Fingers touch my cheek, and I open my eyes to find Keary beside me. “You have a beautiful smile.”
I roll my eyes and try to keep said smile from splitting my face. I don’t know how he always makes me grin like an idiot with all the things he says.
“Do you want to have a ceremony?” Drystan asks.
There’s something in his tone that makes me think he does, so I nod. I’m rewarded when his smile becomes almost childlike with excitement.
“Awesome. It’ll be the best. When we’re done hunting the pod, we’ll go back to the base and get married!”
“You know what the best part of getting married is, right?” Keary asks. I look at him, and he wiggles his eyebrows. “The honeymoon!”
Notto sighs. “You act as if there’s something preventing us from fucking all day now.”
“It’s going to be different. Husbands,” he says, smirking at Notto over his shoulder.
I’m distracted as we come to an old street sign. The sign itself is long gone, but there’s a banner hanging from it. It’s white with a human profile. The name Greer is still legible, but the banner itself looks like it’s been torn.
I look beyond it toward a small huddle of huts. There’s no movement. No smoke. No noise at all. I don’t know why, but my stomach drops. A sense of familiarity, sickness, fills my chest. “Let’s go check it out,” I suggest.
There’s no argument as we approach. I keep my hand buried in Kaida’s fur-feathers. Her body pushes gently against mineevery dozen steps, reminding me that she’s right there. I’m not alone and she’ll protect me.
We’re still a dozen feet away from it when it becomes apparent that the camp is empty. The little huts are made of what had once been enormous highway signs, bent and folded in such a way to create shelters over two-to-four-foot trenches dug into the earth.
There are three of these huts, with still-occupied clothing lines hanging between them. There’s a central firepit with large coals that look as if they’d died out from lack of attention and fuel. There’s a stuffed bear that’s missing its soft texture, its eyes, an arm, and it has a slash through its middle.
Most of the malformations are from time. This missing arm has been sewed closed. The threadbare appearance is because it’s likely decades, if not a century, old. But the slash through its middle?
That’s new.
“There’s still food in this pot, but it’s very, very old,” Drystan says as he stands near the firepit, holding the lid of the pot and looking in.
“Bedding and clothes are still inside the huts,” Keary says just as I see the first signs of struggle. The shuffling in the dirt. A gouge in the earth where someone dug something in.
A vision of my uncle digging his fingers into the ground as one of the monsters dragged him away flashes before my eyes. Chills break out over my skin, and I continue to look around.
There. Right there. The first sign of blood. It’s not much. A drop next to a hat. Using the toe of my boot, I flip the hat and take a step back. There’s a lot of blood in the hat, as if it were used to catch someone’s dripping blood.
I follow the subtle trail of blood spatter. It’s light. Much of it has been lost to time, though not so long ago that it’s missing entirely. It’s still very clearly here. Undisturbed.
The entire camp is undisturbed even though its occupants have vacated. I frown as I realize I know this. Everything about it is familiar.
“A pod took them,” I say. As the words leave my mouth, I see a footprint that isn’t human—neither barefoot nor covered in some kind of shoes. This appears animal-like, but… no. It’s a beast. There’s a strange shape to it, a cross between pictures found in dinosaur books and something canine.
“Yes,” Notto agrees as he steps up beside me. His hand grips the back of my neck in a show of comfort. He’s far more affectionate now than he had been before the library conversation. “They tend to target small human camps. They’re easy pickings.”
I wince. Mine had only been seven. Me, my two cousins, my parents, my aunt and uncle. “Why did they leave us?” I wonder. “I know that one saw me. They met my eyes as we hid within a broken, rotted shell of a truck.” I can still see his eyes.
“That’s a good question,” Notto says. “It’s incredibly unlikely that they’d purposefully leave you behind.”
I’ve spent many years telling myself that that moment didn’t happen. That they didn’t see me. That somehow, our parents hid us well enough that they didn’t know where we were. They didn’t know we were there.
It’s a lie. It’s always been a lie. I didn’t imagine that moment. We locked eyes through the crack in the side of the truck while I watched in horror. He stared right at me for several beats. I remember the way dread curled through my stomach, sure that we were dead. He’d come after us now.
But he turned and walked away, dragging my father’s limp body behind him by an arm.
That’s how the symbol that he wore on the back of his shirt was burned into my memory forever. The circle with threespheres sticking out like points of a triangle. There are two revolutions, reminding me of the old atomic symbols.
Right in the middle is an eye. Not a human eye but something that feels draconic. Chilling. Until this moment, it’s been nothing but a blur, but I remember it clearly now.
