Vera Blackwood's Arc

Chapter 4 of 8

The bleeding rune led them east through the woods all afternoon. By dusk Vera crouched behind a fallen log and stared at the new lair. It sat in a hollow where the trees grew black and close. The demon paced in the doorway, a gaunt shape with red eyes and teeth like broken glass. Vera pressed her back to the log. The demon had seen her face once. If it looked her way now, the hunt was over before it began. "It will know you," Silas said. He crouched beside her, all in black, still as the trunk itself. She had walked with this man for days now, and she still hated how calm he stayed near a thing that ate children. "The moment you step into that clearing, it comes for you." "Then I don't step in as myself," Vera said. Silas turned his head. "You have a plan." "The demon marks with a flower and a rune. It reads flesh, not faces alone. It knows my scent, my mark, the shape of me." She pulled off her glasses and folded them. "So I stop being the shape it knows." She worked fast. She rubbed cold ash from a dead fire over her face and hands. She tore her coat and turned it inside out. She bound a strip of cloth low across her brow and cheeks, leaving only her eyes. Then she smeared mud through her hair until its color died. Silas watched without a word. When she finished he studied her the way he studied a broken clock. "Your walk gives you away," he said. "You move like a hunter. Move like prey." It stung because it was true. Vera dropped her shoulders. She let her hands shake. She bent her knees and shuffled, small and hurt, the way the boy behind the shed had shaken that morning. "Better," Silas said. "It hunts the wounded." Vera crept into the clearing. She kept her head down and her steps uneven. The demon stopped pacing. Its red eyes fixed on her. She felt the weight of that stare crawl across her skin. She waited for the roar, the charge, the claws. It sniffed the air. It tilted its head. Then it turned back to the doorway, bored, seeing only another stray thing too weak to matter. Vera's breath came out slow. She had passed within twenty feet of the thing that knew her face, and it had not known her. She reached the tree line and slipped behind cover. Her hands were steady again. Silas met her there. For once his flat calm cracked into something like respect. "It let you close," he said. "Close enough to see the way in." Vera unfolded her glasses and pushed them up her nose. She had the lair, the layout, and a face the demon could no longer trust. "Now I can reach it. But it feeds tonight. Whatever's chained inside won't last till morning."