Page 35

34

AUbrEY

T he current pulls me through absolute darkness, my body tumbling helplessly in the frigid water. I can’t tell which way is up or down, can only surrender to the rushing torrent that carries me deep into the dark. My lungs burn with the need for air, fingers numb from cold, the water’s roar drowning out everything but my own thundering heartbeat.

Just when I think I can’t hold my breath any longer, my head breaks the surface. I gasp desperately, pulling sweet air into my starving lungs, arms flailing for any purchase in the black. The current remains relentless, sweeping me forward through what feels like a narrow channel, the rough stone walls occasionally scraping against my shoulders.

“Aubrey!” Lainey’s voice echoes somewhere ahead, barely audible over the rushing water. “Keep afloat! There’s light ahead!”

I strain to see through the darkness, focusing on the direction of her voice. There—a faint grayish glow, so dim I might have imagined it. I kick toward it, fighting to keep my head above water, body numb with cold.

The channel widens slightly, the current easing its grip enough that I can swim with more purpose. The glow grows stronger—moonlight filtering through some opening ahead. Lainey’s silhouette appears against it, her transformed eyes reflecting light like an animal’s in the darkness.

“Almost there,” she encourages, standing in shallower water near what appears to be the exit. “Just a few more yards.”

I push forward, muscles screaming with exhaustion, until my feet finally touch solid ground. I stagger upright, water streaming from my clothes, shivering violently in the cave’s chilled, damp air.

“Jensen?” I gasp, looking back into the darkness behind me. “Where’s Jensen?”

“Here,” his voice calls from somewhere in the blackness. Then he emerges from the water like some primordial creature, coughing and sputtering, his large frame moving with surprising grace despite obvious exhaustion.

I reach for him instinctively, helping him to his feet as he finds the shallows. His hand closes around mine, solid and reassuring despite everything.

“You okay?” he asks, voice rough from swallowing water.

“Still breathing,” I manage through chattering teeth. “You?”

“Been better,” he admits, pushing soaked hair from his face.

Lainey stands a few feet away, watching our exchange with an unreadable expression. Unlike us, she seems barely affected by the frigid water—no shivering, no labored breathing. Another reminder of how much she’s changed.

And yet it’s still her.

“We need to keep moving,” she says, gesturing toward the opening ahead. “The hungry ones won’t follow through the water passage, but they’ll find another way around. They always do.”

She leads us toward the exit, a narrow fissure in the rock face that opens to the night beyond. We squeeze through one by one, emerging onto a snow-covered slope bathed in moonlight.

The cold hits with renewed force outside the cave’s relative shelter, the wind cutting through my soaked clothes like knives. I stamp my feet and rub my arms, trying to restore circulation, knowing hypothermia is a real danger now and there’s no sleeping bag for Jensen and I to crawl into.

Jensen orients himself quickly, surveying our surroundings with practiced eyes. “I know where we are,” he says after a moment, surprise evident in his voice. “We’ve almost made a complete loop. The trapper’s cabin is, I don’t know, maybe less than a mile that way.” He points downslope, toward the forest.

“Can we make it?” I ask, teeth chattering uncontrollably now. “Before we freeze?”

“We have to try,” Jensen says grimly. “It’s shelter, and there might still be supplies. Fire. There is still furniture to burn, and kerosene.”

Lainey nods in agreement, though something flickers across her transformed features—a brief spasm of pain quickly suppressed. “Then the cabin is our best option,” she says, her voice slightly strained now. “But we need to hurry.”

We set off through the snow, our wet clothes immediately beginning to stiffen with ice in the bitter cold. I walk between Jensen and Lainey, all of us moving as quickly as our exhausted bodies allow. The forest is eerily silent around us, the only sounds our labored breathing and the crunch of snow beneath our boots.

After about ten minutes of painful progress, Lainey suddenly stops, a visible shudder running through her frame.

“Lainey?” I ask, stepping toward her in concern. “What’s wrong?”

She backs away from me, arms wrapping around herself as if in pain. “I need a moment,” she says, her voice altered, rougher somehow. “Keep going. I’ll catch up.”

Jensen places a warning hand on my arm. “Aubrey…”

I shake him off, moving closer to my sister despite his unspoken warning. “Lainey, what’s happening?”

Her face contorts with what appears to be intense pain, her breathing becoming ragged. When she looks up at me, her eyes have changed—the blue more intense, more alien, the last traces of humanity fading from her gaze.

“It’s the hunger,” she gasps, clearly struggling to speak normally. “It’s getting stronger. I can’t…I’m too tired.”

“Fight it,” I urge, reaching for her despite Jensen’s sharp intake of breath behind me. “You’ve fought it for three years. You can fight it now. For me.”

A bitter laugh escapes her, the sound all wrong. “It doesn’t work like that, Aubrey. I’m not strong enough anymore. Too tired. Too cold.” Another spasm wracks her body, and she doubles over, a moan escaping her lips. “You need to get away from me. Both of you. Now.”

“We’re not leaving you,” I insist, though I do take a step back, instinct finally overriding emotion.

“Then I need to tell you something,” she says urgently, visibly fighting for control. “While I still can. They’re hard to kill. Bullets won’t do it—just slow them down. Even severe wounds heal eventually. Maybe you can take off their head, but that’s not easy. Only fire destroys them completely. Burns them to ash so they can’t regenerate.” Her gaze shifts to me, intense and pleading. “Remember Mom’s fear of fire? It was more than a phobia.”

The pieces click into place—my mother’s inexplicable terror of open flames, her refusal to even light candles in our home. She’d known, somehow, that fire was the one thing that could truly destroy what lived in her blood.

“There’s kerosene in the cabin,” Jensen says. “Enough fuel to create a decent blaze if we need it.”

Lainey nods, then another violent tremor passes through her. This time when she looks up, her face has changed further—features sharper, more predatory, teeth visibly elongated. She drops to her knees in the snow, hands clutching her head.

“Go,” she manages, the word barely recognizable. “Please.”

I kneel in front of her, ignoring Jensen’s warning hand on my shoulder. “Lainey, look at me. Focus on my voice. You can fight this.”

She raises her head with visible effort, and for a moment, I see my sister in those alien eyes—terrified, in pain, but still there. Still fighting.

“Aubrey,” she whispers, her voice almost normal again, though the effort clearly costs her. “Sweet Aubrey. I need you to do something for me. Something terrible.”

My throat tightens with dread. “Anything.”

“End this,” she says simply. “While I’m still me enough to ask. Before I become like them completely. Before I hurt you.”

The request hits me like a physical blow, stealing my breath. “No.” I shake my head vehemently. “No, Lainey. I can’t, I won’t?—”

“You have to,” she insists, reaching for my hand with fingers that now end in definite claws. “I’ve been fighting this for three years. I’m so tired, Aubrey. So tired of being caught between, of never being fully human but never surrendering completely to the hunger either. I need peace. I want peace. I want to be with Mom and Dad again.”

Tears blur my vision, freezing on my cheeks in the bitter cold. “There has to be another way. We can find more of the minerals you mentioned, make the mixture stronger. We can research a cure?—”

“There is no cure!” Lainey interrupts before she breaks off into a coughing fit, spitting out black blood. “I’ve searched these mountains for three years, studied everything the hungry ones know about their own condition. There’s no going back from this. Only forward, into complete transformation, or…” She trails off, the implication clear.

“I won’t kill you,” I say, my voice breaking. “I just found you again. I can’t lose you like this.”

“Then you’ll watch me become something monstrous,” she replies, a note of desperation entering her voice. “Something that will hunt you, hurt you, with no memory of being your sister. And then you’ll die. Is that better?”

I have no answer for her. Both options are unbearable, impossible to contemplate. Finding Lainey only to lose her again—whether to death or to complete transformation—feels like a cosmic cruelty I can’t accept.

Another spasm tears through her, more violent than before. She falls forward onto her hands, body contorting unnaturally, a sound escaping her that’s halfway between a human scream and an animal’s snarl, her spine jerking up and down.

“It’s happening,” she gasps, voice distorted. “I can’t hold it back much longer.” She looks up at me one last time, her eyes briefly clearing, my sister visible through the monster she’s becoming. “Please, Aubrey. Let me go. Let me die as myself, not as one of them.”

I shake my head wordlessly, paralyzed by the impossible choice before me. Behind me, I hear the metallic click of Jensen checking his rifle.

“Jensen,” I say without turning, my voice barely audible. “Don’t.”

“She’s suffering,” he says quietly. “And she’s right. Once the transformation completes, she won’t be Lainey anymore. She’ll be one of them.”

“For a while. Then she’ll change back.”

“But then you’ll be dead,” Lainey cries out, spittle flying.

“I can’t do it,” I whisper, tears flowing freely now. “I can’t burn my own sister.”

“You don’t have to,” Jensen replies, his voice gentle despite the grim resolution underlying it. “I failed her once. I won’t fail her again.”

Before I can react, he raises his rifle, aiming at Lainey’s head. Our eyes meet for one brief, charged moment—his filled with apology and determination, mine with horror and disbelief.

The shot cracks through the night like thunder, echoing off the surrounding mountains.

Lainey crumples, a small, neat hole appearing in her forehead, the back of her skull exploding outward in a spray of blood that stains the pristine snow. Her body falls sideways, suddenly lifeless eyes still open but the unnatural blue already fading as death claims her.

“NO!” The scream tears from my throat, raw and primal. I lunge forward, catching her body before it fully hits the ground, cradling her head in my lap, heedless of the blood soaking into my already freezing clothes. “No, no, no…”

The world narrows to just her face, still recognizably my sister’s despite the partial transformation, the changes that had begun to overtake her features already softening in death. I rock her gently, words failing me, grief so overwhelming it feels like a physical weight crushing my chest into oblivion.

“I’m sorry,” Jensen says from somewhere far away, though he hasn’t moved. “She was right, Aubrey. It was the only mercy we could give her. She deserved that.”

“You didn’t even warn me,” I manage, voice cracking. “You just…killed her.”

“If I’d warned you, could you have let me do it?” he asks, his voice rough with his own grief. “Would you have stood aside?”

I have no answer. He’s right, and I hate him for it. Hate him for doing what I couldn’t, for ending Lainey’s suffering when I would have selfishly prolonged it rather than let her go.

A strange warmth spreads through my lap, and I look down to see Lainey’s blood spreading across the snow, steam rising from it in the frigid air. Her blood runs hotter than human blood should, another sign of the transformation that had been changing her.

“We need to burn her,” Jensen says gently. “Like she wanted. To make sure…”

“To make sure she doesn’t come back,” I finish dully. The horror of it all is too much, my mind struggling to process everything that’s happened.

I look down at Lainey’s face, peaceful now in death. The sister I lost and found and lost again all in the space of a few hours. I brush a strand of her matted hair away from her face, remembering how I used to do the same for her when we were children, when nightmares woke her screaming.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper to her. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to give you peace myself.” A sob catches in my throat. “I love you, Lainey.”

For a moment, I swear I see a faint smile touch her lips, though I know it’s impossible, just a trick of the moonlight and my own desperate grief. Still, I cling to the image, to the hope that wherever she is now, she’s at peace. Free from the hunger that tormented her for so long.

At least momentarily.

“We need to move,” Jensen says quietly, his silhouette dark against the moonlit snow. “The shot will have attracted attention. We need to reach the cabin, get warm, prepare.”

I nod mechanically, beyond arguing, beyond feeling anything but the hollow ache of loss.

Jensen hands me his axe, then reaches down and picks up Lainey’s body, his movements careful, gentle, as if she can feel him. He adjusts the grip on his rifle, then turns to face the direction of the cabin, visible as a dark peak in the distance. When he speaks, his voice has hardened, grief giving way to determination.

“If we’re burning her,” he says, each word precise and heavy with resolve, “we’re burning all of them. Every last hungry one in these mountains. Starting with Adam.”

I follow his gaze to the cabin, then back to Lainey’s body, small and still in his arms. A matching resolve crystallizes within me, cutting through the fog of grief with startling clarity.

“Yes,” I agree, my voice steady for the first time since the shot. “We burn them all.”

The night stretches around us, cold and unforgiving. Somewhere in these mountains, Adam and his pack of hungry ones continue to hunt, unaware that they’ve created their own nemesis in their pursuit. They’ve taken everything from me—my sister, my peace, my future.

I have nothing left to lose.

And everything to avenge.