Fated in Stone, page 6
“I know I have a lot to explain to you.”
She snorted out a laugh that might have been a little too close to hysterics and definitely didn’t have any humor in it.
“We don’t have much time. We need to get somewhere safe. I’ll explain as soon as I can. You can move the stone statue of my body, that won’t hurt me, but I’m heavy that way. So I’ll stay this way long enough for us to get out of here.”
“Will that kill you?” She gestured at the still seeping wound. She wanted to put pressure on that bleed. To reapply the shirt that had slipped off the injury when he’d gone from stone back to flesh. But she was also afraid to get too close. To touch him.
Afraid of what, Elle? He’ll turn you to stone with a touch? She scoffed at her own reactions. Even though a part of her was worried about just that.
“I’ll manage. If it gets too bad, though, I’ll have to leap. When this body is stone, it heals faster.”
“So…doing that will keep you from dying?”
He nodded. “I never got your name.”
That felt like a non sequitur from the conversation about him dying, but she answered automatically. And with her real name. “Elle.”
“Benjamin. I go by Ben.”
“Alright, Ben. Let’s get you out of here.”
She hesitated a brief moment, watching him leverage himself on one side and push up. Then she moved in and took his arm gently over her shoulders, so she could help him stand. This time around, she noticed that she was touching his bare skin, his bare chest. She tried hard to ignore that fact. Because he still had a pretty significant gunshot wound, and it seemed rude to notice he had nice muscles and his arms were magnificent.
He leaned to one side and scooped up the fallen sword. She wasn’t sure whether to be pleased he thought to keep hold of a weapon or annoyed he was likely doing more damage to his injury. She caught his torn t-shirt just as it was about to fall and shoved it back against his wound, using it to keep pressure there, even though the blood dripped more slowly.
“You still have a bullet inside you,” she pointed out. “It didn’t go through.”
“My body will push it out as it heals. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” He was sweating as they started limping toward the back door. His voice was already pretty deep, but the strain deepened the sound into a rough rumble. She could practically hear his gritted teeth and from the corner of her eye, she saw his jaw muscles bunch tight.
“You sound like shit and you’re sweating a lot. Not sure this counts as fine.”
He chuckled faintly. An actual chuckle. “Had worse.”
Which wasn’t necessarily reassuring news. What did he do that he’d been injured worse than this before?
Well, Elle, he has a wolf that leaps in and out of him so, you know, maybe it’s not something you want to know more about?
“You like…a…a werewolf or something.” She had this vague idea that werewolf shifts were different, but having thought they were fictional up to this point, she hadn’t actually given werewolf shifts much thought. In the movies they were different, though.
“Not a werewolf.”
“Okay.” Was that good or bad? “If you explain all this to me, is that knowledge going to get me killed?”
He paused for a beat, and while she couldn’t be certain the pause wasn’t caused by him trying to walk while sporting a gunshot wound to the chest, she wasn’t certain that pause meant good things for her.
“Not the knowledge itself, no. This isn’t a ‘I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you’ kind of situation.”
“Well that’s something I guess.” But he was hedging and being careful with his wording. “I’m curious enough to want answers anyway. But I’m leery.”
“Good instincts,” he muttered. “The crates… Could you identify anything in them? You said you didn’t look closely after the storage fridge, but…is there anything you did see?”
The realization that he’d heard all that while she was saying it to the wolf and he was a stone statue was surprising for some reason. She wasn’t sure why. Obviously, he and the wolf were somehow one and the same, even if he wasn’t a werewolf. Still, the fact that he’d heard her and remembered what she’d been saying—or at least knew what the wolf had heard her say was… Well, she should probably be disturbed by it.
Instead, she was just relieved. She didn’t have to reexplain everything.
“Nothing good,” she said, suppressing a shudder. “You probably don’t want to know.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Body parts. Animal mostly. That I could see while trying not to look. But…there were a few human body parts. Or at least, they seemed to be human. Hard to tell.”
Another pointed pause, then, “Why hard to tell?”
“The various parts are all…attached to other parts. I didn’t look close enough to see how. I don’t really want to know. When I spotted the first eye buried inside something that looked furry with something like a budding mouth over the top of the eye, I decided I didn’t want the details.”
None of the hunting she’d done with her father had really prepared her for the things she’d seen spilling out of the broken crates, and she didn’t want to think about those things too long. Her nightmares were vivid enough already.
And maybe that’s what this was. Maybe she was actually asleep in her car, and this was her having a nightmare. Vivid and detailed. But not real.
Except… The man—Ben, his name was Ben—Ben didn’t feel like part of a dream. Not when she was tucked up under his shoulder this way. Not with the heat of him lining her side and the weight of him solidly against her. He felt very real. And she realized she’d be weirdly disappointed to wake up and have him turn out to be just a figment of her imagination.
How strange. She’d actually miss him.
They clambered around more broken crates, some of which seemed to have been toppled purposefully in the way, like someone—or something—had dumped over some of the maze to make getting to the back door more difficult. She hadn’t noticed that seemingly deliberate wreckage when checking the house for monsters and gunmen, but then, she hadn’t been trying to get to the back door. And maybe it only felt deliberate now because she needed to get this large, heavy man through the destruction.
She probably should have thought more about all the broken and tumbled crates when she’d been searching the house. There shouldn’t be this much of a mess.
A scraping sound behind her nearly sent her jumping out of her skin. Her spin to face the sound was truncated, because Ben was still leaning heavily on her, but she still twisted to see if the noise was just a rat or if she’d missed a guard. Or a monster.
She regretted looking.
She should have just run.
From the broken crates, something oozed forward. A collection of pieces that seemed connected by a gelatinous black goo. As the goo rolled forward, things like eyes appeared and disappeared, and…parts—tentacles, a human looking arm, a clawed foot like something from a huge eagle—all stuck out of the goo, sometimes more than at other times. The mess of…stuff rolled toward them, scraping over the wooden floor as it pushed broken wooden bits aside. As it moved, it seemed to scoop up some of the other things that had fallen out of the crates as well as some of the broken wood.
“That is one disgusting sponge,” she murmured.
“Fuck,” Ben muttered. “We have to go. Fast.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” But he was still sporting a gunshot wound. He wasn’t in a position to run.
Or so she’d thought.
The next thing she knew, they were racing toward the back door. She was still tucked under one of his arms, and the run was more like a lurch, awkward and disjointed. But also a hell of a lot faster than she’d expected. They rushed past more crates just as more…things started to ooze out of the broken wood.
“Fuck.” Her turn to curse. She screamed when a crate nearby crashed to the ground and unleashed something with wings that screeched from a beak implanted in the black goo.
She’d never even had nightmares about things like this. If this was one of her super vivid nightmares, she was plumbing new depths of horror. And she was not happy about it. She didn’t even read horror. Where had her imagination come up with these things?
“Get back,” Ben ordered suddenly, coming to an abrupt halt.
Elle found herself pushed behind him—even though he was the one with the bleeding wound! He swung the large sword he held one-handed and sliced through something made of the goo. The stench that unleashed nearly had her doubling over. Nothing had ever smelled that bad before in the history of bad smells. It was like rotting meat mixed with sewage mixed with festering puss and while she’d smelled each of those things individually, the combination made her eyes water and her gorge rise.
She was still gaging and trying not to throw up when Ben grabbed her hand and pulled her past the hissing steam coming out of the goo.
“There are no fucking heads to cut off,” he muttered. “We have to get out of here.”
“Heads?” Oh, she did not want to see heads.
“They’ll have them,” he said, almost grudgingly. “But I don’t have time to find them.”
She screamed against when something just beside her crashed through some still-standing crates.
Ben swung his sword across whatever the thing was before she’d even had time to register what she was seeing. So fast she barely saw Ben move.
A tentacle and some talons dropped to the ground and then Ben was pulling her rapidly toward the back door again.
They shoved outside just as something like human fingers on the end of a lion’s leg reached for them from the depth of more black goo.
Heart hammering, panic and fear tight in her chest, Elle never thought to object when Ben ran straight for the woods. She wanted to get as far from that house as possible, as fast as possible. Before the goo got out!
But the thought of those horrors escaping the house left her breathless.
She was about to pull Ben to a stop when he came to an abrupt halt on his own.
“I can’t leave the place like that,” he said. “I have to destroy the things inside.”
“Yeah. We do.” She looked back at the now creaking wooden walls of the building. “Wood burns. There’s a lot of wood there.”
“Got a handy match?”
She pulled a small, wax wrapped bundle of stick matches from the thigh pocket of her cargo pants. “Always.” She studied the house, then pointed. “The generator. I can rig that to blow.”
There were a lot of things she regretted and hated about the years she’d spent with her father. But some of the skills he’d insisted she learn had turned out to be unexpectedly useful.
Ben gave her a look, but she ignored him as she continued to study the house. None of the goo had escaped. Yet. There were no windows for it to leak out of—fortunately—and they’d slammed the metal back door closed on the way out. Or Ben must have. She’d been too panicked to think about it.
But with some distance from the immediate danger, she was able to think again. Frantic and desperate, but still thinking. Thinking about how to destroy those monstrosities inside that house.
“Will the explosion spread?” Ben asked.
“Might. So might a fire. But the area is pretty damp from the rain two days ago.” She winced. Probably not damp enough. If sparks flew or something that was on fire tried to crawl out of the house…a fire could easily spread.
Ben leaned against a tree, his sword lowered and held at his side, reminding her he was still very seriously injured. And he’d just been swinging that sword around like he wasn’t.
“We need to get you to my car—or yours?—soon so you can…do that thing you do and heal.”
“House first,” he said, ignoring the drip of sweat trickling down his cheek. “Fire. No explosions if we can avoid it. Draw too much attention. Last thing we need is humans investigating.”
“Gonna need a fire crew eventually to put out the fire, though. Can’t leave it burning to ash.”
“Why not?”
She blinked at him. “It’ll spread. There’s no way it won’t spread.”
“It’s gotta burn to the ground to ensure what’s in there doesn’t get out. And we have to work fast, because what’s in there is starting to get out. I’ll stay here until it’s done. You can go back to your car—I assume you have a cellphone?” When she nodded, he said, “Get to somewhere there’s cell service and you’ll be able to call for help. By the time anyone gets here, the fire will be burnt low enough, we won’t have to worry.”
She was shaking her head before he’d finished talking. “I’m not leaving you. You’ve been shot. You’re in pain. You need to…do that thing you do.” She raised a hand when he opened his mouth. “I’m not leaving. Shut up and deal with it. We don’t have time to argue.” She looked back at the house. Then said, “Ordinary fire’s going to take too long to spread. Something will get out.”
She started back toward the house, even though every single part of her rebelled at the thought. She did not want to be anywhere near that goo. Those…whatever they were. Monsters. Though monsters seemed pretty fucking basic a word for what was inside that house. They’d spent too much time talking already, though. And they could only see one side of the house. Something might have already gotten out the front.
An explosion would bring attention. Which meant emergency services would come quicker. There wasn’t anyone in the area for miles and miles. But a generator blowing up was still bound to draw attention.
She hoped. They really were pretty isolated out here. This wasn’t someplace with good roads leading back to it. A single dirt track left the paved roads far behind to get here. Might even be impossible for a fire truck to reach the house. Might need one of those planes that put out forest fires. Which would take more time. The fire could spread. Lots could go wrong.
But there were monsters in there that needed to be thoroughly destroyed and an explosion was the fast way to do it.
She couldn’t afford to get her or Ben caught in the explosion, though. They had to have time to get away. But not so much time a lot of monsters got out of the house first.
She dropped the magazine out of the gun she still carried and removed one of the rounds, testing its weight in her palm. It would do. Maybe two rounds.
Ben was at her side before she’d gotten the second cartridge out.
“You should have stayed where you were. You’re in no shape—” she started, but he cut her off.
“I’ll manage. What will you do?”
“Gonna rig the powder in the cartridges with a match, drop it into the generator’s gas tank, then run.” She looked at him, at the sweat on his face and the way his chest wound still seeped blood. He wasn’t gushing blood. But he was pale even in the dark. And he was still bleeding.
“You should have stayed where you were,” she said again. “You won’t be able to run fast enough.”
He raised his brows at her, a funny little smile on his face.
“Why are you smiling?”
“I’ll explain later. Rig the generator. I’ll check the front of the house. Shout if…anything approaches.”
She shivered, but didn’t ask what might approach. She concentrated on her part of the job.
The gas-powered generator was still humming gently as she approached. Inside the house, beyond the wooden walls, Elle swore she heard things scraping and moving. Other sounds too. Like moaning. She didn’t want to think about that even a little bit.
After wrapping the two cartridges together with a rubber band she also had in one pocket, she tucked a few of the matches inside the band. She then very carefully pried the bullets from the casings, gently, using the plyers in her multi-purpose knife, which she carried in the thigh pocket opposite the matches. She winced, knowing plyers were not a safe tool for this, but she didn’t have a lot of choices. And her father had taught her a number of ways to do things like this in a pinch.
The fact that all the things her paranoid, survivalist, prepper, militia father taught her managed to come in handy so she could destroy some monsters that shouldn’t exist in the real world was an irony not lost on her.
She opened the gas tank on the generator and dropped in a rock, listening for the splash. Didn’t take long. Tank was three-quarters full. Pulling in a deep breath, she struck one of the matches not banded to the open casings against a rough patch of wood on the house. The flare of the little flame lit the shadowed area and made tiny dark spots swim in her vision. She took a deep breath, then lit the matches banded to the open cartridges and set the bundle on the very edge of the generator near the gas tank opening.
Taking a moment to ensure everything was balanced right and would work as she hoped, she edged back from the generator. A small trickle of gun powered flowed from the open casing, into the gas. As the weight balance in the cartridges shifted, the whole bundle tipped toward the tank.
“Ben,” she shouted and started backing toward the woods, fast.
An instant later, strong arms wrapped around her, lifting her off her feet. She blinked. A whoosh of air movement. A queasy sensation in her gut.
She blinked again and she was deep in the woods, the house a faint silhouette in the distance.
What the…?
She hadn’t even had time to think, to react. Strange arms coming around her triggered a knee jerk response in most situations. She went immediately into fight mode. A survival instinct forged in her childhood that she didn’t have much control over, even now. But…she hadn’t had even a chance to start to struggle before she was already hundreds of yards from the house, cradled in a stranger’s arms.
And she knew without looking whose arms enveloped her.
“Sometime soon, I’m going to need an explanation for…you,” she murmured.
“Soon,” Ben agreed.
Which sort of surprised her. She might want an explanation. But he didn’t have any obligation to indulge her curiosity. In fact, she’d have assumed he’d disappear and leave her with all her questions. He obviously had secrets. He wasn’t an ordinary man—an understatement that almost made her laugh. Why would he reveal anything to a perfect stranger just because they’d survived monsters together?
