(I'd suggest reading the first chapter first.)
Once again, I'm sorry for any formatting errors!
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Chapter two:
She kicked as hard as she could in the opposite direction, dragging Guinevere with her. Her lungs felt like balloons about to burst.
Their heads broke the surface at the same time. Ayra sputtered and gasped, treading water as she sucked in air greedily. Nothing had ever tasted so good.
“The creature – it’s still down there,” she told Guinevere as soon as she could speak.
“I know.” The other girl appeared perfectly calm. She remembered with a shudder how Guinevere had thrown the monster off of her without even breaking a sweat; her lightning reflexes, pulling Ayra out of the way a millisecond before its claws turned her into hamburger meat, and knew that her brain would have a massive meltdown trying to process this as soon as it got the chance. But that didn’t matter right now. All that mattered was the creature, probably rising to the surface this very moment. It could be right underneath them, and she wouldn’t know until it was too late –
“Ayra,” Guinevere said, still infuriatingly calm. “Listen to me. It can’t survive in the water. “
“Oh … oh. So that means we’re safe?”
Guinevere smiled grimly. “Far from it. But we do have to get to shore, and get out of here. Meaning, NOW.”
About a thousand questions surfaced in Ayra’s mind.
But she also wanted to survive, and get out of the cold. So she kept her mouth shut as they swam ashore; in fact, she didn’t say a single word as they made their way, shaking and blue-lipped, through the forest. Even though every shadow looked like a crouching monster, and every rustling leaf made her all but jump out of her skin, and she had to keep digging her nails into her arms to keep from thinking about what had just happened because she’d go insane if she did.
But finally she just had to ask, “Guinevere. Where the fuck are we going?”
Guinevere stopped and sagged against a tree, the first sign of fatigue she had shown all evening. “Guess I owe you an explanation, huh?”
“Or several. But that can wait, for now … I just need to know that I’m not going crazy.”
Guinevere’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Crazy? Why would you be going crazy?”
Ayra gaped at her. Because cats like that don’t exist, or shouldn’t. Because you threw it off of me as if it weighed nothing. Because I just jumped in a lake with someone I barely know in the middle of the night when I’m supposed to be asleep and dreaming of my next day having fun with my friends. Not shivering in the forest with someone who inexplicably doesn’t seem to find any of this strange.
“You mean you’ve never seen monsters like that before?”
“No! This is all extremely … not normal. If ‘normal’ were planet earth, I’m on fucking Jupiter, okay? I dunno about you, but my average night does NOT involve almost becoming a midnight snack for some prehistoric alley cat!”
Guinevere, who had looked slightly amused before, now looked as though someone had told her she had cancer. “Oh, no,” she said quietly. “No, no, no … “
“Yeah, I agree.” Ayra realized that she was hyperventilating, her chest heaving in panic. A montage of the night’s events scrolled through her head.
The monster’s oil-shiny gaze, full of nothing but animal hunger.
Guinevere’s wild, trapped eyes as they tried not to breathe in a forest of reeds.
The punch of cold, her lungs almost bursting underwater.
Ms. Gibs’ screams cutting off with brutal suddenness.
“No,” Guinevere was saying. “You don’t understand, I-“
“Of course I don’t understand!”
Guinevere smoothed the wet hair off her face. “I don’t have the time to explain now. I will, I promise. But we have to keep moving.”
Ayra nodded. That was all they could do, just keep running and hiding. She knew that eventually she wouldn’t be able to anymore, that she would collapse and have to figure all of this out. But for now it was all they could do.
In front of her, Guinevere had already started walking, moving with an unconscious grace through the cool blue shadows. The air felt still here, permeated with leaf mould; the trees seemed to bow under the weight of the sky, forming a cathedral of silence. Asymetrical cutouts of moonlight fell through, just enough for Ayra to see.
Guinevere looked like she could manage with no light at all. Ayra caught a glimpse of her eyes: a thin band of grey around pupils swollen like dark moons. She could see her own reflection in them, pale and frightened looking. Not at all like Guinevere’s beatific calm. Looking at her, at the high smooth brow, the sculpted cheekbones, the easy grace with which she moved, Ayra wondered if inside Guinevere was just as confused as she was.
But no. She had seen her murmuring to the animal, luring it forwards. She had known what she was doing. Guinevere, she decided, was one of those people who always knew what they were doing, even when they were doing something terrible.
One of those people. If Guinevere was even a person. There was plenty of evidence to suggest that she wasn’t … that she might be … Ayra forced herself to think the word. Inhuman. Guinevere is not human. She mulled this over, biting her bottom lip and willing her brain not to implode, as they made their way through the forest.
After what Ayra guessed was ten minutes, the trees started thinning. Lights glowed up ahead – and noise. People panicking. It took her a moment to realize that they were nearing the cabins, and that the screams she was hearing were coming from her classmates. She imagined more monsters pouring into the camp in a wave of brindled fur and began to shake, leaning against a tree for support.
Guinevere stopped and stared ahead. Her wide grey eyes were unreadable, but her mouth was drawn and grim, as if she were trying to make peace with herself before doing something unforgivable. Maybe she was.
“Ayra,” she said slowly, still looking emptily into the light.
“Yeah?” Ayra pushed away from the tree. There was something about the other girl that made her want to prove herself, prove that she too could get things done. She wouldn't let her fear or the immense strangeness of everything that had happened govern her, she refused to let it.
“What we are going to do is sneak around the cabins,” Guinevere said calmly. Her eyes were glowing with the reflection of lights. “Then we’re going to find the portal. Simple. You with me?”
Ayra nodded, despite the fact that she had no idea what this ‘portal’ was.
Guinevere sighed. “Then I explain everything. Oh, and before we go: tell me if you start to feel sick. I mean it.”
They slipped towards the cabins like thieves. Ayra felt strange, like at any moment someone would yell “CUT!” and she would discover that the bush she was hiding behind was just a stage prop. By the time they reached the first cabin she had convinced herself so entirely that Guinevere’s whisper of “run now!” almost made her jump out of her skin.
This is real, she reminded herself as they dashed across an open stretch of grass. And it was. It was the realest night of her life; it was so real it hurt.
They passed by her cabin. Ayra faltered. Jade was in there … she had to say goodbye. She didn’t know exactly why, but she felt like wherever she and Guinevere were going, it wouldn’t be an overnight stay.
“What are you doing?” Guinevere hissed. She was in the shadows just off the trail, crouching down; in the dim light her eyes glowed like an animal’s.
Ayra shivered. “I have to see my best friend before we … leave.” She didn’t wait for Guinevere’s answer.
Jade was sitting on her bed, frantically packing her bag. She looked up at Ayra’s entrance, her blue eyes wide and scared.
“Ayra! Did you hear about Ms. Gibs – where were you?” Then she frowned and squinted, leaning closer.
“Is everyone leaving?” Ayra asked, trying to ignore the strange way her friend was looking at her.
Jade cried out and gripped the edge of her bed. “What happened to you? You look – you look like a …”
Ayra opened her mouth to say ‘what are you talking about?’ and suddenly found that it was full of blood. She spat red and Jade screamed. There was a sickening jolt deep in her stomach – as if something were being torn loose. Her vision misted as she doubled over in pain, clutching her sides.
“What happened to you?” Jade repeated. She sounded hysterical, and she had pushed herself up against the cabin wall in her haste to get away from Ayra.
“I can’t explain … I have to … the monster, is it here? Or it drowned … Ms. Gibs is dead, Jade, why are you looking at me that way?” she mumbled through a thick mouthful of blood, not even realizing that she was making no sense whatsoever.
Jade’s face was pale, so pale in the light from the window, Ayra thought distractedly. The room seemed to shimmer around the edges, as though they were underwater. A sound rippled through her mind: Guinevere crashing through the door. She grabbed Ayra’s arm and snarled, “we have to go.”
Ayra could barely see through her hair and there was a noise filling her head, a noise like the fizzing sound of pouring ginger ale into a glass. “Ginger ale,” she said.
Jade screamed suddenly. Guinevere swore and steered Ayra towards the door just as the dripping form of the monster smashed through the cabin window. Jade’s screams were earsplitting as it advanced, still wet from the lake, its whole body shaking with fury.
Adrenaline helped clear Ayra’s mind. She wriggled out of Guinevere’s grip and picked up a shard of glass from the floor, ignoring the way it cut into her palm when she held it. It looked eerily like one of the monster’s teeth – good, Ayra thought. Now we’re kind even. Almost.
“Over here!” she yelled, brandishing her glass tooth. The words rasped and gurgled horribly in her throat.
“We don’t have time for this!” Guinevere said in exasperation. “Take her,” she said to Ayra, jerking her chin to where Jade huddled against the wall, “and wait for me outside. I won’t be long.”
Ayra stumbled across the room and hauled her friend up by the sleeve. Jade was sobbing quietly, her face ice-pale and streaked with tears.
Outside, the night was strangely calm, the sound of crickets punctuated at intervals by the monster’s snarls and the tinkling crash of glass breaking. Ayra turned to face her friend. “Jade-“
“Don’t look at me!” Her mouth trembled, but her next words came out strong and steadily: ”You’re a monster.”
Ayra felt like she had been slapped. They had just seen a massive cat-like beast with stilt-like legs and a mouth full of jagged teeth and now she was the monster? “What?”
Jade’s face twisted in horror or disgust. “Just – get away!”
It felt like she was slowly being immersed in ice water: going numb, cold, unfeeling. She spun and gave Jade a push that sent her sprawling, then leaped up the stairs to the cabin.
The sight of the monster’s face barely affected her. She was still underwater. Guinevere said something that she couldn’t hear and they left, past Jade, who was struggling into a sitting position, past the dining hall, and finally, into the cool dark woods.
Through the numbness Ayra became aware of a pain in her hand. She discovered that she was still clutching the shard of glass from the window and turned it over and over in her fingers, trying to see her reflection.
The glass was smudged; she appeared as a featureless white blur surrounded by a mantle of dark hair. Her mouth was a grim red slash.
A shaking started in her spine and climbed upwards, rattling her teeth together. She remembered Jade’s face twisting in horror as she proclaimed her a monster. And now, in the middle of the woods with a mouth full of blood, it seemed she was right.
Real, this is real, the trees whispered sadly.
