Darkheart

The Present: Tooth & Claw

It was happening again . . . it was happening . . . again! And there was nothing he could do to stop it, had in fact welcomed it by returning. He'd known this was where it would all lead, and yet he'd come home anyway. He'd had to, hadn't he? It'd been Kai. She'd made him come. He'd been a task, something they'd assigned her--Get Jeremiah home; he's wavering--and he knew it, now. He knew that all of his life had been nothing more than a preparation for what was to come, that he'd never had any choice in the matter; he'd been dead pretty much from the moment he'd been born, and everything prior to the here and now was like a horrible movie with him as its credulous protagonist, signifying nothing.

Where had that notion come from? Something he'd read, long ago, probably in high school. Signifying nothing . . . it was the truth, anyway.

Tooth and claw--there was another one from his old English classes. Why were they coming to him, now? He hadn't been much of a reader after his school years, but he tended to remember certain things that disturbed him in some manner. It'd been a poem, where that line was from. Red in tooth and claw. He couldn't recall anything else about the poem except that one line, which he thought was about nature, its brutality and callousness. Nature didn't care about anyone or anything, that was the idea. It just was, and what it was had no regard whatsoever for the humans who assumed they held importance as they wandered through it.

Well, maybe Jeremiah was making that part up; he didn't remember the poem, really, only the image it conjured. His hand went to his neck, where Kai had bitten him. It didn't hurt, really, not physically, anyway. The shame, the humiliation . . . those would linger. The resorters, whoever they really were, whatever they did, they used their teeth and claws. But even they weren't as terrible as what they worked for. Worked for? Was that the right phrase? Jeremiah didn't know. He didn't understand the relationship between the resorters' ways and the real teeth and claws. It'd never quite been explained, not like someone had sat the four teens down after they'd happened to witness one of their demonic rituals and given them a little lesson.

No--not demonic. That certainly wasn't the right word for their practices. Demonic implied demons, and there were no demons involved. That was the stuff of myth and folklore. He wished it were a demon they dealt with. In all the stories, even demons made bargains. There were no bargains to be made, here, except maybe amongst themselves. It was the only thing they had going for them--to be open with one another; he'd thought they might try, being together again. But apparently even that was going to be too much to ask.

He knew Cris had seen something she'd been unwilling to discuss, and while he didn't know what it was, he did know what it wasn't. It wasn't that devil girl because he'd been able to see her, too. It wasn't any of those masked monstrosities. She had something else going on, and what that was, only she could say. But she'd clammed up the minute Kevin had taken hold of her, angering them all. It was much more than those children who haunted her, more than the resorters and their nefarious cultish ways--something had gone on with Cris since the very beginning of it all, and the fact that she'd kept things to herself then had been one of the determining factors in their falling out; it was obviously going to be problematic now, as well, the only difference being that there was no friendship worth trying to preserve, at this point.

He'd not spoken to her at all when she'd driven him home from the diner. It hadn't mattered, though, because she hadn't said anything to him, either. They'd both lost themselves in thought. And when she'd dropped him at his house, rather than head inside, he'd gone around the back. The rain had let up momentarily, and the world seemed suspended in a dark twinkling mist.

Nothing but forest was behind his family's cabin, and it stretched on and on until the land dropped off into the lake. When he and his sisters had been children, they'd often played amongst the trees, but after his father's accident, after Caroline's diagnosis, Jeremiah had lost interest not in the forest itself but in venturing into it. He'd spent much time looking through and over the trees, whether from his bedroom windows or from the back deck, wondering at the placidity and what moved within it.