Laws of Nature -2 Page 4

  "All set?" Jack asked.

  "Yeah. Let's go. The weather shows no sign of letting up, so we should just get on the road and take our time."

  As the three of them turned toward the vehicles again, they saw Bill slide a large black chest - like an old sea trunk - into the back of Jack's Jeep. It had a thick padlock on the front. Though it was heavy enough to make the back of the Jeep sag a bit after he lowered it, Bill moved the trunk effortlessly. His strength was incredible, and it reminded Jack just how badly outmatched he and Molly would be if they ran up against any Prowlers unprepared.

  Bill strode toward them, seemingly unaware of the rain sluicing off his head. "When you're parked, I want you to throw some blankets over that trunk so it will draw a little less attention," he told Jack. "But the things in that trunk are only a precaution. If you see any Prowlers up there, I want you to call me and we'll figure out the next move then. Check in with us regularly."

  Jack's eyes widened. "Yeah, of course. But if you're playing cavalry, why do we need weapons now?"

  All traces of a smile disappeared from Bill's features. "Just in case, Jack. I'm not taking any chances. There's a goddamn arsenal in that trunk, and that should tell you how seriously I'm taking this. You know how I feel about weapons. I know you feel the same." He glanced at each of them in turn, lingering a moment on Courtney's face before looking at Jack and Molly again. "None of these are traceable, unless you leave prints on them. Don't get caught with them. Don't shoot at anyone human unless it's to save your own life. Hell, don't ever shoot at anything you don't intend to kill."

  "Bill," Courtney said hesitantly, "I don't know if - "

  "We have to have them," Molly interrupted. Her face was pale, but her voice was clear and strong. "We've got to be prepared."

  Bill nodded and handed Jack a small key that would open the padlock on the trunk. When Jack took it, Bill clasped his hand tightly and pulled him close.

  "Be careful. Don't take any chances. Call for me and I'll come," Bill said, his voice a low rasp.

  In the huge man's powerful embrace, Jack found reserves of strength he would sorely need if he and Molly found what they were looking for.

  "You'll protect her, if anything happens?" Jack asked.

  "With my life," Bill promised.

  A sudden rush of guilt filled Jack for the doubts he'd had. Bill might be a different species, but he was part of their life and family. These people were just about all that mattered to Jack.

  "Let's get on the road," he said as he turned away from Bill.

  Molly carried her suitcase to the back of the Jeep. Jack took it from her, put it on top of the trunk, and closed up the back.

  "Wait, I'll get a couple of blankets," Courtney said quickly.

  Jack and Molly climbed into the Jeep, he slipped the key into the ignition, and the engine roared to life. Anxious, Jack stared at the rain pelting the windshield.

  Molly reached over suddenly to take his hand and his fingers twined with hers as he turned to face her.

  "It'll be all right," she said, an uncommon tenderness in her voice. "If nothing else, it'll be an adventure."

  With a laugh, Jack shook his head. "Let's hope it's nothing else."

  Pine Hill provided an idyllic backdrop for the town of Buckton. Almost anywhere else in New England, it would have been striped with ski slopes and chairlifts, but this part of Vermont had far less tourism than some other areas. The name of the "hill" was misleading, however. It was not quite a mountain, but certainly far more than a hill, and there were far more than pines along its span.

  Though there were numerous small streets off it, Pine Hill Road, in addition to being the main street of Buckton, was mainly a throughway to other areas of the state. Very few Buckton residents chose to make their homes in the deep forest of the hill. Given the realities of snow removal, garbage collection, and postal service, what little new home construction there was in Buckton tended to be in the areas already populated.

  As such, only hikers, hunters, and amorous or adventursome teens made their way into the densest parts of Pine Hill. Among those, only a small percentage stumbled upon Bartleby Road, a densely overgrown dirt path that had once accommodated wagons and carts laden with building materials. For, once upon a time, there had been an enormous estate built atop Pine Hill, more than a mile from the nearest road.

  Before there was a Buckton, there had been the old Bartleby place. And yet only the eldest members of the community were certain it had existed. Others knew of it only as a legend, a whispered story to frighten young children, a house full of bogeymen, perhaps. The ghost of a house, most thought, if it had ever existed at all.

  But it had.

  Now only the ruins of the Bartleby place remained, tumbled fireplaces and fire-blasted brick, charred lumber under nearly a century's worth of detritus. The estate had burned to the ground in 1904. The only human beings who had seen it in the past few decades had literally stumbled across it. Almost all had continued on, thinking nothing at all of it.

  Almost all.

  A few had poked around, even tried to camp there. Hikers, mostly, and mostly from out of town. Some of those had never made it home.

  It was a sacred place to the Pack, for it was where Bartleby himself had been slain those many years ago. The Prowlers who had lived upon that land had been driven off, not to return for decades. Once they had returned, however, and created of Buckton a sanctuary where all Prowlers were welcome so long as they followed the rules, the ruins became their meeting place, the chapel within which they worshipped all that was wild.

  If the Prowlers could be said to have a religion, that was it. The wild and the wilderness. And the blood of prey.

  It was late afternoon that Thursday, nearly one hundred years after Bartleby's murder, that the Alpha bounded along paths human eyes would have missed, up the Pine Hill toward the ruins. Rain pelted from the sky and slicked back his fur. He barely noticed the storm, however. His blood raged with a fury that had been all too common in recent days, and yet this latest development had upset him more than anything else.

  A steady, ululating snarl emerged from his throat as his claws tore at the ground, and he burst from the last stand of trees beside the remains of Bartleby's sanctum.

  The others were already there. At times - particularly when, as now, they met during the day - some of them would choose to appear in their human forms. In the rain, especially, they might have opted to wear coats or hold umbrellas to protect them from the elements. Such things disgusted the Alpha. The elements were part of the Wild. The Prowlers were part of it as well.

  Among the ruins, nine members of the Pack awaited his arrival, mostly elders. The rest were in the town, going about the business of their human lives in a community filled with people who had no idea that monsters lived amongst them. Other pack members were still far from home, wandering across the world, though they would return someday.

  When the Alpha reached the ruins, he paused, then advanced slowly, head high, establishing his primacy within the Pack. The others approached cautiously, lowered their snouts in greeting. Even those in human form cast their gazes at the ground. He waited until all such proprieties had been dispensed with before he spoke a single word.

  It rumbled from his chest like rolling thunder.

  "Desmond."

  The young Prowler, who had challenged him three years earlier for Alpha and lost, raised his head with a start and a barely audible whimper. Then Desmond slunk back a step from the circle they had made among the ruins of their history.

  "You have much to answer for," the Alpha went on.

  Defiantly, the other Prowler bared his teeth. "I did what I thought was right. If you had not written the book - "

  With a roar, the Alpha rose up to his full height and slashed Desmond across the snout, tearing bloody gashes in his fur. The cur cried out in pain and clasped long talons to his face.

  "What you did!" the Alpha growled. "Oh, what you did, you little bast
ard. That book is our legacy, our history, to be passed down to those who come after us, so that no one shall ever forget Bartleby and the principles upon which this sanctuary was founded."

  Desmond sneered, blood dripping from his wounds. "That book is an abomination. You claim to despise human things, but you write this . . . this bible for the Pack, just like a human. Oral history has - "

  "Silence!" the Alpha growled, and Desmond obeyed instantly. "Oral history is little better than mythology, particularly with the packs scattered and so many nomads drifting in the world. When they come to find sanctuary here, they need to understand what they have found."

  The Alpha paced a moment, then leaped at Desmond, the sheer force of his presence forcing the younger beast to back down.

  "Enough of this. I do not have to explain myself to you," he snarled in the guttural voice of the beast. You have put this sanctuary and everything it stands for at risk. The first law of our Pack - the law that has allowed us to survive so long when so many of the Great Packs upon this continent have died out or been hunted to extinction - says that we must never hunt at home."

  "It was not hunting," Desmond replied, though tentatively, eyes downcast. "It was self-preservation."

  The Alpha sat upon his hind legs and addressed the upper hierarchy of the Pack arrayed about him. "What he did, this foolish beast, was slaughter Foster Marlin and Phil Garraty, right here in Buckton."

  "Marlin found the book. You didn't hide it well enough. He found it, and he read it," Desmond went on, voice tinged with pleading now. "Worst of all, he believed it. He had to die."

  The Alpha growled low in contemplation. "There were other ways. You know the laws of this sanctuary. We have lived among the humans long enough to know there were other ways. Marlin may have read the book, but with him dead, we have no way to know what has become of it. And what of the postman?"

  "Garraty brought the letters, the demands," Desmond reasoned, almost whining now.

  At the young one's words, the Alpha reared back and slashed him again, this time long gashes upon his shoulder. "Garraty was the postman, you idiot!" he screamed. "It was his job to bring the letters."

  "We could not know if he had read them! We could not know what he knew. And he was Foster Marlin's friend. Perhaps the man's only friend. And he knew of the book. He confessed as much before we killed him."

  "And what have you accomplished?" the Alpha asked him. "Two men killed and left where they could be found. The postman's murder was in the newspapers, Desmond. I've had phone calls from Hartford, Boston, and New York. You have compromised us, and we are no closer to discovering who now holds the book.

  Until it is safely back in my hands, the secrecy, and thus the safety of the pack of our sanctuary, is in jeopardy. Now that you have set us upon this path, we may have to kill again before it is through. We may once again be forced to abandon this place, our pack's original home upon this continent. The sanctuary we provide to others. And you are to blame."

  There was a weight to his words that was unmistakable. Worse, though, was the low growl that began to emit from his throat when the last of his words had been drowned in the rain, stolen by the wind.

  Desmond's eyes were wide. "No."

  "You have shamed me. You have endangered the Pack," the Alpha declared. The single word that followed, a low and guttural sound, was spoken in a language more ancient than humanity.

  Desmond tried to flee, his cowardice another example of his shameful behavior. He did not get far before the others dragged him down and tore him apart.

  Unnerved by what lay hidden in the chest in the back of his Jeep, Jack never drove more than five miles per hour above the speed limit on the trip to Buckton.

  Though normally the drive would not have taken more than four hours at the outside, the heavy rain that had enveloped all of northern New England slowed them down even more.

  All along the way, as they went north on Route 93 into New Hampshire and then continued northwest on Route 89 right up into the mountainous heart of Vermont, Jack did his best to keep Molly's mind off their destination. Though there was no way she would have let him go up to Buckton without her, that did not mean Molly was not nervous. Quite the contrary. It was clear in the way they both talked around the subject of Prowlers that neither of them was free of anxiety, even fear, as the site of the murder of Phil Garraty drew ever closer.

  Molly also seemed reluctant to talk about her mother, and the conversation she had had with the woman right before they left Boston. Not that Jack minded, however. He preferred not to speak about Molly's mother at all. The woman's behavior toward her daughter, and the way she seemed to have flushed her own life down the toilet, were inexcusable. And yet, for all the pain her mother caused her, if anyone else spoke against her, Molly was just as likely to defend her as she was to join in. That was something Jack had learned the hard way.

  So they talked about the few friends Molly still kept in touch with from high school, and who was going to what college, and what Yale might be like for her in the fall. Jack was surprised at the reticence in her voice, as though Yale were yet another subject she would rather not discuss. They did talk about it, though, and he found himself, despite the errand they were currently occupied with, hoping that the six weeks left of summer would crawl by.

  When fall came, and Molly left for college, nothing would be the same for him. It was unsettling how vital a part of his life she had become. Whatever mystery or trouble they were traveling into now, there was a thrill for him in just being with Molly. Though their conversation dissipated to almost nothing by the time they were halfway across New Hampshire, and though the rain continued to darken the sky ominously, he knew that there was something about this trip that was precious and newly formed, and might never come again.

  As they passed through White River Junction, just over the border in Vermont, Jack glanced over to see that Molly had fallen asleep, her leggy form curled up tight where she leaned against the door. His eyes ticked toward the passenger side door, and he was reassured when he saw that it was locked. It wouldn't do to have her tumbling out onto the highway.

  He smiled to himself and punched the buttons on the radio until he found a soft rock station, something soothing. With the forbidding nature of their destination and the contact she had had earlier with her mother, Molly's dreams were likely to be of dark and perilous things. Jack hoped the music would soothe her.

  Keep the predators of the mind at bay.

  The bruise-dark sky made the long July afternoon seem more like one in midwinter. Even though it was only beginning to edge toward dinner time, it was as though night had come already. Traffic had thinned as they continued northwest, until there were only a handful of cars on his side of the road. The rain began to let up when they were twenty miles or so from the tiny dot on the map where Buckton was supposed to be.

  That was when Jack saw the first ghost.

  He frowned and narrowed his gaze at the figure standing alone on the side of the highway. A man, he thought. Hands up, he waved his arms at Jack, who began to slow the Jeep. Someone in trouble. Scenarios flashed through his head of accidents and cars off the road in the storm. A Volvo station wagon behind him honked loudly and sped past in the next lane.

  Jack squinted as he peered through the rain-spattered windshield, the wipers squeaking back and forth as they dragged across the glass. The Jeep rolled almost to a stop as he cut in toward the breakdown lane just slightly. Just enough so that his headlights washed over the man waving emphatically from the side of the road. The lights cut right through him . . . as did the rain.

  The man had kind, sad eyes behind thick glasses and wild hair. But his hair was not wet. He was not, after all, really there. He was a ghost.

  Jack shivered, but it was not the chill of the rain that brought it on. He had seen ghosts before, had spoken to them. They had saved his life more than once.

  Artie, after all, still appeared to him. But these lost souls of the mournful
dead were still tethered to this Earth by grief or confusion or some unfinished business.

  He would never get used to seeing them or to the twinge of sadness he felt when he did.

  The spirit appeared to be waving at him, but had not noticed when he began to pull over. Jack wondered if the man had died in an accident on the side of the road, and stood there for eternity trying to flag down some help, unaware that it would never come. He suspected that if he looked into it, he might find reports of other sightings of the ghost, a lost soul.

  Ever since Artie had first appeared to him as a ghost, Jack had been able to see into the Ghostlands if he wanted to. Sometimes, though, it just happened, whether he wanted it to or not. Artie had explained to him that the phantoms who wandered the Ghostlands were spirits who were still tied to the earthly plane by grief or some sort of unfinished business. Many of them had died horribly, suddenly, such as the victims of Prowlers. Among those were ghosts who were not even aware that they were dead.

  This man was probably one of them, killed so quickly in a car accident that his soul could not accept that he was dead.

  Some of the ghosts Jack saw chose to be seen, to draw his attention to them. Others he simply noticed, sometimes out of the corner of his eye, like a spectral little boy he had seen a few weeks earlier, standing on a street corner as though waiting for a school bus that would never come. It had unnerved him, seeing that boy.

  It seemed that whatever door Artie had opened in Jack's mind could never again be closed all the way.

  Chilled, Jack did his best to push the thoughts away. He accelerated again, left the ghost behind. A short way up, he found the exit for the local, two-lane highway that would eventually lead him to Buckton. It took a moment for him to figure out which direction he ought to drive, but then they were moving again.

  Three miles farther on, he saw another ghost. A woman, this time, standing in the center of the highway, arms raised above her head in what might have been prayer or a supplication to heaven. The rain passed through her, spattered the pavement around her. His headlights caught on the wraith-like mist of her phantom form, like the glitter off morning fog.