AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“And it might mean everything.”
Barbara looked around the cabin again, letting it soak in, breathing in the smell: stale beer and weed, the cloying aroma of spruce. Beneath it all, the faint irony tang of blood. Death had come here, she thought. And it had been hungry. Ravenous. And there was something else too. Anger. Fear. Hatred.
Her head whipped around. A noise from outside. A flurry of birds taking flight.
“You hear that?”
“What?”
Barbara crossed the cabin quickly, yanking open the door and almost pulling it off its hinges. She was just in time to see a slight, blonde girl turn and disappear between the trees. Barbara hurried down the cabin’s steps, slowing as she reached the edge of the woods. Easy to get lost in woods like these, if you didn’t know the area. She walked a little way into the trees’ embrace, conscious of keeping the cabin in sight behind her. She stared around. The girl was probably long gone…
And then she saw her. Standing a short distance away, half shrouded in the gloom of the thick spruce. She was dressed in what looked like an assortment of animal skins and her white-blonde hair hung over her shoulders in two long pigtails. Barbara didn’t believe in ghosts, but for a moment, she looked just like…
Mercy.
The girl stepped forward and Barbara realized her damn foolishness. Not Mercy. How could it be? This girl was much younger, for a start. And her skin was pale. Mercy’s skin had been dark, in striking contrast to her hair.
And when they drowned her for the fifth or sixth time, it floated like silvery seaweed in the river.
Barbara swallowed. “You okay, sweetheart? You lost?”
She asked the question even though she was pretty sure the girl wasn’t lost. Or a little girl.
“Who’s Mercy?” the girl asked.
Ice slithered down Barbara’s spine. She hadn’t said the name out loud. She forced a smile, and the effort made her cheeks hurt. “Just an old friend. What’s your name?”
“You don’t need to know, old woman.” The girl cocked her head slightly to one side. “You a cop?”
“A detective.”
The girl nodded. “Then you go tell that fuckwit chief that the Colony didn’t kill the boy.”
Barbara flinched a little at the swearword. She was sure the girl had meant her to.
“You from the Colony?” she asked steadily.
The girl smiled, revealing sharp, gold incisors. Her natural incisors must have been broken, or removed, at some point.
“You catch on fast,” she said.
“You know about the murder?”
“I make it my business to know what goes on in the human settlement.” She spat out the word “human” as though it tasted bad.
“Then maybe you could tell me who did kill the boy?”
The girl’s amber eyes appraised her. “Look closer to home.”
“Deadhart?”
“Ask ’em about the Bone House.”
“The Bone House?”
“You heard me. And keep the fuck away from the Colony.”
Before Barbara could ask anything else, the girl was gone, melting into the woods, like she had simply dissolved.
