Page 69 of Outside the Veil
“Stirring. Considering. It feels you coming.” Finn jumped a fallen pine without breaking stride. “I think it’s curious.”
“So we’re in time? It hasn’t killed again?”
“Not yet. It’s famished. Don’t you feel it?”
“I don’t…”As if the thought had conjured it, the wendigo’s chill chasm of hunger reached out for him. “God…Finn… It feels like it wants to swallow the world whole.”
“If it could find a way, it most likely would.” Finn took a sharp turn and thundered uphill, out of the trees, hooves striking sparks on the rocky ground. “It comes, my hero. You must be ready, but you do not stand alone.”
“I know, mi vida.Neither do you.”Despite the distance from his body, he still found his lightning when he reached for it. Power flooded through him, dangerous, intoxicating.
Underneath him Finn surged forward, muscles bunching and flexing as his body took on yet more mass, sleek, black scales growing up to cover horsehair. The beat of huge wings replaced the drum of hooves. Challenge roared from Dragon-Finn’s throat.
The wendigo’s answering howl echoed off the hillsides.
“Shaman.” Its colder than the void thought knifed into his. “Banish your spirit guide and come to me. Send it away or I will take another.”
“I won’t let—”
With hurricane force, the wendigo manifested in an icy blast, both physical and psychic. Its size and shape remained elusive, though a shimmer on the wind showed where it passed. Finn struggled to keep aloft, cursing as he flung up a barrier to shield Diego.
“No,querido, don’t let it distract you.”Diego nudged the barrier back down. “Concentrate on attacking. I won’t lose you.”
“Best not, bucko,” Finn growled. “And take your own advice.”
A two-story wall of water rose from the nearby stream and slammed into the wendigo’s shimmer. It only wavered for a moment before it renewed its onslaught.
“Your spirit guide is nothing, Shaman. Powerless. Come to me. Feel true power.”
The fierce winds tumbled Finn from the sky. He landed awkwardly on the rocks, one wing pinned beneath him. “Blasted, cursed, evil bag of wind,” he muttered as he struggled to rise. “Diego, do you have it? I could use some help. Just a mite.”
“Almost, almost… Are you all right?”He tried his best to concentrate on gathering the lightning, but Finn’s pain was terrible. The wing or the leg or both had most likely snapped.
“Destroy that wretched thing and I will be.”
The ball of lightning gathered on his palm and grew from an orange lick of flame to blue to a white-hot maelstrom of crackling plasma. He felt as much as saw the wendigo bearing down on Finn, and he hurled his lightning into the center of the tempest. The winds shrieked, the monster’s progress halted.
Then, to Diego’s horror, it turned and fled, not into the wilderness but toward town.
“Never fear, my hero. It shan’t get far.” Finn rid himself of the broken wing and reformed as a Rottweiler-sized black falcon. He arrowed through the gathering dusk, gaining swiftly on the wendigo, whose passage wavered and meandered as if it were dizzy.
The lights of a house shone through the trees. A small child played in the patch of grass by the back door.
“No! Finn, get in front of it!”
With a tremendous burst of speed, Finn swooped in to cut the wendigo off from the house. It shrieked its frustration and took physical form, perhaps hoping to reach the child on the ground. On all fours, it loped toward the toddler, who sat frozen and helpless in horror.
“Don’t panic, don’t panic…”Grim determination overrode terror. Diego pulled the lightning to him in a vertiginous rush, only half-aware, he formed a spear instead of a ball. “Wendigo! Leave the child alone!”
The cadaverous, mottled face lifted to him, mouth stretched in a manic leer. He hurled his spear directly at its heart. The lightning struck true, the spear shattered against its heart of ice, and the wendigo turned to stagger back into the trees.
Now the toddler recalled how to move and dashed into the house, screaming, “Mommy, Mommy, there’s a monster outside and an angel fighting him!”
Diego heard the mother reply in a distracted fashion as she closed the door, “That’s nice, hon.”
Once again Finn shifted, this time to a black bear to match the speed of the wendigo through the forest. “Damn you, coward! Turn and fight!” he roared, as they crashed through a bramble-heavy thicket.
The wendigo stumbled on, wounded, unable to return to its most powerful, incorporeal form. Its thoughts had gone silent though, so Diego did not discount the possibility of a ruse to draw Finn into a trap. The thicket became so dense they could no longer see their quarry, though the snapping, rustling sounds asserted he still ran ahead.
