Olivia Read online

  The woman who had tried to run away was standing and shivering, clutching a saucepan in both hands. Another had nothing but a teddy bear. Others had packed paper bags or backpacks.

  The rain was coming down harder now, and the moon was entirely hidden by the clouds. Olivia’s captor patted her arm, then went to talk with another group of creatures. Olivia stood and waited, watching the overpass. A cop car drove by, lights flashing, but it was alone. It didn’t stop and come back to save them. It didn’t do anything and then it was gone.

  Olivia’s creature came back, and took her arm. He led her out of the parking lot, around the buildings, and over to the steep embankment that dropped away behind the complex. It stank when it rained because the dumpster was over here and people had a way of throwing their garbage down the embankment when the dumpster was full and the apartment manager refused to clean it up. There was a fence, but it had mostly fallen in. The monster took her right to the edge of a good fifty-foot drop into a fetid pit and stopped. “Turn around,” he said.

  Olivia looked down at the rocky, trash-strewn swamp below them. I could jump, she thought without much conviction. She was beginning to shiver in the rain, or maybe she hadn’t dried off enough after her bath. Being cold and uncomfortable reminded her that she was alive. Her story, whatever that story was, wasn’t going to end here. As awful as it was to think that all the nice, normal things that had come before—hamburgers and Christmases and trips to the store and oil changes for the car—were over, she was going on.

  The creature’s inhuman hand gave her arm a careful squeeze. “Turn around, please,” he said again.

  She turned and faced him. He tucked the photo album into the broad belt of his loincloth and looked at her, fanning his wings. He beat them twice, stretched them fully, then glanced back at the parking lot where every eye, captor and captive, was on him. He looked back at her.

  “Please, don’t,” she said. She only said it once.

  He put his hands around her waist and lifted her off the ground. “Hold on to me,” he said.

  She did, her arms trembling as they slid around his neck.

  He bent his head. She could feel the breath heaving in his body, the soft spikes of his fur everywhere it touched her skin, his claws digging at her back and the edges of the photo album pressing at her chest.

  She was not dreaming.

  He jumped.

  3

  She didn’t scream. They didn’t fall. She felt the strangest sensation (she had been on an airplane twice before, so it wasn’t exactly unknown) of the precise moment when gravity lost its grip and the sky took them. The wind of their passage howled into her ears. The rain pelted her back like stones. They were flying.

  She peered around his arm and saw only the dark shape of his wings beating against the air. She tried to tell herself it couldn’t be. Scientifically speaking, there was no way he could be lifting himself off the ground, much less be carrying her added weight. Of course, the same could be said of bumblebees, too large to fly, but who flew all the same.

  This is horror, she thought. When something impossible exists and refuses to explain itself.

  She tried to squirm up enough to see over his shoulder, but he dipped his head in close to her ear and murmured, “Do not move.”

  She turned to see the ground and found herself several hundred feet up, soaring away from the still sleeping town and into the foothills.

  She heard a scream and turned to see another creature on their left, struggling to hold onto his hysterical woman. She could see his mouth moving, but couldn’t make out what he said to her. In any event, it wasn’t helping to calm his captive, so he pulled back as far as he could and butted her in the head. She went instantly limp and he gathered her up, tossing Olivia’s captor a wincing sort of glance before he dropped back in the formation, out of sight.

  Olivia suddenly felt very loosely confined, and tried to scramble further into her captor’s grip, at the same time looking back over her shoulder at the distant ground.

  “Do not move,” he murmured again.

  “You’ll drop me,” she whimpered.

  “Never,” he promised, and flexed his claws. The tiny pricks of pain steadied her nerves, but she clung to him all the same, locking her ankles and her thighs around his waist. He lifted his wings and swooped higher, heading towards the peaks of the mountains that had stayed safely on the horizon all the years of Olivia’s life.

  “Where?” she stammered. “Where are we going?”

  “Soon,” he said soothingly. It was not exactly the correct answer, but she found it strangely reassuring nonetheless.

  It wasn’t soon, not really. She couldn’t hold on to her fear enough to keep her awake for the whole flight, and every time she opened her eyes, the shock of the nightmare slapped home. High Hill Apartments was gone. So were the lights of town, not just her town, but Sugartree, Poho, Sanctum…every town. The roads went next, or maybe there just weren’t any cars moving on them for her to see. She dozed and woke over snapshots of trees and lakes and mountains, and it was a very long time before she realized there was a destination at the end of this journey after all. There was a single mountain, no different from any other, all dark rock and jagged pines, growing bigger with every passing moment. If it had a name, she didn’t know it, but the sight of it filled her with drugged dread.

  Olivia pulled on the creature’s neck until he ducked his head closer to her. “Is that it?” she asked, her heart hammering. “Is that the place? Is it alive like you are? Is it…Is it real?”

  “Do not move,” he told her. “Soon, this is ended. Do not move.”

  They were right over the top of the mountain now, not even a hundred feet off the ground, close enough to hear the treetops whistling by beneath them. The creature carrying her banked suddenly, then performed an aerial feat that nearly stopped her heart in her chest: executing a loop and flying upside-down over the lip of a craggy mountain top and underneath a ledge, into a narrow cavern. Without slowing, he maneuvered through rocky outcroppings she could scarcely see, aiming for what appeared to be a flat wall dead ahead. In the last instant before impact, he snapped his wings fully open, then eased his grip on Olivia’s waist and put one arm and both legs straight out.

  He struck the wall, his blunt claws sinking into the stone like a warm knife into butter. His limbs bent to absorb the shock, but Olivia’s back smacked into the stone, and the full length of his hard body crashed into her, pressing the air from her lungs in a harsh, hacking cough.

  He immediately drew back, folding his wings small and passing his hand over her several times, less to console her than to check for injuries, she thought.

  While he did this, two other creatures landed on the wall, slamming their captives into stone. Sobbing wails and the leathery slap of wings surrounded her until the fear came back and she had to clap her hands over her ears to keep from screaming herself. Olivia’s captor tucked his arm back around her waist at once, pressing his strange mouth against her neck. It was comforting; she wanted to think that was just the drug they’d used, but didn’t quite believe it.

  “Hold on to me,” he murmured, close against her ear. “Do not move.”

  And then he started moving again, hand over hand, climbing down. What she had first taken for a wall was in fact the mouth of a wide shaft dropping deep into the mountain. At first, she could see the holes made by the passage of many claws, but what little light there was didn’t last. In seconds, she could see nothing, and hear only her captor’s breath in her ear, the wails and moans of women, and the scraping sounds as the creatures hunted out handholds in the dark.

  She only knew when they were coming to the bottom because the echoes changed, and because he gave her another of his distracted little pats. Then he hopped off the wall, pulled her all the way up into his arms like a small child, and set off down a passage. He did not move as though he could see, but rather like a man so familiar with his surroundings that he did not need to see.
It was very cold down here, and her damp skin crawled so that she pressed herself further into his fur in a vain effort to share his warmth.

  Miserable, shivering, Olivia listened as the sounds of other captives being carried away dwindled into the distance. Soon, they were alone, moving rapidly through a maze of passages, climbing up and down walls as he encountered them, until he came to a short tunnel with a low ceiling. He crouched, walking along the brief length of it until he came to the end, then straightened. There was a narrow passage straight up, like a chimney. He climbed it, sucking in his breath to avoid scraping her against the sides.

  At the top, he put her down. “Stay,” he said, patting her arm, then moved away.

  She waited, hugging herself, fighting back hysteria and tears. I want to wake up, she thought wretchedly.

  A soft light bloomed in a corner, outlining the shape of the creature who had brought her here. He turned towards her with a blunt, pallid lump of a candle held in a bowl. He looked at her. She looked away.

  It was a small chamber, not a natural cavern, whose walls and low ceiling had been shored up with cut timber. The floor, fairly smooth and fairly level, had a roundish mat in the middle of it made of woven reeds. Behind her, the chimney they’d just climbed out of opened in the center of a sort of abstract mosaic which covered that entire wall, made from clay shards, cracked stones, broken bricks, glass, metal pieces, even animal teeth and bones. There were a few openings to lead out, but apart from the lit candle and a few low, cut-stone benches, she could see no other furnishings.

  “Take the light,” he instructed.

  She did. It was smoking heavily, and smelled foul, like burnt bacon.

  “Come with me,” he said, already passing through one of the doorways and out of sight.

  She followed him, numb to her surroundings, until they came out in a wide, tall chamber with a glow of embers burning in a small fireplace. He stopped in front of the hearth, pulling the photo album from his belt.

  “Please, don’t!” she cried, rushing forward. “Don’t burn it!”

  He held the book out to her at once. “It is yours,” he said. “Yours.”

  She took it from him and cradled it, feeling the urge to weep rising steadily inside her, billowing out like smoke.

  Perhaps he sensed it. He took the candle from her and placed it on a low table beside a small alcove along one wall. “This is a place for you,” he said slowly, making curious patterns in the air over the alcove, as if he were smoothing out invisible sheets.

  She looked at the fire pit, which put out a surprising amount of heat despite its small size. The smoke was drawn up through a narrow chimney. Presumably, it was being funneled out through the top of the mountain, where it would be utterly disregarded. Mountains always had steam coming off them, didn’t they?

  The thought took away what lingering shreds of rescue remained, and she turned away, as though removing the fire from sight would magically restore her hope, but all she could see was the reality of this room. Because that’s what it was…not a monster’s cave, but a room. Someone had carved it out, carefully shored up the walls and ceiling, padded the hard, cold stone of the floor. There were two low tables on either side of the fire, and one rather high table a little further back in the room. All three held unlit candles and nothing else. The walls, what she could see of them in the flickering light, had weird markings painted on them in certain places where the rock had been made flat. In the middle of the room, centered before the fireplace, was a wide pit full of sleeping bags, animal skins and fleeces, even an old canvas tent. A bed. His bed.

  Frightened all over again, she looked back at her captor. “Where am I?” she asked, shivering.

  He glanced at her arms, then bent and put a few greasy, black lumps on the old red coals, waking up sparks and new heat. He straightened, reaching for her, but lowered his hand when she backed rapidly away. “This is a place for you. For you to be,” he amplified, gesturing again to the alcove. He spoke slowly, as though unsure of his words.

  She crept towards him, then around him, and placed her photo album inside her alcove.

  He seemed to relax. “Good,” he said, patting her arm.

  “Can I go back to sleep now?” she asked, her voice breaking a little on the last two words.

  His brow furrowed as he translated her request, then furrowed further as he contemplated its meaning. “Sleep there,” he commanded, pointing at the pit.

  She started to obey, but he stopped her with an upraised hand, then pointed at her clothes. “Remove those things you wear,” he said.

  Olivia started crying, reaching up with shaky hands to obey him. She wept in shuddering, gasping breaths, head bowed and face turned away in a mixture of submission and shame.

  When there is no choice, she thought, there is no fear. No fear! Stop crying this instant!

  Fear had nothing to do with it though, and deep down she knew it. She was tired, she had been uprooted and taken to a horrible place by a horrible person, and she had no hope of ever leaving or finding her way home, but she was not afraid. Depressed, despairing, repulsed, and exhausted, she succumbed to tears, but not to hysterics or panic. She knew she was his.

  Naked, she stepped into the pit, dropped to her knees, wrapped herself in a sleeping bag and rolled over, sobbing. She heard him move, heard the low rustle of her clothing being moved to one of the tables. He put out the candle, poked listlessly at the coals in his fireplace, then came to the side of the pit. She could feel his eyes upon her, and it made her feel worse.

  She heard another sound then—the low whisper of leather on leather as he removed his loincloth and set it with her clothing. He stepped into the pit, knelt next to her, and unpeeled the sleeping bag.

  She moaned and twisted deeper into the hodgepodge of bedding.

  He did not move at once, only watched her, then lay down on his side, clumsily pushing one wing out behind him and stretching the other over the both of them like a blanket.

  She felt its weight, feather-light, on her hip and thigh, and it was real. The animal smell of him permeated the bedding underneath her and it was real, too. She lay, shuddering with the effort of repressing her sobs, and at last, the inner storm began to abate. She took several gulping breaths, and finally quieted, her hands balled into fists.

  She could feel him watching her, hear him listening. After a while, his hand brushed her waist and rested there. His palm was at once rough and soft, like well-worn leather. When she didn’t throw it off or fall into weeping again, he slid closer. She felt his breath on her neck and shoulder. He moved up against her, and his fur was soft as an otter’s, hard with the muscle and sheer mass of him. He was real. It was all real.

  A tear slipped out of her eye, over her cheek, and into the pit, but it was alone. She tucked her head into the crook of her arm and closed her mind away from thought.

  Horror is a creature that should not be and refuses to leave.

  Horror is being cut from your own life like a tumor.

  Horror is having no explanation.

  Horror is, and it doesn’t care.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CAPTIVE

  1

  Olivia dreamt she was in the front office of the advertising company where she worked. She was dressed in the tie-dyed T-shirt she used to wash the car, but no one seemed to notice. Her boss was wearing a leather loincloth and black socks. Susan Greely from sales walked by with her price list and a saucepan. There were bats hanging from the ceiling in profusion, flapping their wings. It was a horrible sound, all of them flapping and flapping.

  Olivia twitched and the dream receded. She struggled to find it again, because the reality that waited for her, she knew, was somehow even more horrible. She reached out as though to seize her dream and pull it back into her head, and encountered the slithery topside of a nylon sleeping bag.

  She opened her eyes, and the first thing she focused on was the edge of a wing draped over her.

  The wing, she
decided, was quite beautiful. If it was just the wing, she supposed she could get used to it. As long as she didn’t think about the creature whose hand rested comfortably around her middle and whose sleeping breaths puffed against her shoulder, she would be fine.

  She moved her head just enough to see her watch, tilting it to catch the light thrown by the dying coals in the fireplace. It was nearly four-thirty in the afternoon. She hadn’t slept in so late since college.

  College. How could somebody who went to college, who still had eight thousand dollars in unpaid student loans, end up here? It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It didn’t even seem legal.

  Olivia settled back into the bedding, letting her eyelids droop heavily. She watched the wing through her lashes, drowsing.

  Far away through the caverns, a woman’s high-pitched terrified scream suddenly jarred both of them to full wakefulness.

  Olivia’s captor bolted upright, wings fanning out so swiftly that one struck Olivia in the head and knocked her sprawling in the pit. He immediately folded them flat against his body, crawling forward to peer at her.

  He lifted her hair out of the way to check the side of her head, then turned her face this way and that, frowning as he stared intently into her eyes. He started to grumble something, then stopped himself, and began again in cautious English. “Do your eyes hurt?”

  “Do my…?” Olivia lifted one hand in confusion towards her face, then she realized what he must be talking about. “I’ve been crying,” she said bleakly.

  The very tip of his thumb carefully pried her left eyelid a little further open and he leaned even closer, close enough to kiss if she were so inclined. The thought worked a shudder through her and he growled low, as if in answer, as he searched her eyes. “Red eyes,” he said, slowly and carefully, either mistrusting his English or to prevent her from panicking. “Red and…swollen.”