But everytime she nearly convinced herself to run, Alashiyaremembered the screams. She remembered her parents pushing her into the woods, urging her to run. She remembered what it was like to be found, days later, and to come home to a grove of ghosts.
She wasn’t helpless, and this washerland. If someone wanted to take it from her, they’d just have to kill her.
So she walked, keeping to the darkest, wildest parts of the property. Gradually the barn resolved itself into more than just a sad shape in the dark. Her breath caught as she stumbled to a stop near the tree line. Behind her, birch trees stood like solemn spectators dressed in bone white, the patterns of black eyes on their trunks ever-watchful. A stately owl she’d known from a scrawny fledgling stood on the roof like a sentinel against the dark sky and its stormy clouds. The owl watched her, too.
Details were hard to come by, but she could see just enough to balk at. The roof had been nearly completely caved in. For a wild, wonderful moment, she nearly laughed at herself.
The roof had been falling apart for years. She didn’t have the funds to fix it, and even if she did, perhaps she wouldn’t have had the heart. What would she do with a large barn, anyway? There was no one and nothing to inhabit it, save the bats who dangled from the rafters and the mice who made their homes in the ephemera of lives long extinguished.
It felt like a fitting tribute to allow Blight to reclaim it, as he would do to all things eventually. Even her.
Perhaps that was all the noise was. One too many boards had rotted and it simply gave way. It didn’t explain the wards, but neither did a meteor. Only a sapient intruder would’ve triggered those, but how likely was that? A far more reasonable answer was that something had gone awry when the roof collapsed. Perhaps an old ward laid down into the structure by one of the grove had activated, or maybe she’d simply done something wrong when she layered them again just before the start of recreation season.
Maybe it’s Blight,she thought wryly, recalling all the stories her parents used to tell her. When she was little, she believed thegod of forests, decay, and darkness would appear when she least expected it. He was in every shadow and rustling of leaves. She’d been told he’d show up when she needed him most.
Faced with the unlikely prospect, Alashiya wasn’t sure what she’d say to a god except, perhaps, that he was a century too late to help her.
Whatever had happened, there appeared to be no sign of life in the barn — threatening, friendly, or divine. The large barn door was still closed. There were no voices, no footsteps. If there was a shifter about, an owl certainly wouldn’t have perched contentedly on what remained of the peak of the roof, its golden eyes calmly surveying her. Animals usually became restless and wary when a bigger predator was about, so his relaxed posture eased her worries.
It’s nothing. Thank the gods.
Alashiya’s sweaty grip slackened on the scissors. She pressed the heel of her hand into her eye, fighting back the sting of tears. She could’ve collapsed into the undergrowth and wept with relief, but she wanted to get back to her bed far more.
She’d just begun to turn around when the horrendous clatter of something moving in the barn made her heart lurch. The owl let out a low, authoritative hoot, as if to say,You should probably check on that.
Her breath escaped her in a long, reedy exhale as she stared unblinkingly at the white trees. The warmth of the night had turned to cold needles, thousands of them pricking her from within and without.
It’s just the debris settling. That’s all.
The fantasy was shattered not a moment later by a terrifying animal rumble. Cold sweat dotted her forehead as she forced herself to turn back around. The owl remained where he was, but his head had cocked to peer down at the barn below his talons. He didn’t appear alarmed in the slightest, but why would he? He could fly away at a moment’s notice. What a relief it would be to have a pairof wings.
It’s an animal,she thought, fighting the sharpest edge of hysteria.It has to be.
Animals tended to like nymphs. Even the most aggressive moose or wolves wouldn’t attack her, so long as they weren’t ill or injured. But a moose wouldn’t have dropped out of the sky, so that left only a handful of terrifying options — almost all of which involved her being shredded by claws and potentially eaten.
Whatever it was, it soundedbig.Bigger than big.
Alashiya’s fingers had begun to numb from her grip on the scissors, but she didn’t feel any discomfort as she stared at the old, rotted wood of the barn door. The air stung her eyes and forced her to blink.This was stupid,she decided. Running in the opposite direction of the intruder was obviously the right choice. It was all very clear to her now. Why hadn’t she done that? Why didn’t she ever actually listen to what her instincts tried to tell her?
A charged, syrupy summer breeze, a prelude to the coming storm, had picked up and was no doubt blowing her scent through the gaps between the wood of the barn. If the creature was alert at all, it probably already knew she was there.
The instincts of millennia, of every one of her line who’d come before her, were a live wire inside her, urging her feet to move. Her pulse jumped in her neck and wrists with a frenzied beat.
A plaintive whistling note pierced the air. Alashiya’s right foot, which had moved backward without her conscious permission, froze. More noises came from the barn. A lower, sadder sound was followed by one she knew well — the involuntary, breathy moan of a creature in distress.
A lump lodged in her throat. Whoever orwhateverhad crashed into her barn was possibly injured. That changed things. It both lowered and escalated the risk of confronting it considerably. An injured intruder was less able to harm her, certainly, but the likelihood of attack from a large, wounded animal increased.
The smart thing would have been to make the trek through the woods to her closest neighbor’s home. The Thompsons had atelephone she could use to call the rangers station. A wild-eyed troop of young, eager shifters with tranq guns could be there in twenty minutes.
It was funny how most of the time twenty minutes didn’t seem very long. Twenty minutes of sleep was nothing. Twenty minutes of facing down an injured animal all by herself was very muchnot.
But doing the smart thing meant possibly leaving an injured creature — sapient or not — to die alone.
Alashiya couldn’t make herself walk away, not when those terrifying but pitiful sounds continued to reach her. She tried to. She really tried.
But could she face herself if she turned her back on a dying creature?
No,she decided, at once resolute and annoyed with herself.I may be the last, but that’s not how we were made. If I die, it’ll be because I chose to help. Even my ghosts couldn’t blame me for that.
