Ashes, Ashes

21 - Blood Eagle

"Logan! Logan, chill out. It's just me." 

I thrashed, wheeling around in a panic before the words came through to my brain, and even then I stood and stared for a second, my thoughts lagging behind my body. 

Richard was standing there, his hands held up in a gesture of surrender. His usual wide-eyed, boyish grin was replaced with a hollow, haunted look. 

"The fuck have you been?" Pent-up adrenaline, overflowing from having no option to either fight or flee, spilled over. I shoved him hard in the chest, a swell of anger bubbling under my skin. How dare he. How dare he be gone while I had to watch Abby's brains slide out of her skull, while I had to wash her blood from my hands. 

"Finding the car," he replied, taking a step back, his hands still raised. "Which I did, by the way. You're welcome." 

I stared at him, brain out of sync with the moment. "Liza's body is missing." 

"Forget about that for a minute." An edge came into his voice. His eyes were wide, wild, the whites rimming the irises in a perfect circle. "There's something you need to see."

I opened my mouth, ready to retort, when a piercing scream tore through the woods, echoing among the snowy trees. Dawn. That was definitely Dawn's voice. 

My skin tightened, muscles clenched with the need for action. 

"Guess that means she found it," Richard muttered under his breath. 

He turned to run, and I followed, trailing the sound of her scream out into the thick pine forest at the back of the campground. A path curved through the trees, traveling past rows of cabins and peeling away from the sloping hiking trail we had taken to scatter Laurel's ashes. The path was too narrow to be a proper road, but there were deep grooves carved into the mud under the snow, dual ruts made by knobby tires. Richard jogged down it with the surety of someone who knew where he was going. 

Ahead, half-buried in drooping pine branches and wedged into a narrow space between two trees, I could make out the bulk of Parker's car. The paint was heavily scratched, and a dusting of snow settled on the roof and hood, half obscuring the tree limbs that arced over it. It must have been here most of the night to accumulate that kind of snow. 

Why would Parker have left the car here? 

If it's here, where did he go? 

I noticed then that Dawn was crumpled on the ground beside the SUV, her legs buckled under her, face in her hands. For a moment I thought she was dead, but then I saw the tremble of her shoulders, the hitch of her heaving ribs and I realized she was sobbing. 

My blood went cold, gaze sliding slowly sideways across the scratched-up side panel. The driver-side door was open, and something slouched in the opening, a dark silhouette against the gloom. 

Drawn forward despite myself, I crept up on the car, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. I knew, of course, with the same certainty as when I'd seen Liza's mangled body, as when I'd watched the axe blade slide so neatly through Abby's skull. 

I knew, the same way as I had when I watched Laurel fall limp, muscles losing their coordination, the first convulsive shudders running through her body as her throat worked its belated attempt to expunge the poison she had followed. 

I knew, but I refused to accept, and refused to understand. 

Richard stood in place behind me, as if horror were a disease he could catch. 

The figure slumped over in the driver's seat no longer looked human. There were ripped tatters of clothes littering the seat and floor board, shredded through and discarded like a food wrapper. The lower body was more or less where it was expected, although the legs were bent up at a severe angle. The torso, or what should have been the torso, was slumped forward, smashed into the steering column. Two arms, stark white and bloodless, were pulled forward, tied at the wrist to the figure's ankles, forcing the body into a compact triangle. 

The way the rope was frayed, the dried blood tangled in the fibers, the jagged grooves worn through the gray-white flesh, it was clear that the body had been alive when it was posed. Alive and struggling. 

But the rope burns were the least of the problem. The greater horror was the misshapen mass that rose from the body's waist, the skin peeled away in strips to show a lumpy, mottled canvas of meat and bone. Glimpses of broken ribs and shattered vertebrae shone silver-white against the black gore. Where the shoulders should be, two misshapen sacs of flesh, visible beyond the white points of severed ribs. 

Lungs, I realized, unable to tear my eyes away despite the horror of it. Lungs, ripped out through the holes gouged into his back. 

Blood eagle, the name rose, somewhat randomly, into my mind. I couldn't remember where I knew it from, or why. Whatever the reason, it didn't matter now. 

Flopped lifelessly over the steering column, smeared with blood and some other dark, oozing fluid, was the dead face, its lips pulled into a grimace of pain. Blond hair spilled over, partially shrouding the open, staring eyes. A pair of glasses, their lenses smeared with blood. 

Behind me, I could hear Richard retching, trying and failing to hold back the contents of his stomach. 

Dawn still crouched in the snow beside the car, weeping. 

Parker's body stared at nothing. 

None of us heard the sound of footsteps approach, or noticed the figure stalking menacingly through the woods toward us. 

It wasn't until they had slipped behind me, one arm wrapping smoothly around my throat in a choke-hold, the other plunging a needle into the muscle of my arm, that I realized anyone was here. 

And by then, it was too late.