When Winter Comes | Book 6 | Winter Comes Read online

He looked down and saw their legs. He aimed the rifle behind him and shot. Three, four, five. The fingers were still in him, but their strength faded as they dealt with their wounds.

  Oscar dropped to his knees, hoping that gravity would aid his escape. Their fingers slid out. He crawled, then pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the lightning bolts of pain that shot through his arms as he ran. Instinct drove him. Not towards his auntie, not towards the girl, but towards the object that had caught his eye at the far side of the clearing.

  The creature kicked out a mighty leg, sending the boy flying like a ragdoll. He came at Oscar. Oscar dropped to the ground, grimacing as his shoulder yielded. He climbed hastily to his feet, making a swing to his right and out of the way of the creature’s path. The object was small, but intrigue pulled him, a disturbing tether that dragged him towards the white item discarded on the ground.

  A bone mask. Antlers soaked in crimson. A hand that had once pacified his cries as they wrapped around his body. A hand that had once stroked the tears from his cheeks. A hand that once ran its slender fingers through his hair. A hand now severed. Alone and removed from the mess of body that littered the ground. All that was left of her.

  Oscar didn’t cry. Didn’t falter. There was no time. Stars wheeled overhead and the aurora danced its waltz as he reached for the skull, hands as steady as a rock, and placed it on his head.

  15

  Tori Asplin

  The shrieks dulled to a mild nuisance as gunshots rang around the clearing. Somewhere she could hear Oscar struggling. In another place, Sophie was calling Cody’s name.

  She glanced up and a boy was hurled through the air, arms and legs limp as if made of cotton and thread. His body crashed to the ground nearby, and the hungry wolves descended.

  Dark hands reached for him, hunger lighting up dead eyes. Tori peeled her hands, sticky with blood, from her head and ran for the kid, snatching up the rifle as she sprinted towards him. She fired shots without looking, sent wendigos reeling backwards. The kid lay lifeless and still. Wendigos pawed at his body…

  A roar stilled them, another powerful gust of ancient air disrupted their frenzy and brought them to a standstill. The cry was clear, an instruction to leave the boy for their master.

  Tori made it to the kid’s side and crouched beside him, hovering over his body like a protective mother. She had never had children of her own, was never sure she wanted them, but that didn’t mean that this monster could steal someone else’s. Sophie sent off report after report, the bullets finding their way into the creature’s dark body, nothing more than mosquito stings on the statue of a giant. The creature stalked towards them, a giant amongst men, coarse hair and throbbing muscle. The eyes fixed on Tori and the boy. Sophie screamed, fired the shotgun until it ran dry, then tossed the gun at the creature who didn’t so much as bat an invisible eyelid.

  Behind him stood the Masked Ones. A bear, a stag, a wolf. The vanguard of the damned, awaiting their master’s call.

  The creature was slow in its movements. Deliberate. How could something so monstrous exist? In which history class did they teach of this? The ground trembled, an impossible weight slamming down with each step.

  Tori shook her head, tears welling in her eyes. “Stay back!”

  Her words rippled around the clearing, then were absorbed by the forest. The aurora danced, its pulsing lights giggling down on them.

  “I mean it!” She stood, knees trembling, rifle aimed into the centre of one of the creature’s eyes. “One more step and I shoot. This is your last warning.”

  Are you trying to reason with the Devil?

  The creature cocked its head, a sparrow eyeing up a worm. Tori half-expected shrieks to explode in her head again, but only silence remained. There was no more need for words, the message was clear: It’s over.

  Words that defined every step of her night, every last miserable experience since the first coming of the storm and the sighting of the red lights.

  It’s over.

  The creature took another step. Tori’s hands shook. Her lip quivered. She fired the rifle, expecting a sudden burst of screaming, a well of chaos, a crumbling of the great being that stood before her.

  Nothing happened. The bullet entered the socket, and disappeared, swallowed in its entirety. She fired again, catching the mask. A fracture appeared in the bone. It took another step, shadow looming over Tori and the boy. Sophie ran over to it, beating her fists against its legs, dissolving into pained screams the moment she made contact with its form, recoiling and lying on the ground as though she’d been burnt.

  The creature stopped before them, eyes boring into Tori. Cody didn’t make a sound. Didn’t move. Tori trained her gun at the creature, as if it would make a blind bit of difference. This creature, already littered with holes, and walking around as though nothing had happened. This creature with its magnificent size and impossible creation. This creature…

  This creature, whose den they had entered, whose home they had invaded…

  This creature…

  She fired again.

  Again.

  Again.

  This creature that grasped Tori in its powerful fists, pinning her arms to her sides.

  This creature…

  This creature that raised Tori off the ground as if she was nothing more than a bird’s feather…

  This creature.

  This creature that belched its message of death at Tori, warm air flowed through the vents of a mausoleum…

  This creature…

  This creature that laughed.

  This creature that stared.

  This creature that squeezed…

  16

  Oscar Oslow

  Dad…?

  Clear as day. There. No mistaking.

  The ghost of Donavon Oslow smiled, a warmth that Oscar had only ever seen in pictures and dreams. A smile… His smile. A smile that stretched in time and brought wetness to his eyes.

  Oscar’s mouth wouldn’t close. It made no sense. He was here. He was right there, standing in the middle of the clearing as the creature lumbered towards Auntie Tori and the boy. Standing feet away from Oscar were the Masked Ones, silent and reverent in the presence of their master, unblinking, unaware of Oscar’s father standing there…

  Standing. There…

  Dad…?

  He daren’t speak the words out loud through fear of spooking his image, frightening the tentative stag into the depths of the woods. He simply stared at his father as the creature loomed over Auntie Tori and the boy and blocked them from sight. His father walked towards him, growing larger, growing more real with every step. His brow was creased with worry lines, crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. His father had died young, but age had followed him. His mother never told him all that much about what happened, only that his father went missing one night and never returned. He had always hoped that one day he might find his father appearing from the trees, impossibly, years after his disappearance, but never once had he envisioned meeting him like this.

  Can you hear me?

  A nod. That smile unfaltering. A smile laced with love.

  Tori shot the creature.

  Oscar fixed his gaze on his father, a ghostly hand rising to come to rest on his shoulder. There was a smell to the ghost, of earth and time and a whiff of some kind of cologne gone stale. He shouldn’t have felt any physical touch from his ghost, but from where his palm sat a warmth seeped into his body, a weight to the hand as it pressed on him, his father cocking his head and smiling.

  What must I do?

  His father’s gaze moved past Oscar, looking over his shoulder. Oscar followed with a turn of the head, a strange mixture of grief and understanding pulsing through him as his mother appeared behind. How had he not heard her appear? How had he not felt her nearby? Her skin was pale, almost translucent. She wore the same smile as his father. Her hand rested on top of his, and for a single second they were happy. They were together. Oscar hadn’t seen the woman befo
re him in his lifetime. The Naomi Oslow from the pictures on the mantel showed a carefree woman, optimistic about a future she would never be able to claim. Here she was now, the light returning to her eyes as she looked at her husband and they wrapped their arms around Oscar. He could feel their hearts beating, could feel their weight and warmth. Could feel… them.

  Another shot fired. Auntie Tori screamed.

  Oscar looked over his father’s shoulder to find Tori raised off the ground, the creature’s mammoth hand wrapped around her waist.

  Something pressed into the cup of his hand. He looked down at his mother’s rifle—his father’s rifle. His mother nudged him forward. His father stepped to the side.

  They didn’t speak, but he knew what to do. Tori’s screams grew louder, taking over the clearing. Oscar reluctantly strode into the centre of the clearing, lining up the rifle with the back of the creature’s skull. There was a dark crack, a fissure where the contours of the bone failed to meet. In the middle of the fissure was a darkness, and as Oscar lined up the shot, he thought of train tunnels and underground caverns, places where the dark things hid in the hopes that the light wouldn’t penetrate.

  His father’s rifle was the breaker of darkness.

  Go. His voice.

  Go. Hers.

  Oscar pulled the trigger.

  Chaos broke out almost instantly. His aim was true, and the bullet was lost in the void. A wet, meaty expansion took place inside the helmet, and the creature screamed, buildings bending and machines chewing up the world. All that was human fell to the ground, hands clamped to their ears, all that was wendigo reared their heads back, stretched their arms and joined the chorus of hurt.

  Oscar watched all of this passively, not understanding, protected in his little cocoon of bone as Sophie fell and Tori dropped from the creature’s hand, and Cody twitched on the floor—his first signs of movement since the mighty kick of the mother wendigo.

  The creature whirled on him, dark ichor oozing from those dark eye sockets. It slammed its fists into the ground and the world leaned left, listing like a ship on turbulent waters. Oscar fought to balance. The creature sprinted towards him, using its fists as supports in the way he had seen apes move in nature documentaries. The creature drew a great fist to the sky, catching the darkening glint of the aurora as it swung down at him.

  Oscar closed his eyes.

  Arms wrapped around his chest. His frozen body was pulled.

  He opened his eyes and the creature was out of arm’s reach, his mother and father standing either side of him, the way they should always have been, faces hardened as they glared at the creature.

  Oscar lined up a second shot and fired, the bullet finding its mark in the creature’s neck.

  Not as effective. A bug on a windshield.

  But now the creature was scared.

  17

  Sophie Pearce

  Sophie watched in horror as the creature bounded towards Oscar. Or, at least, what she thought was Oscar. It had to be him. He wore his clothes, stood with his posture…

  But what was the skull on his head?

  The whole reality was a nightmare, and Sophie felt as though she were underwater. As the wendigos screeched and the cries of the great beast faded, she crawled towards Tori and Cody’s limp bodies. She lay across Cody, head placed on his chest, doing whatever she could to ignore the restless wendigos that beat their chests and waved their arms and gnashed their teeth.

  They were breaking formation.

  What else was there to do but lay with Cody and die? That’s what all of this was leading to, right? Their inevitable death. Who did they think they were to cling onto what wasn’t theirs to have? Maybe the afterlife wouldn’t be so bad in the end…

  Cody groaned. His eyelids fluttered. A wendigo leaped over them, coming to their master’s defense.

  “Cody?” Her words a whisper.

  Cody’s eyes opened a fraction, the pupils still dilated. A crust of blood on his lips.

  Sophie couldn’t hold back the overwhelm of tears that flooded her system, salt droplets falling on his face. “Cody…”

  More wendigo leaping. A black rush of a clouding swarm of bats.

  Another gunshot. Always gunshots. The drumbeat of their melancholy.

  A teardrop, turned to blood in the reflection of the aurora, hit his lip. She traced her finger across its length, wiping away the stubborn crusts until his lips were clean. Shallow breaths came from his mouth, chest beginning to rise and fall. She put her hands to his cheeks and kissed him, her own lips cracked and dry, softening as they touched his, his body responding as he returned the kiss then groaned when he tried to raise his arm to her face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Broken…”

  There were lumps in his arms where there should be none, and as she examined his body, eyes darting quickly to the places in urgent need of medical attention, she caught Tori’s body out of the corner of her eye.

  Before she could register what she was seeing, Oscar’s cries pulled her attention.

  She looked across the clearing, a wave of creatures running at the boy. Sophie spared a longing glance at Cody before grabbing the rifle that had fallen from Tori’s hands when the creature had picked her up. She sprinted towards the mother beast, found the same entry point that Oscar had shot at, and fired.

  She only pulled the trigger once, but three shots followed. The wendigos frenzied, dark blood spraying into the air as something ripped into their heads, their bodies, their legs, and started thinning their number. Sophie shot again at the great beast, this bullet missing its mark as the colossal thing screeched.

  All Sophie wanted to do was escape that haunting shriek, but she powered through, even as warm liquid dripped from her ears, even as static filled her vision, she shot. Four more shots. The Masked Ones moved into the throng, running to the protection of their saviour, their skulls shattering as more shots fired in quick succession. With each Masked One taken down, the mother beast increased its ferocity, swinging wildly around, arms catching its own children and sending them traveling through the air. Were the shots blinding it? Were the Masked Ones in some way associated with its power? Sophie had no idea, all that she knew through her fuzzy haze was that something was happening. Someone was shooting, the wendigos were confused and afraid and, for the first time that night, it felt like there might be some semblance of hope.

  She shot again, catching the mother beast in the back of the head. A large shard of bone chipped off. Four more shots. Sophie glanced behind her, finding a familiar face that flooded her with hope.

  Alex had come, after all.

  18

  Alex Goins

  His clothes clung to his body. Sweat stung his eyes. The vibrations of the earth fizzed through his legs, a gash on his eyebrow where he had been knocked off-kilter and brushed the rough bark of a tree.

  The forest shouldn’t have been so dense, but in a strange way he expected it to be. The trees didn’t want him. The world didn’t want him.

  The wendigos didn’t want him.

  He heard their din from miles away and ran in their direction. When they came into sight, blood-red under the lights of the aurora, all hope drained from him. He couldn’t drink it in, there was too much, information sated his body and overflowed, pouring out of every crevice. He lined one of his rifles—for he had been certain to take a number of firearms from the sideboard in Tori’s sister’s house—and took a shot at the impossible mass of wendigo towering above the others. His grip was clumsy. Rifles were designed for two hands, not one.

  Wendigos turned on him and charged. He sent bullets into their bodies.

  Masked Ones swooped towards him. He adjusted, shouting until he was deaf, ignoring the tremendous screech that made his ears fill with fluid and pulse as though he was underwater. The madness was engulfing, and all he could do was shoot and shoot and shoot until the weapon was drained of ammunition, and then switch to another rifle, and then shoot, and shoot, an
d shoot, adrenaline numbing the pain, coating the overwhelming throb of his shattered shoulder...

  Bodies smashed into him. Hands and needle-like fingers tore at his clothes. Yet still he fired, internally urging Sophie to fire faster, to find the primal animal inside her and fight harder, that was the only way to beat these creatures, to out-animal them, to find the ancient part buried deep down inside and kill until the ground was saturated with blood and the quiet came.

  The enormous creature swung its arms, only helping their case as wendigo flew through the air, spines breaking on impact with the cold ground. At first, they had seemed infinite in their number, but finally they were breaking down. With each toppling of a Masked One, the frenzy grew wilder, but their numbers dwindled. Alex allowed himself a moment of hope, that they might beat this, could beat this. Find an end to it all.

  And then a Masked One was on him. His clip was empty. Alex groaned as the Masked One grabbed him by the throat and raised him off the ground, impossible strength in long, black arms. Alex kicked the air, foot finding the creature’s chest, bouncing back as though he’d kicked a wall. The creature pressed his windpipe and Alex fought for breath.

  The creature’s mask exploded. Sophie shouted something he couldn’t hear. None of them could hear anymore.

  Alex’s feet found the earth. He discarded the empty weapon and moved to his pistol, finger aching as he pumped it against trigger, spinning in all directions until he had bought himself a bit of space to operate. He worked his way towards Sophie. “How you doing, kid?”

  Sophie didn’t answer. He didn’t expect her to.

  The monolithic creature cried out into the night, arms swinging in all directions. It turned its head towards Alex, then froze where it stood.

  Alex looked behind him as the wendigo stilled. Cody rose shakily to his feet, supported by a woman in a thick fur hood, a snow-white dog by their side.