Dana Cress's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Dana Cress had counted every stone the investigators moved from the church. She counted them again now, kneeling in the wet ash where the roof used to be. One thing had never moved. The center beam lay across the rubble like a fallen tree, thick as her waist. Her friend sat near the front that night, in the seat Dana had asked her to save. Dana was sure a body lay under that beam. The investigators had called it rotten wood and gone home. She meant to prove them wrong. She wedged a snapped rafter under the beam and threw her weight down. The rafter cracked. The beam settled deeper. She tried again with a stone as a wedge. Her hands bled and the beam did not lift a finger's width. She sat back, shaking, and stared at the thing she could not move alone. "You'll break your arms before you break that." Dana flinched hard at the voice. A girl stood at the broken doorway, a crossbow slung across a canvas jacket stitched with small silver crosses. She held a battered journal in one hand. Dana had seen her before, walking the tree line at night with a lantern. People said she hunted things nobody else believed in. "I don't need help," Dana said. "You do." The girl, Len, crouched beside the beam. She ran a finger along a gouge in the wood, then flipped open her journal. Inside were sketches of a low, crawling animal with a pale throat. "This wood didn't rot. Something pushed it down." Dana's chest went tight. That was her own belief, spoken by a stranger. "You believe me." "I believe the marks." Len set her crossbow down and braced her boots. "Together. On three." They drove a longer rafter under the beam. Len threw her shoulder into it while Dana pulled. The wood groaned. For a moment nothing gave. Then the beam tipped and rolled, crashing into the ash with a sound that shook loose dust from the walls. Dana dropped to her knees in the gap. She had waited weeks to see this. There was no body underneath. Only a wide, sunken hole in the stone floor, its edges scored with deep parallel grooves. Something had dug up through the foundation and pulled the roof down from inside. "There's no one here," Dana whispered. "No." Len's face had gone hard. She pointed at the dirt beside the hole. Two sets of clawed tracks led away, one larger, one small, threaded through with a dark vine that dripped red where it had been torn. "Two of them. They came through the floor. And they carried the bodies out." Dana looked at the tracks, then at the tree line beyond the broken door. Her friend was not under the beam. Her friend was somewhere out there, where the tracks led.