Ledger didn’t have a knife, so he ripped the net of entangled threads apart with his bare hands. The tissue stretched as he pulled on it, and it sweated a foul-smelling residue, but eventually snapped or tore. As he ripped away handfuls of the skin-strings, the dried-up husk of Earl’s body sagged toward the ground.
A final yank dislodged an anchor as thick as Ledger’s thumb from the wall, taking a chunk of plaster with it. The body dropped to the floor and folded in on itself like an insect. Ledger pushed it onto its back to make lifting it easier.
The body’s eyes were open, wide and fixed with bars of abraded skin broken into the whites. And desperate. They were desperate. Something was still in there, battering itself against the glass of its body. It was the same as the girl upstairs with her pink-painted toes. The same as Dale. Only it had been in there much longer.
That was important. Ledger could feel it. He didn’t have time to worry about it right now. Earl was on his way, and trying to kill him in this corpse was better than doing it to Wren.
Ledger picked the body up.
He’d braced himself for the weight of a person, even a dead one, and nearly fell over when the body was lighter than expected. It felt like a dried-out frog or a sucked-dry bug—just rattling bones and skin. Ledger caught himself against the wall, his arm pressed to it from shoulder to elbow, and his skin crawled at the clammy warmth of it.
From outside, he heard Dale yell, “Conroy!”
Ledger steadied himself and headed toward the door. The back of his neck itched as he went, part of him convinced the house was about to do a jump scare and lasso him with tendrils of old skin. Either it couldn’t or, less comfortingly, it didn’t want to. Ledger made it outside and stopped next to Dale on the steps.
The trees died as Earl walked up to the house, faded greenish lichen scabbed on the branches as the leaves curled up and fell to the ground. So many of them, all at the same time, that it was audible, a rustling, muted thump. The birds replaced them, perched in the branches and balanced on bare twigs. Hundreds of them—and all of them staring at the house.
And Earl walked through them, in Wren’s body, but there was no confusing them.
Dark, wavy hair was streaked with fresh bars of gray, fanned back from the temples, and it moved differently. Wren swaggered, but Earl glided along with a straight back and long steps. There were leaves caught in the silvery bark on its regrown antlers, and the wound on its stomach was still open and raw, torn flaps of skin peeled back and glued to its body.
And the tattoo was gone. Wren’s stolen skin was bare and clean of ink.
If he got close enough, Ledger wondered as he got down on one knee to set Earl’s body down gently on the dirt, would he see Wren battering against the glass behind those eyes?
The smell that rolled off him was different. It smelled like a hunt—of sweat-stained dogs and men covered with blood and sour with liquor. All smothered under the hot, quick blood of something freshly killed and still full of fear.
“When you ran, I thought… you were going to be… good prey,” Earl said in that strained, difficult voice. “I haven’t had… a real chase… in centuries. Then you came here… to go to ground… in the wolf’s own den. Just another… dumb beast.”
Maybe.
Ledger braced his elbow on his knee and shakily got back to his feet. He could feel the sour sweat on himself, although he couldn’t smell anything over Earl. Terror battered him, crushing his lungs and making his heart rattle against his ribs. But it wasn’t real.
His body begged to differ, but he ignored it. Behind him, Dale made a choked little rattle in his throat.
“I want to renegotiate the terms of our contract,” Ledger said.
Earl chuckled. A handful of the little birds in the trees dropped from the branches, dead before they could hit the ground.
“You are the same… as your father,” it said. “Some… common little man… who found a book and saw a thing and… thinks himself the master of us. When they’re just a monkey that’s learned… they get fed… if they dance. Our contract is done. You failed. And now… I’ll hang you up… and pull out your bones.”
Earl broke into a loping run. It shouldn’t have been horrible, but something about that easy, ground-eating stride reached right into the back of Ledger’s brain and hooked up old atavistic fear he hadn’t known was there. It grabbed Ledger’s tapped-out adrenal gland in a death grip and squeezed out one last sludgy dose of adrenaline. His muscles burned, and the pressure in his head went up a couple of notches.
Run, it told him, but that would just give Earl something to chase.
And not for long.
Earl didn’t break stride as he slammed into Ledger. The impact knocked the breath out of Ledger, and Earl’s hand around his throat meant that he wasn’t getting it back. He slammed into the newel post of the steps up to Earl’s porch, hard enough to make the whole old structure rattle.
“At least…” Earl said as it trailed a finger down Ledger’s cheek. The caress made Ledger’s stomach turn. “You’re pretty… and used to pain.”
Ledger pulled at Earl’s fingers as he tried to swallow. “New deal,” he gasped out. “You don’t kill me… or otherwise harm me, and I’ll give you your death. You’re in Wren. He knew I was close.”
A contemptuous smirk tilted Earl’s mouth.
“The way you talk about… him like he’s a real thing,” Earl said. It narrowed its eyes as it stared at Ledger. It tightened its grip, thumbnail dug into Ledger’s throat just over his jugular. “Why should I trust you?”
“I don’t know… why I have to keep pointing this out,” Ledger rasped out. “Look at me. What am I going to do, escape cross-country?”
