Part 8
Raphael came back to life slowly, draining one cup of tea and demanding another, too sluggish to recognize Michelangelo's humor when he placed a huge thermos in front of him instead. Hot enough to make the steel surface painful, the tea made Raphael grimace but he drank it in fast gulps.
Beside him, Donatello had turned and curled around the hearth stones. He'd warmed up enough to start shivering, his hands shaking so much that Raphael sighed and handed him the rest of his thermos.
Between them, his shell resting against the fire place and easily holding his own tea, Leonardo sat with his head down, eyes shut, forcing himself to breathe evenly. The air around them was hot, uncomfortably so, and he began to sit straight, shoulders back, as he warmed enough to relax.
Raphael noticed and gave his shoulder a light punch. "You got better quick."
"Kinda surrounded," Leonardo said, nudging Donatello who only squirmed closer.
"You froze real quick, too."
Leonardo sighed, narrowing his eyes, but after a moment, he nodded once and accepted the unsaid criticism. Raphael was a tank who could absorb more damage. Leonardo, a head shorter and much lighter, simply couldn't take the snow as well.
"I'll be careful," Leonardo said.
"You'll be dead!" Raphael grinned, then coughed raggedly. "Dammit..."
"Karma," Michelangelo said, smacking him with a full thermos before giving it to him. "Don't even joke about that."
"Just a Star Wars quote," Leonardo said. "'Sides, he's right. He lasted, what, fifteen minutes out there? I was barely outside for five."
"I was fighting," Raphael shrugged. "'Course I dunno what I was fighting..."
"Yeah, what the hell was that?" Donatello said over his shoulder. "And don't say a deer."
"...it left tracks like one," Leonardo said. He paused, then groaned to himself and started to sit up, bolting down his tea. "Dammit. Those deer tracks we saw before."
"You saw it before?" Michelangelo leaned in close and poked him. "And you didn't tell us?"
"'Cause we thought it was a damn deer," Leonardo said, batting away his accusing finger. "I don't even know what it is yet."
He started to stand, then grunted as his right knee buckled. His whole body still felt locked with every muscle wanting to sink back down against the hearth.
"...quit trying to make me feel bad," Michelangelo muttered, holding his hand out. "I'm still pissed at you."
"For not being psychic?" Leonardo said, but he took the help, leaning on his little brother. "I know I saw a pencil in the kitchen. Could you grab it?"
"Where?" Michelangelo asked, turning so that Leonardo could sit back on the couch. "It's kind of a mess in there."
Donatello looked up from where he wriggled closer to Raphael, his eyes barely visible under the blanket.
"It's on the calendar."
Leonardo sank down into the couch, wincing as feeling rushed painfully back into his body. Feeling like a lead statue, he had to push himself to reach the old diary against the arm rest. Flipping the pages, he found several blank sheets in the back that had no lines or marks.
"Hang on," Michelangelo called from the kitchen. "Water's almost ready for the next round of tea."
"If I don't warm up soon," Raphael muttered, "I'm gonna drown."
But he still took the next offered cup, beginning to uncurl himself from the hearth and sit down properly on the edge. Donatello muttered something and sat back against Raphael's legs, yawning as he took his own mug.
"Don't let us fall asleep," Donatello said. "I don't think anything bad'll happen now, but we don't usually get that cold, either."
Leaving the pencil aside for the moment, Leonardo took the next hot tea that Michelangelo brought, holding the steaming cup in his hand for several seconds. Slowly his hands warmed, letting him curl his fingers properly again. Only after he finished it did he take up the pencil.
"It was really tall," Leonardo said, staring at the blank page. "At least twice Raph's size."
"But it was kinda bent over," Raphael said. "It didn't stand up so good, like its legs weren't built for that."
"Dog legs," Donatello added. "Or horse legs."
"The tracks looked like deer prints," Leonardo said, "so I'm going with that."
The sketch was nothing but short, straight lines at first-long back, crooked legs like a spidery thin deer. Then the arms, grasping things with...
"Did it have hands?" he wondered softly. "I don't remember."
Raphael snorted. "It grabbed me with something."
Leonardo drew normal human hands, frowned and erased them. Drew their own three fingered-hands, then erased those, too. Then drew four long spikes off of the arm stump and looked critically at the blurry mess.
"The blur feels better than the hands," he muttered.
"That is getting weird looking," Michelangelo said over his shoulder. "What's its head look like?"
"Long," Raphael said quickly. "Real long. Like someone took a human face and stretched it."
"It looked human?" Donatello asked. "I couldn't see it long enough to tell."
"Not human," Raphael said, shaking his head once. "Like, it didn't get stretched down. It got stretched out. Like you hooked a human's eye sockets and mouth and pulled, and it went with it."
"What, really?" Michelangelo asked. "Gross."
"Not like there was blood or guts or nothing," Raphael said. "It was smooth white."
"The whole body was white, wasn't it?" Leonardo said.
"No wonder we had such a hard time picking it out against the trees," Donatello said. "All those white birch and whatever else is out there. It was like picking out bones against branches."
Leonardo didn't reply, adding rounded edges and creating very thin bones on the lines he'd already drawn. Then hooves big enough to match the hands. He started on a rough triangle for the face, extremely long and pointed.
"Were there things on its head?" he asked.
"Kinda?" Raphael said. "I dunno. There was something above it, but I couldn't make it out. By the time I turned over, its head was in the trees."
"So it looked like the trees around it?" Leonardo asked.
Raphael shrugged.
Not sure of what to add, Leonardo stuck a few haphazard lines like branches around its head. He leaned back, staring critically at what he'd drawn. Then turned it around to show his brothers.
"Something's missing," he said.
Donatello and Raphael stared at it for a moment, tilting their heads. With a deep breath, Raphael bent and crawled toward him, resting against the couch as he took a better look.
"Put something on its front," Raphael said. He tapped the drawing where the chest would be. "I stabbed my sai into it, so there's gotta be something there."
"Huh." Leonardo lay the image flat and sketched a circle, then added several lines and shadded beneath them "I guess it would have ribs, so that's gotta be muscle over a heart."
"And it had teeth," Raphael said. "Big ones."
"Pointed?" Leonardo asked.
"Naw, like rabbit teeth, I guess. Real long, though."
Leonardo added the small chisel shapes to the very end of the pointed face, redefining the dark splotches where the imagined the eyes would be. With a single line defining its mouth, the face became an abnormally long mouth.
"No," he whispered. "It felt bigger than that."
"Yeah," Raphael said. "It was like it was knocking on the trees around it."
"There was something on its back," Donatello said. He turned on his hands and knees and crept onto the futons, curling up with a blanket. "Something big, but it was hard to see. Like a bunch of wheel spokes."
Blinking in confusion, Leonardo and Raphael both looked at him, then at each other. When Raphael shrugged, Leonardo could only add a handful of lines radiating out of the creature's back.
"That's the best I can do," Leonardo said, showing it to Raphael again. "At least without seeing it again."
"Kinda hope we don't," Raphael said.
Raphael took the picture, lifting it up over his head as if he were on the ground look up at it. The black eyes stared back, and he grimaced.
"Close enough," he said, tossing it back on the couch.
Michelangelo picked it up, opening the book back to the drawing. He stared at it for a long moment, looking at his brothers to make sure that they were certain this was what they'd fought.
"So," he said too casually, "when do we drive out?"
Leonardo closed his eyes. His own words came back to him-that if anything strange happened here, they would leave. He couldn't justify putting his brothers through that kind of hell again, not if they knew it was coming. It might not have been a ghost, but something unearthly threatening their home was exactly what he'd promised they'd flee from. There was just one problem.
"And go where?" Donatello muttered.
"I don't know," Michelangelo said. "I don't care. Anywhere but here."
"Mikey-"
"Don't 'Mikey' me!"
Michelangelo glared at his brother, clenching the book so tight that the pages creaked.
"I am not doing that again," Michelangelo said. "Those things were in our home. We all nearly died and we couldn't even fight them."
He pointed at the windows now turning dark, lit more by the fire inside than the setting sun.
"You really wanna go back in there and fight it?" he demanded. "When just one round with it put all of you down like this? I mean whatever it is, it snuck up on Raph and you, Donny, you didn't even hear a thing."
Both of them winced. Impossible to argue against, especially when their little brother's eyes were wide and scared. He often turned the puppy dog eyes on his siblings, who hated it for how effective it was, even when he was just whining. His pleading was almost impossible to bear.
"We can figure out a place later," Michelangelo said, turning and heading to the kitchen door. "It's still light. We can pack up, drive out-there's tons of towns we could try."
"The roads are like ice," Donatello tried. "Even the cops are going like ten miles an hour with their sirens going."
Michelangelo didn't answer, first looking through the window to make sure nothing was outside, then opening the door. He walked out onto the kitchen steps-
-and stopped.
Like running into a wall, all of his movement stopped. His shoulders started to drop, and the book in his hands slid through his fingers to the wooden floor.
"Mikey?" Raphael stood, the only one of them who could, and rushed to his side. He scrabbled against his belt for sai that weren't there. "Mikey, what is it?"
He looked out over the snow.
Deer tracks.
Coming from the tree line up to the faint marks Donatello's deep footprints, all that was left of their trudge back from the fight. Then to the kitchen door, then to the van, parked between the door and the forest.
Raphael followed the tracks over to the wall and saw how they lined up with the windows, how there were more hoof prints in the snow just outside each pane of fragile glass. He'd never been so glad for the damn frilly curtains.
"Well..." Michelangelo breathed, staring ahead at nothing. "Guess we ain't driving out."
His hollow tone made Raphael take another look at the van.
One of the tires had been slashed to shreds.
TBC...