Captured by the Fae Beast

Mallory Dunlin

Copyright

"Captured by the Fae Beast" by Mallory Dunlin

mallorydunlin.com

Copyright © 2022 Mallory Dunlin

This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law and fair use.

For permissions contact: [email protected]

This book is dedicated to all those who cheered me on and demanded, often with great vigor, that I publish:

Max, who edited not once but twice,

Remy, who provided invaluable assistance,

Meghan, Kelly, Holly, Kassie, and the rest of the sprint squad, who devoured many snips,

Ariel, who chivvied me onward,

and everyone in IAA who offered critiques,

and kept me writing.

1. Becoming a Statistic

Chapter 1

Becoming a Statistic

I worked my way up the rugged granite climbing crag, following the route James had taken so I could remove each piece of gear and clip it onto the webbing looped over my shoulder. It was an amazing route, a soaring spire with long cracks snaking up the sides and enough little toeholds to make for an exciting challenge. Pinnacles like this were called "gendarmes," standing at attention like soldiers, and I loved the way the world fell away to every side for hundreds and hundreds of feet as I climbed, like there was nothing between me and eternity.

It had been so worth hauling all our climbing gear out into the backcountry of Yosemite. Backpacking with enough food for a ten-day trip and everything you needed to climb made for a heavy pack, and we'd slimmed down everywhere we could, spending hundreds on ultralight camping gear and relying on natural streams and lakes for our water. But rope and our climbing racks were still heavy enough to be a challenge, as were the bear canisters we had to bring with us to keep from feeding the wildlife.

But, God, it was a delight to climb without being surrounded by people. The rock was almost virgin, without chalk or well-defined routes, and it made me feel like some sort of trailblazer. It was day four, and I never wanted to leave. Everything was perfect here, from the sweeping vistas of raw granite and dense forest, to the blazing colors of wildflowers in the meadows, to the fearless creatures that showed themselves when you least expected it. I even liked the bugs, with all their different voices and colors, though I wasn't as fond of waking up with big hunting spiders visible through the roof of my tent.

This was paradise: surrounded by endless beautiful mountains, the warm early-summer sun kissing my skin, alone in the wilderness with my boyfriend.

My attention was yanked back to the climb as a small piece of rock holding the weight of my left foot snapped off. My foot dropped, throwing me off balance, and I fumbled the piece of gear I was holding as I jammed my hand into the crack to stabilize myself.

"Shit!" I yelped, as I scraped my knuckles and as James' favorite cam struck a ledge, bounced, and fell the rest of the hundreds of feet we'd climbed this afternoon to clonk onto the ground not ten feet from our camping gear. Well, shit. Those suckers cost a hundred bucks each, and I'd be duty-bound to replace it.

"You okay?" James called down.

I got myself into a better position, shook out my skinned hand, and looked up at him. "I killed Bessie!" I replied, before starting to climb again.

He made a mournful sound and started soliloquizing as I finished the last twenty feet of the climbing pitch. "Oh, Bessie! No better cam has ever graced the rack of a climber! How can we ever climb again without you, your lovely corpse lying upon the pine-needle soil of Yosemite? How shall I go on? Death! Woe! Ruin! Never again will I see the gleam of the sun upon your sapphire blue—"

I clipped in next to him and smacked him on the arm, making him burst into laughter. "I'll buy you another one, you dork," I said, grinning at him.

He grinned back, his cheerful one-dimpled smile. "They don't make 'em like they used to, Leah. We're never gonna find another Bessie," he said, trying to sound doleful and instead coming off irrepressibly cheerful. It was hard to be sad in the backcountry of Yosemite.

"Of course not," I said in my best lecturing schoolmarm voice. "You can't just replace your most darling, beloved cam! You'll have to fall in love all over again, mister." I flashed a perky smile at him. "How about trying out a Metolius? Sam swears by 'em," I said cheekily, naming one of the brands a climbing buddy of ours used.

"Insult! Horror!" he cried, clutching at his chest. "You would defile Bessie's name with a Metolius? Black Diamond or bust!"

I laughed at that, and started setting up the rope for the next pitch. "Yeah, yeah, you'll get your Camalot 3 Blue, babe."

James sniffed at that, but started transferring the gear to his setup while I got the rope set up. "You don't actually have to buy me a new one," he offered with a cheerful smile. "I'm capable of finding a new beloved cam."

"Psh, don't even try it," I replied with a laugh. "I make more money than you, and I'm the one that dropped her. I'm a big girl and can deal with it." I finished setting up the rope and got my belay device set up so James could unhook from the anchor.

"If you insist!" he said with that same irrepressible happiness. James got himself tied onto the rope, showed me the knots for verification, and checked my belay setup. "On belay?" he asked, as prim and proper as if we were in a climbing gym.

"Belay on," I replied, flashing him a smile.

James got onto the granite wall and unhooked from the anchor. "Climbing!"

"Climb on!" I said back, settling into my belay stance as he started up the climb.

I fed the rope out to James as he made his way up our fourth pitch of the climb. This would be the final ascent up the gorgeous gendarme, I thought, glancing at the remaining rope and back up at the distance James had left to lead. He pulled out a piece of gear as I watched, the cam catching the sunlight. He wiggled it into the crack he was following up the spire of granite, testing it before clipping it to the rope and moving higher. I kept feeding him rope, keeping the slack the way he liked it, with enough space to move but not to fall.

I glanced out across our view, looking out across the rolling shapes of the granite mountains, their bald tops wrinkled with little lines of green from the creeping forest that lay in deep evergreen all around us. A red-tailed hawk circled above us, the sunlight shining russet through its spread tail as it rode the afternoon thermals. Gorgeous, I thought again. There's nowhere better on Earth.

"Take!" he called.

I pulled the rope down to lock my belay device, and resettled my feet against the wall, leaning back to look up at him, sixty feet above me.

"You good?" I yelled back.

"Yeah!" James said. "Just need to think about the approach!"

I squinted up at the granite. The crack he'd been on faded to almost nothing, with a bulge of smooth granite presenting an imposing overhang above it. There was another skinny crack to the left, though, not an easy switch from where he was, but not an impossible traverse. But he was peering to the right; there had to be something around the side of the gendarme I couldn't see.

"Okay, climbing!"

"Climb on!" I replied again, and started feeding him rope.

James worked his way to the right, and then up, only the side of him visible. I kept an eye on the tension, feeding rope out with precise care.

I heard him whoop, and looked up to see him standing on the top of the gendarme, arms flung out. I started laughing as he did a little victory dance, waggling his hips.

"I'm king of the woooorld!" he crowed, howling the words out into the uncaring wilderness. "Leah, you're going to love it up here! You can see for miles! Let me just—"

CRACK-kr-rr-RR-CRR—

I didn't understand what I was hearing. I didn't understand even as the great pillar of granite above me started tilting, stone crumbling and rocks starting to cascade down. Years of rock climbing instincts made me press myself against the face of the cliff as chunks of granite came thundering down, even while my thinking mind froze, uncomprehending.

My hand clenched around the rope, sweat breaking out over my whole body as I watched the gendarme collapse to the left of me. The roaring cacophony of the tortured stone almost drowned out the sound of James screaming. I watched it like a movie in slow motion, unable to do anything but stare.

All those tons of granite fell, picking up speed, and James fell with them. His gear, set perfectly in the deep crack he'd followed, caught the rope, and I was no match for the mountain. The slack of the rope whipped taut and I couldn't let go fast enough, the force of it ripping the skin off my right palm and slamming my hand up into the belay device. The dead rope sang with hissing anger through the metal; the jerk of that immense weight against me, even with the rope being pulled through my gear, ripped two of my three anchors out of the rock wall, and then the belay device off my harness.

They struck me as they whipped by, cracking across my face, my abs, my left arm. Stones pelted me and I swung through the air, hard, slamming into the rock wall and cracking my helmet against the granite face. I ricocheted, unable to stop the motion, dangling by one small piece of gear. Blood ran down my face and off my hand and from a long gash across my stomach.

The stone smashed into the ground hundreds of feet below me, everything sounding far away. Something whined like a mosquito near my ear.

No. Screaming. That was screaming. James was screaming, James was—was—

It was me. I was the one screaming, as the last stones slid down and clattered onto the ground. I was screaming, oh, God, I was screaming and I couldn't stop, as the wail of agony tore at my throat and as tears poured down my face and blood dripped down my numb fingers.

"James! James! Jaaaames!"

More rocks broke loose above me. A fist-sized one smacked into my helmet, snapping me out of the blind grief and horror with the ringing pain. I hung there, panting, tears dripping off my chin and my throat closing with grief and agony.

Yosemite Accident Report: backcountry climbing accident leaves two dead, I thought, the words flitting through my mind with the cold daze of shock. I looked down at my bleeding palm, noting without emotion that I could see the tendons of my hand and that I was missing the meat between my thumb and forefinger. I looked over at the one hex nut I swung on, then down at the cloud of dust hovering over the heap of broken granite that entombed my supplies and my boyfriend. Then up the cliff, at the jagged, loose stone and the angled slope above it.

I didn't want to die. Oh, God, I didn't want to die.

I forced myself to put the terror away, focusing on the broken rock above me as if it was merely another climbing route, nothing special. It had a nice incline without any overhangs, the sort of cliff you can lean against as you go up it to take a little of your weight.

Almost like slab climbing, I told myself, staring at the ascent. People can climb slab with one hand. If you're good and it's not too tough of a route, you can climb slab without any hands at all.

My body was shaking. I told it to stop. It didn't.

It didn't matter. I was bleeding and I knew I had to be in shock. I had no supplies and I was in the backcountry. Nobody expected me home for another six days, and my emergency GPS beacon was both three hundred feet below me and buried under a hundred tons of rock. I could hang here on this one little nut and die slowly of thirst and exposure, or I could unhook and climb.

If I fell to my death, at least it would be fast.

I got myself onto the rock face and got my feet into secure positions, then dug my fingers into a solid hold above me. With my bleeding, torn hand, I unclipped myself from the gear, crying out from the pain. I didn't bother trying to take it with me. I didn't have the hands necessary to do it without falling.

Grimly and with wide eyes, I started hauling myself upwards across the granite. My right hand throbbed with pain, and I could barely get my fingers to work. My legs did most of the work getting me up to the broken stone, and though I trembled from pain and adrenaline, I didn't stop to rest. When you're free climbing, every moment you're on the wall is work. You can't rest without a ledge or a rope, and I had neither.

I could lean against the broken stone, though, and that was enough to let me use my good hand only for balance instead of for holding myself against the wall. I had to rattle every sharp-edged handhold, abandoning the ones that moved, fighting the fear that narrowed my vision and made my ears ring every time I dislodged pebbles. Flecks of mica in the granite glittered in the sunlight, the whole wall rough and fresh. It scraped at me as I climbed, leaving blood on the pale gray stone as I went.

A piece of stone broke under my foot and I almost started sliding, grabbing on with both hands, clawing at the stone. Pain seared through me as if I'd grabbed hold of a branding iron with my right hand. I sobbed as I fumbled for a foothold, tears dripping off my face, every sensation heightened by the adrenaline. My body shook with terror and throbbing agony, wanting to freeze in place as if that would save me from the mercy of granite.

Almost blinded by tears, I forced myself to keep moving upwards, feeling with my left hand as I crept upwards, bracing with the back of my right hand. I kept clawing my way along the cliff, going up and up, and then the wall had a lip instead of more wall. I fumbled over it and wrapped my hand around a solid piece of stone. Panting, agonized, I dragged myself up over the sharp stone edge and onto bare, flat granite. I kicked myself away from the cliff face, belly-crawling away from that horror and towards a little patch of dirt and grass.

I curled up on that dirt in the fetal position and fell apart.

I didn't have any idea of the passage of time as I laid there and shook, blind from terror and sweating through my clothing. By the time the haze cleared from my vision and my muscles ached too much to shiver any longer, the air had grown chilly and the sun was setting. I tried to wet my parched mouth and dry lips, whimpering as the sensation of pain started creeping back into my awareness.

Slowly, afraid of what I'd see, I turned my right palm towards my face and used my left hand to uncurl my fingers. The blood had coagulated, gluing dirt and small pieces of rock to my naked palm, and the scab cracked and pulled as I lifted my fingers. I let them curl closed again, trying not to cry.

I needed shelter before true darkness fell. It often dropped to below freezing at night in the high Sierra, even in the summer. Just last night, we'd zipped our bags together, giggling about huddling for warmth and singing "Baby It's Cold Outside" to each other in warbling voices. I choked on a sob and forced the memories away before I lost more time and water.

I made myself take stock of my situation. I was in a t-shirt and climbing pants, designed for comfort and not for warmth. My climbing shoes would do almost nothing to keep my feet from getting frostbite and weren't that great to hike in. I was damp with sweat and the evaporation would chill me badly as it got colder. I had no fucking clue how to survive in the wilderness: my time in the backcountry always involved expensive gear and a lot of planning. Like pretty much every outdoorsy kid my age, I'd read Hatchet like it was my Bible, but that didn't exactly translate to skill.

With a whimper of pain, I staggered to my feet and started moving, heading down the back slope of the cliff towards the forest. I drank most of my remaining water as I went, replacing some of what I'd wept and sweated away. It was getting dark fast, and I knew I didn't have the time to try and find a cave or anything like that. But there were a lot of trees and deadfall, with drifts of pine needles. I penetrated deep enough into the woods to find an area where a bunch of trees must have blown down recently; there were overlapped logs, their branches heavy with dead needles.

As the darkness settled in a shroud around me, I broke off as many twigs as I could, dumping them in a heap sheltered by three trunks. When I could barely see and the cold started making even my exhausted muscles tremble, I burrowed into the needles. I curled up under the twigs and detritus, trying to tell myself this was just like when I was a little kid, curling up under blankets in my treehouse pretending to be a squirrel in her nest.

Moving carefully, I pulled out the snack I'd intended to eat at the top of the climb and unwrapped it, chewing the salty caramel protein bar with slow, aching bites and washing it down with the last mouthfuls of water. Out of habit, I crumpled up the wrapper and tucked it into my climbing pack—leave no trace. Then there was nothing left to do as the darkness deepened all around me. I sniffed, blinking back the threatening tears, knowing that every tear was wasted water, and waited for the mountain cold to descend.

2. Backcountry

Chapter 2

Backcountry

I woke in the night, over and over, the cold seeping into me through my barrier of pine needles until I roused, shivered violently for ten or fifteen minutes to beat back hypothermia, and fell back asleep. When I opened my eyes to the pale dawning light, I felt dull and tired, everything foggy and distant.

What was I doing out here, lying in pine needles? James would be worried half to death. He'd be looking for me, had probably been looking as soon as it got light enough to see. Any moment now, I'd hear his voice, calling my name like they did on TV shows, all those cop dramas where search-and-rescue crews go out into the woods with dogs and flashlights. Leah! Leah! Dogs barking, flashlights panning, any moment now...

I started shaking again as my brain put the pieces back together. I'm king of the world! You're gonna love it up here! Crack, crack, crack, CRACK—

I bit down on my wrist before I started screaming, the sharp pain and the taste of dirt and blood tearing me away from the agonized panic. James was dead. Nobody was looking. I needed to find water and get out of the backcountry. We were four days in, but that was only two days of real hiking, and two days of making our way to crags and spending the afternoons climbing, once the granite had warmed up a bit and we wouldn't freeze our fingers off.

Without a map or a compass, I didn't know that I could find the trail back, and everyone always says that wandering around was a good way to get dead in the wilderness. Search-and-rescue starts where they expect you, but it's a big world out there and it's so easy to get lost. People sometimes die within a fifteen minute walk of the trail, hidden away behind the verdant green of the forest. Maybe the best place for me would be sitting on top of the cliff, out in the open, waiting to be found. We'd left the list of climbs we planned to hit with the park rangers, so they'd know where to start looking.

Six days. I had no food, no water, and no shelter. I'd die within three or four days without water, though I could make it six days without food. I had no idea how cold it had gotten last night; it had been hovering around thirty-five at night the few days before James and I had left, but if a cold snap hit, it could drop down to ten up here.

I sucked some moisture into my mouth and swallowed. I needed water. That was the first thing. Surely the rangers would know that we would... I closed my eyes and bit back a whimper. That I would have to find water. Maybe they'd check the lakes first. There were a lot of lakes in the high Sierra, beautiful alpine lakes.

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