Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 (25 page)

Even though Jack wasn’t looking into the Ghostlands, he could sort of see them then, outlines in the shadows of the room. Even from their silhouettes, he thought he recognized one or two of them: a nurse named Corinne Berdinka and Father Pinsky, an elderly priest, both of whom had been victims of the Prowlers and had helped Jack before. Jack was tempted to turn the light on because it was growing very dark in the kitchen, but he didn’t because he thought it would make it more difficult to see them. And Eden did not seem uncomfortable in the dark anyway.

A tremor of anxiety passed through him. “Artie, are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, they’re just putting themselves in harm’s way. And so are you.”

Artie shook his head. “
Listen, bro, you can’t do this on your own. You already told me what happened the last time you ran across this thing. Who knows what’ll happen if it really gets its claws into you. If you don’t switch your sight back in time, it could consume you. What would it leave then? Some empty shell?”

“
He’s right, Jack Dwyer.”

Behind Eden, light flashed in the darkened room, a pillar-of illumination flickering like fire, brilliance in the form of a man.

“
Whoa,”
Artie muttered. “
What the hell are you supposed to be?”

“That’s Seth,” Jack told him. “The one I told you about. Eden’s spirit guide.”

“Seth’s here?” Eden asked brightly, and then the brightness disappeared from her features. A dark shadow fell across her face. “It’s time to start, then, isn’t it?”

Artie drifted toward the table. “
Damn, Jack, she’s a babe.”

Jack shot him a withering glance. He wanted to tell him to be quiet, even though Eden could not hear him. The sudden change in her tone and expression concerned him.

“You
are
okay with this, right, Eden?”

She hesitated a moment, then nodded. “There’s not much else we can do, is there? This thing, this Ravenous, it can’t be allowed to run free, destroying people’s souls. Whether they’re supposed to go on to their final destination or come back to learn more, to
live
more. The way I have. They have to have that chance, that opportunity. The Ravenous can take that away, and we have to stop it.” There was a rustling in the shadows of the room like the whisper of the wind through the trees. The ghosts of the dead, the victims of the Prowlers, shadows upon shadows in that room, the moon-and-stars clock ticking on the wall, counting off seconds until Jack would become one of them, until Eden would be one of them again. Until they both would be prey for the Ravenous.

Jack felt the burden then, greater than he ever had before. All he ever desired was the peace and security of his family and his home, this place, the people he loved. But the existence of the Prowlers threatened all that, whether they were attacking his sister and his friends directly. They were a threat that would probably always be there to some degree. He could not feel that burden and do nothing. As long as he drew breath, he would fight the Prowlers. Any time he learned of their existence he would have to do something about it. But now he also had to fight the Ravenous, had to do everything he could to destroy it, whatever the risk. Much as he wanted to tell Artie to leave now, to go, he knew that the more spirits were there the better chance they had of holding the thing long enough to show it what it needed to see, to reveal to the spirit of this beast the netherworld that it was meant to embrace, its own dark, savage realm, its bestial heaven. In its way, the Ravenous was a lost soul, just like the others. Only its destination was different.

“Seth, did you find out what you needed to know?” Jack asked.

The spirit guide’s shining form flickered again, brightened. “
I have spoken to others here in this realm, those even older than I, beings without form or image. They are the purest souls and totems clinging to this earth, phantoms of ancient times, heroes and kings who still watch over their people. Still they linger, haunting these lands, too in love with the world and what it meant to them to go on.

“
They have been here so long that they could not coalesce even for a moment to speak to you, could not communicate with you in any way that you would understand. But these ancient men and women have shown me the borderlands of this afterlife, the destiny awaiting the spirit of the Ravenous. It exists beneath the world you see, beneath the Ghostlands.

“
Just as you have been shown things, been allowed to see things other humans cannot, this realm that exists side by side with your own, so have they allowed me to see. So have they pulled back the veil to show me where my world meets that of these beings you call Prowlers. If you can bring the Ravenous here, I believe that I can show it the eternity it is seeking, longing for. I only hope that once it arrives, I can do
this quickly enough that it does not destroy you first; destroy us all.”

Jack took a long breath, sitting there at the table. Eden watched him expectantly, waiting for him to repeat to her all of the things that Artie and Seth had said. He did not want to. She knew that there was danger to him and to Seth, but Jack did not want to have to explain to her just how perilous what they were about to attempt would be.

He felt Seth’s gaze upon him, this ancient being waiting on him. Then Jack looked at Artie, and he saw the way the ghost of his friend fidgeted, stuffed his hands in the pockets of his old sweatshirt. For the first time it occurred to him to wonder what had happened to that sweatshirt, the real one. Was it still stuffed in a drawer in Artie’s old bedroom in his parents’ house, or had they thrown it out, given it to Goodwill with most of his other clothes?

Jack had begun to realize that in those moments when he peered into that other world, that spirit realm, he became a part of the Ghostlands. His spirit shifted into that place along with his perception, sliding into the afterlife in a way that was not supposed to happen for people who were still alive. Yet somehow, if he focused, he could
see.
All Jack needed to do was shift his perception slightly, and for a moment he could touch that world. Much to his regret, however, he had learned recently, and quite painfully, that it could touch him back.

He felt the presence of the spirits around him, Eden watching him carefully. Jack looked at the wise, benevolent countenance of Seth, her spirit guide, and then took one more long breath.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

C H A P T E R 13

Beyond the window, the sky was a deep indigo blue quickly darkening toward black. The stars had begun to appear, more with each passing moment, as though somewhere a universal hand turned them on, one at a time. The celestial display was breathtakingly beautiful, but where the night almost always brought Bill Cantwell a sense of contentment and tranquility, this evening it brought him only terror.

Courtney,
he thought for perhaps the thousandth time since Dallas had left the room, the very air about him laden with menace. Of course Bill worried for Jack and Molly as well, and anyone who happened to get in Dallas’s way, but it was Courtney who was foremost in his mind. The scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose and her cheeks, like the early stars in the gathering dark of the evening sky. The silky feel of her pale skin under his touch. The way she curled up in the crook of his arm when they were in bed, her head on his chest, her breathing slow and steady.

Blood streaked Bill’s hands and coated his wrists, sticky and pungent. Valerie had left him alone a while ago, he could not be certain how long. Though she had teased and taunted him for some time, even caressing him and whispering to him the words of a temptress, when Bill did not respond the Prowler had grown bored. Even now he could hear the blare of a television down on the first floor, shouts and explosions.

Valerie was watching a movie.

Thirty, maybe forty minutes had passed, though that was just a guess, and Bill had spent the entirety of that time struggling against the shackles on his wrists. A fire of rage burned inside him, the savage heart of the beast thrashing to be free, but he had forced the wildness in him to recede once more behind the human mask. His false human flesh was slicker than fur, his arms slightly thinner, and that was useful, so now he blocked out the pain in his wrists in order to maintain that form.

Still seated on the floor, he pulled at his bonds, muscles rippling in his arms, shoulders, and chest. The manacles tore at his wrists and more blood spilled down across his palms and along his fingers. The skin had been rubbed raw at first when he tried to use sheer force to snap his bonds. When he realized he could not break them, he began trying to pull his wrists free, contorting his hands, forcing the bones painfully together, working the flesh against steel.

And he had begun to bleed.

If there had been more play in his bonds, enough so that he could have slipped his hands beneath him, gotten his arms out in front of him again, things might have been different. A coyote caught in a trap would gnaw its own paw off to be free, and to save Courtney’s life, Bill would be willing to do the same. He had run the scenario over in his head a dozen times, get the cuffs beneath him, slide them out under his legs, then let the beast out, reveal his true self. His jaws would have been more than up to the task of snapping his own hand off. But even if he could have done that, there was no guarantee he would not bleed to death before he could help Courtney.

Still, he would have tried.

But as tight as his hands were bound by the steel shackles on his wrists—no mere handcuffs these—that option was not open to him. There was only one way for him to get out of this. He had to tear free.

And it was taking too long.

There was no clock in the room, but he almost wished there was. Still, he did not need to see the hands ticking across the face of a clock in order to feel the time passing, to know that Dallas moved closer to the people he loved with every passing second.

Courtney,
he thought again.

For just a moment, Bill rested. Then, once again, he began to pull, to twist his fingers and hands up, trying to force the bones to bend without breaking. Slowly, with excruciating pain, he felt the skin of his wrists begin to tear further as he strained against his bonds. The flesh ripped. He bared his teeth and snarled low and deep, enraged at his pain, as if the pain itself were his enemy.

The blood flowed.

The metal became slick.

His right hand slid down half an inch, the bones forced together so tight he thought they would crack. The blood had lubricated his skin enough to allow for just that much movement, the steel circlet sliding over the torn flesh. He feared that one more tug might snap those bones, but did not care. With that slight movement he had forced the width of his hand down into the manacle.

He
would
be free.

Bill gritted his teeth again, and they lengthened slightly as another snarl rolled from deep in his chest. There would be more pain, he knew, but beyond that pain freedom awaited. Dallas had to be stopped.

He braced himself, tension in every muscle, about to put all his strength into one final effort. A sudden growl filled the room, and he looked up to see Valerie standing in the hall just outside the room, her bright eyes glittering with reflected starlight.

Downstairs, the TV still blared.

“What the hell are you doing?” she snarled.

Bill ignored her. He took a deep breath. Even as he did so, Valerie began to change. Her shag cut hair and her pixieish body, clad tightly in that midriff-baring T-shirt and short skirt, changed almost instantaneously. Despite the pain of shapeshifting, her form altered with stunning speed. It was all one fluid transition, fur tearing through flesh that flaked away to nothing, face distending into fanged snout. Her clothes were so tight that they ripped as her skeletal structure altered, and they hung on her in tatters as she crouched, tensed, and sniffed the air.

Valerie bounded across the floor at him, slavering, fangs bared.

Heart pounding in his chest, legs still wrapped in chains, Bill roared in pain and fury and hauled at his bonds, twisting and pulling simultaneously. Smeared with blood, contorted, his right hand slid free. Even as it did he began to change, the Prowler beneath his human masque emerging in a frenzied instant.

She was upon him then. Valerie’s claws slashed down, raked his snout and chest as she drove her jaws toward his throat. Bill felt the wounds, the skin sliced open, but the pain seemed a distant echo now, his blood pumping with the adrenaline of freedom and the knowledge that Courtney’s life was in peril. Even as Valerie’s razor fangs began to close on his throat, Bill lashed out and grabbed a fistful of her fur. He brought his left hand up, bloody shackles still locked tightly around that wrist, and backhanded her. With a crack of bone on bone, he knocked her backward and Valerie sprawled onto the floor.

The chains were still tight around his legs and Bill bent to tug at them, tried to pull them down and off. His knees were so tight together and the chains wrapped so snugly that he could not get them over his thick calves. The chains were heavy and strong, but the lock, he now saw, was a cheap, shoddy thing. With a grunt of determination, he grabbed the chains on either side of the lock and pulled, muscles in his shoulders and back straining and popping.

The hasp of the lock began to bend.

With a shriek, Valerie leaped on him. Her claws slashed down across his back, digging deep furrows in the flesh, and Bill roared in agony. Her jaws closed on his shoulder and blood spurted out onto her snout and into her mouth. Bill felt it dripping down his back, soaking through his oversize shirt. For a moment his blood-slicked, fur-covered hands slipped on the chains. He thought he felt her fangs scrape his clavicle.

He tore at the chains again and the hasp of the lock bent and cracked, popped loose. The chains fell away. With all the strength he could muster he rammed an elbow back into Valerie’s chest, and her jaws loosened for just a moment. Long enough for Bill to lunge forward, away from her, to roll and come up to face her again.