Monsters (Ashes Trilogy 3)

“Oh please.” Her voice came out squeaky. Her eyes snapped back to the bed, and then she was dropping onto her stomach and batting blankets out of her way, reaching beneath the bed. “Oh please, please, please,” she chanted, sweeping her glove over bare floorboards, catching wooly dust kittens, a pencil, an old sock—before slapping metal. Scrambling to a cross-legged sit, she dragged out a dented red toolbox. She was shaking so badly she had to use her teeth to tug off her gloves before fumbling open the toolbox’s icy chrome latch and throwing back the double lid.

Instead of tools, there was a small landfill of discarded candy wrappers and—no mistake—the dizzying aroma of chocolate and petrified coconut.

“Oh.” She said it in that breathless, astonished way she did at a gorgeous sunset or a gift too beautiful to believed. Plunging her hands into the wrappers, she came up with a humongous, giant candy bar that she would’ve recognized even without the helpful blue and white wrapper and big black letters: ALMOND JOY KING SIZE.

“Sometimes you feel like a nut,” she sang. Her grip kept slipping on the slick paper, and she finally ripped the wrapper with her teeth. A luscious perfume of sugar and butter and chocolate ballooned. The butter solids had separated, giving the milky chocolate a dusty, sickly cast. “And ask me if I care,” she said. Teasing out a bar, she stuck the candy into her mouth and bit. There was a hollow chuck, a jab of pain in her jaw. The candy was frozen solid and, literally, rock hard. All she managed was to scrape off a few chocolate shards.

Probably best. Closing her eyes, she luxuriated in sweet chocolate melting over her tongue. Might bring it up if I eat too—

A fizz-fizz, pop-pop boiled into her nose, and she knew, a second before he gave her shoulder a warning nudge: Darth was getting impatient.

“Sit on it and spin, Darth.” Yet when she reached for her knife, she did it slowly. No reason to give Darth an excuse. Placing the bar on the wood floor, she jockeyed the blade’s tip into the chocolate, right behind that first almond, then rocked the knife back and forth, applying steady pressure until the bar broke in a small shower of chocolate-covered coconut.

“Oooh, you don’t know what you are missing, Darth. On the other hand, more for me.” Wetting a finger, she dabbed up all the shards, then popped the finger into her mouth. “Oh, thank you, God,” she moaned. She was definitely taking all the wrappers for later. Give ’em a nice, long lick. Popping the bit of broken bar into her mouth, she tucked it into her cheek like a chipmunk. The rest she carefully wrapped and then slipped into an inside pocket, where her body warmth would thaw out the treat. She was still starving, but even that little bit of chocolate made her blood surge.

Yeah, well, don’t get giddy, honey. The candy might be the extent of her luck. She didn’t see any fishing gear, and her nose hadn’t sussed out anything else other than that strange campfire odor and that hospital smell. Where were they coming from? There didn’t seem to be much else here but the bureau and another bookshelf, made of sagging two-by-fours propped on cinderblocks, filled with hardcovers and paperbacks. A lot of novels, all stuff she’d either read or been meaning to but never got the chance: Tolkien, Asimov, Bradbury, Matheson. A broken-spined, scotch-taped copy of Childhood’s End. Lord of the Flies. Dune, a book she’d read while getting chemo, that mantra about fear as the mind-killer ringing true as she watched the drip-drip of yellow poison flow into her veins. A good collection of Stephen King, too: The Dead Zone. Desperation and The Stand. Duma Key. A Wrinkle in Time was falling apart, and the spine of Watership Down was so creased she could barely make out the title.

But there were also a ton of newer textbooks: Lupine Biology. Mammalian Speciation. The Ecology of Genetic Rescue. A Head of the Pack: The Wolves of Michigan’s Isle Royale. A larger clutch on population genetics and evolution. A third of one shelf was devoted only to history: Where the Buffalo Roam: Roosevelt and the Embattled Wilderness. When Darkness Reigned: Civilizational Collapse in the Middles Ages.

“Whoa,” she muttered. A voracious reader who also had been a history buff and hard-core mammologist was the last thing she’d expected. On the other hand, Peter was a problem-solver, a guy who’d obviously thought about allocation of resources. Someone who would’ve recognized that feeding the Changed garnered additional benefits, like a tidy buffer between Rule and the rest of the world. Fitting, somehow, that he’d read up on the Dark Ages.

She wouldn’t mind crashing here awhile. Childhood’s End looked awfully tempting. So did all that Stephen King. Rereading Wrinkle would be like picking up where you and your best friend left off. Chris would love this, too. A boy who’d dismantle and move an entire bookmobile’s collection would want a crack at these. If she got out of this, she ought to bring him here.

Don’t get ahead of yourself. She had to be practical. You can dream, but food comes first.

Searching each jacket, turning out pockets got her nothing but a crumpled handful of dollar bills liberated from a denim jacket, which she crammed into a parka pocket. Tinder was tinder. She was putting the jacket back when she paused. The garment was big, just as the boathouse had an older-boy feel to it. Its aroma was stark wintergreen and icy iron. While in Rule, she’d never paid that much attention, but now she inhaled deeply, wondering how scents this bold could hide so much.

So, was the house a gift? The chocolate of that Almond Joy chunk was gone, her tongue pebbly with coconut. Flipping the almond from the pouch of her cheek, she chewed, mulling this over. Her curiosity was stoked, which was somehow better than focusing only on that beaky gnaw in her stomach. Or was this just a really old family vacation house where Peter went when he needed to think things over? That felt right. Yesterday, when she swept the woods to set her snares, she’d also discovered an ancient, weathered tree house about thirty feet up a towering oak around back. Judging from the lake house’s unfinished porch, Peter had been busy. The house had also been recently winterized, with double-paned windows redolent with the reek of putty and caulk. She scented relatively fresh insulation behind the drywall downstairs, the lingering tang of paint. A woodstove, so new the house smelled of scorched cast-iron, gave off heat in spades. (A lucky thing, too. There were two fireplaces, one upstairs and one down, but both were very old, the hearths blackened and cracked. The sting of creosote on her tongue was so strong, she bet you could take a chisel to the coal-black residue caking that flue and still not chip it all away. A wonder no one had started a chimney fire and burned the house down.)