Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

of the heavy vehicle clear of the ground, and it was now in the process of falling back. Debris still sang like shrapnel through the air around Thorn’s ears.

      Before the blasted wreck had fallen back again on its four burning tires, Thorn leaped toward it. His motion began on two feet and ended on four, beside the wreck; instantly a second bound on wolf-fast legs bore him, armoured in thick fur, straight through the flames where doors and windows had once been.

      Mary was no longer there. Her mortal form, or what was left of it, had been blown clear of the vehicle on its far side.

      A wolf’s teeth closed on her hair, and on what was left of the collar of her shirt. She was dragged away from the fire, to a distance where its flames were no longer hot enough to burn.

      One of Mary’s arms was gone, off at the shoulder. Both of her legs were twisted, lying at wrong angles like those of some great discarded doll. Still her eyes were open, and alive. They were blankly blue, familiar eyes in a blasted face from which most of the lower jaw had been ripped away. In man-form again now, Thorn crouched over her. He must have looked half-dead himself, with his clothing blown to rags and his skin covered with the black residue of the explosion. But though his nervous system still rang with pain he could tell now that his own injuries were minor, a result of organic matter in his own clothing impacting his body under the force of the blast: the leather in his shoes, the cotton in some of his clothing. His wounds would quickly heal.

      But Mary.

      It was obvious from the first look at her that she was not going to survive.

      Unless … there was one desperate chance to take.

      Thorn closed his eyes, and willed the double fang-growth in his own upper jaw. Then he crouched lower over the girl, bending till his lips touched her charred flesh. In a moment he had tasted of her living blood. Then, kneeling erect again, he ripped open the burnt remnants of his own garments at the chest, and with one taloned fingernail nicked his own blackened skin. Then he lifted the girl like a nursling babe toward his wound.

      He tried, tried desperately, to give Mary his own vampire’s blood to drink. With her jaw gone, her own blood drowning her, it was impossible.

      She never drank the blood that might have given her a chance for a transformed life. Yet still it took long minutes for her death to be complete.

* * *

      “Who’s it from, Bill?” Judy Southerland followed the back of Bill Bird’s blue shirt through the sunlight of highland New Mexico, along the pine-needle path that led from her cabin, past the schoolroom-studio where Bill taught and worked at sculpture, to the lodge that housed the school director’s office.

      Bill turned his head back briefly. He wasn’t handsome, not by Judy’s standards anyway, but very nice. “He said he was your brother-in-law. But then he said to be sure not to scare you, that the family’s all okay.”

      “I see. Thanks.” But Judy was sure she would have felt it had there been something serious wrong with Mom or Dad or Kate or Johnny; she felt things like that, even at a distance, and always had. There had been a bad dream last night, she suddenly remembered. She frowned, but the content of the dream escaped her now.

      Brown-haired, sturdy, never in her young life a runaway, she walked wearing jeans and plaid shirt into the director’s office. The outer room was otherwise unoccupied at the moment, maybe so she could take what sounded like an important call in privacy. The walls here, as in most of the other camp buildings, were of thick logs, the interior surfaces cut flat, heavily and neatly chinked. After that the walls had been sealed with a glossy finish through which the wood shone yellow. With walls like these it was possible for life indoors to be as civilized, as cultured, as anyone might wish, even amid mountains verging on wilderness. The fanciest interior furnishings did not look out of place. Fritz Scholder prints hung here in the office, along with the obligatory Navajo rugs.

      Judy picked up the phone, meanwhile smiling reassuringly at Bill, who had remained hovering just in the doorway. “Hello,” she said. Outside the screened window, open on this warm late spring afternoon, tall pines waved in a breeze.

      “Judy? This is Joe. Kate and everybody here are all okay, it’s nothing like that.”

      “So Bill said.”

      “But there’s something I still thought I ought to talk to you about.”

      Judy glanced at her watch. Mid-afternoon in Chicago, one time zone away. Joe must be calling during his duty hours at the station; for him to do that, it must be something important indeed. She knew now who it was about; the feeling, though not the manifest content, of last night’s nightmare came back in full force. She felt no surprise; as if, on some interior level, she had already known. “I didn’t think it was the family, Joe.”

      “You see,” said Joe’s voice through the long distance buzz, “I got a call just a little while ago from the Phoenix police. A vehicle was blown up with a bomb out there in the desert last night, and at least one person killed.”

      He can’t be dead, I would have known at once if he were dead. “I follow you.”

      “They were trying to trace the man who had rented this vehicle. He had also occupied a certain hotel room out there, from which room a long distance call was made to me here in Chicago. Judy, I think you know which man I’m talking about.”

      “Suppose I do.” Bill was still hanging in the doorway; no doubt courtesy was urging him to leave, but something he saw in Judy’s face was evidently compelling him to hang around. As soon as the call was over