Suddenly, the fawn went still and Green saw its attention snap to the opposite tree line.
His mouth went dry.
That’s where Valentina was heading.
He stared at the fairy-fire thing. It looked peaceful, even lovely, but he trusted his teacher. He still struggled to believe the fawn was responsible for all the death on the mountain, but he trusted her.
The fawn reoriented its body and began gliding toward where Valentina was no doubt watching. Its legs moved, but the movement seemed out of sync with its speed. It shifted across the ground like a marionette in the hands of a novice puppeteer.
She’d been joking when she said that her immortal apprentice was her plan for defense.
She was half joking.
The fawn began to slide faster toward Valentina.
“Aw, hell.”
Green ran.
He felt heavy and loud, but he ran as hard as he could toward the fawn.
He threw his stick aside and put all his effort into a full sprint.
Distantly, he heard the front door of the house click open as he passed.
He ignored it.
He wasn’t a runner and he felt a fire blooming in his chest from the effort.
The fawn’s legs swayed in a languid dance, but it was still leaving him behind.
He needed its attention.
He meant to yell “hey,” but it erupted from him as a half-roared “haaaaaa.”
The fawn paused and did a boneless somersault that made no physical sense and then it was facing Green again, standing stone-still and waiting for his approach.
He slid to a halt thirty feet from the creature, feeling rivulets of sweat freezing on his face. His lungs burned and his chest ached with the sunless cold beneath a frozen sea. Between the sudden winter within his body and his panting exertion, he had to plant his hands on his knees to stay upright.
He eyed the fawn and fought for breath.
Up close, Green saw his mistake.
At that distance, without fogged glass between them, the fawn was neither graceful nor lovely. Neither ethereal nor statuesque.
It was a deer-shaped pool teeming with rotting, malformed fish. A pale, wet, pulsing thing pressed beneath a stone. Its two dark eyes were not eyes and looked at nothing, between them a buzzing, hateful disk spun like a coin on a dish.
Green met its sightless gaze and something unhealthy touched his mind. For a moment, his inner voice was no longer alone within hisskull. There was something else in that refuge beneath the bone, something the color of cream with a forest of questing fingers.
He screamed noiselessly and clutched his forehead.
Then, something else was there in his mental darkness, in the place he had thought so safely locked away and private.
This new thing came with a booming, thunderous growl that drove the invader from the hollow places inside the walls.
Look away, not-man.
Green gasped in a breath and shifted his whole body away from the fawn, turning his back on the creature. The ice in his beard clattered like beads as he turned.
