The four of them clustered in a round booth at a midnight diner. Danae stirred her steaming, black-as-pitch coffee with a long, manicured fingernail. Verna ate her way steadily through a platter of fried shrimp, her silver-tinted eyeglasses glinting in the low light, flashing reflections. Finn, on the other side of the booth, fidgeted in his seat—his plate holding only a smear of gravy, his eyes on the scratch of scrubland across the dark parking lot. “I’m bored,” he said. “I want to get moving.”
Beneath the table, a quiet snarl suggested that Scratcher would object to being dragged away from her stack of burgers, and the final person at the table—a pale, young woman with smudgy black circles beneath her eyes—said, “I’m with Scratcher. Can’t we just take it easy for a bit? That last case nearly killed me.”
“You know you weren’t in any danger,” Danae said.
“I had to run for my life,” she objected.
“You just hate running,” Finn said. “It’s good for you, Star. Makes you feel alive.”
“I don’t want to be called Star any more,” the girl said. She ran her fork tines through the cooling syrup on her plate and licked the utensil thoughtfully. She shivered. This diner was too cold; she cast a covetous glance at Danae’s steaming coffee, but no one took Danae’s coffee. She poured herself another cup, but the coffee that came out of the carafe trickled to a halt after covering the very bottom of her mug. “I’m just not feeling like a Star any more.”
“It’s a stripper name,” Danae said. “I always said so.”
“Just be Sarah,” Finn said. “I don’t know why you want a new name.”
“Because Sarah is the farm girl who didn’t know any better,” she said. “I definitely don’t feel like her any longer.”
“Here,” Verna said, cutting through their bickering. She spun her phone ‘round toward Finn, though Danae intercepted it with a flicker of movement.
Her lips tipped down slightly. “A Wendigo at the Winter Lake Ski Resort? They’re so… untidy.”
“If you read beyond the uselessly lazy and alliterative headline, Danae,” Verna said, each word made crisp with habitual irritation, “You’ll see it’s much more likely to be an abominable snowman, and as such, it is incumbent on us to help ….”
Danae waved a languid hand, flicking drops of coffee across the table. Finn shook his blond head and laughed. “Looks like we have somewhere to be!”
They rose from the table in a tangled rush. Danae slipped free first and went to talk to the waitress. Finn bounded free and tugged Sarah out after him like popping a cork from a bottle. “You’re sticking with us, right? Or are we dropping you somewhere this time?”
Sarah shrugged. “Nothing better to do.”
Scratcher slunk out from beneath the table—a black rough-furred cat the size of a Labrador with tufted ear tips, and eyes that glowed green.
A trucker who’d made a late arrival dropped his coffee cup, and said, “What the hell is that thing?”
Verna turned, and let her glasses slip down her nose just a smidge. “That thing is our cat.”
The trucker stiffened and said nothing more. His eyes showed white all around.
Danae wandered over to the trucker, finessed his wallet from his pocket and handed it to the waitress. “It’s on him.”
The waitress swallowed, but took two twenties out.
“Don’t forget your tip, dear. Make it a good one.”
The waitress liberated another twenty and put it into her purse. The trucker sat in perfect silence. The waitress’s hands trembled.
“Danae,” Finn chided. “Verna.”
Verna pushed her glasses up and shrugged. “It won’t hold for long.”
Danae said, “He was rude. Besides, whose fault is it we’re a little cash poor, Finn?”
“You don’t see that kind of deal on rib eyes all the time,” he said. “Scratcher agrees, right? Best to keep her well-fed, don’t you think?”
Sarah shivered. Yes, keep Scratcher fed.
The big cat snarl-purred, tail twisting amiably.
“But did we need 100 pounds of rib eye packing our freezer to capacity?”
“Eh,” Finn said. “It’ll be alright. I have a feeling.”
“As long as you have a feeeeeeling,” Danae mocked him.
Bickering amiably, they left the diner and climbed into the battered old RV at the far end of the lot. As they drove away, the brake lights illuminated the tire cover, which declared that “Here Be Monsters”.
The thing about Sarah is that she thinks maybe she should be somewhere else. Maybe she should take Finn up on his insincere offer to drop her somewhere. One moment she was worrying about the sheep farm she’d inherited from her grandmother, about the thing that had killed the sheep dogs and was eating the sheep. The next…she was on the road with Scratcher and the rest.
Scratcher rests her heavy head over Sarah’s legs while Finn drives. Sarah rubs the cat’s spiny-furred ears and forgives her yet again for her sheep-eating.
Sarah could have stayed on the farm, she supposes, especially once the trio showed up and caught Scratcher in the act. Finn played sheepdog and ran her down, herding her toward Verna and Danae. Verna stared Scratcher into stillness, and Danae laid a graceful hand on the cat’s broad skull and said, “Oh, stop this at once and come with us.”
Then Danae looked up, pinned Sarah beneath her red-tinged gaze, and said, around a mouthful of gleaming fangs, “You might as well come with us, too. You don’t want to be stuck here, in the middle of nowhere, do you? We can always drop you somewhere if you change your mind.”
The thing is, wherever the somewhere-else-she-should-be is, it isn’t the farm. It isn’t even back at the college she left so precipitously on the notice of her grandmother’s death. So she just keeps on riding with them. She used to be afraid that Danae invited her along as a back-up meal, but now she feels almost like one of the team.
Well, as much as a human girl can be in an RV full of monsters.
Maybe it’s not somewhere else she needs to be. Maybe it’s someone else.
Winter Lake was pretty, isolated, and pretty-damned-isolated. The wind was crisp, even in April, with the cold bite of snow lurking. The snow pack was skimpy along the roadside, but the mountains above were frosted with white. The altitude was high; the locals’ spirits were low.
At the gas station while Sarah picked up team snacks, juggling armfuls of chips and beef jerky—so much beef jerky, Verna!—and Danae’s coffee pods and her own sodas and chocolate bars, Finn got the usual warnings from the locals.
“Yeah, the ski resort used to be a great money- maker for the town. But after that skier was found dead at the top of the ski lift…” The station attendant shrugged beneath his coat. “Bad enough when the skiers were just going missing for days, showing up dazed and confused, all turned around and missing time. But dead is bad for business. You don’t look like skiers.”
“Why else would we be here?” Danae said, smiling, albeit with her lips kept tightly closed. She brought out the dimples.
“Well, then, let me tell you….”
In the convenience store, Sarah rolled her eyes, wondering if the man would talk himself hoarse to please Danae.
The young, female clerk at the register said, “Yeah, Old Bert’s a gasbag. He’ll talk your friends’ ears off if they let him. Y’all going up to the Lodge?”
“That’s the plan,” Sarah said.
“Better you than me,” the clerk said. “Used to be nice up there, but now it’s… strange.”
“Dead skier strange?”
“Jackass skiers,” the clerk said, leaning forward. “It’s like something else is going on, you know? It’s almost all men up there now, no families, few women. We used to get hundreds of ski tourists, shopping in town, buying souvenirs, but now, we never see them at all. Except on their way up. Hyped up guys in big SUVs. You know. Intense.”
Sarah nodded like she knew, but she was mostly wondering if she could get all the little coffee pods onto the counter without spilling them onto the floor.
The clerk’s face went white suddenly, her freckles vivid, as Scratcher pushed through the door to hunt Sarah down.
“Is that a… is that your cat?” There were a dozen questions beneath the straight-forward one. What is that, where did you find it, is it dangerous …?
“Sure,” Sarah said, answering only the obvious ones. It was true that Scratcher preferred her company, but she thought it was probably that Sarah still reminded her of her sheep. Scratcher stood on her hind legs, pried open a refrigerated unit, and batted at a pint of heavy cream. “Add that to my order, will you?”
“Better keep an eye on it,” the girl said, visibly deciding it wasn’t her problem. “Some of these intense guys? They’re carrying guns.”
Outside, the RV tooted. Sarah swept all the snacks into four paper bags. “Thanks,” she said, and let Scratcher carry two of them out to the RV in her teeth.
“Something’s off,” Verna declared as Finn started the RV up the long, winding mountain road. “Skiers found disoriented and missing time? That’s definitely abominable behavior—playing with people. Especially if they have young to protect. Dead skiers, not as much.”
“Accidents happen,” Danae said. “We all know that. Sometimes, despite our intentions, we kill people.”
Sarah bent her head and scrubbed her fingers through Scratcher’s dense brambly coat in the quiet moment after Danae spoke. Talk like that scared her. Made her feel small and afraid.
“Even so,” Verna said, finally. “Things don’t match up. Did you know the dead guy wasn’t really a skier? He was a fish and game warden. And he died from a blow to the back of the head. Abominables aren’t going to sneak attack from behind. They don’t need to, not with the anesthetic gas they leak from their fur….”
Sarah said, diffidently, “Also, there are still people coming, according to the clerk. Just not coming into town. Secretive people. Scary people.”
“I don’t like that,” Danae said. “This feels like another one of those scams. Someone using a legend to misdirect the public. I hate those. Waste of our time.”
Finn met Sarah’s eyes in the mirror and winked. “Last time we had one of those, we unmasked the ‘mummy’ and Danae was so aggravated, she got back on the blood wagon.”
Through the RV window, Sarah saw the ski lift empty of people, stilled, like a line-drawn sketch.
“I didn’t kill him,” Danae said primly. “I just… thought I’d dry him out a little, let him see what mummification felt like. Verna took her turn too.”
Verna shrugged, snowlight blinding on her glasses.
As if even the reminder of blood was temptation, Danae reached into the snack back and pulled out a nespresso pod. Popped it with her fingernail and licked up the grounds with a pale, narrow tongue.
The lodge appeared with the suddenness of a summer thunderstorm. A dark blot on the white snow. As they drew up into the drive, they could see that the wooden walls had a faintly faded red cast. It made Sarah think of decaying meat.
“Sun’ll be going down soon,” Finn said. “I think Scratcher and I are going to stretch our legs. Get the lay of the land. Verna, you’ll get us all checked in?”
“Don’t go too wild,” Verna reminded him; then they split up.
If you ask Sarah who her favorite of her new companions are, there would be no question. It’s Scratcher. Bristle-furred, bloody-mouthed, green-glowing-eyed wild wampus cat that she is. But she purrs soothingly beneath Sarah’s chin in the long dark sleepless nights, and she’s warm against Sarah’s constantly chilled skin.
After that? It depends on the sliding scale of who scares her the most.
You’d think it would be Verna who scares her, given that really, she’s the big gun of the group. But she’s mired in humanities—the petty irritations, her constant harping on keeping busy, the fact that she loses her glasses every so often and has to keep her eyes screwed tight while everyone scatters to find them. It’s hard to be afraid of that, though Sarah’s heart pounds every time and her mouth gets dry. Verna’s the group’s thinker. Sarah likes her, but it’s in the way you like your bossy big sister. Liking tempered with indignation at being told what to do all the time.
Danae… Danae does scare Sarah. Danae is like a risk taken every day. You can’t help but wonder if today is when the odds turn on you. If today, her caffeine runs short, or if she loses her really-quite-amazing composure and rips into them all. But mostly, Sarah helps Danae brush her hair in the logy mornings, and makes sure she has enough coffee, and if Sarah needs something, she asks Danae first. Danae makes things happen. Danae takes care of them.
Finn. It’s Finn who she likes least. Finn scares her down to her bones even if she hates to cop to it. Partly, she feels bad because he’s just such a friendly guy. Quick to smile, quick to reach out to people. He’s the considerate one, always checking with her that she’s still with them. He’s social in a way she never managed on her own, can talk to anyone. He’s good-looking too. Blond and effortlessly fit. A lesser Hemsworth. He likes to be liked. Needs to be liked, and she’s a sucker for that. But she’s seen the teeth in his mouth, she’s seen the claws and the roar he hides beneath his smile. And that scares her, makes his friendly seem like a mask. If pushed, she’ll tell you that Finn is the one.
She has to be scared most of Finn because she can’t be scared of Scratcher. If she lets herself be scared of Scratcher, she starts remembering the blood on her hands, her gutted dogs, her mangled sheep and the taste of blood in her mouth and the hot stink of blood soaking her hair, everything she grew up knowing overturned…. She can’t be scared of Scratcher. She loves Scratcher. Scratcher purrs and keeps her warm. Scratcher brought these new friends to her door.
Sarah followed Verna and Danae into the Lodge, darting quickly after them, avoiding the nip of the air. Thinking about a warm fire, she walked right into Danae’s unmoving back. It was like bouncing off an obelisk.
“Ow,” she muttered, petting her nose to test for brokenness.
Then, Sarah peered around Danae’s rigid shoulders, over Verna’s head, and saw the pelt, held aloft by two men.
As white as snow, as thick as a blizzard snowfall, slightly bigger than a man, but somehow, horribly, tellingly man-shaped, even dangling as it was. The hide, imperfectly cut free, was pallid leather with gelid runnels of icy blue blood. The two men strained to hold the weight, while four others prodded and exclaimed around it.
“A whole pack of ‘em,” one man said, “and the meat’s blue beneath! Freakish!”
“You dare,” Danae said, her voice ringing through the congratulatory huddle of the hunters. “You kill a child and brag of it?”
“It was a monster,” the hunter said, “and I paid for this hunt, so you can take your PETA-loving bullshit right on out of here.”
“I don’t think so,” Danae said, and her fangs slid out. The men raised rifles.
“Gentlemen!” Verna called out. Only two of them glanced at her, but with her glasses lowered down her nose, with her grey eyes fixed on them, with the slightest suggestion of rippling movement in her curly hair, they froze.
The ones holding the pelt up dropped it with a slithering thud; the other two men raised their guns. Danae moved like silk in a hurricane—a swift, effortless lash of movement that left two men screaming over broken wrists and guns smashed into the fireplace.
Then she turned on the remaining two. “Where is the owner?”
“Outside,” the hunter said, white to the lips. “Leading another hunt.”
Danae snarled and Verna said, “Caffeine, not blood, Danae. Allow me.” Another glance and the two men stiffened neatly.
Danae stacked the petrified men like cordwood, binding them all into one great tangle of rope while the other two men cowered and nursed their injuries. She tapped them each on the forehead, knocking them out.
Sarah looked up from the lobby guestbook. “There’s at least a dozen names here, Danae.”
“Verna, let’s do some hunting of our own. Sarah, keep an eye on these assholes?”
“Like I need to,” Sarah said. “The statues are down for weeks, and the other two, even if they wake up, are going to be blubbering for hours.”
“Sarah….”
“Fine, fine,” Sarah said. “Go. I’ll just sit by the fire and be useless.”
Verna had pushed her eyeglasses back up but Sarah could tell she was peering crossly at her through them anyway. “I was thinking you could tell Finn and Scratcher what was going on when they returned, but if you would rather feel useless….”
“Oh, go away,” Sarah muttered.
Left alone, Sarah gravitated toward the pelt, dropped so carelessly on the floor. A young snowman’s pelt. “And they call you abominable,” she murmured. She bent to pick it up, but it was so much colder and heavier than she expected that she pitched down onto it. Kneeling, she began gathering the skin, draping it over her lap, smoothing it in a pointless attempt at comfort. Or apology. For not getting there soon enough. Her fingers caught in poorly stitched up holes where the bullets had gone through.
A rash of screams echoed outside, and she flinched, hoping the hunters hadn’t caught Finn and Scratcher by surprise. Her friends were dangerous, but men with guns could be lethal, too.
The screams stopped and the door burst open.
A man in winter camouflage crashed in, saw her holding the pelt, saw the men lying unconscious near her, and shot her where she sat.
He didn’t hesitate, she thought, or flinch. He hadn’t cared that she was unarmed, seated on the floor, weighed down with the pelt. He’d shot her while she was vulnerable.
He rushed past her and she rose. She caught him by the shoulder and spun him around. She didn’t need to stop him. He would run into Verna, he’d run into Danae, and they’d stop him, but she was suddenly afire with rage. All her cold chill seemed to race away from that central rage.
He hadn’t even asked who she was. He’d just shot her.
She clutched him close, yanked his gun away, tossed it across the room, where it fired on its own.
Her hands were bitter with icy chill, pushing through his skin, his flesh, his bones; his heart was scalding, throbbing in her grasp.
His lips turned blue.
On the stairs, a familiar voice.
“Sarah,” Verna said. “Be careful. No one would fault you if you lost control. But accidents can’t be undone. And vengeance is bitter as the grave.” Her eyeglasses glinted. “It would be so easy right now to drop him dead at your feet. Do you want that? A body at your feet, blood on your hands?”
“He shot me,” Sarah said. “He killed the abominable.”
“Yes, he did,” Verna acknowledged. “He’s a murderer, many times over. And a coward.”
“He found the abominables and he monetized hurting them,” Sarah said. “He had one skinned.”
Danae appeared at her side all at once, a shadow given sudden shape. “He also killed the fish and game man,” Danae said. “I can compel him to confess. He’ll spend time behind bars. He’ll be punished, Sarah.”
Sarah let him go.
He fell, gasping at her feet, clutching his chest.
Finn and Scratcher entered the lobby, full of health and wild-eyed vigor. Scratcher’s fur was too dark to show much, but her teeth were red and her claws left rusty smudges on the floor. Finn’s shirt had shredded, blood smudging his chest and arms. A few scorched blisters attested to bullets that struck but were pushed back out. “I’ve got a group of hunters tied up behind the RV and the snowmen safe for now, but the lodge owner escap….” He fell silent when he looked at Sarah, at the man at her feet. His friendly face grew still, sad.
“He shot me dead,” Sarah told Finn. “But I was dead already, wasn’t I? I’ve been dead for a while. I just… forgot.”
She looked down at herself, and instead of a bullet hole in her black t-shirt, her chest gaped, ruined, clawed open, ribs torn out and missing. Her skin mottled blue-white, her heart grey. She felt the flutter of skin loose at her throat and neck. She remembered sitting in the dark paddock, afraid she was screwing up everything her grandmother had left her to protect. Clutching the shotgun, the flashlight. And still being unprepared for what came out of the dark.
“Scratcher killed me. And ate me.”
None of them said anything.
Scratcher wound around her legs, green eyes glowing beseechingly. She purred; she was warm. She was apologetic and young…and she’d been so hungry, so desperate. Sarah took a step back. Scratcher slumped.
Sarah watched the death-dealt wounds vanish again. Her t-shirt bloomed a bullet hole, stippled with red and black, then that too vanished, leaving her in a pristine shirt.
Finn tried to put his arms around her; she faded through them, stepping back like the ghost she was.
Verna called the sheriff while Danae had her little “talk” with the lodge’s owner. Sarah, drifting uneasily around the room, not quite sure what to do with her hands, with her feet, with her non-beating heart, heard a few words here and there in Danae’s most compelling tone. Gun runners. Rivalry. A falling out over the murder of the fish and game man. The panic when Danae and her friends showed up….
When the sheriff showed up, the team sprang into action. Finn smiled, ducked his head a lot, and muttered something self-deprecating about a few stints in the military tuning out to be useful, and who knew he’d need those skills here, at home?
Danae cried gently on cue, tears sparkling in her lashes like ice melt, until the deputies circled her, bringing her coffee and attention.
Verna stood stolid and disapproving as she spoke to the sheriff. “We just thought we’d take a little break from the road trip. Get some nice rooms, some space from each other, maybe try some skiing, though Sarah’s a scaredy-cat.”
The sheriff’s eyes flicked briefly her direction, and she tried to ease out of her hunch. Tried to look scared, but the right amount of scared, and realized with a jolt that almost made her topple over, that she wasn’t scared. That she hadn’t been scared since the bullet passed through her.
“You all were very lucky,” the sheriff said. “You could have been killed.”
Danae gave a delicate shudder, dabbed at the corners of her eyes.
“I need to find my cat,” Sarah said. “She ran off in the commotion.” She slipped outside, into a night full of strobing lights and looked up at the stars.
Finn found her there a little later.
“The others are loading up. We’ll be out of here soon,” he said. “It’ll be a crowded trip, I bet. We have some friends to pick up.”
She nodded, still looking at the stars, icy and distant, untouchable and utterly beautiful. If she’d stayed on her farm, she would never have seen them like this in the mountain skies. If she’d stayed dead….
Finn swallowed, and said, “Sarah. Do you want us to drop you somewhere?”
She heard the question for the first time with full understanding. Drop her somewhere. In a grave, seeking her final rest? Or just leaving her to make her own way, a single, solitary ghost wandering the roads.
Sarah considered it. Somewhere else she needed to be? No. Someone else she needed to be?
She already was.
“I think you can call me Spooky,” she said. “I’d like that.”
On the road again with the Here Be Monsters RV, and right now they need all the space they can get. Finn is up front, gloating loudly about how he knew all those rib eyes would come in handy as the remaining family of abominables pack them in like potato chips. Spooky is listening to him and fiddling with the RV heater at the same time, trying to find a compromise between overheating the abominables and wiping the chill from her core.
Verna is in the thick of it, stretching maps out along the narrow table, trying to find a new home for the abominables, who have a surprisingly big number of must haves. Every so often one of them mumbles something that sounds like “hot-tub” and another mutters something about “wi-fi”. There’s a reason they live near ski resorts, apparently.
Danae is napping, or doing what passes for napping. Eyes closed, skin white, fangs bared over her lips. Not quite hanging from the ceiling, but she’s on a definite slant on the back mattress, her red hair hanging long and low. Scratcher bats at it absently on her way up to the front of the RV. The cat hesitates for a moment, then carefully leans against Spooky’s thigh. The ghost girl gingerly sets her hand down on Scratcher’s head, stroking between the wide ears. The cat purrs, and the RV drives on into the dark.
Lane Robins’s books include the dark fantasy Maledicte, and an urban fantasy series written as Lyn Benedict. Her short fiction can be found in Nightmare Magazine, Strange Horizons, New Myths and others. Occasionally, she can be found on social media, liking posts about books and animals.
Translunar Travelers Lounge 
Somehow this story is fun and twisted and a touch of gruesome all in one. Loved it!
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