Tomas Edel's Arc

Chapter 11 of 17

The hunter hung over Tomas's shoulder, breath scraping. Behind them the wendigo still screamed in its den. Tomas would not fight the villagers again with gestures. This boy was proof they could touch and hear. He carried him toward the nearest light in the trees, a low house with candles burning in every window. If the sick hunter died before they reached shelter, Tomas would lose the only warning the town would ever believe. Regan ran beside him. "Faster," she said. "He's fading." She did not slow to look back at the cave. Her eyes stayed on the glowing windows ahead. They reached the door and pushed inside. Warm air. Wax and smoke. A handful of villagers looked up from a table. Tomas knew their faces. Days ago they had called him mad in the square. He laid the hunter down on the floorboards in front of them. The boy's leather jacket fell open. The bite wound on his arm was black at the edges. His skin was gray. But he was alive, and he was one of theirs, a boy who had walked into the forest looking for someone lost and never come out. The villagers rose from the table. Tomas pulled the ranger's patrol log from his coat. Its pages were half filled, entries broken off mid-word. He set it beside the boy and tapped the last line. He mimed the creature. The claws. The dragging. He pointed from the log to the wound to the woods. "He was in the cave," Regan said. "The thing kept him. It keeps them." She said it flat, no plea in it. "Tomas has told you for days. Now here he is." A woman knelt by the boy. She pressed her hand to his cheek and made a small sound. She looked up at Tomas, and the doubt was gone from her face. Behind her the others crowded close. One man swore under his breath. Another ran for water and cloth. The boy's eyes opened. His gaze moved over the room, over the candlelit walls, over the faces bent above him. His lips cracked apart. "Wendigo," he said. One word, dry and clear enough for all of them. "It's still out there." The room went silent. Then it broke into motion. Men reached for axes by the door. The woman shouted for lanterns. No one looked at Tomas as though he were mad now. They looked at him as though he were the one who knew. Tomas stood over the boy and let out a long breath. He had carried the warning for weeks with no voice to give it. Now the town believed. But the boy's fever still climbed, the wendigo still lived, and the villagers were already arming to go back into the trees.