Hellbender - Dana Cameron Page 0,33

ten feet from the edge.

Every single muscle in my body was tensed for falling, crashing, dying. I tried to relax them, with varying degrees of success.

“That’s closer than the manual recommends,” she announced after taking a breath.

I was inclined to agree. Breathing unnecessarily would, it seemed to me, tip us over the edge. “Mmm . . .” I finally took a deep breath, rotated my shoulders. “Thanks.”

She understood I meant “Thanks for the ride, for not killing us, for getting me here.”

“No problem. Who are you going to visit?”

“I’m not sure.” I’d been so busy finding my way here and making connections that I had no idea of how I’d find the house on the hillside. We’d landed on a small mountain, and there were foothills and mountains all around us. “I’m looking for a log cabin–styled house, red shutters, on the side of a hill?”

“You want Fatima Breitbarth’s house.” Luanne paused, opened her mouth, and then shut it again. “I’m sorry. It’s just kind of unusual to come to Kuskokwim if you don’t have a pretty good reason.”

“I have a good reason,” I said. “Just not a lot of details. Can you point me toward it?”

“Sure.”

We said good-bye and I saw Luanne batten down her plane for the night. The weather was turning bad indeed. I pulled up my hood and followed the pilot’s directions, keenly aware that every eye in the village was on me. Curtains twitched in the windows of the tiny, weather-beaten single-story houses that clustered by the river along a dirt road. Another road wound around the base of the mountain we’d just landed on. Gas tanks were behind every house—How did the fuel get here? I wondered—and a few of the more ramshackle places looked as though they still utilized outhouses. I nodded and greeted the five people I met on the road, which was probably about a tenth of the population, telling them I was heading to Fatima’s house and asking, was she in?

“Maybe,” one of the kids on a three-wheeler said. “Sometimes she takes off into the bush.”

My heart sank, and I thanked him. He tore off down the road toward the one large, modern building, which I assumed was a community center or school.

While it was possible I could track her down in my wolfself, I couldn’t handle another detour. I really needed Fatima Breitbarth, whoever she was, to be at home right now. Among other things, it had started to rain, and in Alaska, October feels more like winter than autumn.

By the time I finished the hike up the hill, it was pouring down, and it was cold. Any colder and the snow would have been flying. In my borrowed and mended clothing, I was not dressed for the coming winter.

I knocked. A light at the back of the house gave me hope, and when I felt the vibrations of an interior door opening, I couldn’t help myself. I started to cry quietly.

Fatima Breitbarth was very old indeed, with bone-white hair piled up on top of her head in a style that seemed appropriate to the nineteenth century. The skin of her face was brown and fine and paper thin, her sharp features reminding me of the Moorish trader I’d seen in a vision once. She wore wool trousers that were getting rubbed thin at the knees and a sweater I’d seen in an L.L.Bean ad.

“You’re Zoe Miller, aren’t you?” Her accent was a mix of Arabic and German. “Please come in.”

“What? How the hell do you know that?” I said, crying harder now. “How do you all keep knowing when I’ll arrive before I know I’m going myself?”

She smiled and guided me into the house, and waited until I had controlled my sniffling before helping me with my coat. “Even if I didn’t know the sound of Luanne’s plane arriving off her usual schedule, even if I didn’t have the airstrip in McGrath calling this morning to let me know someone was on the way, even if it wasn’t for Viktor Denisov tracking down Family in Alaska to find the one closest to Kuskokwim and let me know, even if everyone in the village didn’t know, for perfectly mundane reasons . . .” She shrugged. “I could feel it in my bones. It’s always been my private theory that the older we get, a little bit more of the oracle takes over to make up for the lack of speed, the dullness of tooth. If we’re not killed outright