Winter Lost

I had changed into a coyote before I could crawl. It was as basic to me as breathing. I couldn’t hold my breath or twitch a finger, but when I tried to shift, the familiar zip of magic shot through me.

The ghost jerked away from me with a hoarse cry that sounded more like a flutter of dry bones than any sound a human might make. I squirmed out of Adam’s hold and hit the floor, putting more distance between me and the ghost, which was flailing soundlessly on the floor as if the brief contact with my coyote self had been damaging. The dead usually had no physical presence, but a brass lamp on a table about ten feet from where the ghost held his solo struggle fell to the ground with a loud clatter.

Adam didn’t move.

That meant he was held as I had been. Helpless.

The thing writhing on the ground didn’t look dangerous anymore, but I put myself between Adam and the ghost anyway.

Now that he wasn’t touching me, I could get a good look at him. He was all bones and rags, a gray and off-white mass on the Persian carpet, smaller than he’d felt when he’d been feeding, barely recognizable as human.

The damage he’d suffered trying to feed from a coyote lessened after maybe thirty seconds. For a moment he lay motionless, then he rolled to hands and knees and looked at me.

I felt a buzz of my magic and I saw him, not the ghost but the man he’d been before he’d become this monster.

I’d expected him to be Native because the land we were on had been occupied by Indigenous people, by my people, for a long time before the white settlers had come. But now, even in the dark room, I could tell that his hair had been several shades lighter than mine was. His features were Anglo, with a narrow chin and a prominent nose that had been broken at some point. His body was so thin that although he was clothed in the flesh he’d worn in life, I could see both the radius and ulna bones between his wrist and elbow.

The Cabinet Mountain Range was a dangerous and difficult area to try to survive in. There was a reason that it had still been largely uninhabited when it was made a protected wilderness in the middle of the twentieth century. Starvation was only one of the weapons the great mountains had used to kill interlopers.

I blinked, and the man the ghost had been vanished, with only the monster left behind. And then it, too, disappeared, because ghosts don’t need to move like real people.

I knew what that thing wanted. I was moving before the ghost reappeared on top of Adam. One hand gripped my mate’s bare shoulder, and the other caressed his cheek as the ghost kissed Adam’s lips.

I vaulted onto the bed and opened my jaws to grab the back of the ghost’s neck and wrest him away—my instincts working before my brain reminded me that he was probably not something that tooth and claw could affect. My teeth sank into something that was not flesh. But because ghosts are not limited to moving like normal creatures, something caught me under my ribs. My teeth couldn’t hold on as the blow propelled me across the room until I hit the chest of drawers with enough force to rock it back on the wall with a crack.

I rolled to my feet and bolted back to Adam.

The second time the ghost threw me, I hit the wall next to the bathroom.

I am curious why you are running around unprotected, like an invitation to any spirit-predator you happen by, the spider said.

I ignored her. Magic spiders talking in my head were something for future me to worry about. Right now, I had to save Adam. But her words broke the mindless frenzy that would have had me throwing myself at the ghost now feeding from Adam in earnest.

My previous actions hadn’t worked. I had to try something different.

Panting, more from terror than exertion, I stared at the thing killing my husband in front of my nose—and a flash of silver caught my eye as the spider descended down a line of tinsel-thick spider silk to land on the back of the ghost’s neck, just where I’d been attempting to seize it.

In return for answers, I will give you a gift, the spider told me.

I couldn’t tell what she did, but the ghost fell away from Adam, curled up into a fetal ball, then melted into a pile of stinking, unidentifiable goo.

Adam exploded out of the bed. He stood naked, breathing hard, his wary attention on the bed. I couldn’t tell if he was staring at what was left of the ghost or at the silver spider picking her way out of the wet mass and into the folds of the bedclothes.

Pretty man, said the spider with approval as she hid herself in the white chenille. As soon as I could no longer see her, her presence was gone from my head.

I shifted back into my human shape and hurled myself at Adam. I had almost had to watch while he was eaten by a ghost.