Eventually the crying stopped, and she pulled back, kissed him on the lips. "I love you so much."
"I love you, too."
"Now it's your turn," she said.
"What?"
She touched his face. "Come on. I want to know your big secret.
You've been keeping something from me, and I want to know what it is."
' 1"here is no big secret. My life's Open book." "With some missing pages." She stood up on her knees, pretended to point a gun at him.
"Come on, buster: Adroit it." Her face was still red from crying, her cheeks glistening with the wetness of tears, and she looked so sad and lost and alone that it damn near broke his heart.
So he told her.
He did not tell her everything, did not go into detail, but he told her that he had powers, that his father had had powers, and that they had both used those powers to help people. He explained that others had not understood, had feared and hated them, that his father had been killed and he himself had only narrowly escaped the same fate.
He told her he was a witch, though he did not use the word. \020She seemed subdued, her reaction not what he had expected. In fact, he did not know that she had a reaction. She was neither understanding and supportive nor horrified and angry. Instead she was politely quiet, pensive, and though that worded him at first, when she gave him a quick kiss before llaey parted and said, "I love you," he. knew that all she needed was a little time to get used to the idea.
He felt good that he'd unburdened himself, freer than he had since living with his father, and he fell into a quick and easy sleep.
The blacksmith awakened him. "Get up!" he whispered. "hey're coming after you."
Jeb stirred groggily, blinking against the lamplight. What? Who?"
"Reverend Faron's gathering up a posse, and they're coming to get you.
They're going to string you up."
She'd told her father.
He felt as if his guts had been yanked out of his chest, and only at that moment did he realize how much he truly loved her.
He'd escaped--with the help of the blacksmith, who understood what he was and didn't care--and he'd been on the move ever since.
"Maybe it wasn't her," William offered. "Maybe someone else found out.
Maybe--'
"It was her."
Even now the wounds still hurt. Just talking about those memories had dredged up the emotions that went with them, and Jeb found himself wondering where Becky was now, what she was doing, who she was with, what she was like. "I've never been in love," William said sadly.
They were both walking, William leading his home, and Jeb looked over at him. "Never?"
The other man shook his head, started to say something,
then thought the better of it. Jeb waited for him to say something else, but he did not. '
They continued on in silence.
They came upon the monster in the late afternoon.
The beast was dead, its corpse rotting in the sun, but even in death it was a fearsome sight to behold. They were well up the canyon by this time, fenced in between high rock walls that blocked out half the sky, and they saw the oversize body lying in the dry creek bed well before they reached it. They could both sense the undiluted malevolence of the creature's lingering presence, like the smell of a skunk that remained long after the animal had gone, and the horse seemed to sense it too because William had to talk to the animal to keep it from bolting.
They approached the body warily. It was easily as big as three men, both in height and width, and was vaguely human in form, but there were claws instead of hands at the ends of the excessively long arms, and what remained of the head was unlike anything Jeb had ever seen. Like the rest of its body, the monster's head appeared to have been deflated, like a balloon, black rotting skin hanging loosely off an interior frame of bone, but even in this ruined shape, he could see that there was hair where there should not have been, eyes and nose that should not have been on any living creature, and far, far too many teeth. Long teeth. Pointed teeth.
The very air here felt heavy, and Jeb turned toward William. "What do you think it is?" he asked, his voice hushed.
William shook his head, not taking his eyes off the monster. He bent forward to look more closely.
Jeb shivered. The canyon seemed suddenly far too small, far too narrow, and he looked up at the top of the rock walls
to see if there were any more of these creatures about. He didn't feel the presence of anything else here, but he did not trust his own instincts, and he glanced both up and down the canyon.
"It didn't die naturally," William said. "Something killed it. It looks like its insides were eaten out. Or sucked out through this hole at the top of the back."
"What could kill something like this?"
William looked at him. "I don't think we want to know." Jeb wanted to get out of the mountains immediately, but though it was a small range, there was no way they could make it through before tomorrow or the day after, and they were forced to set up camp on a flattened ridge. At least they were out of the canyon. He would have rather walked through the night and taken his chances with the cliffs and the darkness than sleep in that cursed place.
Whatever could bring down a monster like that could have them for dessert, but they both wove protective spells around the camp and decided to take turns standing watch for the night, prepared to either flee or right at the first sign of anything unusual.
Jeb's watch was first, but he saw nothing, heard nothing, and, though he kept his senses wide open, felt nothing. The horse, too, seemed calm. As far as he could tell, they were alone in this place, and he hoped that it remained that way. At least until morning.
He woke William when the moon was halfway across the sky, and the two of them switched places. He knew he had to rest for the grueling trek tomorrow, but he was not at all tired and was not sure he would be able to sleep.
He was out almost immediately after his head hit the saddlebag.
He dreamed of a town in which all of the houses were identical and where at sunset a dwarf roamed the community, placing metal spoons on the porches of those who would
die before dawn. He was living in one of the houses and was awakened in the middle of the night by a mysterious sound and went outside to investigate. But when he walked onto the porch, he felt something cold and hard touch his toes, heard a clattering noise. He looked down to see that he'd accidentally kicked a rusted metal spoon off the porch.
There was a snickering from the bushes, and when he looked more closely, he saw the face of a dwarf grinning evilly up at him.
He awoke in the morning feeling urtrested. William had already conjured a fire and was making coffee with some muddy water he'd found in a barely trickling creek a little farther along the trail. They drank their breakfast, packed up, and set out, both of them wanting to escape from these mountains as quickly as possible.
They did not speak much that day, or that night when they camped in a narrow ravine between two tall cliffs. It was as if a spell had been cast on them, even though they had carefully protected themselves.
The next day they left the mountains and it felt to Jeb as though he had awakened from a bad dream. The feelings that had been following him faded, and even the memory of the monster seemed not as sharp. He recognized the sensation. It was the exhilaration one felt after averting disaster. He had guiltily experienced a variation of it upon escaping Lynchburg and avoiding his father's fate, and he knew that this sudden lifting of dread was due not to any magic but to simple human emotion.
They'd had two days to think about what they'd come across back in the canyon, and while he himself had not been able to piece together any solutions, William struck him as a more pensive sort, a deep thinker, and he turned toward his newfound friend. "What do you. think killed that monster?" he asked