She lit a cigarette to settle her mind, and almost welcomed the buzzing of an engine, the orange plume of dust behind a ute thumping down the rutted road from the gate. Then she realised what it meant. She ran a few steps, went back for the shotgun and walked around the other side of the building, through the scrap heap, out of sight of the approaching vehicle.

She didn’t see Gary leave the shed.

Something, she said, the one time she talked about it, flicking the lighter so the flame spurted briefly. It was sunset, and something found her. The worst was, for a moment she was glad. She heard an unutterable wail from the distant bush, like a warning, and for an instant, primed by the long day, hungry, anxious, she wanted to see the dog-wolf-thing.

But something shifted between rusted tin and abandoned tyres, elbowing into the red light. Too many elbows. It was bony and gelatinous at once, a thing, a person that had been taken apart and put together wrong, that was trying to be too many creatures at once. But it could speak.

“Blood calls to blood,” it said. “In I come to see my friends, my boys, my apprentices, and find you. I remember you. You stole my life, girl. Twice over.”

David Spicer, or whatever he had become, had once been like Darryl Scott. He had believed in stories. He had believed in talking his way into and out of difficulties, surviving in mockery of everything that should have destroyed him. But at some point, everyone’s story gets taken out of their hands. It happened three times to David.

First was the woman who had—no one is left who knows how—traded him a wild twilight existence for his youth. Then her daughter, Linda, who seized his freedom and dragged him back into humanity and old age. And then there was her granddaughter.

Trish fired.

Her dad had taught her. She was a good shot.

When she came back into the shed, her hands on the shotgun were steady.

Chapter 7: A True History of Blood and Fire

CHAPTER SEVEN

A TRUE HISTORY OF BLOOD AND FIRE

Don’t remember this: the heft of a body, fully human, so much weightier than bird-boys and flower-women. Forget rending steel, the car where it slumped. Don’t remember where you dropped the keys (maybe they’ve been found, added to a rattling graveyard of metal). Don’t remember limping home through the trees, believing them empty.

They were always full of ghosts.

You were already becoming one.

Darkness, and a rolling thunder like the end of the world.

My legs felt heavy. I sprawled on the floor, against Mitch’s cage. Above me, Trish stood holding the shotgun. I smelled blood, the scorched-iron-and-earth of gunpowder. Her knuckles were pale.

Chris had fallen across my legs, his back and side a sticky mess. He moved his hand, but I grabbed the knife.