Maxwell's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Maxwell ran with the silver hammer banging against his thigh and a dropout's worth of medical school rattling in his head. Two days ago he had swung that hammer at two men who tried to drag him out of a roadside diner, and now the law wanted him almost as much as the thing in the trees did. He knew silver resisted infection and corruption. He had learned that in a lecture hall before he learned he was no good at lecture halls. The hammer was the only thing he owned that still meant anything, and he needed to turn it into something that could kill. The creature behind him was not a wolf, though it ran on four legs. He had glimpsed it twice through the birches: too much color for an animal, mouth open too wide, eyes set wrong. It moved like it had already read the map of his footsteps. When he cut left, it was waiting on the left. When he doubled back, it had doubled back first. The proof of it caught up to him at a stream bend, where he found a paw print pressed into the mud beside his own boot mark. The print still glowed faintly, pink and blue, like spilled paint that hadn't dried. He scraped a fingertip through it. The color clung to his skin and would not wipe off. He ran until his lungs gave out, and that was when he saw the shed. It sat low under the pines, walls covered in bark so it looked like part of the trunks around it. The door was real, though, and the hinges were iron. Inside he found a packed dirt floor, a workbench, and an anvil bolted to a stump. Someone had built this place to work metal where no one could see. Maxwell shut the door, dropped the bar across it, and set the hammer on the anvil. From his coat pocket he took out the stone he had picked from a creek bed that morning: a smooth moonstone the size of his fist, milky white with soft orange veins. He had taken it because it felt cold even in sunlight, and because a stone that cold seemed like it might hold something. He pressed the moonstone against the hammer's head and struck. The stone cracked along one vein and a thin light bled out, soaking into the silver until the metal hummed under his palm. The hammer was warm now. It was his. Then something heavy hit the shed wall behind him. The bark-covered planks bowed inward. A second blow split the small window above the door, and through the gap Maxwell saw one wrong eye, close, patient, waiting for him to come out.