All Things Devour

two

The evening grew much colder than anyone had expected.

The team’s original plan had been to retreat to the village below once done for the day, but the fog Sonya had admired earlier in the afternoon had swelled and eddied, wrapping itself about the hills in such a way that it masked the road and the tricky cliffs framing the ascent. Fortunately, they’d prepared for the eventuality of not being able to find lodgings and so had a series of little tents to set up in the shadow of the fallen oak, provisions stored in the vehicle’s boot. The night came upon them fast, but the curious students turned on the lights and kept working.

Given the weather, they couldn’t start a fire and instead opted for eating their dinner of dehydrated granola bars under the dripping canopy. They soaked up what heat the industrial lights emitted and chatted about home. Dr. Rangel went to sit in the car and make phone calls again, or at least attempt to, leaving the younger people alone. Sonya thought it was probably macabre of them all to snack while sitting next to a table of disarticulated bones, but no one else said a thing about it.

“I much prefer the digs in Africa to this,” Callum complained as he munched on granola and gestured around them. “The heat is intense and there’s bloody spiders the size of my fist—but at least it doesn’t rain for days on end.”

Sahar snorted. “You all should be used to it, shouldn’t you? Being English and all.”

“Those are fighting words,” Kirstie replied with an exaggerated pout. “I’m not one of these Sassenachs.”

“Now hold on, we’re not sure where Sonya’s from.” Callum raised an expectant brow. Mud smudged his cheek, and he hadn’t cleaned it off despite being told about it several times. “Well? Traitor or not a traitor?”

Sonya shrugged, unfazed by the teasing. “Born and raised in London, I’m afraid. I like the rain.”

Kirstie and Sahar booed and flicked broken bits of peanut at Callum when he protested.

“Have you all done projects together before?” Sonya asked, Sahar and Callum nodding, though Kirstie shook her head.

“We haven’t done a project together before, but I’ve been around these enough.” She flashed a cheeky grin. “And you? How’s it over in anthropology?”

Sonya hummed in thought. “Interesting enough, I suppose. Though we don’t often venture out of the lab or archives. I’ve never been on an expedition before and fell into this one on accident, really, being the assistant on hand for Dr. Rangel when the assignment reached him.” She grinned. “No regrets, though! It’s not often I’ll have a chance to come out to the field.”

“Sorry your first dig is such a bore.”

“Come on, Callum,” Sahar sighed.

“I’m not joking,” he said. “I think it’s silly they called us here for this. Those tablets must be fake; I bet all the quid in my pocket on it.”

“You haven’t any quid in your pocket, cheapskate. You told us so at the airport!”

“Did I? I might have exaggerated a bit.”

Sahar—who had paid for his coffee and crisps that morning when he begged off—smacked him in the shoulder. Callum laughed and leaned back—but in doing so, bumped the table of bones. “Oops, shite.”

A piece rolled and tumbled, falling into the grass and disappearing down the incline.

“Good job, ya numpty,” Kirstie snorted.

“It was an accident,” Callum insisted, rubbing his smacked arm. “Help me look—.”

The four of them got to their feet and slouched back into the rain. The clouds had intensified to such a degree not a single star shone, and given the lack of city lights, the whole of the mountainside was doused in unrelieved darkness. Their enclosure seemed like a bright, blinding beacon, and even armed with torches as they were, the light barely pierced through the shadows. They illuminated the grass in muddled, static-filled patches, and even Sonya, who liked gloomy weather and was determined to have an enjoyable experience this trip, felt exasperated.

“Where in the hell did it go?” Kirstie complained with a groan.

“It couldn’t have rolled far.” Sahar paused in her search, propping a hand on her hip. “It’s a bone, not a ball.”

Even so, the group floundered about for nearly ten minutes, slipping on the muck and through puddles, until Sonya’s torch caught a glint of white under a low-growing elder bush. “I think I found—.”

Her words cut off in a sharp breath, and she almost dropped her torch. Sahar joined her.

“Looks like you found the missing skull,” she commented, bending to extract it from the weeds. The mandible—or jawbone—was still attached, and when Sahar held it in her hand, exposing it to the light, both women stared. They didn’t hear Callum and Kirstie join them, but they did hear his startled yelp.

“What kind of sick prank is that!”

Because it had to be a prank. What other reason would there be for the skull to have literal fangs ?

“Do you think the locals are having us on?” Kirstie asked as she tapped a finger against the long cuspid tooth. “Och, it feels real! Have a look at that!”

Skin prickling with unease, Sonya gently eased open the mandible and probed her fingers along the jaw while Sahar held onto the whole skull. It did feel real—cool and solid, with a natural yellow shade tinting the top. She tried to feel for a rough seam that would come from settling in a plastic mold, but she found nothing.

The skull itself feels as authentic as the other bones , Sonya thought, her brow furrowed. And we know those are real. We’ve authenticated them. What are the chances those bones are real while this one is fake?

“This is ridiculous. It’s not real,” Callum asserted. “It looks like something from a Halloween shop.”

Real or not, Sahar took the skull back to the enclosure, where it looked all the weirder and ghastlier in the harsh electric light. The cuspids seemed near an inch in length and naturally set against the lower jaw, the teeth formed around its intrusion. Sonya shivered.

“We need Dr. Rangel,” Sahar decided, and because Sonya thought that a good idea, she went with her while Callum and Kirstie stayed under the canopy. They tromped through the downpour, ignoring their soaked clothes and the mess it made of their hair as they went to the silent vehicle.

Sahar rapped her knuckles on the driver’s window.

“Dr. Rangel?”

They pressed their noses to the glass and cupped their hands around their faces, squinting against the dark. No one was inside.

“He’s not there,” Sahar said. “And he left the keys on the seat. Damn him.”

Sure enough, when Sonya tried the door, it wouldn’t come open. “Do you think he needed the loo?” she asked, unable to ignore the nervous rise in her voice. They were far from home in the grips of a storm with odd things popping up around them. Sonya would very much like to find someone who could give answers. “He couldn’t have gone far in this, could he?”

“Not if he doesn’t want to break his neck on the rocks,” Sahar grumbled, her torchlight roving back toward the enclosure, over the glistening stones, disappearing toward the wooded tor. “Where in the world is he?”

They searched the immediate area around the car and, finding nothing, met again by the driver’s door. “I’ll look over here—.” Sahar vaguely threw her torchlight toward the crevasse and the oak tree. “While you check the woods there. Try not to get lost, all right?”

“No promises?” Sonya tried to joke, but her humor came out strained.

She caught Sahar’s aggrieved eye roll before she turned away, and Sonya followed her original hunch toward the trees. Her breath came out in white puffs as the temperature cooled, and she longed for a nice dry robe and a fire, maybe a hot drink with something extra added in for a nightcap.

“Dr. Rangel?” she called, stumbling over a fallen branch. “Ouch. Blasted— Dr. Rangel ? Professor? Are you there?”

Her voice echoed back at her like the chattering of crows, all clipped syllables and swallowed vowels. Frustrated, Sonya sucked in air and shouted, “Are you there, Dr. Rangel?!”

Again, no voice returned aside from her own. Sonya was beginning to worry he might be injured; the professor had the build of a sedentary scholar with a penchant for biscuits and sugary tea. She could easily imagine him taking a wrong step somewhere and getting stuck—but where ? Where would he be going in this downpour? What if he was hurt? How on earth would they get him help?

From the corner of her eye, she thought she spotted movement—a shadow rippling oddly against the others—and she pointed her torch at it. The rain crackled like blaring static, and the generator grinded beyond it, adding an additional layer of noise. Sonya was deaf to its roar until it suddenly went quiet, and the lights at her back sputtered out. The shadow disappeared.

Sonya pivoted on her heels in the pitch blackness—and cursed at a branch thwacking her arm.

“Callum? Kirstie?” she called. “Is the generator out of petrol?”

No answer came, and Sonya was convinced everyone on the mountain must be suffering from spontaneous hearing loss. She couldn’t see a thing even with the torch, and she was seized with the sudden urge to chuck the worthless thing into the undergrowth—but she kept it in hand and sighed. Sonya marched back toward the enclosure and tripped once, landing hard on one knee, hissing at the resulting sting. Water sloshed over the top of her boots, and she huffed, hands too filthy to peel her wet hair from her face, the rain forming new puddles in the bunched collar of her windbreaker.

I wished for a bit of adventure and got far more than I bargained for , she thought to herself, staggering upright. I could have been in my flat right now! Or in the library. As bad as the dust is for my allergies, at least I don’t leave there with rain in my knickers.

Sonya tripped again, falling on her wounded knee. She exclaimed, “I cannot see a ruddy thing! Can someone please get the lights?”

There was no answer.

When Sonya again managed to gain her feet, she moved deliberately, walking with care until she reached the edge of the enclosure and finally stepped out of the deluge. Her torch’s beam bounced around the space and found no sign of Callum or Kirstie, only broken granola bars and rumpled wrappers. She called their names as she searched—and red gleamed in the slanted light, stealing Sonya’s breath.

A runny streak of crimson was smeared across the trampled grass. More of it dripped from the table—the table now empty of bones. The table now bore one bloody, smeared handprint.

Sonya’s heart thrummed in her chest, and with barely a thought, she ran for the crevasse, shouting for Sahar. In hindsight, it might not have been the best choice to go sprinting toward an open chasm in full darkness, but Sonya didn’t think of that at the moment. Instead, she called for Sahar again as loud as she could, her voice high and thready with fear—when a weight slammed into her side.

Sonya couldn’t manage the air to scream as whatever it was pressed hard against her ribs and crushed her lungs. At first, she thought it was a wild animal—a wolf, no matter Dr. Rangel’s aspersions against them possibly existing in the highlands—but then an arm, wiry and strong, curled about her front and grasped her by the chin, jerking her head back. Sonya struggled, kicking and thrashing, her hands coming up to claw at a thick, masculine wrist, and she finally did scream when a pain like no other drove itself into her neck.

It hurt. It hurt so terribly, Sonya would have wailed if she could’ve at the fiery sensation searing like a knife into her neck and throat and chest. Nails bit into the skin of her face, bony fingers flexing—and as suddenly as it had begun, it ended, and Sonya was thrown to the ground.

She lay in the mud, gasping, and her hand scrambled at her neck. She couldn’t see it, but she could feel the warm, wet pulse of blood gushing under her fingertips. The burning sensation continued, seeming to spread through Sonya’s veins and ache behind her eyes. Something bit me , she realized, struck dumb by the notion. Something—someone—.

A man stood over her like an obelisk, dressed in a long black cloak the rain slid off, the edge of his face and the glint of his cloak’s fastenings illuminated by the torch still clasped in Sonya’s shaking hand. The gold curls of his hair were plastered to his head, dripping with water. He looked at her once with bored, formless pity, like a person who’d seen a bird with a broken wing on the pavement and kept walking without further thought. The man glanced away and stepped over Sonya, ignoring her feeble efforts to stop him.

In his gloved hand, he held the fanged skull.

“The others?” he asked—and Sonya saw more people there, more shrouded figures looming out of the murk, their silhouettes somehow darker than the miserable night around them.

Who are they? Where did they come from? Who—?

“Finished,” answered a taller man in an accent Sonya didn’t recognize in her panicked state.

“Good,” said the first. “Order your men to clear the site and repair the breach in the ward before first light. I’ll make certain the humans disappear without comment.”

“And the locals, sire? Won’t they ask questions?”

“They’re superstitious enough to keep their mouths shut.”

Another shouted from a distance. “Should we alert the Albians?”

And the first answered with a laconic drawl, “Why bother?” as he raised the skull toward his eye level. “Poor, poor Radu. They should have left you in the dirt to shrivel up into dust.”

Sonya, at this point, had managed to rise to her knees, and she fully intended to run as fast as she could from these strangers to find help. Blood pushed against the fingers she had pressed to her neck—and Sonya swallowed her panting, fearful breaths, terrified she was going to find her end on this rural hillside among the gray stones and windswept grass. She didn’t want to die. She needed to get help.

Sonya took one step—and the ground crumbled beneath her boot, the crevasse opening wide, the fissures rising and rippling like a swelling sea. The earth swallowed Sonya whole, and she fell into the dark.