The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater [83]
Dove jerks to attention.
Looking in the side of the lean-to is a long black face.
It is the devil.
It takes everything in me not to whimper. The creature is black as peat at midnight, and its lips are pulled back into a fearsome grin. The ears are long and wickedly pointed toward each other, less like a horse and more like a demon. They remind me of shark egg pouches. The nostrils are long and thin to keep the sea out. Eyes black and slick: a fish’s eyes.
It still stinks like the ocean. Like low tide and things caught on rocks. It’s barely a horse.
It’s hungry.
The capall uisce has hooked its head around the side of the lean-to, over the fence. All that stands between us and its strangely light grin is three boards that I nailed up myself while Mum watched. Three nails, not two, into each, because ponies, she said, will test everything.
And now this night-black horse presses its chest against them. Not hard. Only as hard as it had pushed against the lean-to wall.
The nails creak.
I can hear my heart or Finn’s heart or maybe the both of them, and it’s going so fast and loud that I can’t breathe. My hands are fisted over the hay, the nails biting into my palms.
We’re hidden, you can’t see us, go away.
Dove is utterly still.
The capall uisce looks at her and opens its jaw, and then it makes a sound that turns my blood into ice. It’s a hissed exhalation with low clucks behind it, clicking from somewhere deep in its throat: kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw.
Dove flattens her ears back to her head but doesn’t move. How many times had we been told that the capaill uisce want a moving target? That to move is to die?
Dove is a statue.
The capall uisce pushes again. The boards creak again.
I hear Finn sigh. It’s so quiet that I know no one but me could’ve heard it, and only me because I’ve spent my whole life listening to every sound that my brothers could possibly make. It’s a soft, scared little noise that I haven’t heard him make in a long time.
Then I hear a wail.
It’s coming from out in the pasture. Both Dove and the capall uisce flick an ear toward it.
It comes again, and my stomach is an endless pit. It’s another one, I think, that’s pushed down the fence on the other side, that’s in the pasture with us, not even three nails a board to keep us alive.
The black monster swivels its strange long ears again.
The wail, again. It sounds a little like a baby crying, and then I see Finn’s mouth moving. It’s about all I can see of him.
He mouths at me with exaggerated syllables: Puffin.
The sound, again, and this time, I recognize it immediately. Puffin the barn cat, always in search of Finn, back from her travels and drawn by our light. She wails again, her baby-cry meow that she uses to call him. When he’s feeling indulgent, he’ll repeat it back to her and she’ll use the sound as a homing beacon.
Now she cries again, closer, and the capall uisce shifts its weight away from the fence.
In the gray light of the mist that the rain drives up from the ground, I see Puffin’s form, trotting toward us, her tail a question mark. Wow? she asks.
The capall uisce’s grin closes.
Puffin sees the capall uisce only when it moves. The fence tears like paper, the boards exploding off with a sound like the world being destroyed.
She bolts and the capall uisce charges after her, made hungrier by the chase. They both vanish into the mist, and the last thing I hear is hooves scrabbling, frenzied, and then Puffin wailing.
Finn covers his face, the hay falling from his hands, and I see his shoulders shake.
I can’t think about that, though. I think about this: the capall uisce coming back and killing my brother.
I grab his shoulder. “Come on.”
I don’t have a plan yet, but I know we can’t stay.
From behind me, I hear a sound, and I jerk so hard my muscles hurt. It takes a full second for me to