They shouldn’t have stayed.

  The boy knew it as he kept walking forward, boots whispering through trampled grass and ash. The camp lay open to the sky, a raw wound on the land. Vultures hopped and flapped and scolded one another, irritated that two skinny children had come to bother their feast.

  Lily’s fingers were little hooks in the back of his shirt.

  “Brother,” she whispered. “We don’t have to be here. We can go ‘round. We can go far ‘round.”

  He could feel her shaking through the cloth.

  “We can’t go ‘round hunger,” he said. “Lots of things here we can take.”

  He kept his eyes on the ground, on what was scattered there.

  The smell sat thick in the air—rot and iron and smoke. Under it, something fatty and half-burned, like meat left too close to a fire. The boy breathed through his mouth, shallow, tasting it anyway.

  He picked his path between the bodies.

  They lay where they’d fallen, or where something had tossed them. Men on their backs with mouths open to the sky. Women curled around children who hadn’t made it under their arms in time. One old man sat propped against a pole as if resting, except his chest was gone from collarbone to belly, ribs like broken fence pickets. Flies droned over him in a black scarf.

  Lily kept her head tilted down, eyes almost closed, like she could pretend the shapes around them were sacks or bundles of firewood. It didn’t help. You couldn’t mistake the curve of a hand, the shape of a face, even when half of it was missing.

  “We shouldn’t step over ‘em,” she said thickly. “Feels wrong.”

  “Dirt doesn’t mind being stepped on,” he said. “They’re dirt now.”

  The words came out harsher than he meant. He saw her flinch in the corner of his eye and felt a small, sour twist inside. But if he let himself soften, let himself look at them the way she wanted to… they’d starve a little prettier, that was all.

  He moved toward the fallen tepees.

  Fire circles ringed with stones. A rack of poles for drying meat, now half-collapsed. A line of children’s footprints pressed into a patch of bare earth near a stream-cut that had gone to mud. Everyday things, put places by hands that expected to use them again.

  He headed for the drying rack. Meat meant food. Food meant not dying.

  “Stay close,” he said.

  “I’m not lettin’ go,” Lily muttered.

  The rack had been built tall, a tripod of peeled poles with crosspieces lashed on. Strips of meat hung from them, long and dark, like rows of washing. He reached up and grabbed a strip.

  It came away in his hand with a dry crackle.

  Smoked bison, he guessed. He’d seen a bison once. Those things were massive. The meat was black-red all the way through, stiff and oily. When he bent it, it tore, long fibers pulling apart with a little shine where fat streaked them.

  He tore off a piece with his teeth.

  Salt and smoke and old fat exploded on his tongue. His jaw ached with how hard he had to chew, but once the fibers broke, the meat turned to something almost soft, almost sweet. His stomach twisted, demanding more.

  “Here,” he said, around the mouthful. “Try it.”

  Lily looked at the strip.

  “It was theirs,” she whispered.

  “They don’t mind,” he said. “They don’t care. They’d rather it filled someone’s belly than fed crows.”

  Probably not, but the dead didn’t care.

  After a moment, Lily reached out and took the strip between two fingers. She lifted it to her nose and sniffed, face pinching, then bit off the tiniest corner.

  Her eyes closed.

  “It’s good,” she admitted, like the words hurt. “It’s… really good.”

  “Smoked meat keeps,” he said. “You do it right, it’ll last all winter. This is real food, Lily. War food.”

  He thought of stories he’d heard about Comanches riding for days on nothing but strips like this. “We put as much as we can in.”

  He looked up at the sagging rack, did a quick count in his head. Ten, twelve, fifteen good-sized strips left, plus whatever lay in the dust that vultures hadn’t gotten to.

  [Inventory], he thought.

  The strip of meat in his hand winked out of the world.

  He shoved another in. Another. The space took them, stacking them in some order he didn’t have words for. He felt it growing tighter, the sense of a room filling.

  When he pushed a sixth strip in, the pressure shoved back.

  “Too much?” Lily asked.

  “Full,” he said. “We gotta throw some things out.”

  She frowned. “We can’t throw food out.”

  “Not food.” He hunted through the shadow-stuff in his mind, sifting. Flour from Cobb’s store, musty and likely to go to weevils soon. Pickled vegetables cloudy in their jar. A rock he’d put in once, just to see.

  He grabbed the flour with his thoughts and yanked it back into his hand.

  The sack appeared, rough under his fingers, heavier than he remembered. He weighed it, thought of the smoked meat against his tongue, then set the sack down under the rack. The rock came next. He let it fall to the ground.

  “Flour’s no good without a place to bake,” he said. “Meat you can eat anywhere.”

  “That’s still food,” Lily protested.

  “Can’t eat it without cookin’ it first,” he said. “Maybe the vultures’ll try it.”

  He pushed more strips into the [Inventory] until that silent shove told him it was full again, then tied two more together with a rawhide thong and slung them over his shoulder. The rest he piled under the rack in a rough guess at a cache. Maybe they’d swing back this way. Maybe they wouldn’t. Either way, better here than wasted.

  On the far side of the camp, he found pemmican.

  It sat in rawhide bags, stiff and painted, tucked in the shade of a fallen tepee. The bags were square and flat, edges stitched with care. One had split when some big weight fell on it, its contents oozing out in a brown-red lump.

  He crouched and scooped up a handful.

  The stuff looked like someone had mashed meat and fat and berries all together until you couldn’t tell what was what. It smelled like dried tallow and smoke and a faint, ghost-sour note from the fruit. When he pinched some between two fingers, it squished but didn’t crumble.

  “What’s that?” Lily asked, hovering behind him.

  “Pemmican,” he said. He’d heard the word from drovers in the saloon, bragging about how the northern tribes made it. It was said to last weeks. “Meat and fat and berries all beat together. They say you can ride a week on a piece the size of your fist.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “For real?”

  “Reckon so,” he said. “Feel how heavy it is.”

  He took her hand and pressed the lump into it.

  He scraped the spilled pemmican back into the torn bag and bundled the rest into their invisible space until the [Inventory] shoved back at him again. He cursed under his breath.

  “Language,” Lily murmured. “Don’t talk bad around… around what’s listening.”

  She meant the System.

  “If it don’t like cussin’, it picked the wrong world,” he said.

  He stuffed one smaller bag into his burlap sack and left the other torn ones. Coyotes would get them. Coyotes had to eat too.

  By the time they’d picked through the food storage, Lily’s breathing had gone strange.

  He heard it first—sharp inhales that meant she was trying not to cry. He kept his own eyes on what he was doing—tightening the tie on the smoked meat, shifting the weight of the burlap on his shoulder, waiting to see if she’d swallow it down.

  She didn’t.

  A sound slipped out of her, high and broken. When he glanced at her, her face had gone red, eyes shining. Tears spilled anyway, rolling tracks through the ash on her cheeks.

  “Lily,” he said.

  “I know,” she said, words catching. “I know we gotta eat. I know it. I just—”

  Her gaze bounced off a little form half-hidden in the grass, a small brown arm reaching from under a torn hide.

  “There were babies.” Her voice cracked on the word. “They… they had dolls. Like Ember. They had…”

  She gulped air desperately, like the smell was choking her. “They had lives.”

  He didn’t know what to do with that. His own chest felt tight, but not the way hers did. For him it was more like standing under a sky that had grown too big.

  He set the sack down and put his hand on her shoulder, clumsy.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ll get you out of the stink.”

  People shit themselves when they died.

  He looked around for somewhere less awful and found, near the edge of the camp, a tepee that had only half-fallen. Its painted hide still mostly wrapped the poles; the doorway faced away from the worst of the bodies. No blood darkened the grass at its mouth. Whoever had lived there had fallen somewhere else, or perhaps gotten away. He didn’t think much on which.

  He lifted the flap.

  Inside, the light was dim and brown. The air was close and smelled of old smoke and leather and human breath, but not so much of rot. A pallet of furs lay near the far side. A little clay pot sat by the fire circle, overturned. Beads had spilled from a broken string, glinting scattered in the dirt.

  “It’s clean enough,” he said.

  Lily hovered at the flap, arms wrapped around Ember.

  “I don’t want to be where they were,” she whispered.

  “You already are,” he said. “Every step. This is just a place without as much blood.”

  He softened his voice as much as he knew how. “You stay in here, you don’t have to see ‘em. I’ll be right outside. I swear.”

  She looked up at him through wet lashes, searching his face. Whatever she saw there must have been enough. She ducked inside, shoulders hunched.

  He let the flap fall behind her. For a moment he stood there, one hand resting on the hide, feeling the faint warmth of the day in it. Lily’s muffled sniffles came through, small as a field mouse.

  He turned away.

  Work first. Feelings later. If later came.

  He was halfway back toward the center of the camp, thinking on blankets and maybe some kind of extra water skin, when he heard it.

  A grunt. Low and wet.

  Followed by a whimper.

  He stopped dead.

  The wind slid past his ears, carrying the buzz of flies and the whisper of wings. Nothing else moved. Then, there it was again—so soft he might have imagined it.

  He turned his head, trying to place it. His feet moved without asking him, picking their way between sprawled bodies and dropped spears.

  The sound came from near the big fire circle at the camp’s heart.

  A hand clawed out of a pile of bodies.

  It was dark with dried blood, the fingers scraped raw, nails broken. It scrabbled at nothing, trying to find purchase. Then a shoulder heaved, a head lifted.

  The man could not have stood even if he’d been whole.

  He had no legs.

  The boy’s stomach lurched. For a second, his mind refused to shape what he saw. Then it caught up.

  Both legs ended in torn flesh just below the hips, wrapped in a crust of dried blood and dirt. One arm was gone above the elbow. The other ended ragged halfway between wrist and shoulder, the hand that had just clutched at the air little more than a flap of meat and bone.

  His belly was open.

  The boy had seen guts before, animal and human. These glistened in the gap of his torso, slick coils held in only by the angle he’d been lying at. They bulged when he breathed, each shallow pull threatening to spill them.

  He should have been dead.

  He would be, soon.

  The man’s face was a mask of dried blood and ash. One eye was swollen shut. The other, dark and sharp, fixed on the boy.

  Their gazes locked.

  The boy did not move.

  The man’s lips worked. No sound came out at first. Then he coughed and a string of thick, dark stuff spilled down his chin. When he tried again, the words came in two tongues at once—some in his own language, sharp and breathy, some broken in English.

  “You…” He swallowed, shuddered. “Boy.”

  The boy stepped closer, boots sticking a little in dried blood.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  The man’s lone eye flicked past him. A noise tore out of him, half groan, half something like a laugh robbed of all joy.

  “Gone,” he whispered. “All… gone.”

  His fingers dug at the dirt again, leaving little trenches.

  The boy crouched, awkward, careful to keep just out of reach of the dragging stumps of arms. He knew too well how things that should not move sometimes did.

  “What did it?” he asked.

  “Big,” the man rasped. “On two feet. Like… like man.”

  His breath hitched. “Not man. Hair all over. Teeth.”

  He swallowed. A shudder went through him, making his torn belly pulse.

  “Came from woods. Fast. Screamin’ horses, screamin’ people.” His gaze slid toward the pile behind him. “We shot. We stuck.”

  His chest hitched. “Hurt it. Not… enough.”

  The tracks he’d seen at the edge of the camp earlier hadn’t meant much then—just deep depressions in the churned mud, smudged by hooves and dragged bodies. He’d thought they were tricks of light. Now he could see them properly in his mind’s eye: long, wide impressions, heel and ball and toes like a man’s, only four times the size, sunk inches deep where they’d hit. Strides longer than any horse’s.

  “Where’d it go?” he asked.

  The man made a small, choking sound that might have been a laugh.

  “Still smell it,” he whispered. “Out there.”

  His head twitched toward the tree line.

  His gaze fastened on the boy again, sudden and fierce.

  “You… avenge,” he said. The English word came harsh and clumsy from his tongue. “You hear? You see it, you… you kill.”

  His breath whistled in. “Make it die slow. Make it… remember.”

  The boy opened his mouth, closed it. What promise could he make? The thing this man described sounded like a nightmare on legs.

  Still. Those dark eyes begged something of him.

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  “I’ll try,” he said at last. “If I can. If it doesn’t kill me first.”

  The man’s mouth twitched, like that answer pleased him more than a lie would have.

  He started to say something else.

  “Aven—”

  The word never finished.

  His remaining eye widened, then stared past the boy at something he could not see. His whole body seized, once. The bulging guts in his belly shifted, a horrible, sliding motion. Then everything went slack.

  The breath went out of him and did not come back.

  The boy sat very still.

  Before he even knew it, [The Hollow] did its work.

  From the dead man’s chest, from his open mouth, from the stump of his arm, a haze rose.

  It was different than the imp’s had been. Denser. Brighter, somehow, though it had no color he could name. It curled upon itself, reluctant to leave, as if the weight of the life beneath it held it down.

  Then it felt him..

  [The Hollow] reached out.

  The boy grit his teeth.

  “No,” he whispered, to himself, to the thing in him, to whatever watched. “He was… he was a person.”

  [The Hollow] didn’t care.

  The soul-echo streamed toward him.

  It hit like stepping into winter creek water up to his neck. Ice in every vein. Then it burned, heat flooding his muscles, his bones, his skull. And in his mind flashes memories that never quite formed—horses under him, wind in his hair, the twang of a bow, the recoil of a long gun, the sound of his own voice laughing with others around a fire.

  Soul consumed!

  +2 Strength.

  +2 Dexterity.

  +2 Vitality.

  +2 Magic.

  The messages popped in his head one after the other, each one like a nail tapped in. His numbers shifted: Strength climbing from 6 to 8. Dexterity from 9 to 11. Vitality from 12 to 14. Magic from 7 to 9.

  There was no Level Up this time. No new loose stones to place.

  He sucked in air, chest expanding. The world felt… sharper. The weight of the gun at his hip seemed a touch lighter. The ache in his ankle from the hermit’s grip faded to a memory. Even the stink of the camp cut cleaner, as if each smell had edges now.

  He realized his hands were shaking.

  “Brother?”

  Lily’s voice, muffled, came from the tepee. He must have made some sound.

  He looked down at the dead man.

  Whatever had risen from him was gone now. The body looked emptier somehow.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  He wasn’t sure who he meant it for.

  He pushed himself to his feet and backed away, eyes scanning the camp again. No other bodies twitched. No other souls rose.

  On the edge of the churned ground he saw the tracks proper.

  Huge, man-shaped prints, sunk deep into blood-muddied earth. Heel, ball, toes. A faint suggestion of claws at the tips, where the mud had torn. Each one was as long as his whole leg from knee to heel, he reckoned. The stride between them was wide enough he’d have had to leap to match one step.

  He put his boot down in one, heel against the back edge. It barely took up the space of a single toe.

  “Brother?” Lily’s voice came again, more anxious.

  “Coming,” he called.

  They left the camp as the sun slipped.

  As they walked away, the vultures settled in properly, no longer flapping up every few heartbeats. Coyotes ghosted at the edges of the clearing already, small gray shadows sliding between brush and corpse. A big black crow hopped up onto a fallen warrior’s chest, cocked its head at the children, and then plucked out an eyeball.

  Lily kept her hand locked around Ember and the other around the boy’s.

  “You talked to one,” she whispered after a while.

  He glanced at her.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Your face.” She sniffed.

  He hadn’t known that. He filed it away.

  “He was… hurt bad,” he said. “Legs gone. Belly open. Nothin’ to be done.”

  Her eyes went shiny again.

  “That’s awful,” she said softly. “Did he… did he say anythin’?”

  “He said the big thing came from the woods,” he answered. “Said they hurt it, but not enough. Said it’d come back.”

  Lily shivered.

  “Did he say his name?”

  “No,” the boy said. The lack of it felt wrong, somehow. “He just said to kill it slow, if we ever got the chance.”

  Lily was quiet for a long stretch of steps.

  “Can we?” she asked finally. “Kill somethin’ like that?”

  “Not now,” he said. “Maybe later. When we’re more.”

  “More what?”

  He paused for a moment and considered his answer.

  “Strong,” he said. “When we’re stronger.”

  They walked until the stink of the camp thinned from the air and the sky had turned a washed-out blue with streaks of pink clawed across it. The land rolled a little now, low rises and shallow dips. On one of those dips the creek had bitten into the bank, leaving a little overhang of earth and roots.

  The boy spotted it and veered toward it.

  The overhang wasn’t a real cave—just a shallow scooped-out place. But it was big enough for two children to hunch under if they didn’t mind the dirt. Roots dangled from the roof like brown hair. The front looked out onto the creek and a little strip of stony shore.

  He set his burdens down with a grunt.

  “This’ll do,” he said.

  Lily peered in skeptically.

  “It’s small.”

  “Small is good,” he said. “Harder for things to see us. Harder for the wind to steal heat.”

  He scraped out some loose dirt with his hands, making the hollow a touch deeper, then spread their blanket over the floor. It didn’t help much, but it kept the worst of the damp off.

  Lily coaxed [Spark] from her fingers, a little tremble of flame that took to the tinder he’d piled just outside the cave mouth. The fire they built was small, barely bigger than his two fists together. He stacked stones close around it to block the light, the way he’d seen hunters do.

  They ate beans and pemmican.

  He opened a can with his stolen knife and set it near the fire to warm, the sauce thickening as it bubbled. He sliced thin curls off a lump of pemmican with the same blade and dropped them into the beans. They melted in the heat, fat loosening, turning the mess rich and slick.

  They took turns with the spoon, like always. The pemmican made each mouthful heavier, more filling. He could almost feel it laying itself into his bones.

  Lily ate in small, mechanical bites, eyes distant.

  “They had this every day,” she said suddenly, staring into the can. “All that meat. All them horses. All that… life.”

  “Had,” he said. “Not have. That’s why we’re eatin’ it now.”

  She frowned at him.

  “You’re mean,” she said quietly.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But we’re alive.”

  She didn’t argue.

  When the beans were gone, he scraped the last streaks from the tin with his fingertip and licked it clean. The hunger quieted down from a howl to a grumble.

  The creek murmured a few yards away. Crickets started up in the grass as the light died. The little fire burned low, then lower, coaxed into coals.

  “Do you think the System saw all that?” Lily asked after a while, voice very small. “Back there. All those folks dyin’. Do you think it wrote numbers for it?”

  He thought about it.

  “It didn’t give us anything,” he said. “I didn’t feel it. No Level. No… nothin’. Just… I reckon it only cares when we’re swingin’.”

  “That’s worse,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Means it watched,” she said. “Watched everythin’ and didn’t bother to count it.”

  He didn’t have an answer for that.

  They lay down eventually, turned on their sides facing each other under the low roof. The blanket scratched his cheek. Lily tucked Ember between them, the doll’s singed face watching the dim glow of the coals.

  “You sleep first,” he told Lily.

  “You?” she asked.

  “I’ll listen a while,” he said. “Then I’ll sleep.”

  She nodded, already half-dozing, lashes heavy. Her breathing evened out slowly.

  He lay awake.

  The night spread out. Stars pricked into being above the lip of their shallow cave. The creek’s voice stayed the same—a low, steady mutter. Every now and then a coyote yipped far off, the sound skipping over the ground.

  He let his mind skim his insides, checking.

  He could bring the Status up now with barely a thought. And he did.

  Name: —

  Level: 2

  Race: Human

  Strength: 8

  Dexterity: 11

  Vitality: 14

  Magic: 9

  Sometime after the moon had hauled itself over the line of black trees and started toward the other side of the sky, he heard it.

  A loud howl rose and fell. This sound was… different. It came from far off and still seemed too loud. Something about it made his stomach turn.

  Lily snapped awake beside him with a small scream stuffed into her palm.

  “What is that?” she gasped.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t wanna find out sittin’ here.”

  He put his hand over the little coal-bed and smothered it with a handful of damp dirt. The last light died, leaving them in the dark under the ledge.

  “Brother—”

  “Up,” he said. “Now. We move.”

  She scrambled to her feet, fumbling for Ember and nearly dropping her. He slung the burlap sack and the carrying pole. Heavy and unwieldy in the dark. He shifted as much as he could into the [Inventory], feeling it tighten at the edges..

  “We can’t see,” Lily whispered as they edged out from under the overhang. “We’ll fall.”

  “I can see enough,” he said.

  His eyes had adjusted. The land was all gray now, the rises and dips turned to ghosts. The creek showed as a darker line. The sky above was a lighter smear with stars pricked in it. His boosted Dexterity made his feet sure where his sight failed; he felt the ground more than he saw it.

  He led her away from the camp’s direction first, then angled upstream to keep the creek on their left. The sound of the water was something to follow if they lost the sky.

  The howl came again, closer.

  It had a shape to it now. Not just noise. Anger in it. Frustration. Hunger. It made the coyotes shut up entirely. Even the night insects paused, as if listening.

  “Is it comin’ for us?” Lily whispered.

  “It’s comin’ for anything that moves,” he said. “So we keep movin’ right smart out of its way.”

  They walked fast, half-run, half careful skitter on loose stones. Twice he had to catch Lily when her foot turned under her. Once something small and dark—a rabbit or a prairie rat—burst from under a bush and nearly made Lily scream before she clamped her hand over her mouth.

  Behind them, somewhere in the dark, coyotes fell in.

  He heard them first as soft footfalls in the grass, little scritches and rustles. Then, when he glanced back, he caught faint gleams of eyes, low to the ground. They didn’t come too close. Ten, fifteen yards back, maybe, trotting along behind the two children in a loose half-circle.

  “Brother,” Lily hissed. “They’re followin’.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “They want somethin’ worse than us to do the hard work first.”

  She swallowed.

  “Will they…?”

  “If they were gonna bite, they’d have done it when we were sleepin’,” he said. “They’re waitin’ same as us. For leftovers.”

  It was not a comforting thought, but it was a true one.

  They walked until Lily’s steps started to drag and her breath rasped in her throat. The howl came twice more, each time changing place, as if the thing that made it was ranging back and forth, looking.

  They never saw it.

  He counted that as luck, or maybe the System’s strange kind of mercy.

  When the sky had gone from black to a deep, exhausted blue and the first hint of dawn touched the east, the coyotes peeled away, slinking off toward whatever den or hollow they called home. Lily stumbled on the same rock three times in a row.

  “Just a little more,” he told her. “I see somethin’.”

  At first he thought the shape on the horizon was a low line of trees. Then it moved.

  A dark lump against the paling sky, coming toward them along some invisible road, rolling and rocking. As the light grew, it resolved into a box on wheels, swaying behind a horse big as a small house.

  A stagecoach.

  He’d seen one once in town, rattling through with its driver sitting high and straight, the whip flicking at the team. That one had had four horses, though, muscles bunched under shining harness. This coach had traces for more, leather dangling loose and slap-empty between the shafts. Only the one big bay pulled now, foam crusted white along its neck.

  “Look,” Lily breathed. “People.”

  Hope slid into her voice like warm water.

  The boy’s first feeling was the same. People meant news. Food. Maybe some place to sit where the world wasn’t moving under his feet. Maybe someone who would look at them and see children, not just pests.

  Then his other instincts woke up.

  People also meant questions. Where were your folks? Why were you wandering? How much did you have hidden? In this new world, with monsters in the bushes and dead men walking, people might mean worse than that.

  “Slow,” he said, grabbing her arm when she started forward. “We don’t run at ‘em.”

  “Why not?”

  “So they don’t shoot us thinkin’ we’re somethin’ else,” he said. “We come at the side. Crouched. Then if we don’t like the look of ‘em, we can slip away.”

  She frowned, but nodded.

  They angled off, cutting toward a low ridge of rocks that paralleled the stage’s path. As they climbed, the coach drew nearer, wheels jarring over ruts, the one horse laboring.

  On the box, the driver hunched, hat pulled low, eyes slitted against the wind. Beside him sat another man with a rifle across his knees. Both wore dust-stiffened coats.

  Through the coach’s small side window, he glimpsed faces—a woman with her hair coming down, a man with a beard gone iron-gray, a girl in a bonnet not much older than Lily. Their mouths moved. He couldn’t hear the words from here, but he recognized the rhythm of worry.

  They were alive.

  Relief loosened something in his chest he hadn’t known he’d been clenching.

  Then the wind shifted.

  It came from behind the coach now, blowing toward the children. It brought with it a smell that wasn’t dust or horse or sweat.

  Rot. Old blood. Wet fur.

  The boy’s skin crawled.

  “Get down,” he snapped.

  He shoved Lily behind a boulder before she could ask why and dropped beside her, peering over the rock’s edge with just his eyes.

  “What is it?” she hissed.

  “Somethin’ wrong,” he said.

  The coach had only a little way to go before it reached the low point in the trail, where wagon wheels had bitten deep over and over, carving ruts. On one side, the ground rose in a gentle slope toward the rocks where the children hid. On the other side, a stand of scrub oak hunched, branches tangled.

  The brush moved.

  Then something massive stepped out.

  For a heartbeat the boy thought it was a bear. He’d never seen one in the flesh, only in drawings pinned to the wall of Cobb’s store—big, shaggy shapes with paws like plates. This thing had the same heavy shoulders, the same black, matted fur. But bears didn’t walk that way.

  It came on two legs.

  It was taller than the coach. Its head brushed the tops of the scrub oak as it pushed through, shoulders hunching. Its arms swung down past its knees, hands tipped in black claws. Its chest was as wide as the driver’s seat. The fur that covered it was clotted in places with dried blood and dirt.

  Arrows stuck out of it.

  Half a dozen shafts jutted from its shoulders, its ribs, its thigh. Some had snapped off, leaving bare stumps; others still wore their fletching, colorful against the matted hair. Dark, wet patches ringed each wound. Old blood had stiffened fur into spikes.

  Bullet wounds dotted it too—round, ugly holes in its chest and belly, some crusted over, others still seeping.

  It limped.

  The right leg dragged just a little with each step, the weight never fully coming down on it. Each time its left foot hit, the ground shook.

  “That’s it,” the boy breathed. “That’s the one.”

  “The what?” Lily whispered.

  “The camp,” he said. “The thing that tore ‘em up. They shot it full o’ holes and it’s still walkin’.”

  The driver saw it.

  The man on the box sat up straight, yanking on the reins. The bay screamed, eyes rolling white, and tried to shy away. The coach slewed on the rutted ground, wheels biting deep.

  “Whoa! Whoa, damn you—!” the driver shouted, fighting the horse.

  The guard beside him snatched up his rifle, hands moving almost faster than the boy’s eyes could follow. Powder had already been rammed, ball seated; all he had to do was aim and squeeze.

  He fired.

  The percussion cap snapped, the hammer falling. Flame spat from the barrel. Smoke bloomed.

  The bullet hit the creature high in the shoulder.

  Fur and flesh puffed. The thing staggered a half-step.

  It roared.

  The sound was worse up close than the boy had imagined from the night howls. It was too deep and too high at once, a layered noise that made his bones hum. The horse went mad, lunging forward, harness leather squealing.

  The creature moved.

  For all its size, it was fast. It closed the distance between brush and coach in three strides, each one a small earthquake. The guard barely had time to half-cock his rifle to reload before it was on them.

  It hit the coach like a storm.

  One huge hand—a paw, a clawed thing, whatever it was—smashed into the side of the box. Wood splintered. The whole coach tilted, wheels on one side jumping the ruts. The driver flew, arms pinwheeling, and hit the ground in a tumble of coat and hat. He didn’t get back up.

  The guard screamed something wordless and lunged with his empty rifle like a spear, jabbing at the creature’s chest. The barrel struck fur and muscle and bounced.

  The creature seized him.

  It wrapped one arm around the man’s middle and squeezed. The boy heard ribs crack even from here, a brittle snapping under the roar. The man’s scream cut off as his breath was crushed out. The creature shook him like a rag, then flung him aside. He hit the ground and lay wrong.

  Inside the coach, voices rose to shrieks.

  The bay tried to bolt, traces tangling, wheels grinding. The creature’s head snapped toward the horse. Its lips peeled back and showed teeth.

  It lunged.

  Its jaws closed on the horse’s neck.

  The sound was awful. Meat tearing, bones grinding. The bay thrashed, forelegs flailing, then crashed to its knees, then to its side. The coach lurched forward as the whole rig twisted.

  Blood sprayed, dark against the pale dawn. The horse’s body jolted, then slowed, then sagged. The creature planted a foot against the coach’s broken step and ripped a chunk of flesh free, tossing its head back to gulp it down. Thick, ropey strands hung from its teeth.

  The boy’s hands had gone numb around the rock he hadn’t realized he’d picked up.

  “Don’t look,” he whispered to Lily.

  She looked anyway. He felt her nails bite into his arm, felt the tremor running through her.

  “Is it a devil?” she breathed.

  He didn’t answer. Whatever it was, it didn’t come from any book he’d seen.

  The coach, half on its side now, groaned as the weight shifted. The door banged open and one of the men inside spilled out—a bearded fellow with a hunting coat and a rifle clutched in white hands.

  He rolled, came up on one knee, and fired from ten paces.

  The bullet hit the creature square in the ribs.

  It bellowed and jerked sideways, that terrible head snapping toward the new pain. Fresh blood ran, bright over old.

  “Reload!” someone screamed from inside the coach. “Reload, damn you!”

  The man fumbled at his powder horn, hands shaking. He never got the chance.

  The creature covered the distance between them in two strides. Its hand came down, claws raking. The man’s head snapped back. For a heartbeat he stood there, blinking, and the boy thought maybe he’d been missed.

  Then the man’s throat opened.

  Blood fountained. He fell, gurgling, rifle dropping from suddenly slack fingers.

  The creature put a foot on his chest and pushed, pinning him while it ripped another chunk from the dead horse’s flank.

  It kept eating the horse.

  That struck the boy as wrong even in the middle of the horror. The men lay there, bleeding, some maybe still breathing in shallow, terrified pulls. The woman inside the coach was sobbing, a high, broken sound. The creature ignored them.

  It tore strip after strip from the bay, working methodically. Ribs cracked between its hands. It dug in with those needle-teeth and came away with loops of gut, swallowing them in thick gulps. When one of the men inside the coach leaned out with a pistol, hand shaking, and fired a shot that went wide, the creature swiped once with the back of its hand, casually.

  The man’s skull broke like a dropped melon. The pistol flew.

  “Why’s it not eatin’ them?” Lily whispered.

  “Maybe it likes horse better,” the boy said. “Or maybe it ate all it wanted of people back there.”

  He thought of the boy in the camp with half his middle gone, spine showing. Of the woman with her throat chewed out. Of the Comanche warrior whose soul now beat inside his own ribs.

  He swallowed.

  The creature kept eating.

  By the time it slowed, the horse was mostly ruin—a ribcage opened like a chest, one hind leg torn off at the hip, the head a crushed mess. The road was a slick of blood and offal. Flies would come soon, if they weren’t already. Maybe other things.

  The creature stood up straighter, breathing hard. Its chest rose and fell in long, powerful pulls. Steam rose from its fur in the cool morning air. One of the arrows in its side snapped and fell as it moved, the shaft finally giving up.

  It turned its head toward the coach at last.

  The woman inside had gone silent. Whether from fainting or death, the boy couldn’t say. The girl in the bonnet was nowhere he could see now—maybe thrown, maybe hiding under a seat. Bodies slumped half-in, half-out of the broken doorway.

  The creature sniffed.

  It leaned in and sniffed again, long and deep, the way a dog might test a scrap it wasn’t sure it wanted. It wrinkled its lip as if in distaste, then snorted and straightened.

  “Doesn’t like us,” Lily whispered, almost insulted.

  “Be glad,” the boy said.

  The wind, which had been at their backs, shifted.

  Just a breath. Enough to change the way the smoke from the ruined coach curled. Enough to take the reek of the horse, the blood, the fear-sweat of the dying men—and the sharp, gamey scent of two children hiding behind a rock—and push it across the gory clearing.

  The creature’s nostrils flared.

  It froze.

  The boy stopped breathing.

  Lily’s fingers closed on his sleeve hard enough to numb his arm.

  Slowly, very slowly, the creature turned its head.

  Its eyes were wrong.

  Crimson. Glowing like coals. It blinked once and then fixed on the rock where the boy and Lily crouched.

  The creature’s lip lifted, exposing bloody teeth in a soundless snarl.

  Then its massive head snapped fully toward them.