CHERYL MADDALENA

“Oh no,” breathed Abby. Her skin crawled, l ushed with goosel esh. What she saw before her was not her love of old. It was the evil spirit that had entered his body, vulnerable and unprotected in death on that awful desert slope. “You’re not him,” she said, scrabbling backward up the hillside, loose rocks rolling wildly under her hands. “Why did you track me?”

She rushed through her mind, trying to remember anything she could about this spirit monster. The pumawha were shape-shit ers, able to mimic human and animal form, and also to inhabit the dead. They chose forms that would give them the advantage they wanted. They were impossibly fast. And she couldn’t remember if they could be killed.

“Well, a body has a l avor,” the man-shaped thing licked his lips, “and this one tasted of you. None of the bodies between there and here could satisfy this craving.” Its head tilted, eyes black. “I’ll go back to running wild at er this. Nothing else could compare.”

“But where is your, your pack?” Abby shouted, desperately scrambling for a distraction that could help her reach her beautiful bike, just twenty feet above their

precarious slope. “Your pack leader? Are they back in Arizona? Do they even know you’re here?”

Even as Abby retreated up the hill, the skin-walker began to shit. The familiar lines of her beloved, so strangely dressed, began to blur and grey. The wide, friendly features of her old professor elongated, widened, and became canine. At the same time its whole form expanded, grotesque and hulking. It was a coyote, but like none she had ever seen. It was as big as a bear.

Just as Abby crawled back onto the dusty yellow trail, now thrown into shadow, the skin-walker howled. Her throat closed as she sighted her bike, homely and familiar beyond belief. It rested on its side, benign as a child’s tricycle. She was lying down the trail before she even realized she’d touched it.

She didn’t dare look behind her. She just focused on the trail, the sound of the crunch beneath her rushing tires. When she let pavement for dirt earlier that day, it had felt like a door opening. Cobwebs cleared from her mind, everything became focus and breathing. There was nothing more relaxing than beating the crap out of yourself up a hill. Feeling the ine line between pushing yourself, and throwing up, all to get to the top for that coveted view.

This pell-mell descent was a perversion. Like inding a demon at a church’s altar.

Another howl followed her down, the same sound but from farther away. She pulled her bike side to side, up and over the rolling trail as it went around the bend. Maybe she could make it. To her car. To help. She bombed down the trail, reckless as she’d ever been.

Maybe the thing was just giving her a head start. A predator, playing with its prey. And then she realized that the pumawha might really be taking on the attributes

of her old love. Because what is a professor who seeks power over a young student, but a beast who seeks to feed itself? And then she began to form a plan. A way she could survive.