Voracious - Alice Henderson [102]
But what she’d come away with didn’t help. It didn’t even pertain to her situation. These people had faced grizzly bears, powerful creatures indeed, but seldom predaceous, and then only when desperate for a meal or threatened beyond reason. Most of the time when a grizzly attacked, it stopped when the person played dead or was no longer a threat. In only very rare cases had grizzlies eaten people.
A powerful force of nature, a symbol of a healthy ecosystem, the grizzly didn’t make it personal when it attacked. It hadn’t selected its victim from a series of newspaper articles, or from word of mouth as people chatted with each other about friends with extraordinary abilities. The victim mauled by a grizzly wasn’t selected at all but just happened to be the unlucky person who stumbled across a mother grizzly and her cubs or a big male eating a moose carcass.
But the creature she faced was no bear. It was undeniably predaceous and calculating, selecting each victim for the precise purpose of devouring the person’s flesh, for acquiring a talent or gift.
It had specifically selected her. And it wouldn’t stop when she played dead. It would keep coming, teeth sinking into her, devouring her flesh. And then it would have her “gift.” The power that would give the creature staggered her. It would know intimate details about its victims, where they were going, their routines, their deepest fears. It would twist and compromise her ability, finding endless, horrific uses for it; it would contort the “gift” into a thing of evil, extending it to a place of darkness she herself never would have taken it.
She glanced around nervously, scanning the lake’s edge, the gift shop and lodge, feeling oddly possessive of her gift. She may not have asked for it, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to see it used for evil.
She wondered where the creature was, why it hadn’t even made a single appearance since the night before. Here she was, sitting alone, and though she was among a swarm of pulsing, vibrant tourism, she thought at least she’d feel its eyes burning into her back or catch a glimpse of furtive movement in the trees at the lake’s edge. But she’d seen nothing in her three hours of reading and watching.
The extent of its injuries had been considerable. It might still be healing, though it had been well enough to rip out the underside of her car. Still, no ordinary weapon had torn the gashes into the creature’s flesh, and if Ffyllon’s journal had been correct, then those wounds took longer to heal.
She continued to glance around, briefly watching a couple in their fifties holding hands and strolling along the lake’s edge.
She looked again at her watch and thought about George. He didn’t know what was going on. If she asked him to go to the cabin, she’d be endangering him. She looked at the path to the cabins. Presently, quite a few people strolled on it. If she hurried there now, she’d be in public and could get her wallet and knife.
Tucking the book under her arm, she set off down the path, nodding at families as they walked by, surreptitiously watching them for any suspicious behavior.
Then suddenly she did feel someone watching her. Peering around, her eyes fell on a dark figure in the trees behind her, some two hundred feet away, just at the edge of the riverbank. A man, definitely watching her, stood there silently, unmoving. She tried to make out his face, but he was too far away. She looked closer, peering intently. He didn’t react at all to her noticing him, and this made her nervous.
Normally when you caught a stranger staring, he looked away.
The cabin area wasn’t too much farther. Madeline decided just to continue casually in that direction. She walked down the path, chancing a glance over her shoulder. The figure was closer. Much closer. Only a hundred feet away now, though she hadn’t seen him move at all.
She turned around fully now and walked quickly backward, not taking her eyes off him. He vanished behind a cluster of hemlock trees. She continued her backward progress, watching for his reappearance.