The Harbeast Part I
James Eleazar MacNamara was already having a bad morning, and that was before he found all of the blood and guts.
Jem, as people called him, deeply regretted accepting that farmer's offer of a silver mark in exchange for watching the old man’s barn while he was away; it seemed like easy money in the daytime when he agreed. Of course, if Jem had known it was a full moon, he might have thought better of the deal. He was friendly with the dilapidated farm’s occupants: one ancient farmer, and his even more ancient mother. When Jem first came across the place while wandering about a couple of years ago, he felt bad for the old man trying to care for an elderly parent, in addition to his animals and crops.
For the last six months or so, Jem had been working odd jobs around the farm to help the man out in exchange for food and a place to sleep When the farmer offered actual currency for one of those jobs, Jem jumped at the opportunity. To his detriment, he now realized. The old man said he was concerned thieves or drifters might try to steal his livestock while he was gone. Jem thought the farmer was just being paranoid, but agreed. The farmer was finally taking his mother to live with other family who were better equipped to care for her. Jem quite honestly had no clue how the woman had lived so long – she had to be at least 90 – but he suspected that she lived out of spite. That, or something in the well perhaps.
Around dusk, Jem situated himself in the hay loft, listening to the sounds of various farm animals bedding down for the night and ignoring that of the mice in the animal feed that the barn cats didn’t catch. The weather had been so dry lately, he didn’t dare bring a candle or even a closed lantern into the barn. The stars shone brightly through some missing shingles in the roof. As he peered up at them, Jem decided it was time to move on from the farmer’s homestead; he didn’t normally stay in a place longer than a couple of months. The payout from this job would carrying him for a little while in one of the nearby villages. The young man sipping from a stolen bottle of burning liquor was too naive to be concerned about the shadows in the treeline.
Jem was too drunk and deep in sleep to hear the latch on the barn door grind as the catch was released or the hinges squeak as it was pushed up. He was awoken from his stupor by the distressed cries of the donkey below the loft. Grabbing the knife he brought with him, Jem scanned the stalls from his vantage point overhead. In the darkness below, a slight movement at the other end of the barn caught his blurry attention. Something turned in the donkey’s stall, fixing Jem with the pale, reflective gaze of four predatory eyes. Definitely not a thief. At least, not a human one.
Startled, Jem knocked the half-empty liquor bottle off the edge of the loft. The piercing shatter of glass in turn startled the thing below, which bolted out of the barn with a rustle of fur and scraping of claws on the dirt floor. Jem’s mind was entirely too pickled to register the rapid string of events. He sat back down in the hay, supposing himself to have dreamed up the eyes in the dark. Astonishingly, Jem fell back asleep within ten minutes of the strange occurrence.
The next morning, Jem woke with a pounding headache and was assaulted by an offensive odor hanging in the air. He tried to blink away his dizziness as he dressed, but his head only cleared once he recognized the smell: blood. Jem shot down the loft ladder and froze when he heard the crunch of glass under his boot. His gaze slid to the donkey’s stall where he saw what was left of the poor creature. Its neck was slashed and its side was torn open, the contents unceremoniously strewn across the floor. The animal's eyes were glassy and staring up at nothing. The entire stall was spattered with drying blood and buzzing with flies. Jem stumbled out of the barn and spilled his guts just outside the door. Gagging, he peered back inside with a sobered mind, reeling from the revelation that last night hadn’t been a dream.
After a few steadying breaths, Jem decided that the donkey carcass had sat there all night, so it could sit there an hour or so longer. He led the other animals out to the fields, completing his regular morning tasks through sheer force of routine and habit. After all, the other animals still needed to be fed and watered; Jem was feeling rather parched himself. Once there were no more mindless chores to keep him occupied, Jem returned to the barn after much trepidation.
With a clear head and an empty stomach, Jem braved the inside of the barn. This time around, the bloody tracks leading out of the building caught his attention. Given the dust and dirt, the tracks were barely visible by the time they reached the barn door. Jem examined one of the clearer prints, noting the distinct claw marks around the pads. A wolf, perhaps? He turned to the carcass, which he could no longer ignore in the stall. It would have to be dragged out and burned soon so that the other animals wouldn’t catch any diseases from the insects or rodents scavenging it.
Initially recalling vaguely the shattering bottle from last night, Jem assumed that he had startled the beast mid-meal. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Tying a kerchief over his mouth and nose, Jem began poking and prodding the carcass with a trowel and a grimace. It appeared to be missing most of its internal organs, but nothing else. Jem had no way of knowing for sure, but he thought it seemed intentional. He loaded the carcass into a wheelbarrow and brought it out to the waste heap behind the barn. There wasn’t enough wood on the pile to build a pyre. Jem released a long-suffering sigh and grabbed an axe.
Jem went to work hacking apart a dead log when he heard a strange noise like a wounded animal not far ahead of him. His knuckles tightened around the axe handle as he cautiously moved toward the sound. He nearly jumped out of his skin when he found the source.
It was a wolf, but not quite.
The thing was facing away from him, caught by the hind leg in a hunter’s jaw snare. It was massive. Two sets of ears grew from its head, as well as two sets of eyes, which were grass green with slit pupils like a cat. It twisted around to bare its fangs at Jem, pulling as far away from the young man as it could get. Blood stained its wicked teeth and the gray fur around its ankle where the jaw snare dug in. It growled and snarled as Jem approached. The creature was cornered, wounded, and frightened. And though frightened himself, Jem pitied the animal.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” Jem told the not-wolf. “I’ll release you if you’ll allow me to.”
The creature ceased growling as though it understood the young man. It crouched, rigid and distrusting. Jem slowly set the axe down off to the side, not breaking eye contact with the creature. The not-wolf’s four grass-green eyes bore into Jem’s two mismatched brown and green ones. With as much calm as he could muster, Jem moved a step closer, then two, then he was within an arm’s length of the creature. His focus shifted down to the snare.
It was a cruel device. Jem had seen snares like it before, hanging up on the wall of his father’s tool shed and his hunting cabin. He hated the very sight of it. As a small boy, Jem had witnessed firsthand what the heavy iron teeth of one of these snares could do to a grown man’s leg. He was genuinely surprised that the creature’s leg wasn’t snapped in half. For the first time in his life, Jem was glad his father had forced him to learn how to set and dismantle all hunting kinds of hunting traps, including jaw snares. The creature was as still as stone as Jem set to work releasing the pin and spring mechanism. Most of it was rusted over; it looked like it had sat in the forest for years. It was a terrible wonder that the mechanism still sprung and was as sturdy as ever. He laid the chain over his knee as he worked, not wanting to pry the stake out of the ground lest the creature try to flee with the snare still on its leg. Without any tools to work the pin, Jem struggled to open the snare.
“It will not make a difference.”
Jem nearly jumped out of his skin and dropped the chain with a metallic clatter. The not-wolf spoke in a deep, rumbling voice that sounded like it should come from the earth itself.
The beast laid down with a defeated snarl. “The iron has already tainted my blood, and come nightfall, it will have consumed me.”
For a long moment, Jem stood very still. “The trap is not poisoned,” he said at last, feeling a touch crazy, “although, it may still ruin your leg.”
The not-wolf barked a rough laugh, his sides heaving. “Iron itself is poison to my kind, son of Man, and there is no antidote. A mortal living so close to Faerie ought to know that.”
“Still, you shouldn’t be left to die in this way,” argued Jem, reaching for the snare again, adding pointedly, “even if you did kill the donkey.”
“All creatures must eat, son of Man.” The beast snarled softly as Jem jostled his injured leg. “And I am restricted to hunting the livestock of mortals; it is my geas to Faerie.”
“What’s that mean?” Jem asked absentmindedly as he pried at the pin.
“All Fae creatures are subject to bargains with Faerie,” the not-wolf explained. “It’s how we retain our magic. Millennia ago, my kind – grrrr watch it – were hardly different than the dumb beasts found in this Realm. My ancestors took a deal with Faerie to gain power in exchange that we guard the creatures of the Fae Realm. The conditions of our geas dictate that we may not harm another child of Faerie, so we hunt the creatures of the Mortal Realm. Some may only hunt the wild beasts, and some such as myself may only hunt livestock. Others still may only hunt the children of Man.”
“That doesn’t sound like a very satisfying existence,” Jem commented, glaring at the stubborn snare. He was frustratingly close to releasing the mechanism. If he could just get it to budge a little further and... click. The pin finally released the spring. The beast’s four ears twitched at the sound, but he otherwise did not make a move.
