Tara scowled out the window at the snow. Flakes the size of nickels sifted down from a lead-colored sky. A gust of wind caused cascades of white to tumble from the sagging tree branches. It was the kind of snow that accumulated quickly and to a significant depth.
Her breath coated the inside of the window with lacy filigrees of frost. It was difficult to see much, but squinting through an ice-covered window was better than lying in bed. At least there was some light streaming in, and if she was close to the glass, the towering piles of crap in the room felt less claustrophobic.
All was still outside except for the steadily falling snow, then an animal the approximate size of a small mountain lion disturbed a clump of sagging bushes and caused a miniature avalanche. For a minute, she was excited by a welcome diversion from the boredom. Lions were shy, and she had only seen one twice before.
Her lips lifted, baring fangs when she realized it was no natural animal. Her fists clenched as instincts not her own pushed her to confront the monster interloping on her territory immediately. Since the transformation, she’d become both alarmingly aggressive when threatened and nearly as secretive as the lions when trying to avoid detection.
According to everything she had ever been taught, a hellbeast was mindlessly aggressive to all who might encounter it. What was one doing here?
Limping, and sniffing every object it passed, the hellbeast shambled through the snow. When it reached the garage door, it rose up on long hind legs and scrabbled at the metal. There were always pack rats in the garage, as Tara’s rodent-banishing warding did not extend that far, and she presumed it smelled them.
The garage door rattled and banged as it tried to enter, causing her to hiss through her teeth. Sound carried out in the country, though perhaps not as well during a blizzard when the falling snow dampened everything. Still, it was a real concern.
People up here were nosy and looked after their neighbors. Early on, just a few weeks after Todd had cursed her, she’d tried to fix a boarded-up downstairs window when a storm dislodged the plywood. The hammering had caused the closest neighbors, who lived just under a quarter mile away, to investigate.
She presumed they knew the Riley place was supposed to be unoccupied and had a wealth of hoarded stuff that might attract burglars or curious kids — plus, from their perspective, Todd had ‘gone missing.’ They’d called his name out as they arrived in hopes that he’d returned.
Upon discovering the loose board and her quickly abandoned tools on the ground, the neighbors had called the cops to report a suspected break-in. She'd heard the entire conversation while hiding in a dense thicket of elbow-high manzanita across the creek; grimalkin ears were far keener than human. Then, the neighbors continued to patrol the property several times a day for at least a week. They still drove through the yard randomly. She’d learned to listen carefully for their Jeep before stepping out into the open, and she left absolutely nothing visibly disturbed. Even her mere footprints had caused them to stop and investigate a few times, though fortunately, they seemed to believe they belonged to a very large mountain lion.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Tara sighed. Despite their nosiness, the Herrelsens were a nice retired couple who raised emus and alpacas, and the hellbeast would be drawn to their farm. She needed to take care of it before they, or someone else, got hurt. She just didn’t want to go out in foul weather and risk discovery.
“Damnit,” she said, and her voice came out as a rumbling bass that made her cringe. She wasn’t supposed to sound like James Earl Jones!
The hellbeast gave up on rat for dinner and loped off through the snow in the direction of the Herrelsen’s goat barn.
“Fuck.” She pushed the window up, padded across the roof, and dropped barefoot to the ground — right into a drift that reached above her knees. “Fuuuck.”
Profanity did not help the misery of wading through snow without shoes. Sometimes, in the coldest of weather, she wrapped her enormous feet in rags, but that didn’t do much in the snow. The fabric just ended up soaking wet. At least this body didn’t seem prone to frostbite.
She headed quickly for the garage. The faster she got this over with, the better.
According to Granny, the recommended method to deal with a hellbeast was to incinerate it with a leybolt. Tara had never been able to summon more than a candle-flame-sized fireball, and that took all her reserves of power and left her with a headache for days, so the next best option was to hack it to pieces. Regrettably, she was fresh out of medieval weaponry suited for monster slaying; that seemed to be one of the few things that Mrs. Riley had not hoarded.
Her own sword, passed down for many generations, was hidden in the crawlspace under her father’s trailer. Granny had willed it to Tara, along with a whole entire ranch. But, a thirteen-year-old girl and her trailer-trash father couldn’t exactly afford good legal representation, so in the end, all she’d actually inherited was that centuries-old weapon.
Her father had promptly and predictably sold the sword to a pawnshop. The ass-whipping she’d gotten when she’d traded his gaming PC to get the sword back had been worth it, and she’d refused to tell him where she’d put the blade no matter what he did to her. He was claustrophobic, and she’d layered as many concealment charms on it as her weak gift would allow. It was unlikely he would find it, but not impossible if he forced one of her siblings to go urban spelunking under the trailer.
Unfortunately, that sword wasn’t accessible to her now. However, there was a perfectly viable modern option for monster dismemberment in the garage.
Granny, a fan of horror since movies had been silent, would have approved.
