Robert cleared the roof and jumped down, right over the edge. I followed and nearly slid off the icy shingles. A fire escape, ten feet below.
I jumped down, landed with a thud, and slid down the fire escape, trying not to trip over my own clumsy feet. Wind whistled around me and then we were on the ground and next to Robert, who held Cuddles’s reins.
I swung into the saddle and gave her a squeeze. We had to hurry.
Cuddles didn’t move.
“Come on!” I kicked her sides. “Now isn’t the time to be an ass!”
Cuddles planted herself. Not now, you stupid donkey.
Ascanio snarled and smacked her butt. Cuddles shot into a gallop, thudding down the street.
8
THE WARREN FLEW by. We made another right and burst onto Garbage Road. Trash and refuse lay piled in huge heaps against the walls of abandoned buildings, forming a twenty-foot-deep canyon of garbage. If we made it through, we’d reach White Street.
Cuddles began to slow. I let her drop to a canter. A mile of gallop over rough terrain was all I could ask, even with Hugh behind us. It was that or, in another mile, she’d quit on me.
Small scavenger beasts with long tails scampered back and forth on the hills of trash, their eyes pinpoints of yellow against the darkness. The shapeshifters ran on both sides of me, leaping over hazards on the garbage slopes. Garbage Road had come about because of the Phantom River. It flowed through the Warren, invisible to the eye, picked up trash and loose refuse, and dragged it here, to Garbage Road. The Phantom River terminated when it reached White Street, which had its own brand of screwed-up magic. People said that the river’s “waters” pooled here, held back by White Street like a dam, before they deposited all of its stolen treasures and disappeared.
The road widened and we emerged into what must’ve been a roundabout at some point. Now with the side streets choked by debris, it was just a trash bottleneck: one way in, one way out.
Ahead Derek stumbled.
I pulled on the reins, trying to get Cuddles to stop.
Derek tried to keep running, but he stumbled again and rolled down the garbage slope right under the donkey. Cuddles’s hoof missed his head by a hair. She finally stopped, and I jumped to the ground.
Derek rolled up clumsily to all fours and vomited a torrent of gray on the ground. A putrid sour reek hit me. It smelled like someone had sliced open a cow carcass that had been baking in the sun for days. I gagged and knelt by him. The vomit was filled with dark gray slime, streaked with black and red.
Ascanio and Robert dropped down next to me. Desandra landed next to us, shivered, and vomited to the side, the same torrent of slime and blood. Something was horribly wrong with them.
“I’m okay.” Derek coughed.
“Are you still bleeding?”
He didn’t answer.
I grabbed his hand. Blisters bulged on his skin where the thorns had punctured it. The wounds still wept gray blood. The toxins from Nick’s magic were eating them from the inside out.
Desandra turned to me. Open gashes weeping gray blood marked her furry arms.
Behind us something screeched. The long ululating cry rose above the rooftops and hung somewhere between the sky and the city, braided from hunger, predatory glee, and mourning, as if the thing that made it knew exactly how horrible it was. Only a human being could be so self-aware. It chilled every bone in my body.
Ascanio whipped around. “What the hell is that?”
That was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
“Can you walk?” Robert asked.
Derek staggered up and swayed on his feet.
I grabbed Cuddles’s reins and walked her over. “On the donkey.”
“I can walk.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Robert snapped.
“Get on the donkey. We don’t have the time for this shit.” I glared at Desandra. “You, too.”
Desandra vomited again. The stench hit me. My stomach tried its hardest to empty itself. I choked down the bile. “Obey me, damn it. Now!”
Desandra staggered to Cuddles and climbed into the saddle. Robert picked Derek up as if the seven-foot werewolf in warrior form weighed nothing and lifted him into the saddle like he was a child. Cuddles flicked her ears, unperturbed by two werewolves on her back.
Behind us, the howl rose again: heart-wrenching, hungry, filled with despair. Closer this time.
The trash on both sides of us moved. Dozens of small creatures dashed past us, their glowing eyes wide. Oh crap.
Cuddles brayed and dashed up the street, carrying the two werewolves with her. Robert, Ascanio, and I chased her. Pain stabbed my side with each step, as if my cracked ribs had turned into spikes and pierced my insides. I clenched my teeth. Fuck it. I’d beaten a lot of pain before; I would beat this one, too.
Behind us, a forlorn cry shook the night. I turned to look over my shoulder.
A colossal creature moved through the trash canyon. It towered even with the garbage walls: giant, white, with fringes of coarse pale hair along the back of its enormous arms. Its pelvis sat low to the ground, its arms disproportionately long and armed with long, garden-shears-sized claws. Its bones pushed against its skin, its stomach so sunken in that if I had seen it in the wild, I’d think it was sick and starving. Its head was round and pale, sitting on a short neck. Its face might have had a distinct bone structure at some point, but all of its bones seemed to have melted into the skull to make room for its wide mouth. Its lips were missing and the rows of long sharp teeth in its mouth jutted, exposed. Its nose was little more than a bump with two holes, but its eyes, three inches wide and sunken into their orbits, looked completely human.
The moon broke through the clouds, its light illuminating the abomination. The creature’s white flesh glowed, translucent, and within it I saw its pale lungs and pink stomach, and, in the middle of this mess, cradled in the cage of its ribs, a darker, humanlike shape, as if the beast had swallowed a person whole and the corpse became its heart.
Goose pimples ran up my arms. I had seen one before in photographs but never in real life.
Ascanio shivered and shifted shape, so fast he was a blur.
“A wendigo,” Robert whispered next to me.
“Run!” I sprinted. “Ruuuun!”
We charged down the street. My cracked ribs set my side on fire. Speed was our best chance. There was no place to hide on Garbage Road. We didn’t have the numbers or the means to kill it, and every second we spent fighting would cost us time we didn’t have.
Legends said that wendigos haunted the winters on the Atlantic seaboard in the States and Canada, feeding on the Algonquian tribes. According to the Native American myths, those who reverted to cannibalism eventually transformed into a wendigo, doomed to a never-ending hunger for human flesh. I had never fought one, but I’d talked to a man who had. The wendigo couldn’t be reasoned with. Their hunger overrode all else. They would devour their prey even as they themselves were being cut apart, and the only way to kill one was to dismember it and burn the pieces. If you didn’t, it would regenerate in minutes, knitted together by magic.