A terrible stillness descended. The expected second blow did not come. I looked back at the door.

  “Can I come in?”

  Sally’s voice slithered in between the door planks.

  Pale light flickered beneath the door. The smell of sulfur and fish rot.

  “John? Tom? Help me!” Henry’s voice.

  The two voices continued pleading. Others I did not recognize joined in. Ice water ran down my back.

  I stepped further into the stable, mindful of drawing too near the powerful back legs of the mules. The tension in the room had them spooked. I looked up at John, who had just come back in after laying Deborah in the still room atop a bed of straw. Martha and Mato were just at his heels. The moment John heard Henry’s voice, his face twisted and reddened. He started for the door.

  “NO!” Ike held up his hands wardingly.

  Silas stepped in front of the door, barring it. He spread his legs wide and hefted his axle. He surveyed the room. John stopped and looked down at his hands, clasping and unclasping them.

  I too felt the pull to lift the bar. To see my friend again. I shuddered.

  “Seamus!” I rasped out.

  The Irishman merely stood blinking at me for a moment. He shook his head, then nodded and took up his fiddle. Esther stood by him, her lantern flickering brightly. The tune seemed to push through the room and past the doors as a ripple more felt than seen. As it did, the buzzing passed through my mind. Outside, the voices distorted, their pitch lowering until they became inaudible.

  Silence descended once again. Seconds became minutes. We all looked at each other, wide-eyed, bodies tense. Still nothing.

  No one dared move.

  Every eye was on the door.

  Then I looked at Seamus and wondered how long he could keep playing. He returned my gaze and I knew he had the same thought.

  I turned back to the door. Was Seamus’s song the source of the Charmers’ hesitation? I admitted to myself that I could not be sure. I looked past the others into the still room. I lingered on Deborah’s prone form. She lay serenely wrapped in gray. Was she their fear? Could she even take the form of the Great Bear again? I did not even know if she would ever wake. She made no sign of stirring in the desperate flight to the stable. To all appearance she slept deep.

  I looked about the room. My gaze caught on the anvil in the corner. Horseshoes were scattered about it. Cold iron, mined from below our feet.

  The flood pressed the ice.

  A steady pressure this time. Less a question or an offer. This felt like a demand.

  Take up thy mantle.

  No. I must do this with what I knew. By creed and skill. I knew how to do two things better than anyone I knew, bought with patience and labor: make stable black powder and smith a gun. If only I had my Colt, I could at least go down fighting.

  The flood roiled. Pain coursed through me as if it disapproved of my hesitation.

  SLAM.

  The doors echoed the heavy blow and threw dust into the air.

  I looked at Ike and Ruth. They were embracing each other where they sat atop a hay pile. Everyone seemed to be praying. Ike rubbed his fingertips together as he recited something. I remembered his miracles. He formed an elegant pillar from coal. He cut the tip off that Charmer with word and hand. Surely he could form a revolver with the right materials.

  Blows were raining faster and harder on the doors now. Square nails worked loose from the iron banding, pinging to the floor one by one. The band followed, clattering.

  Something in me flinched with each strike.

  I tightened inward, packing ice thicker into the dam, willing it to hold against the pressure. I would not let it spill. Not yet. My teeth ground.

  It pained me, but I dismissed the thought of the forge. Even if Ike could perform this miracle for me, he could not do it in time, not while the Charmers were breaking in. Besides, I feared we would need his power to fight these things, and I knew from his two past uses that it left him as tired as he was at the end of a shift.

  Seamus struck up a new, faster tune. The Devil’s Dream.

  The slams against the doors quickened.

  My whole body went cold.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Kindling-sized strips of white oak began to fall from the planks.

  I looked down at my chest.

  The sound of splintering wood raked across the room.

  We might make a desperate last stand, but we were all going to die. There was no escape. My hip itched where my holster should be. I wanted nothing more in that moment than to make a good showing of myself and die with my friends. I could not hope for more. I thought of the flood behind the dam.

  A plank gave, and the veiny bulb at the tip of a Charmer thrust through the opening, fully illuminated. It was far brighter than our lanterns, and I was momentarily dazzled. When I recovered my sight, I saw that the planks on either side prevented the creature from sliding in more than a couple of feet. It writhed, and I heard the groan of oak under strain.

  Silas stepped forward, blazing red, and smashed down on the globe with all his might. The wheelboss tip of the axle embedded deeply into the globe and bile sprayed. All along the room where it splattered, that same pale whiteness continued to glow from the muck. The mine shifted, and I stumbled. The Charmer did not withdraw. It pressed in. Oak splinters pierced it, but the creature forced its way heedless inch by inch. It dripped dark bile. I felt gorge rise into my throat.

  The dam fractured. My whole body clenched. I packed ice into the widening checks, not knowing what would happen if I let it loose. I would not be the tool of something I did not understand. I would not become an abomination.

  The flood mocked me.

  Scripture rose in me with the sting of rebuke. The heart is deceitful. Deny thyself.

  The dam groaned. I echoed it.

  Cracks spidered across its face. Blocks shifted under a pressure I could not measure. I braced until my teeth hurt.

  I was only a man. If the Almighty meant me to stand apart from this, He must intervene.

  Outside me, the Charmer forced the door inward. Wood shrieked.

  Inside, the dam failed.

  It did not explode. It sundered.

  Ice slabs sheared loose and the flood broke through them, carrying the fragments with it. What I had built did not vanish. It joined the current. Ice and flood together.

  Pain lanced through my skull as if frozen spikes drove inward. A scream hung in my throat, unreleased.

  I forced my eyes open. I saw them all around me, bloodstained, exhausted, still clinging to one another. I would not be their ruin.

  The Charmer flesh pressed through the door, hungry and bright. Was this what the power would make of me?

  I looked over to where Little Mato clung to his mother. Wide eyes fixed on me.

  No.

  Ruth got up from Ike’s side slowly. Her brow furrowed and she cautiously approached me.

  “Tom, you all right?”

  I jerked my hand up, halting her.

  For one terrible instant I thought I would tear the stable apart. The rupture raged in me, but I forced it inward.

  My thoughts strayed to my revolver. If I had it here I could end this torment.

  My heart fluttered. I could touch it with my thoughts. I felt it. I called it. Not in pieces as I had left it, but whole. Primed and ready. My Colt. I felt a warmth at that spot on my hip, like standing near a wood stove with the door open. The pain remained, but that one bit of relief anchored me.

  I reached for what I already knew was there. My Colt rested in its accustomed place, holstered as if it had been with me all along. My revolver. My powder. My lead.

  The pain of the rupture did not relent. I drew slowly, my hand shaking as it had the first time I touched this steel. I acted on instinct alone. I felt the sharp immediacy of the pain. I felt the warmth of the familiar weapon as if it were made to fit my hand.

  My scream boiled over. It finally reached my own ears. Tears streamed down my face. I stood holding the weight of flood and ice, trying to keep it steady.

  The shot cut through the chaos of the stable.

  The bullet penetrated deep into flesh. It entered the Charmer through the ruined light organ Silas had crushed. The damage I did appeared secondary, a smaller explosion marring tissue and sending bile spraying. Still it withdrew.

  The mine cracked and rolled. I stumbled.

  In the stable every head snapped toward me as the boom of my gun echoed off stone and timber. Hands reflexively went to ears.

  “You hurt me, Tom!” Henry’s voice mocked. Then a shrill cackle. Sally.

  I felt lead in my gut. Haze seemed to drift into the room from nowhere. My Colt-wielding arm went limp at my side. I knew the Charmers were back in my head, toying with us all, but the knowledge did nothing to help me resist.

  Seamus was no longer playing.

  He was scrambling in the straw, fiddle in one hand. He must have dropped his bow in the shock of the pistol shot. The voices continued as Seamus scattered straw wildly. Weight plummeted in my gut.

  Pale flesh shot through the breach. The Charmer tossed Silas aside with snake-strike speed. He flew across the room and hit the wall. He did not rise.

  My movements began to feel sluggish. The doors rattled ominously. The Charmer was shaking them back and forth, throwing its great bulk. The hinges were already bending.

  The voices were no longer words, only groans and skrieks. Sally. Henry.

  I saw the same slow movement around the room. Esther squatted slowly in the straw and helped Seamus in his search. Ike was shaking his head back and forth as if to clear water from his ears. Ruth kept her hands clasped tightly to her head.

  My gut filled with lead. The Charmers were slowing our minds. The poison before the swallow.

  The power pressed at me, no longer from behind a barrier.

  I hung my head. This was all wrong. This creature of pale rot. I lifted my gaze. How many had it consumed? I had tried not to dwell on it until now. Eight? A dozen? Just since the collapse of the mine. How many before that? Still it scrabbled for more, always more, playing with our minds before gorging itself. I saw it clearly now.

  Gluttony.

  The Charmer retracted an inch. Hesitated.

  I slowly raised my head and clenched my jaw. The Colt went cold in my hand. Freezing. My arm raised. Ice crept up from the gun and coated my arm, locking it in place. Not the sensation. Substance.

  It burned cold, but it felt right.

  I loosed thunder by my own hand.

  The ball shot forth with the weight of judgment behind it. The creature split down the center. The short length within the doorway froze, cracked, and shattered on the floor. The blunted mass left behind pulled back, leaving the breach empty.

  My vision went black at the edges. The ice evaporated instantly from my arm, forming a mist. My arm flopped limp, entirely numbed. I sank to one knee.

  The stable grew still. I heard wet sliding outside the door.