Free Near + Far by Cat Rambo Page A

shelf to compensate for the absence. She touched a sheaf of feathers clustered in a vase. Eagle or hawk, she wasn't sure which. Gathered by a lake one morning at summer camp, long ago. They ruffled against her fingertips, soft comfort.
    The loss hurt.
    The intrusion into her workspace, always off-limits in unspoken terms, hurt even more.

    Middle of the night; waking.
    Something, someone stood there in the bedroom in the darkness. But she knew the door was locked, she did that habitually, couldn't sleep if she knew it was open.
    Moonlight sliced across the carpet. Was she dreaming?
    Something breathed immediately next to her ear.
    She couldn't move.
    Surely this was nightmare. All she had to do was force herself awake.
    The brass-framed bed creaked and tilted as it settled onto the mattress beside her. She smelled musk and smoke.
    Force herself awake.
    Weight, so great it hurt , even more than the pinprick of claws, settled onto her shoulders, directly on the joints.
    Another massive weight on her hip.
    The ashtray reek of its breath, stink-fumbling at her lips.
    Force herself awake .
    She managed to pull her hands under it, shove it away by digging her thumbs into the pits directly behind its forelimbs.
    She wasn't dreaming. Her eyes were open.
    She was frozen. She remembered being told what to do when attacked by a brown bear. Kick and punch and drive it away. If she was dreaming, couldn't she drive it into that shape, fight it off?
    It had seemed impossible, the idea of a human fighting off a bear, but people had, the instructor said. People had done stranger, more valiant things.
    It bore down on her. Claws drove into her side.
    She dug her thumbs as deep and hard as possible with a wild shriek like an eagle's squawk.
    It roared and tried to pull away from her. She let herself be drawn up, used the momentum to swing her feet under herself, clamber back away and over to the bed lamp, all in the space of one terrified breath.
    Screamed, "Help me, someone please help me." Heard it go ringing down the corridors of time.
    Wake.
    Clicked the light on.
    Nothing.
    Her room, ordinary, bedclothes askew, laundry hamper, paperback straddle-backed on the bedside table. Beige carpet. The sound of her heartbeat, hammer-blasting in her chest, her throat, her ears.
    She paused. Surely the commotion would have drawn Lewis. He was the lightest of sleepers.
    Only silence from the rest of the house.
    She crept down the hall in bare feet, paused outside his door. Her arm was sore, pain biting at it whenever she moved.
    Only the sound of his breathing inside. Nothing else. She waited. She had read you could tell when someone woke up, that no one could control the pattern of their breathing from sleeping to waking. But the sounds continued, deep regular inhalations, rhythmic as a saw blade in action.
    Faking? Or exhausted by his day, by the draining effects of his disease?
    In the bathroom she avoided looking in the mirror as she dabbed at the edges of the wound with a washcloth, then covered them with Neosporin and a gauze bandage.
    What had happened?
    But that was not the real question.
    Her mind crept around and around the real question.
    How had Lewis managed it?
    Because Occam's razor, the simplest explanation—who hated her, who wanted to harm her?
    Only Lewis.

    Back in her room, she left the light on.
    Somehow she slept.
    And dreamed. Child-Lewis, standing beside Child-Amber, hands intertwined, his voice chirping, "What's up, sis?" Love between them like a knotted rope.
    Her arm around him, protecting him. "Close your eyes."
    How could it be any other way?
    At 5:30, she rose and did her morning run, steadfastly not thinking of the creature and showered while avoiding its shadow. It came at her in snatches of memory, so vivid she could smell its breath, fetid as old meat, feel the way its claws thudded into her flesh.
    The water streamed down and down around the raw blotches along her arm. She looked at her flesh and felt herself shaking