed stock-still and listened intently as the rustling noise grew louder and louder. Until the animal reached the doorway of the shed and clambered over the pile of noodles and floats.

  Adara had half a mind to turn tail and run—it was only ten feet to the fence with a gate she could lock behind her—but her curiosity got the better of her. She wanted to know exactly what had wandered into Edgerton. A bear? A wolf? Something less? Something more?

  As unobtrusively as possible, Adara peered around the edge of the house.

  The thing standing next to the pool wasn’t an animal. It was a monster, straight from a nightmare. And it was staring directly at Adara.

  Chapter Six

  The monster could be best described as a cross between a wild boar and a naked mole rat. Two feet tall and hairless, with pink, wrinkled flesh, it looked like something that had been flayed alive, its muscles tightly corded and writhing like large worms. Twisted tusks jutted out from its misshapen maw, and yellow saliva drooled from the corners of its mouth, leaving long discolored trails of wetness down its neck and chest.

  It had humanoid hands with three fingers and a thumb, but the digits were all clubbed, and the fingernails were solid black. Its feet were those of goats, cloven hooves that scratched the concrete with each waddling step it took. None of its movements looked right. It seemed to have too many joints.

  From a couple scratches on what Adara might call its wrists dribbled a bright-orange fluid—its blood. The monster had hurt itself when it broke the patio table.

  Its beady eyes, pure black with no visible sclera, bored into Adara’s face like a physical force. The monster was eying her in a way that mimicked curiosity, as much as a face so deformed could express such an emotion. Adara got the eerie impression that this little beast was closer to her in intelligence than it was to a dog or a cat, despite the fact that it had spent the past few minutes tearing up pool and patio furniture with abandon.

  She swallowed to wet her parched throat and said evenly, “If you try to hurt me, I will defend myself, even if that means killing you. Do you understand?”

  The monster cocked its head to the side, as if considering the question. Then it shrugged its double-jointed shoulders—and lunged across the pool.

  Adara backpedaled toward the fence gate as the creature sailed a full twenty feet over the water and landed in a controlled tumble on the other side, her side. She spun around and made to leap through the gap in the fence, only to find that something, perhaps gravity, perhaps a puff of wind, had swung the fence gate closed, and she would have to unlatch it before she barreled through. The fence was too high for her to jump, and there was nothing nearby she could use to boost herself up.

  Behind her, the monster snarled, slinging yellow spittle all over the ashy ground, and took off on all fours, using its hefty knuckles to pick up more speed than its hooves could manage on their own. Adara reached the gate a split second before the monster made a running leap at her back. She hit the latch with the side of her closed fist, kneed the gate open, and used her other foot to haul herself not through the gate but to the right, her body skimming along the boards of the fence and picking up a litany of splinters.

  The creature, with no way to stop, soared through the open gate and slammed into the earth on the other side. Adara lugged the gate shut, then darted around the side of the house. She headed for the sliding-glass doors, praying that they were unlocked, or at least had glass weak enough to break.

  But as her hand reached out to grab the handle of the nearer door, a horrifying scream—the high-pitched scream of a child in trouble—made her stumble. She missed the handle, lost her balance, and took a spill onto the hard wood of the patio.

  She let the shock of pain and fright consume her for only a second. But it was a second too long.

  As she scrambled to her feet, the monster landed in the grass next to the pool, sliding to a stop on its hands and hooves, kicking up a cloud of ash. Furious at having been tricked, it opened its deformed mouth and let out a bellowing…scream. The same scream that Adara had heard a moment ago. The same scream that had first drawn Adara from the safety of her apartment.

  There had never been a little girl here.

  She’d been duped.

  The monster made another flying leap, and Adara dodged to the left. She was almost home free when a rogue board sticking half an inch farther up than the rest caught the pad of her rising foot. She spun out of control, teetered on the edge of the patio, and fell. Right into the pool.

  Just as her head sank beneath the ashy surface, she saw the monster smack the sliding-glass door, shatter the glass, and fly off into the house’s living room.

  Water surged up her nostrils, burning all the way, and flooded her mouth. Her lungs hadn’t had the chance to take a deep breath, so her body instantly went into panic mode. She struggled to orient herself in the pool, unable to tell up from down because the layer of ash sat so thickly atop the water that it stunted the light of late afternoon.

  With a lucky twist of her head, she spotted the hole in the ash left by her intrusion, already filling with dappled gray as the churning surface began to calm. She hit the bottom of the pool then, and pushed off. The pool wasn’t extremely deep. She only had to kick a couple times until she reached the surface and—

  The monster careened out of the broken doorway and threw itself at her. She tried to pull out of its path, but she was too slow in the water. It managed to wrap one of its meaty hands around her neck as it plunged into the pool. It dragged her back under with colossal strength, and Adara wasn’t able to suck in a full breath before the sweet relief of air was snatched from her again.

  The monster sank like a rock, and Adara sank with it.

  She thrashed, kicked out, punched with all her power, but the thing didn’t even notice the blows. It grabbed one of her wrists as she tried to jab her fingers into its oil-black eyes and tightened the grip around her neck until she felt like her head was going to pop right off her shoulders.

  They settled at the bottom of the pool, the creature pinning Adara beneath its unnaturally heavy body, and the only thing she could do was let out a useless scream. A single bubble traveled to the surface of the pool, the sound lost.

  I’m going to die, she thought. I’m going to die at the hands of an ugly monster that crawled out of somebody’s nightmare.

  The monster brought its ugly head close to her face and looked her in the eye, its mouth curling up in a way that suggested a satisfied smirk. It didn’t do anything else. Didn’t break her bones. Didn’t d
isembowel her.

  It was content to watch while she drowned.

  It wasn’t just smart. It was cruel.

  And something about that fact made Adara very, very angry.

  This creature had come into her city, into her neighborhood, onto her street, uninvited. It had torn up the back yard of a property that it didn’t own for no identifiable reason. It had attacked the first person who’d come to investigate its vandalism, a person who’d done absolutely nothing to harm it. And now it was trying to kill that person, and enjoying every second of her struggle.

  How dare you? she thought. How fucking dare you?

  Something inside Adara’s body, something both physical and not, snapped in half like a rubber band. And on the back of this great breaking came a mighty flood. It ran through her veins with the chill of water rushing down from mountain slopes, spun in her belly and brain like whirlpools hungry for the taste of inexperienced sailors.

  It was a rage unlike any Adara had felt before. A rage that vibrated through every fiber of her being. Every pore. Every cell. Every atom.

  She was consumed by this rage until she and it were inseparable entities, not a person experiencing an emotion but a person who was herself an emotion. And with the merging of her being and this rage came the sudden and glorious feeling of freedom.

  Somehow, she’d slipped out of the monster’s grasp.

  Invigorated, she took her awesome, awful rage, funneled it into her fist, and rammed that fist into the monster’s chest.

  She expected the monster to flinch back, and nothing more.

  Instead, the monster was launched out of the pool in a great swirling vortex of water, straight into the wooden fence. The fence exploded into a rain of shrapnel, and the monster continued on, spiraling helplessly through the air, its leathery skin streaked with blood from a thousand cuts.

  It flew farther and farther, carried away by the rushing water, until it was out of sight. Yet even though Adara could no longer see it, she swore she felt it when it finally landed, the wet thump of flesh on hard asphalt, accompanied by the crunch of breaking bones.