Count On Me Read online

  “There’s nothing here at night that isn’t here during the day,” I say aloud.

  I glance at my traveling companion for confirmation. She smiles thinly and doesn’t meet my gaze.

  Pops taught me that as my mantra, sort of. I was terrified of the dark as a girl, until he helped me through it.

  I was staying with my grandparents over Christmas vacation, the year after my mother passed away. I was always extra scared when I had to sleep in the dark in a strange place. I knew my grandparent’s farm pretty well, but I only stayed there a few times, so the bedroom was like an alien landscape.

  When I told him I was scared he just patted me on my head and said, “We’ll fix that right now.”

  I can still see him as he was that day. He was rotund in his youth but went skinny with age, but no one told his clothes. They hung baggy on his frame: these old khaki pants like he used to wear in the army when he was in Korea, a plaid shirt, and one of a million cardigans that my grandmother knitted for him. They made him great for hugs.

  “You just sit right here,” he said, taking a spot on my borrowed bed.

  I did it, and he clicked off the light.

  “Now I want you to look around, and visualize the room just like it was when the light was on. Do you see it?”

  “I see it,” I said.

  I could see him too, nodding.

  “There’s nothing in here now that isn’t here in the light.”

  After that I was less afraid. It faded over time. The only time I remember it coming back was the first night I slept in a dorm room, and then only a little.

  “There’s probably wolves,” Saska says, shaking me out of my memories.

  I look at her. I can barely see her in the dark.

  “What?”

  “Wolves. You know what a wolf is, don’t you?”

  “Of course I know what a wolf is,” I sigh.

  Well. That helps. I get so close to her I nearly bump into her.

  I think an hour later she says, “Switch.”

  By the fifth “switch,” we seem no closer to any lights, and my legs feel like lead weights. Somehow I still take steps. Left, then right. Left, then right.

  After the first time I stumble, Saska grabs my wrist.

  “We need to rest. Eat and drink.”

  “Do you have any idea where we are?”

  She shrugs. “Do you?”

  “No. I couldn’t get a signal on the plane, so I don’t know where we went down.”

  After the cramp in my side dies down, I stand up. We switch the pack and I start walking again, brushing Saska’s side every few steps as if that will keep me safe from whatever lurks in the dark.

  I can’t let it get to me. I will not.

  Finally, lights. I spot them first, quickening my pace just a little as I see them. A ring of faint glow in the distance. It could be windows, a town. As we grow nearer I realize that it isn’t as far as I thought, and the lights are much smaller.

  The glow is from tiny mushrooms, punching up from the dirt in a rough ring about thirty feet in diameter. The grass just dies as it creeps up on the glowing toadstools, and the ground behind is bare. Just inside the ring is a more regular pattern of standing stones, so inky black that they’re darker than the night. Each is six feet tall and broken, like a jagged tooth. In the very middle there is a stone slab, a table, longer than it is wide, big enough for a person to lie in the channel in the middle.

  I take a step toward it and Saska grabs my hand.

  “Don’t,” she says, and starts circling around.

  “What is that?”

  “Best not,” is all she says, and now there’s a spring in her step as we walk forward, always forward, mountains over my left shoulder.

  I walk along with her, fighting the urge to just start talking, blather about whatever pops into my head. It’s silence that makes the dark so black. A void waiting to be filled is the scariest thing. There’s no moon tonight and we both have to take slow, laborious steps, testing our footing.

  After a few more hours we come to a big enough rock to sit on, and stop. More water, and another energy bar. Saska eats hers very deliberately, in tiny bites. It’s so dark out here I can barely see my own hands, but her skin seems to glow, and her teeth even more, whiter than white, like the purest snow. Her incisors are a little sharp, giving her a predatory air when she bites into a protein bar.

  She gasps and I snap around to face her way. Saska looks out into the dark, and my eyes lock on to the same thing. A light bobs and weaves in the dark, moving.

  In my rush I stuff the water bottles back into the bag and shoulder it quickly, only for her to grab my arm and clamp her hand down on my face.

  “Quiet,” she says, her voice barely more than a soft breath.

  She crouches.

  “What is it?” I whisper, wincing. Each word sounds like in a shout in the total quiet of the wilderness.

  She’s quiet for a time then says, “We can’t be far from the border. They might be Harkanian. They might be Red Scarves.”

  “Red what?”

  “Be quiet,” she hisses.

  More lights appear. They flicker. Fire. Torches. Not torches like English people say torches and mean flashlights: burning rags on the ends of sticks. They move high enough off the ground that the bearers must be on horseback.

  In the glow I make out the thin legs and hooves of horses, leather saddles, and high boots. Saska sinks into the grass and huddles against the rock. I join her, exhaling slowly and wincing when I suck in another breath.

  Voices drift on the wind. I strain to listen, only to realize that I can’t understand them anyway.

  Saska turns just slightly back to me, her eyes never leaving the torches.

  There must be twenty or thirty in all.

  I slip the pack on my shoulders.

  “Stay low,” she breathes, “put your hands on my back.”

  I do as she says, and crouch walk, moving away from the path of the torches as they sweep toward us. Now that they begin to close in, I can see faces.

  A chill runs down my spine. They all wear a red scarf looped around their right arm, and another wound tightly around their faces to make a mask.

  There’s something wrong with their faces, blue-black veins standing out against pale skin, their eyes glassy and distant.

  Saska stops every few feet and looks, listens. My own breathing is so loud in my ears I’m sure it will give us away.

  Dread creeps into the corners of my mind. It sings a song as sweet as rot, filling the back of my head with all kinds of dread. It begins to dawn on me that I survived a plane crash in the middle of nowhere and now I’m hiding from weirdoes on horses carrying torches.

  My head feels like glass.

  Worse is the swimming feeling of familiarity. I must just be used to being chased. This feels different, though. Stronger. Something swells in my chest, like my heart has grown a size, and fine hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

  “There,” Saska whispers. “Look.”

  A standing stone. It punches up out of the ground, an obelisk of solid black stone eight feet high, square, rising to a sharp tip. Sitting on the very top, a candle flame flickers and swirls in the dark. Maybe fifty yards away there’s another one, its light twinkling like a miniature star.

  When we pass it, it’s like walking through a door. I have a deep, distinct sense that I have entered something, that we have trespassed. It’s like that feeling I had outside that ring of mushrooms, only much, much stronger.

  We crouch low in the grass.

  “What are they saying?” I ask as I hear voices.

  Saska cranes to listen.

  “Arguing. The one says he spotted movement. The other says they must not pass the stones.”

  The voices get louder, and the hoofbeats, too. The one who was arguing to follow us won.

  Half the riders dismount, carrying their torches high. One of them doesn’t carry a torch at all, but a rifle in both ha
nds. The others have pistols or big, hooked knives, steel fangs in the dark.

  Saska stops and presses low to the ground. I join her, shivering. My jaw aches. I clench it shut so I don’t let my teeth chatter. There’s a footstep not ten feet from me. The light is blinding after so much dark. The man in the red scarf sweeps it from side to side, looking.

  His eyes meet mine and he shouts a command.

  “Run,” Saska shouts, all whispers abandoned.

  I throw myself up and push with my hands into a sprint, shrugging off the bag, running for my life. Saska starts another way.

  They follow us both. The riders are faster, outpacing the men on foot. They pass me, two of them on horseback, and come around, stopping in my path as the others run up behind me.

  They shout at me in their language and I don’t know what they’re saying. I put my hands up, the only thing I can think of.

  Fog. There wasn’t any fog a moment ago. It rolls low along the ground, like the earth is sloughing off snakeskin. Wisps of mist curl around the blades of grass, thin tendrils spiraling off the top like smoke from invisible flames.

  The Red Scarves look around, sensing something. I feel it, too.

  We’re not alone out here.

  I hear Saska scream. They shout at her in her tongue and she shouts back.

  They keep shouting at me until they realize I don’t speak their tongue.

  “On your knees!” I finally hear in German.

  I get down, hands still up. The mist rises, like the tide coming in. It’s nearly to my chest.

  They’re arguing. I don’t need a translation. Someone wants to leave right now. One of them points at me with his torch and comes closer.

  Roughly he grabs me by the chin and wrenches my head to one side then the other.

  Saska screams something in a language I don’t know. It’s not the same one the Red Scarves speak.

  Oh my God, what the hell am I doing her? I don’t…

  I see it, too. In the dark there’s a horse, its coat and flowing mane so pale it all but glows. I can’t make out the rider, except that he’s enormous, a shadow. The horse is bigger than one of those big, shaggy ones that pulls wagons, but leaner, more muscular, sleeker. The rider stands in the stirrups and there’s a flash of metal.

  His sword is red. The blade is three and a half feet long, maybe four, and as wide as a big man’s hand. Running down its length are three sharp channels, cut into the spine of the steel. Red, but not red like painted red, like a red car. It just is.

  Light flickers around him. It’s coming from the blade, I realize. The glow catches in the middle first and spreads, first red hot, then white, only red at the edges, like it’s just been pulled from a forge. The smell of it is heavy on the air, a tangy, oily scent of hot metal. The glow expands and I can make out the rider now in sharp relief.

  He’s huge, broad shouldered, and dressed in a flowing cloak of green so dark it’s nearly black, though his shoulders are draped with a shiny, silvery pelt from some huge animal. Its lupine head adorns one shoulder, and its tail hangs down the other.

  His head is too square, until I realize it’s a helmet. Antlers jut from the top, spreading into sharp points that glitter in the red light.

  Everyone is paralyzed. Then the rider kicks into his mount and surges forward, sword flashing. The Red Scarf ahead of me falls from his saddle one way, his head another, as the antlered giant passes then wheels and comes around.

  The world goes insane. Torches, the light of the sword, it’s like a strobe light in my eyes. Everything is chaos.

  I break and run, away from the stones, deeper into…this. Behind me over my shoulder I see Saska running another way, and the giant man on his gargantuan horse cutting down the Red Scarves as if they are grain. A crack pierces the night, but it doesn’t matter. The shooter is ridden down.

  I almost fall over a rock and break my damned neck. Pressing against it, I do the only thing I can. I hide in the grass.

  The mist swirls around me. The shouting and shooting stops. I hear Saska arguing, shouting in her language, and then she goes silent.

  Hoofbeats of a single horse grow nearer. I see his antlers first, rising high over his helmet. He turns this way and that, searching. Saska sits behind him against his back, her wrists bound, gagged.

  She spots me, somehow. I move toward her and she shakes her head sharply.

  That makes the rider turn my way and press back down.

  I have to do something. I feel around, looking for a stone to throw, a branch, anything, but there’s just dirt.

  The rider sits there on his saddle for what feels like an eternity. I can see his weapon slung next to him, hanging from his saddle in a scabbard of dark leather.

  Whispers curl around the edges of my mind, and I almost stand up before I make myself sit back down and press into the rock.

  It feels like hours. No one moves. The only sound is Saska’s soft breathing and the occasional chuff or snort from the horse. The rider is like a statue.

  The man on the pale horse rides off with her and I sit there and do nothing.

  Only when he is far, far away do I start to sob. My bravado is gone, my confidence shattered, the memory of my grandfather’s teachings a distant joke. There is something in the dark that isn’t there in the light, and I just saw it.

  The only way I know I fell asleep is because I wake up. When I do the sun is shining, and the world is different.

  Rising, I find myself standing in a field. The backpack is easy to spot. I almost reach it before I recoil in shock and disgust from what I find.

  One of the Red Scarves lies where he fell, cut in half, diagonal like. I don’t look any closer than I have to, until I find his rifle.

  I don’t know much about guns, just enough that a long one is a rifle and a little one is a pistol, but I know enough that what I am seeing makes no sense. I pick up the shoulders-bit, the back end. The rest was cut off in a single perfectly clean stroke, right through the worky bits where all the moving parts are. Some of them fall out when I tilt it. The cut is absolutely crisp, laser sharp.

  I hold it and glance at the body, tilting the gun just so.

  The man who held it raised it to defend himself, to block the sword stroke. The sword cut right through the gun and the man who held it both.

  I drop the thing like it’s a dead bug and stumble away from it then grab the pack.

  A sip of water to ease my burning throat, and I look back.

  If I go past those stones, I know there’s nothing. Miles and miles of nothing, going farther than I could ever walk.

  I force back my tears, bite down on my fears, and I walk.

  After an hour I come to a road.

  Roads go somewhere.

  2

  Dire Circumstances

  Conrad

  He knows she is here. He can smell her on the air, a taste so familiar yet so foreign. She smells of flowers and turned earth and sweat, of the warm air of summer that never comes again, and hopes long lost.

  As ever the evil thing on his back whispers in his ear as it sings in his veins, a wordless song of fire and death, blood and thunder. It fed well tonight. These trespassers make for a fine feast, but still it hungers.

  He doesn’t feel the girl tugging at his cloak but he knows she’s there.

  “You need to go back,” she urges.

  Conrad ignores her and rides. He rides hard, driving his mount until he froths at the mouth and lathers from sweat.

  The armor grasps his body like a weight, spectral fingers digging into his flesh. As he ascends the mountain road he rips the helmet from his head and lets his hair unfold into the wind. The chill air drinks his sweat, so that he shivers by the time they reach the gates.

  Saska dismounts first, stepping back while Conrad lands on his feet with a thud.

  “Conrad—”

  “Silence,” he hisses. “Through the gates. Now.”

  The garrison knows better than to bar them tonight. Sask
a runs across the drawbridge and vanishes into the castle while Conrad slips the scabbard from his shoulder and sits down on one of the heavy stones that mark the edges of the road. He looks up at the horse.

  “Off with you,” he snarls.

  As black as the night that takes it, his mount thunders down the mountain slope, riderless. He doesn’t know where it goes. He doesn’t care.

  He grasps the scabbard and hilt of the cursed thing and draws it forth. The whisper of red steel on leather is thirsty, like the smacking of parched lips anticipating a drink. He tosses the scabbard aside and rests it across his armored thighs.

  The clawed fingers of his heavy gauntlets scrape along the steel, but it matters not. Nothing can so much as mark it. It quivers in his lap in response, as if excited. Staring into the blade, he sees only his own face framed by darkness.

  “Where is she? Show me.”

  The surface ripples and shifts, growing deeper as his reflection fades, as though he steps back and back from a mirror until he is gone. He looks down on a solitary woman trekking down a road in the dark, clutching a bag she wears strapped to her back. Her clothes are foreign to him, like something a boy might wear, but there is no mistaking her.

  Conrad rises. The armor he wears anchors him like chains, hangs around his neck and shoulders like lead weights. Holding the sword in his hands, he battles temptation to turn with all his might, swing, and hurl it into the black.

  It’s pointless, and they both know it. He snatches the scabbard from the dirt and shoves the blade home. The steel catches on the wooden throat, fighting him for a moment until the guard slams against it. A soft rattle rises from within as he takes the sling over his shoulder.

  He crosses the wooden bridge on foot, his heavy boots thumping in the night, spurs jangling. The blade fights him as he crosses the yard and passes through the tunnel. Its weight grows on his back, bending his knees until he adjusts. The strap pulls at his neck, like a leash in the hand of an impatient master.

  In the reaches of the castle the dead tree stands sentinel, its silvery-stone bark aglow even without the moon. When he slips the scabbard from his shoulders again to return it, the sword suddenly weighs a hundred pounds, dragging his arms down as he fights it back into place.