Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives

Running Wild: An Outcast Season Story by Rachel Caine

As mountains go, Albuquerque’s Sandia Peak was not especially tall; the great mountain ranges of the world were not much intimidated by it, I would imagine. Still, it had a certain austere, ragged beauty. Time and friction hadn’t yet smoothed the jagged edges of its peaks and ridges, although the desert had clothed them in green, tough scrub brush to blur the raw cutting surfaces. It had been a long, difficult climb to the summit, even for someone as agile, strong and long-limbed as me, and with as little fear of death or injury.

I had not been born human. It was still difficult to truly understand fragility, after so many millennia spent as a Djinn, a spirit of fire and power, immortal and untouchable. But oddly, being Djinn had proved to be the ultimate vulnerability. It takes only a stronger, more determined Djinn to rip away all your power, your fire, your existence, and trap you in a form like this.

A human form.

It had not been my choice to become human, but I have made my peace with it, in most ways. I no longer flinch when touched, or experience uncontrollable flares of fury when I clash with others. Perhaps that is all I can ask from this experience — a teaching, finally, of patience.

I might have wished for a less direct method of instruction.

I had come up here, to this deserted and quiet place, to listen to the earth around me. Connected as I was to Luis Rocha, a Warden who wielded power through the rock, the living things grounded in it, I could feel the slow, steady heartbeat of the world as clearly as I sensed the smaller, faster pumping of the heart within my body.

And I could feel where shadows had fallen, in this sunlit and unforgiving place.

I reached in my pack and brought out the news stories I’d printed from Luis’s computer. There’d been a string of odd disappearances in this part of the mountains — three female hikers over the past few months, yet no bodies found. Traces of them had been discovered in the form of torn clothing, along with abandoned tents and gear. Added to that, there had been two undeniable deaths, but not of women — of men, lone male hikers torn to pieces by some savage animal. Mountain lion, it had been speculated. Possibly a bear. The corpses had been too deteriorated to be certain, or so the official stories claimed.

I wondered.

It was, in fact, no affair of mine at all, and it had merely been an excuse to indulge my wish for solitude. I was more than prepared to forget the dead and missing hikers and spend the rest of the day — and the night — admiring the hush and whisper of the wilderness.

I did not get that chance.

The first warning came as a scrabbling fall of stones far down the trail, then a muttered curse in Spanish that carried clearly in the thin air. Then more rattling rocks, thumps, more cursing.

Eventually Luis, my Warden partner, came into view, puffing and sweating up the steep, treacherous trail. Reaching the ledge where I sat, he heaved in a deep breath, and collapsed in a heap at my side. “Holy crap,” he said, and took out a bottle of water, most of which he downed in a desperate gulp, then dumped the rest over his sweat-soaked head. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and blotted his face with the sleeveless shirt he wore. I cast him a quick look, then went back to my contemplation of the view. Not that Luis was unpleasant to look at; he was, in fact, quite lovely, for a human. Tall, strong, with black hair and skin the color of caramel. Flame tattoos licked up both arms in still-life flickers. “Madre, woman, I’m an Earth Warden and even with all that connection to the Earth this is a crazy hard climb. You could slow down a little.”

“I didn’t ask you to follow,” I told him. I was, however, not surprised that he had. Luis didn’t like to let me stray too far, claiming that I was a magnet for trouble. That might have had some credence, actually; I did seem to draw attention to myself far too much for safety. Djinn arrogance. I couldn’t seem to shake it, even in human form.

“Too damn bad,” he said. “You don’t get to go off roaming by yourself anymore. Where you go, I go. Just … not so fast. And maybe not so graceful.”

I raised my eyebrows, but said nothing. The truth was, it pleased me in an obscure way that he had followed. There was a kind of solid peace that radiated from him, a sense of controlled and focused power.

In a Djinn, that would have been very attractive. I was not quite yet ready to believe there was anything that could make a mere human — even a Warden — attractive.

And yet.

Luis finished his water and stowed the bottle. He was still breathing hard and shining with sweat. I took out a bottle from my own pack and handed it over. Luis made a moan of indecent longing and reached for it, which made me smile. “I really love you right now,” he said, and then thought about it for a second. “Evil bitch.”

That made me smile more. I rested my chin on my crossed arms and looked out across the world, bathed in clean fresh sunlight. Below us, humans toiled and polluted, loved and created, hated and destroyed. Up here, it was almost like being a Djinn again, a creature above the earth, yet completely a part of it. I could feel the slow, sure heartbeat of the Mother herself.

“Energy bar?” Luis, ever practical, was rooting in his backpack for food. I held out my hand, and he passed one of the wrapped bars over. It tasted like flavored sawdust, but it would serve. I was not overly concerned with the needs of my body just now. “So, why’d we haul our asses all the way up here, anyway?”

I hadn’t asked him to come along, and I wasn’t feeling particularly cooperative. “Perhaps I like the view.”

He gave me a filthy look. “You’d better not go with that one. There’s a tram, chica. You know, you get in it, it hauls ass up the mountain all on its own without all the sweating and muscle cramps.”

I couldn’t explain it to him at first, and then I slowly said, “I needed to feel my feet on the ground. I needed to sense the earth around me. I needed — order, in all of the chaos.”

That made him pause. He squinted, wiped sweat from his forehead, and took another drink of water before nodding. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “I got that. Hate it, but I got it. So. Better now?”

“In time,” I said.

“Because it’s going to take us about the same number of hours getting down off this rock, and I don’t want to try it in the dark. Going to get cold, too.” He eyed me at an oblique angle. “Cass. Half an hour, then we got to go, okay?”

“If you’re that worried, maybe we should start back now,” I said, and stood up. He held up his hands in surrender.

“Okay, okay, I confess, I’m done in, Survival Girl. Give me half an hour. I need to rehydrate, or you’ll be watching my body as it bounces down the side of the mountain.”

I snorted, but sank back down into a crouch. It was a very still day, little breeze. He was right; as the sun drifted toward its western horizon, I could feel the heat leaving the air. It would stay in the rocks a while longer, but by full night, it would be cold and clear.

“You ready to tell me why we’re really out here?” he asked me. I gazed at him a long moment, and a random whisper of wind came out of the chasm below us and blew pale hair back from my face. I’d taken the pink highlights out of it, leaving it puffball white. My skin remained pale, as pale as any human I had ever seen. I was — exotic.

Luis called me beautiful, but I did not feel beautiful. I felt … lost. Better, in the wilderness, but still disconnected. Drifting.

“There were reports of something out here,” I said. “Some — thing that comes out at dusk. There have been disappearances, a few deaths.”

“Accidents?”

“Perhaps. Or animals.” Or something else. There was an old, unusual feel to this place, a wildness I had not felt in many places — not since the humans had civilized the world so thoroughly. “I don’t know.”

Luis frowned and looked around, at the scrub brush, and the deeper shadows of the pine forest just below us. “Maybe a mountain lion,” he said. “We’re in their territory.”

“Maybe.”

“But you don’t think so.”

I shrugged. I had no evidence; in fact, I had nothing more than instinct, a whisper of something that could not even be defined as suspicion.

Restlessness, likely enough. Our lives had been difficult lately. My first Warden partner, Manny Rocha, had been shot down in a senseless act of violence, along with his wife, and neither I nor Luis had reconciled our emotions. Luis had blamed me, and I had blamed myself; neither of us was right, or wrong. But trust was, at times, a thin shadow between us. I preferred not to shine a bright light on it.

“Okay,” Luis said, sounding equal parts disappointed and annoyed. “Give me another fifteen minutes. I’ve got to work some of these damn cramps out.”

I sat silent as he rubbed his calf muscles — which were indeed cramping, I could see the muscles jumping under his skin — and watched the wind whip through the trees below, bending them first one way, then another. If I listened carefully I could hear the voices of tourists brought up from the tram; they never ventured far from the safe, patrolled paths, so there was no danger of them making this final, perilous ascent and disturbing us. They’d buy their cheap souvenirs, take photographs, and leave as they had come.

“It’s the journey,” I whispered to myself.

“What?”

“Your age seems to value the destination so highly. All this fast travel, transporting from one spot to the next, rushing without experiencing. Recording to see later, at a distance. I don’t understand it. Why do you choose to live so — disconnected?”

It was Luis’s turn to be silent. He shrugged and kept working on his muscles. After a moment, I reached over and placed a hand over his leg, feeling the tense jump of the tissues beneath, and he took in a startled breath.

I took power from him. It felt like hot, golden sunlight moving through my body, and then I directed it out again, through my pale fingertips. Refined by the core of me, the part that was still and would always be Djinn, the power sank in deep, healing, soothing, restoring. “So odd that human Wardens can’t heal themselves,” I said. “That must be annoying.”

“Not really,” he said. Luis was now bracing himself, both hands rigid on the stone behind him, and his voice came out strained and soft. “I’d rather give than receive, anyway.” His face was flushed now, and his breath came shallow and quick.

I took my hand away. He flopped back full length on the stone and put a forearm over his eyes to block out the sun, and to prevent me from seeing his expression. I didn’t need to. There were certain … complications to this arrangement between us. Healing, whether applied from him to me, or from me to him, still touched on human nerves in a way that was either painful or extraordinarily sexual.

I suspected the latter, in this case. Which meant that it was better to be up and moving, quickly, before he could suspect I felt the distant echo from him. Before it could affect me, and build between us like supernatural feedback. I stood, grabbed my pack and gathered up the empty water bottles. As I did, Luis took the arm away from his eyes and looked at me, squinting into the sunlight. I offered him a hand, and he took it to pull himself upright, testing his legs carefully before dropping my hand and stepping well away. I watched him, still hyper-aware of his presence; that was the lingering effect of the healing, I knew, but there was something else in it as well.

He glanced up at me as he shrugged on his backpack, eyebrows raised in challenge.

I shook my head, and started for the trail head.

The trail down was certainly no easier than it had been on the climb up; in fact, it took considerably more care, now that I was more aware of the failing afternoon light, and Luis’s presence. I did not care to see him hurt on my behalf.

We were well into the shadows and premature evening of the trees when the first howl came, rising and falling in an eerie cadence. More than one beast. A chorus of them. I stopped, panting and wiping sweat from my face, and looked at Luis, who had gone very still. The sound grew, hushing birds and normal forest noise, and then faded away.

“I freaking hate it when you’re right,” he said. “Just so you know.”

I wasn’t fond of the fact myself, at this moment. “Wolves?”

“That’s no wolf pack. And bears don’t howl. Isn’t a mountain lion, either.”

“Then what is it?”

“Something that shouldn’t be here,” he said, and under the bronze color of his skin he seemed pale and shaken. “Something wrong, Cass. Really wrong. Let’s move it.”

“But—”

“This isn’t something for just the two of us to handle.”

“How do you know—?”

“I know, all right?”

“You know what it is.”

He took in a deep breath. “Maybe. But the point is, a couple of Wardens alone out here isn’t going to cut it. Let’s get moving, fast.”

I was unconvinced, but Luis’s concern was genuine enough. We increased our pace, though the going remained slow; the trail was rough and treacherous, growing more so as the shadows deepened. It would be full dark before we exited the woods, even barring any delays or accidents.

Within another half hour, our pace had decreased even further, and the howl sounded again — distant, but chilling. I could barely make out Luis’s face in the gloom. The sun was scraping the western horizon, expiring fast, and we were still in the thick of the trees. The temperature was also dropping, bringing chilly gusts of wind to whip the limbs of the pine trees and create a whispering hiss that sounded like a warning.

“We’re not going to make it out before dark,” I said. “I’m sorry. I hadn’t planned for two of us. I was going to stay here for the night.”

“Flashlights,” he said. “Keep moving.”

I had packed two, and so had he — sturdy things, and bright, but the artificial light seemed to only serve to make what it illuminated seem harsh and strange. Our pace increased, but so did our pursuers.

When the howls came again, they sounded closer.

Luis clicked off his light, and after a moment, I did the same. We stood in silence, listening. I felt something echoing through his connection to the earth — something strange and as dark as the falling night.

“What is it?” I asked. “What’s out here?”

“Something old,” he said. “Very old. It’s an avatar.”

Avatars were rarely encountered in the human world; they were manifestations of old powers, very old. Eternal, but rarely emerging from their sleep to possess and drive a human. The Greeks had known of them, and the Romans. The races and tribes even older had a history of encounters with the dark at the rawest levels — a history the Djinn had observed, even if there was little written record of it in the human world.

But here? Now? Why?

“What kind of avatar?”

“Madness,” he said. “Primal madness.”

I felt a cold chill sweep over my all-too-mortal flesh. As a Djinn, I had seen the rites of Dionysius and Bacchus enacted. I’d seen the frenzy sweep through the Bacchae as they were driven to leave behind their human, civilized selves.

I had seen the destruction they left behind.

“The missing women,” I said. “Bacchae. Following the avatar.”

“And they’re hunting,” Luis said. “Tonight.”

The howls sounded again, a high, wild sound that echoed from the stones. Then the howls dissolved into frenzied screaming, filled with triumph and fury, and I heard beneath it the cries of something that voiced its pain without words. An animal. Something large.

A rabbit burst from the underbrush and dashed past us, frantic and glassy-eyed. Then another. A family of raccoons crossed the path ahead of us, fleeing the same direction, and in another moment, a doe bounded in pursuit.

“Move,” Luis barked, and we increased our speed as much as we dared. More animals flashed across the limited scope of our flashlights, fixed only for an instant by the bright beams. None of them paused.

The last, another doe, had long bloody scrapes down her flanks, and she was running flat out, panting, head down. Running for her life.

I remembered the male hikers, bodies torn and half-consumed by predators. They’d never understood their risks. Never had a chance.

That chorused howl again, closer now. Chilling and yet fevered.

Luis kept moving, focused on the path, taking each step deliberately, but with all possible speed. He knew, at least. He understood what little chance either of us stood against the madness of an avatar. Earth powers might allow us to fight, a little, but our chances of truly defeating one were slim, at best.

These were the nightmares of Mother Earth, thrown up in her troubled, ages-long sleep. And they shared her power, deep in their roots.

The air smelled suddenly rank and sweet around us, drowned in rotted syrup. I whirled, flashlight flaring pale against tree trunks, swallowed in dark gaps, then reflecting suddenly from a face. Filthy, bearded and matted with dirt and leaves. A young man’s face, and a bare, tanned, nude body whipped with scars and bruises and old dried blood.

His eyes were ancient and empty and yet full of something so intoxicating that I felt myself falling … falling … I tasted honey on my lips, felt the heat of liquor firing my veins. Felt the universe shattering around me into pieces, fierce hot pieces, and my skin was burning, even my hair, too hot, too hot…

I heard a thump as my pack slipped off my shoulders and fell to the trail, but it seemed so far away now. There was nothing in the world but the glow and fire and dark intoxication of the woodsman’s eyes. I ripped at my shirt, pulling it apart in a frenzy. Too hot. Burning. Had to get cool.

“Cass!” Hands grabbed me and spun me around, a confusing whirl, and my flashlight beam fell on another face, on rich dark skin and wide black eyes and strong, flame-marked arms. “Cass, stop! Stop it!”

I slashed at him with hooked fingers, and he flinched backward. I turned, flashlight stabbing darkness in nervous jerks.

The woodsman was gone. I staggered, screamed, and heard the ring of madness in my voice. The rising, disbelieving tone of loss, of need. I still felt the burning in my veins, my skin, and I ripped again at my clothes, shredding, snapping threads like spider webs.

Luis — that was his name, Luis — grabbed me from behind, twisted my arms behind me, and forced me down to my knees on the hard rock, then forward, on to my face. The pain made me whimper with pleasure, and a growl of hunger came out of my mouth. Violence. That would sooth the burning. If I could run, chase, rip, tear, consume…

Luis put his full weight on me to hold me face down on the path as I convulsed, trying to get up, to run, to hunt.

“No,” he panted, and I was overwhelmed with the smell of him, the rich male animal musk of his sweat, his body, his sex.

If not the hunt, then this. This.

“Oh Christ,” he murmured, and I felt him shudder in response. He was feeling what I felt now, too close for there to be emotional distance between us. The bond that fed his energy into me also echoed back, and he could not fail to know what I wanted. What I needed. “Cass, stay still. Stay still. Breathe. Come on, this isn’t you. This isn’t what a Djinn does.”

I wasn’t a Djinn. My body — my body—

It is only a body, the cold core of me whispered. And I am a Djinn. A Djinn. Not an animal, driven by meat and fury.

I shuddered and went limp under Luis’s weight, a submission that made the beast within me shriek and writhe inside. He didn’t move for a long moment, then whispered, “Cass?”

“Let me go,” I said. My throat felt raw with fury, as if I’d breathed in superheated air. “Off!”

He rolled away. I rolled the other way, breathing hard, and crouched with my back against the rough bark of a pine tree. I felt hot, still, and the fury pounding through my veins was maddening, trembling on the edge of uncontrollable. My shirt hung in rags around me, and the fluttering pieces annoyed me; I pulled it free and threw it away, snarling, and glared down at the thin sports bra that I still wore beneath it. I had ripped it in places, but it was mostly intact.

My denim shorts had survived my frenzy, though they were fraying at the hems in untidy strings. I struggled with an urge to strip them off, rip at them with teeth and nails, and closed my eyes to focus on slowing my hot, panting breaths.

The howls sounded again, a longing chorus that pulled at the desire inside me.

“Cassiel.” Luis’s voice. He’d ventured closer, but he was keeping a safe distance between us. “What happened?”

“The avatar,” I said. “I saw him.”

“Him?”

“The Bacchae are followers. They have no mind, only hungers. I saw the avatar. He thinks. We have to stop him if we want to stop them.”

But the Bacchae were his guard, his army of teeth and flesh and claws. There was no avoiding a confrontation with them, if we hunted him. Just as there was no avoiding the fact that I remained perilously close to becoming one of them. I had to push aside the memory of the avatar’s eyes, of the furiously empty hunger in them, of the sweet, hot intoxication of honey on my lips and in my blood. I had to. Or I would turn on Luis in an instant, and the first drop of blood I drew would trigger the final frenzy, reduce me to a naked, clawing, biting animal made of hunger and lust. I would not stop. I would take everything from him, down to the marrow of his bones, and then I would be lost.

“Can you handle this?” Luis asked me. He sounded tense, cautious, ready to move back at a single tremor from me. “Because I need to know. I can’t turn my back on you if you’re not in control.”

“I’m fine,” I lied. I had to make it true by sheer will; Luis couldn’t defend himself from other threats if he had to watch me as well. “We have to find the avatar now, if we want to survive the night.” Because the Bacchae would have caught Luis’s scent by now, that rich male musk that had drenched me in frenzy. They’d chase him down and rip, rape, consume. It was what the avatar had infused in them. Individually, they were normal human women, probably mild and gentle creatures. But here, in the wild, with the honey and wine in their veins, they were Furies.

I rose smoothly and loped off into the dark. Luis cursed and stumbled in pursuit. I did not need a flashlight, now; my eyes pulled in light in new ways, new colors, painting the world in flashes of red and gold and white. The eyes of the avatar, shared with his hunters.

I could feel him out in the darkness, moving through the forest. Wandering. Seeking … whatever fathomless thing avatars sought. It was nothing humans could understand, and the human body it was using at present would be destroyed in the process, either from hunger or thirst or sheer overdriven exhaustion. It would leap to another male body if it could, unless there was nothing to receive its spirit. Then it would sink back into the earth, back into sleep.

Luis. Luis would be here to receive it. I couldn’t permit that to happen.

In the next second, I realized that I couldn’t worry about that; I had to think of myself first. The avatar’s presence pulled me like a tide, drawing me closer, and I heard him now, padding through the forest, plunging through brush and thorns, leaving bare, bloody footprints on the ground and rocks. I smelled his rotted-honey stench.

I ran, loping like a lion giving chase, feeling the frenzy inside me mount and boil.

I burst out of the trees into a clearing. Overhead, the stars were white cold chips set in an onyx sky. A crescent moon had cleared the eastern horizon, bathing the small meadow in icy light.

The avatar stood in the center of it, staring up at the moon, arms raised. His back was to me, and I saw the claw marks scoring his back, his buttocks. The scratches and cuts. The trickling black blood.

Ecstasy was a deadly dangerous, shockingly beautiful thing.

I dropped into a crouch, teeth bared, made all animal in his presence. The pounding of sweet, hot fire inside me rose up, burning all my control to ashes.

All except that ice-cold core that had been mine since the beginning of time. I am Djinn, it whispered. I am not his meat. I will not be turned.

His back remained to me. His worship was aimed at the moon, and I could see the shudders running through him — sexual, most surely. I could feel the pulses from here, booming inside me like a drum.

I could not approach him, not without losing what little control remained. If I did, I would end up pinned beneath his rampant body, screaming, biting, giving and receiving violence and sex.

I reached instead for the rich warm glow of power, grounded through Luis, and brought it up around the avatar’s feet.

The grasses whipped up, knotting into ropes, growing at a staggering pace. They tied his ankles, then wrapped his legs, his torso … and a thick, meaty vine whipped around his neck and began to tighten.

Behind me, I heard the hollow shriek of the Bacchae. They had found Luis’s trail now, and I sensed the hot burst of his fear through the link between us. He couldn’t outrun them. Not in the dark. He’d have to turn and fight — a battle he was sure to lose.

The howls and shrieks burst out of the night, and I thought I heard Luis call my name, but my world had narrowed to the avatar, and the vine around his neck. I poured all the power I could muster into it, commanding the living green rope to tighten, to squeeze, to crush the life out of the avatar before his minions tore the life out of Luis.

It wasn’t going to work.

The vine was withering fast. The earth didn’t wish to kill him; the creature was part of it, part of her. A memory, a nightmare, a dream. Something lost and almost pitiable in its hunger and loneliness. I couldn’t fight him with the tools of the earth. Iron wouldn’t kill him. Neither would stone. I could batter at him, and the life inside him would heal all I inflicted, because he was raw, bloody power, and nothing else.

I lunged, hit the avatar in the back, and slammed him face down to the grass. The bonds I’d put around him withered, blackened, and turned to ash, and his slick naked body writhed, bucked, tried to turn to face me. I couldn’t risk that. I put a hand on the back of his head and slammed it deeper into the dirt, snarling, but somehow he slipped free, and his body moved beneath me, and then his eyes…

…his eyes…

I felt sanity pour out of me like water from a broken jar, and the moonlight burned cold and empty, blinding me, and suddenly I wanted … I felt … I was …

No.

I am Djinn.

The thing inside me, the thing in the core of me, that tiny spark of ice and rage that would never be human, seized control of my hands, grabbed the avatar’s jaw in my left hand, the back of his head in my right, and pulled power out of Luis in a blinding flood, a scorching wave that burned my muscles with its force.

I don’t remember twisting his head, but I remember the springy, tough resistance of his neck, his body trying to fight me, and I remember the exact instant that the fight was lost, and his bones snapped with sudden, muffled clicks. I kept twisting as the body went limp beneath me. Kept twisting, jerking his head back and forth as if I would wrench his head off his shoulders like a bloody triumph.

His eyes…

His eyes faded into confusion, and then into silent darkness.

I felt, then saw, the black flood pour out of the corpse like mist, creeping over the meadow in all directions, searching for a host. It couldn’t take me. The ice inside me wouldn’t thaw.

Luis. It would take him first.

I stumbled away from the avatar’s body and raced ahead of the mist.

I fell over the first of the Bacchae less than a hundred yards out from the clearing; her naked, battered body lay shuddering on the side of the narrow path. She was curled into a ball, shut away from the horror of what had taken hold of her. Without the avatar’s power fueling them, the Bacchae were just … lost.

I picked her up and carried her. I couldn’t leave her. The mist might reject a female avatar, but it might not. I had to keep all of them away from it.

I found Luis lying another hundred yards out, with the other two Bacchae. He was dirty and scored with cuts, but he’d avoided any serious injury. The Bacchae were, like the one I carried, naked, bloody, and pathetically bruised by their time of insanity; the bottoms of their feet were raw wounds, sliced and torn by their rampage through the forest. They had been knocked unconscious. Luis had collapsed, his breath ragged, felled most likely by the raw power I’d pulled from him to destroy the avatar’s body.

I dumped the third Bacchae, and turned to face the black mist. It was mere threads now, spread too wide and too thinly. The last whisper of the nightmare, creeping over the ground, crawling, searching blindly for rescue.

I dragged Luis another twenty yards, as a precaution.

The mist reached the Bacchae, and they twitched and whimpered and whined, even in their deep trauma.

It couldn’t touch them. It had wounded them too deeply already. That was one small blessing.

I took hold of Luis’s limp form beneath the arms and hauled, gritting my teeth, pulling him one torturous inch after another down the treacherous path until finally, I looked up to see that there was no black mist flowing toward me.

It had pooled on the ground, exhausted, and as I watched, it sank slowly into the ground from which it had come.

Gone like the nightmare it had been.

I collapsed next to Luis, my eyes full of the moon, and like the other Bacchae I curled in on myself, cold and empty and sick with what I had felt.

Luis stirred enough to gather me into his arms, and we lay together in the cold with the whisper of pines around us, as Mother Earth dreamed her insane, cold dreams of hunger and fear and loneliness and need.

After a long few minutes, Luis rolled to his feet and went back up the hill. I didn’t have the strength to protest, curling back into my traumatized ball. The world seemed so cold. So quiet.

One after another, he carried the naked women down the path. He’d retrieved our packs, and he spread out a thin insulating ground cover, then bundled the three together under a blanket. He fed them some water, a little food, and gave them gentle touches on their hair, their faces.

They needed gentleness. I knew, because I was myself starved for it, and I hadn’t sunk so deeply into the violence as the others.

As Luis worked on building a campfire, I managed to pull myself to a sitting position. He was shaking with exhaustion and weariness as he tried to set match to tinder. I took it from him and lit the fire, watched it catch with dull eyes, and took the bottle of water he passed me without much enthusiasm. The first mouthful tasted like filth, and I gagged and spat it out. My mouth still remembered the taste of honey and blood.

The second mouthful was better, and I swallowed and kept swallowing until the foreign taste was gone.

Luis settled back against a tree, stretching out his legs, and I sank down next to him. Not touching, not quite, until he reached out and pulled me closer. My head fell against his shoulder, and I felt his lips brush the dirty, sweating skin of my forehead.

“You’re safe now,” he said, and the heat of his body — a gentle warmth, not the burn of the avatar — crept into me in slow waves. Animal comfort, but a very different kind. I felt trembling muscles slowly begin to relax, and my breathing slowed to a deeper, slower rhythm. “Did he — did you — are you all right?”

I knew what he wanted to ask, and looked up into his face. He had dark eyes, shifting and gleaming in the firelight, but they were not empty. What was in them was gentle and warm and sweet, and it too came from the earth, from human kindness and compassion and … love.

“He didn’t take me,” I said, in all the ways it could be meant. “He couldn’t. I’m not human, Luis. Not fully. You understand that?”

He did, and it made him sad. He touched my hair, stroked it, and the pleasure of that echoed inside us both. I relaxed and let my head rest once more against his chest, listening to the hollow rush of his breathing, the solid, steady beat of his heart.

“Don’t worry about it. Being human ain’t what it’s cracked up to be,” he said, and I knew he was looking at the women, who might never be able to face what they had done. What had been done to them, by forces they couldn’t possibly comprehend or resist. “I’m glad you’re who you are, Cassiel.”

In that moment, that oddly gentle, oddly sweet moment that I closed my eyes and let the night steal over me … I was glad, too.