Silas, I thought. But the thought dissolved before it could become anything else, and the last thing I saw before the dark swallowed me was the thing’s mouth moving, forming words I couldn’t hear, wearing the face of a woman who had believed me when no one else did.
CHAPTER 10
Katie
My sense of smell came back first.
Pine trees, cold rock, and something musty that coated the inside of my throat. I could feel I was in motion, a rhythmic bouncing that sent dull shocks through my ribcage and stomach where I hung folded over something hard and warm.
A shoulder.
My wrists were bound behind my back with what felt like zip ties, the plastic biting into the skin each time the shoulder moved. My head hung down against a broad back, and through the curtain of my own hair I could see the ground scrolling past below me. We were climbing. The air was cold and thin and the light was a diffused gray.
The body carrying me smelled like Silas. Pine sap and woodsmoke and that warm musk underneath, all present and correctly assembled, as convincing as the face at the motel had been.
But I knew what had me even without the sulfur stench that now hit my nostrils.
Mainly because I wasn’t lucky enough to get darted in the neck like a dinopark animal out of its enclosure by the skinwalker and then somehow wake up to Silas rescuing me.
But also because the warmth of this thing felt surface-level, skin-deep, while Silas radiated heat from the inside out, the furnace of him burning through every point of contact.
And the rhythm was wrong. The thing moved with Silas’s stride length and Silas’s weight distribution, but each step landed with mechanical precision, like I was being carried through the mountains by a very bulky robot.
I kept my breathing slow and shallow and did not open my eyes wider than the slit I needed to watch the ground pass beneath me. The thing hadn’t noticed I was awake. Or maybe it had and didn’t care, because we were already deep in the mountains and I was bound and there was nowhere for me to go.
“You can stop pretending.”
The voice rumbled through the chest my stomach was pressed against. It was Silas’s voice, or at least way closer to Silas’ voice than the thing had gotten in its past impersonation attempts. This wasn’t a Silas-bot. This was the lead singer of a top tier Silas cover band.
I didn’t respond.
“Your heartbeat changed four minutes ago. I can feel it.”
I opened my eyes fully.
“Why did you copy Silas?”
The thing adjusted its grip on my thighs, hitching me higher on its shoulder. “It’s easier to carry you in this form.”
The trees had thinned to twisted, wind-bent things that clung to exposed rock faces, and the terrain was steep and broken. We were somewhere deep in the Jemez range, in country I didn’t recognize, far from any trail or road. The sky overhead was flat and gray and the wind carried the mineral bite of snowmelt.
I didn’t know how long I’d been unconscious. Hours at minimum, based on how far we’d climbed. “Where are you taking me?” My voice came out rough, scraped raw from the drugs.
“Home.”
The word, in Silas’s stolen voice, made my skin crawl.
The thing turned up a narrow path between two volcanic ridges, the rock walls closing in on either side. The light dimmed as the walls rose higher, the sky narrowing to a strip of gray above us. The air temperature dropped by several degrees. The charred-sage smell intensified, mixing now with something older and fouler, like mineral deposits laced with decay.
We went deeper. The path twisted left, then right, then opened into a wider space that was less a cave than a wound in the mountain. The ceiling was jagged and low, the floor smooth with centuries of water and wind. Bones littered the place. I could easily pick out several skulls and ribcages of larger animals amid the scant remains of countless smaller creatures.
The skinwalker dumped me on the ground.
I hit the smooth rock hip-first and rolled, the impact jarring through the zip ties into my shoulders. The cave, or lair, orwhatever it was, stretched back into darkness beyond the gray light filtering in from the entrance. The walls glistened with moisture. The air was cold and still and saturated with chemical reek.
The thing wearing Silas stood over me.
Then it changed.
