“I have a lead,” she told me. “A little girl who disappeared four years ago from her Colorado home just reappeared. Only she’s not so little anymore.”
“Look, Lily, I don’t mean to criticize, but that sounds kind of flimsy. I know you haven’t been among the living for a while now, but kids grow up. It’s hardly news, let alone evidence of Brethren involvement.”
Lilith gave me a look that could have shattered glass. “I don’t mean to say that she got taller, you fucking dolt, I’m telling you she wandered out of the woods an old woman.”
I sat up a little straighter in my chair. “She what?”
“You heard me.”
“You sure she’s not a nut?”
“That’s what the authorities believe, of course,” she said, “but they’re wrong.”
“And you think there’s Brethren mojo behind her aging act?”
“Do you recall what Jain said to you?”
I narrowed my eyes at her in puzzlement. “Jain?”
Lilith shook her head subtly — more to herself than to me — and clarified. “The one you killed in Mexico.”
I thought back. “If I could be killed,” I quoted as best as I could remember, “my mountain cousins would have found a way. They begrudge me my appetites, as if their method of procuring sustenance is any more humane.” Realization dawned. “You think the mountains are the Rockies, and the humane methods are sucking her life-force dry bit by bit but leaving her alive?”
“I do indeed.”
I looked around. Slammed closed the book that I’d been poring over. A plume of dust that smelled like dried vanilla poofed out of it and pricked at my sinuses, daring me to sneeze. “Then fuck this place,” I said. “Let’s find me a new meat-suit and head to Colorado!”
“Excellent,” said Lilith. “As it happens, I have just the candidate.”
The police combed the woods, of course, aided by countless volunteers from as far afield as Fort Collins and Durango, sweeping through the brush in dotted lines of men and women with only ten feet in between. But despite the fact the area surrounding Colorado Springs was too dry for any significant snowfall to accumulate the terrain was steep, uneven, and tough to navigate, and there was just too much of it to cover with any degree of confidence. After a week spent trudging back and forth along a grid two square miles centered on the spot the woman had been found, the police called off the search.
Lucky for me, the Monster Mavens hadn’t, and who could blame them? Their fifteen minutes of fame had brought them endorsements, late-night talk appearances, even the promise of a book deal. They were gonna milk it for all that it was worth, and with a YouTube audience now numbering in the hundred-thousands, that meant trying to find the mysterious cabin of which the old woman spoke. And, of course, the strange, subhuman creatures within.
Did they believe the woman to be Ada? Hard to say. Nicholas, based on what little I could glean from the not pot-dulled bits of memory I’d been able to access, didn’t, but Topher and Zadie seemed earnest enough. Lord knows they played it up whether they believed it or not. And the internet gobbled it up like so many McNuggets. The old woman had her own Wikipedia entry, and the comments section of the Monster Mavens’ blog was chock-a-block with speculation. SCULLY58008 was betting, against all odds, on some sort of hillbilly brainwashing cult, while LilMsGlinda was leaning toward a coven of witches looking to fatten up the old lady Hansel-and-Gretel style so they could eat her. VanH3llsing, predictably, guessed vampires. And Area69 said dollars to donuts it was aliens, or a government cover-up of same.
If they only knew how much weirder the truth really was.
It was six days in to the Monster Mavens’ search — our search, I should say — that we’d found the cabin.
We’d been hiking in a haphazard zigzag — something Topher (never Christopher, a rule even Nicholas-not-Nicky obeyed, though neither Topher nor Zadie extended him such courtesy) cooked up between sips of Early Times straight from the bottle as he hunched over our maps beside the fire at camp one night. “The cops don’t know what the eff they’re doing, man,” he’d told me conspiratorially, the sheer paint-blistering offensiveness of his whiskey breath making me wonder whether it might be prudent to be sitting farther away from open flame. “The sorts of things we’re looking for, they don’t follow lines or grids, you get me?”
I didn’t. Luckily, Topher was too drunk, and too comfortable in his role as alpha-male to require — or even expect — a response.
“We gotta, like, listen to our souls, bro. They’ll lead us true, you wait and see.”
And as stupid as that sounded, it kinda sorta worked.
We’d been on the trail for hours. Lungs hoarse in the thin mountain air, Topher and Zadie snapping at each other all day in the benign way all couples do when their company runs brittle. They’d been pushing hard to find some scrap of fame-stretching evidence ever since the calls started drying up a few days after the discovery of the old woman, and they were both haggard, tired, and grumpy as all get-out. Not that I had a ton of sympathy for them. They had each other, after all, while I had no one, and on a pettier note, they got to walk all day with those ski-pole-looking thingys that helped with balance or whatever, while I was stuck pretending to be their cameraman. That meant hauling thirty pounds of camera around on one shoulder and maneuvering by viewfinder, which in turn meant I’d experienced several days of stumbles, backaches, and motion sickness. But I’d gotten my revenge, I guess. I was supposed to be editing and uplinking the footage of our mystical snipe-hunt every night from camp, but in fact, I’d been doing no such thing. Wouldn’t even know how, to own the truth. Hell, there was a pretty good chance this camera I was carrying wasn’t even on. Not like I could tell the difference either way. Best I could hope for was to remember to take the lens cap off.
But that goddamned camera was good for one thing, at least: it could see the fucking cabin. Which is more than I could say for the three of us. Though whether we couldn’t, or just wouldn’t, I’m not entirely sure; Lord knows how Brethren mojo works. The sensation was not unlike the one I’d experienced when I’d first arrived at the shuttered public bath house Magnusson had been using as his laboratory. But while that building simply resisted looking at, causing my eyes to slide right off it with nothing more than the scantest of impressions, the cabin flat-out would not show itself to my — or Topher’s, or Zadie’s — naked eye.
I’m getting ahead of myself. First I should tell you about the almost-murder.
We’d been trudging along for what seemed like forever, on jagged nerves and terrain to match. The afternoon was getting on, and the long shadows cast by the mountain ridge to our west bathed us in chill gray half-light like crushing depression, dulling colors, numbing limbs to sluggishness, and settling creaky into our every weary joint. My feet were blistered. My camera-shoulder ached. And my head was throbbing, on account of Topher and Zadie’s bickering, which had begun as the occasional potshot a few miles back, only to escalate to a vicious barrage as the afternoon wore on.