Because you can’t eat the jewelry, she thought, a little crazily. The ruby-red frames of a pair of sunglasses stared up from the snow, the right lens broken into a starburst. You can’t eat glasses.
This wasn’t just a clearing.
It was a feeding ground.
And maybe one of several, because now her numbed brain registered more color in the trees to her left, and then farther on to her right again. Each area was marked by more wolf carcasses as well.
Her gaze crawled from the clearing back to the trail. Ahead, she saw a neat pyramid, a crude trailmarker, maybe—the kind normally made of stones.
Only these were not stones.
They were heads.
No.
Some were leathery and very old, the eyes and noses and ears gone, and the tongues. Others were fresher, with nerves worming from their sockets and half-eaten lips clotted with frozen gore.
No.
A few weren’t old at all—were nearly fresh, with blue tongues and noses only slightly gnawed and eyelids that dropped sleepily. But no maggots, no flies—it was too cold; hadn’t she just learned that?
She counted, her gaze slowly ticking from one ruined face to the next. The pyramid was twelve heads long, seven deep at the base, and stood maybe four feet hi—
No.
Her breath died in her chest. She went completely and utterly still.
No.
She couldn’t tear her eyes away.
No, please, it can’t be him.
It took all her will to blink, and then blink again—as if her mind was a camera and she could somehow unsnap that picture so the image she’d just captured would be erased.
But no. Nothing changed.
Harlan was there: second row down, three heads from the left. She could never forget that face, or those teeth.
Her stomach seized. A flood of incredibly vile, intensely bitter liquid rushed from her mouth to spatter and steam in the snow. Her knees unhinged, and then she was sagging, the rifle sinking into the snow as the vomit roared from her mouth. She threw up until her stomach was empty, and then she hung there, groveling in ruined snow, gasping, her nose full of the stink of her own vomit—
And then a fresh wave rolled over her, a stench of something sick and dead that had sweltered and decayed beneath a hot summer sun.
A bloom of black horror squeezed her lungs and choked off her breath, and she finally understood why Jess had talked about Isaac—and sacrifice.
Maybe they had been watching. Maybe they had even enjoyed what they saw. But more likely, they came here out of habit, hunters following the likely path of good game—knowing where to find their next meal.
There were five: three boys, two girls. They wore parkas and boots and gloves. One boy and one girl wore skins, the animal fur pulled down so their eyes peered from a wolf’s face.
And they all had weapons. One girl and two of the boys, including Wolf Boy, had rifles. The third boy, maybe a middle-schooler once, had a Beretta, which would be much easier for a young boy with small hands.
The only one without a gun was Wolf Girl, who held a corn knife instead. The blade—very long and very sharp—was stained with rust spiders of dried blood.
And there was one more thing, one last detail that made these kids so very different.
These Changed weren’t clean, but they weren’t filthy either.
They looked, in fact, very well fed.
The truth hit her like a hammer.
Rule wasn’t fighting them.
Rule was feeding them.