I sat up cautiously, expecting to find I was suffering from a lingering nightmare, but the camp was still. Too still. The two men who were supposed to stand third watch had fallen asleep. In the distance, running away, I saw that same tattered form, clad in rags. The stink was less than I expected from Freaks, just a trace of rot, but the fact that a Freak had slipped like a shadow into our camp? That wasn’t what concerned me most.
No, big trouble came in the form of the flaming brand the creature carried.
“Wake up!” I shouted, kicking the guard who should have been our sentry.
He jolted away with a curse, and he came up swinging, but he was doltish and clumsy. I dodged.
“Take a look out there. What do you see?” I demanded.
He squinted into the distance. “Naught but a will o’ the wisp, you stupid—” Fade’s hand clamped on his throat, silencing him, and he didn’t let go until the other man’s face went purple. I tried to get him to stand down, but he had no tolerance for men messing with me or calling me names.
Seeing the situation going from bad to worse, I roused Longshot. He came awake fully alert and scanned the terrain behind me. “What’s wrong?”
I summarized what had happened and he frowned at me. “You expect me to believe a single Freak sneaked up on us … and stole fire?”
His skepticism didn’t insult me. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t credit the story either. With one hand, I indicated the guard I’d woken. “He saw the light receding in the distance, going away into the trees. Ask him.”
The man hunched his shoulders. Belatedly, I realized it was the same one who had made the joke about what else I was good for, besides cooking. He hadn’t done himself any favors by failing his duties on watch.
“It was just a will o’ the wisp.”
“Would you swear to that?” Longshot asked, shoving upright.
There was a long silence. “No.”
“You’re digging the latrine in the morning, Miles, you and your partner. That thing—if it was a Freak—could have cut all our throats as we slept.”
It could have. It hadn’t. Though it was still the middle of the night, I paced, worry eating me from the inside out. Who the devil knew what they’d do with that lit branch? Maybe it would go out. Maybe nothing bad would happen.
How I wished I believed that.
As their attacks had shown, they grew more dangerous all the time. Hunger no longer predicted their movements. These Freaks had enough to eat with all the game in the woods. Big game, like deer and moose, offered plenty of raw meat. I’d sampled both at Momma Oaks’s table. For them, this was no longer about food.
It was something else. Something scarier.
Recon
For the next week—as we built fortifications and put up tents—the others treated me with a combination of anger and distrust. The bulk of the ill feeling came from Gary Miles, who felt I’d gotten him in trouble over nothing. Half the squad agreed with him, as we’d seen nothing the following nights. They thought I was a hysterical female who’d had a bad dream due to sleeping outdoors. I couldn’t swear to what I’d witnessed, of course, but however unlikely, my version of events was more probable than what Miles claimed—that we’d seen some magical ball of light, believed to be spirits who came out at night to lure people to their doom.
More alarming, the Freaks had been ominously silent since that sighting. I turned the event over and over in my head, wondering if I’d gotten it wrong. During the daylight, it seemed so implausible. Freaks didn’t sneak, but then, until recently, they hadn’t posted warnings, and they hadn’t used camouflage either. Their cunning made their behavior more difficult to predict—and it made them harder to fight.
No, I was right. It happened. The only question came in terms of their intentions … what they would do with the flame they’d stolen.
“This is duller than I expected,” Stalker said, dropping down beside me, where I sat sharpening my blades. I was glad he seemed to have put the awkward personal stuff behind him. I wanted to be his friend.
“It’s waiting,” I answered. “Which is, by definition, boring.”
“We should go looking for them. Root them out.”
Stalker had suggested it before, and Longshot always rejected the notion. He’d say, “We have orders to guard these fields, and by the devil, that’s what we’ll do. I don’t care if that forest has a Mutie in every tree. We’ll leave them alone as long as they return the courtesy.”
The men were getting antsy, driven by Stalker’s impatience. There was only so much you could do while walking around patches of ground without losing your mind. The other guards didn’t necessarily want to go after the Freaks, but they were tired of doing nothing. Longshot said we were lucky we hadn’t been annihilated as we built the watchtower. In my opinion, that would’ve been too easy. The Freaks had something worse in mind, something to cripple us and destroy our will to keep watch over these fields. I couldn’t imagine what it might be.
At least Longshot kept his promise and had Stalker and Fade teaching hand-to-hand. Frank showed potential; he had good reflexes and reach. But most men were old enough to resent being taught by boys half their age. That was pure pride, a mistake in our circumstances. They should grasp any advantage for the coming fight.
Stalker drew out his weapons and set to with the whetstone, looking pensive. “If Longshot can’t officially send us, we should see for ourselves.”
“Better to ask forgiveness than permission?” It was the only saying I recalled from my history lessons, but I couldn’t recall who said it or why. I had an idea it was a famous female warrior, though, which made me like the quote more.
“Something like that. You in?”
I shouldn’t. But if we hadn’t been ordered not to go, then it wasn’t exactly like insubordination, a charge Silk loved to harp on time and again. More information to arm ourselves sounded like a good idea. On the other hand, when we were still down below, Fade and I had gone to Nassau strictly for recon purposes, and that information hadn’t helped us at all. If the situations paralleled, we’d be driven out of the summer patrol and maybe from Salvation entirely. Though I didn’t believe Longshot was that sort of elder, I couldn’t be certain.
“Let’s ask Fade.”