Page 20 of His Human Believer

I exhale. “How far inside the preserve did this sighting happen?”

“Not far into the jungle. I followed the walking path to the first turn. And it didn’t try to attack me or anything. I think I scared it and it ran away. I didn’t feel like it was dangerous.”

“What did it look like?”

“It was standing up on two legs, like a Hyrrokin.” He glances up at me quickly, to see if I’m going to react to that. I don’t, so he keeps going. “It was taller than my dad.”

“Taller than Hannibal?”

“A lot taller. And its eyes were gold. Hyrrokin eyes go red in the dark. All of us. Skylo’s go red too.” He tips his head back toward the wulver. “These were gold. Like a lamp.”

“How long did you see it for?”

“I don’t know. A while.” He thinks about it. “Maybe a minute? It felt longer.”

“What did it do?”

“Nothing. It didn’t come at me. It didn’t run away either, just looked at me. I wasn’t scared.”

“Anything else?”

And that’s when he tells me the important part. “There was a sound.”

“What kind of sound?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Try.”

“It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t like a roar or anything. It was really low. Like, you know how sometimes you can feel the engine of a big transport before you can hear it?”

“Yes.”

“Like that. I felt it in my chest before I heard it.”

“Can you make the sound?”

He looks embarrassed.

“Dagr. Can you make it?”

And he hums it. Low, in the back of his throat, and it pulses, slow, up and down, and goes on for maybe four seconds, and every hair on my arms comes up at once.

He stops. “Like that but way lower. And bigger.”

“Dagr. I need to ask you something, and you can absolutely say no…I want to tell Dr. Coalstone about all of this, including the sound. He’s got audio equipment out at that wall right now, running every night.” I lean forward. “If something out there makes a noise, there might be a recording of it. He’s the only being on this planet who can actually go and check.”

Dagr thinks about that. “He won’t believe me.”

“He might not,” I agree, because I’m not going to lie to a kid to get a yes. “He’ll probably tell you there’s another explanation. That’s what he does. That’s literally his whole job, to be skeptical.”

“So why bother?”

“Because that’s not the same as him thinking you’re lying. There’s a difference between I don’t believe your conclusion, and I don’t believe you saw anything. He doesn’t think the kids are making it up. He thinks they saw something but were wrong about what it was. Dr. Coalstone thinks there isn’t a real Skyggjar and that Hyrrokin have always mistaken it for a different kind of animal.”

“But, Aunt Margaret, I’ve lived next to the preserve since I was little. I know the types of animals out there and this wasn’t one of them.”

“Then tell Dr. Coalstone that.”