Winter Prey

Chapter 42

Chapter 42

"We made a deal, Kymbria. We have to start back."

"Caleb - "

The roar surrounded them without warning, a blend of anguish and anger so strident that trees shook and clumps of snow thudded to the ground. Kymbria's hands clenched on the snowmobile handlebars, and she froze, immobilized to the point where she wondered if even her heart could beat. From the corner of her eye, she could see Caleb as rigid as her, his pale, strained face set in terror.

Fifty feet away, the windigo stepped out of the underbrush.

Every descriptive word Caleb had used on the beast leapt into Kymbria's mind. Everything she had sensed about the thing. Wicked. Foul. Malevolent. And its eyes - fear and horror curdled in her stomach, yet she couldn't tear her gaze away. Inhuman eyes, eyes that shone red with a light that emanated outward. Eyes that drew her, yet repelled her. The light surrounded eye-pits that could be a pathway to Hell itself, the color a reflection of the fierce glow from fiery coals.

The evil, though....where was that?

Caleb's snowmobile engine revved, and Kymbria tightened her hold on her throttle controls. But she couldn't force herself to flee. Where was the evil that Caleb insisted over and over the windigo radiated? The evil that could drive a person insane just from looking at a windigo.

The evil that had to be there. This beast had killed - and eaten its prey - over and over again for generations.

"Move!" Caleb shouted. "Kymbria, go! It's too far away for me hit with a shotgun! Follow me!" Evidently trusting her to obey, his snowmobile engine roared and he raced away.

Caleb's entreaty irritated Kymbria rather than motivated her. She sat there, caught in the web of hers and the windigo's commingled gazes.

The beast was tall, towering even. Muddy brown fur covered its body, inches thick in places where clumps tangled. Claw-tipped hands spread out in a pleading gesture on the ends of arms as massive as the trunks of the hundreds-of-years-old pines that permeated the area. The muscular legs seemed incongruously shorter than necessary to support such an enormous upper body, and smaller but just as sharp claws grew from the feet.

She somehow took all this in without losing contact with the creature's gaze, as though her mind examined it without benefit of her eyes. Then, abruptly, the red glow lessened and Kymbria studied the face: a broad, prominent brow, eyes now a shade of black silk as deep as a moonless night, an almost-hidden nose beaked beneath fur that hung down past the hidden mouth. A mouth filled with teeth that Caleb had described as sawtooth.

"What do you want?" she whispered just as Caleb raced out of a clump of trees near the windigo.

Darn it, he'd circled around and come back to protect her. He had one hand on his snowmobile throttle, the other holding the stock of the shotgun jammed against his hip.

"Get the hell out of here, Kym - "

In a nearly imperceptible movement, the windigo broke off a young pine tree and heaved it at Caleb. The jagged trunk pierced the snowmobile hood, and the high-pitched scream of an engine in distress drowned out Caleb's shout. His machine veered sideways, into a deadfall beside the trail, scattering snow and heavy limbs until it stalled in the tangle of brush and trees. By then, Caleb lay draped over a fallen tree trunk deep in the pile of brush, his body dangling lifelessly. Kymbria could see the stock of the shotgun, crushed under the snowmobile track.

"Caleb!" Kymbria cried. Hands frozen on the throttle responded at last to her commands, and she tore toward the deadfall.

The windigo appeared beside Caleb's body. Kymbria gasped and her hand dropped from the throttle. She instinctively glanced back to where the windigo had stood only a split-second ago, but the spot was empty. Her snowmobile halted on the trail, her gaze caught on the cross Caleb had worn, dangling from a limb in the deadfall - torn from his neck when he was thrown from the snowmobile.