Taken by Nightfall Read online

  Taken by Nightfall

  Book 1 of The Midnight Valley Saga

  Sierra Storm

  Dark Star Press is an imprint of Automaton Industries.

  Dark Star Press and Automaton Industries logo are official labels of Automaton Industries.

  Taken By Nightfall

  Copyright © 2019 by Sierra Storm. All Rights Reserved.

  Published by Dark Star Press.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of very brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  About The Author

  Dark Star Press

  Chapter 1

  Nine years ago, a woman named Jen Lowell was found dead on her back porch, murdered. This happened here, in our quaint little town of Midnight Valley in California, where the trees grow tall and strong and the moon shines high over the mountains at night, and no one ever found the killer. Jen had showed no sign of a struggle. She had bite marks originally thought to belong to a dog, but no dog would have left the corpse so completely untouched otherwise. I’ve seen the grave, a smooth granite stone with a lei draped around it and flowers left by her friends and family.

  I never knew Jen. I’ve heard that she liked dogs and hiking and that she was taking distance courses in graphic design. The thing that gets me about her death is that it happened only three blocks away from my home and that she died on her twentieth birthday. I guess there comes a point in your late teens where young adulthood isn’t far away anymore. Lately she keeps haunting my brain. I wonder what she planned to do with her life, whether she saw her death coming, and whether she’d noticed how beautiful the night was before her attack. It had been a beautiful night. My family had just moved to town when the murder happened. The moon was full, and the fireflies were out in force.

  “Hey Vi, are you going to touch that pizza?”

  I snap my attention to my friend Tristan Carter, half a living room away and sprawled out on the couch. I don’t know how his mom allowed him to order six pizzas in addition to my own pepperoni. I guess teen guys eat a lot. Tristan has lately, but he has the muscle to compensate. He’s a quarterback now for the Midnight Valley Nighthawks, and this is his third year on the team. Tristan is the complete package now, not at all resembling the chubby-faced boy who doodled me a cardboard heart on Valentine’s day in fourth grade.

  Tristan lifts a dramatic slice of six cheese high in the air and nibbles on the tip. “Pizzas aren’t table decorations, you know,” he says. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Jen Lowell,” I say.

  “Again? It’s a cold case. The Rodriguez case is much more interesting. One boy missing, the others in the family drained of blood,” he says. “Want me to get out the folder?”

  “That’s not necessary,” I say, finally taking another bite of the pizza.

  Tristan understands my interest in Jen Lowell. Solving these cases has grown into an obsession with him lately. I looked inside his locker yesterday and saw that he had the names of everyone who’s disappeared in this town over the past hundred and fifty years. Statistically, I guess Midnight Valley is a death trap. “Then don’t worry about it,” he says. “When I was out sick last week, I did some research on my own. Guess what? All three Midnight Valley funeral homes are involved. There’s an embalmer who was caught taking blood samples. Why would she do something like that?”

  “We don’t need to get involved,” I say, training my eyes briefly on the TV screen before us. This was supposed to be a movie night for me and Tristan. I don’t even remember the name of the old B horror we started watching earlier, but it’s in black and white and all about a vampire apocalypse. There’s an old man on the screen now, Dr. Ivan Horowitz. He was the professor who started the whole mess. Currently he’s standing in his parlor and puffing on a cigar while a woman begs him for mercy. Dr. Horowitz is a cold, calculating person.

  I turn my attention slowly back to Tristan. He got sick last week, really sick. Even now I see the dark circles under his eyes and the feverish paleness to him. At least he has an appetite.

  In the next room over, Tristan’s mom talks into her tablet at a virtual conference. I forget what exactly she does—I think she’s a remote secretary for a large international travel corporation, an airline or something. Tristan looks nothing like her. His mom is shorter than I am with clipped dark hair displaying an obvious hint of hispanic blood somewhere back there.

  “You know the director died halfway into the making of this movie,” says Tristan. “I’m not kidding. The chandelier in the parlor fell on him and some of the others, so you’ll notice things shift a lot and get more surreal for the second half. I think the next director didn’t take it as seriously.”

  I appreciate the commentary. B horror films are not what many people would think I like—in public, I'm always polished and modest, having a penchant for black lace and plain golden hoop earrings. The good Christian girl with only the slightest hint of a dark side. But now I slide to the edge of the couch, nodding appreciatively as another wave of vampires claw their way out of the caskets that held them in place. "Seriously, where do they come up with this stuff?" I ask.

  "Wait until you see the sequel," says Tristan. "The vampires build a time machine and go back to the start of the movie. I am dead serious."

  I start to chuckle, but then Tristan buckles forward, gasping.

  “Tristan?”

  He holds a hand up. "Sorry. I think I ate too much pizza there."

  "Yeah, you don't look good."

  The color is completely drained from his face, which is scrunched in pain and confusion. I rise from my seat and run to his side.

  “No,” he says, pushing me away with surprising force. “I’m fine. I just need some air.” He snatches the remote and pauses the movie right as a cloak-draped vampire sticks his fangs into a screaming woman’s neck.

  "Seriously, are you?" I ask.

  "Yeah, just full. Too much pizza. And it's getting late. You should be heading back."

  I instinctively pull out my phone from my pocket and activate it. It's 8:36. I hold the screen up to him with raised eyebrows.

  "You know what I mean," says Tristan.

  "No, I don't," I insist.

  His eyes narrow defensively. I'm beginning to wonder if there really is something wrong, something that I should know. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen,” he says.

  “It’s barely dark. I live three houses down,” I say.

  “Well, I’m getting some air. Sit here if you want and finish the movie.” He accents every word as he speaks as if he were giving a code of some sort to an eavesdropping spy.

  “Fine, I’ll join you,” I say.

  Tristan shrugs and moves towards the door. His stomach growls loudly enough for me to hear. I follow him onto the back porch of his house, where the wooden planks feel warm from the day’s heat under my feet. There’s a breeze tonight, and a full moon that looks wide on the horizon over the tops of the trees. There’s no secret to the name of the town Midnight Valley. On the other side are the mountains, a close drive away. People like to camp over there sometimes, and the only things you can hear at night out there are the crickets. Right here where we are is the edge of the California woodlands, hidden and remote and secr
etive. When my family first moved here, I remember thinking that this place resembled the forests in a fairy tale. We have fireflies here—I can see them in the trees out there, blinking and shining. There is also a line of primrose bushes around Tristan’s house, currently open to full bloom the way they only do around dusk.

  “Are you still sick?” I ask, tentative for his answer.

  Tristan tenses, his biceps growing momentarily in the light. Again I’m reminded of how jacked he’s gotten lately, not even weakening much over the period of his sickness. He doesn’t look at me but instead stares over the woods. “It’s not the kind of thing you ever recover from,” he says.

  I don’t speak. He doesn’t seem sick, at least not that sick.

  “You know how I’ve been looking into things lately,” he says. “Like the disappearances. The murders. The cold cases like Jen Lowell. A month ago I found out that all three of the local funeral homes are connected to a group.”

  “Yeah, you said that,” I say. I already know what group he’s going to talk about. No one ever pays much attention to the forest cult in Midnight Valley. They’re a weird bunch, primitive hippies I think with a strong Native American influence. But they stay away from us, and they don’t seem to mean any harm.

  Tristan doesn’t look at me, but he continues. "You remember the game on Tuesday? When we played against Phillips?"

  I nod. I attend all of Tristan's games. When I first learned that he got on the team a few years ago, I tried out for the cheerleading squad, but for all the smiles and pleasantries I'd earned I was rejected after the first round. So I settled for cold bleachers instead.

  "I got bruised up near the end there."

  "I saw it," I said. He had been tackled pretty badly. That was right before he got sick, too.

  "I spoke with them after the game. . . . No. I can't tell you this." He turns his head away from me in a shy manner.

  "Why not?" I pry. My seventeen years of little-sisterhood have primed me well for getting information out of those who want to be quiet. "I'm not going to let you go until you tell me."

  Tristan blinks and looks at me fully for the first time since we stepped outside. I notice again how sallow he appears in the moonlight, how hollow his eyes are and how his skin looks tightened around his skull.

  I raise my eyebrows again.

  "Oh, okay. Fine," says Tristan. "You know the murder rate for this area? The disappearances?"

  “Who’s behind them?” I ask.

  “The worst part of it was always how it happened,” he says. “The bite marks, the skin torn from the body. Like an animal had done them, but an animal as intelligent as we are.”

  I feel the blood leaving my head as I watched Tristan speak. "Who’s doing it?" I repeat.

  "More of a what, actually." Tristan plops down on the porch, crossing his legs and again looking out into the woods. I realize that the backyard of his house is facing where the forest cult camps out.

  "All right then," I say. "What?"

  “That movie we were watching tonight was a pretty good clue.”

  I imagine the hokey creatures from the TV ripping through the earth to sink their teeth into anything they can find. “Vampires?” I ask skeptically. “Or. . . someone trying to be a vampire?”

  “The first guess was more accurate,” says Tristan. “I think. But they’re not vampires. Vampires don’t eat flesh.”

  I roll my eyes in the dark.

  “It starts with a W.”

  “Werewolves?” I ask. It’s silly, but I could almost believe in the existence of werewolves. I don’t believe in them in any romantic or humanized sense, but I’ve heard the stories on the news. Canine is the word used. Canine bite marks on Jen Lowell. Canine styled injuries.

  “Close enough,” says Tristan. “But worse. We’re looking at wendigos.”

  Chapter 2

  “Wendigos?” I echo, not even sure of the meaning of the word.

  “It happened a week or two ago, when I was at the store,” says Tristan. “One of them came in to shop.”

  “One of. . . ?”

  “The forest cult people. She was only about our age, and seemed nice enough,” he said.

  “What did she do?” I ask. “What did she want?”

  “Nothing exciting, but I didn’t realize they used real money,” says Tristan. He stops talking for a moment then, looking sick even in the dark. “She looked human. But she wasn’t.” He runs a hand through his thick mane of hair. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. It doesn’t make sense to me, but I’m sure I read up on it.”

  “But what happened? How do you know what they are?”

  “Where are we?”

  “Midnight Valley,” I say.

  “California,” says Tristan. “This region has a long history of the wendigo mythos. Like seeing bigfoot in Canada or the Loch Ness Monster in—in Loch Ness. These people hide away from everyone. If they work, they work at a funeral home or do something with dead bodies. They have no sense of right or wrong; they’re completely soulless. So I met with this girl a few times and she confirmed me, and now it’s too late.”

  I scan him visually for bite marks, but don’t see any, which doesn’t mean much under the old jersey he’s wearing. “Did she attack you?”

  “She didn’t bite or anything, but she did something,” he says. “After the game I felt it. Like everything in my head was swimming and I couldn’t get warm and, well, I got sick. And I think she turned me.”

  Tristan’s believability at the moment is highly subjective. He still looks sick as anything, and I know he’s been obsessing over this crime thing more than I have. “Have you told your mom about this?” I ask.

  “What? No,” he snaps at me. “I can’t tell her. She’d think I’m nuts. But she wanted me to see a doctor last week, so I convinced her it wasn’t that bad.”

  I scan the darkness as if looking for signs of the cult out there.

  “That whole time, I thought I had the upper hand. Turns out she was sizing me up, stalking me,” he continues without answering my question. “Wendigos are predators. There’s nothing glamorous about them, nothing heroic. They don’t need to eat much, but what they do eat comes from people. I think she took something from me. Saliva or a lock of hair. . .”

  “So they don’t eat people,” I say.

  “I’m still learning how it works,” he says. “I visited their clearing in the woods, and they confirmed everything. She told me she did it.”

  “Did what? If they don’t eat people or bite, how do you know they’re wendigos at all?”

  “I can’t stop eating,” he says, ignoring my question.

  “You haven’t been able to stop eating in three years.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” he says. “I’m serious. I’ve eaten almost eight thousand calories today, and I’m still hungry.”

  I shake my head. “You’re sick. Getting better. It’s normal to eat extra.”

  Suddenly Vince turns and grabs my arms, squeezing me tightly. “Don’t try to reason with me, Vi,” he says. “I’ve already made my decision. I’ve joined their group.”

  Our eyes meet. His are so gray and somber that I almost feel like they're swallowing me whole. I try to swim past the emotion to determine exactly what he's saying. Then I laugh. I hardly know where it comes from.

  “I’m serious,” says Tristan.

  “Serious? About joining a group of kooks out there in the sacred wilderness? We don’t know anything about these people,” I say. “Look, they’re religious, right? They probably have—rituals, and things. Like human sacrifice. What if they ask you to convert?”

  “They’re not religious,” he says. “There’s no. . . sacrifice or any of that.”

  “You couldn’t last a day out there.”

  He’s breathing more heavily now, heaving in his frustration.

  “It’s a phase,” I say. “Like the chess club freshman year. Or that TV show we tried to make in middle school.”
r />   “It’s not a phase; I’ve already committed.”

  I shake my head back and forth. “Yeah, yeah, I don’t know. Maybe you need to stay in bed for another day and think it out. Or tell your mom about it if I don’t beat you to her first.”

  But Tristan doesn't lighten. "I'm sorry, Vi. I thought at first that I could keep things normal. I had a bad fever for a couple days after it happened. That's why I didn't go to school. I thought it was just a coincidence. Even yesterday and today I thought I could keep things normal, keep the cravings under control."

  "But what is it that you want? Blood? Skin?" I ask. “Ripping flesh from bone? Joining a murder cult out there just to—to prove something?”

  “I’m not proving anything,” says Tristan. “I don’t want to prove anything. I don’t care about any of that. I’ve only wanted to learn, Violet. And now that I know. . . now that their hunger is mine. . . I can’t turn back.”

  “Maybe you should just take a break,” I say.

  “Another one?”

  “Well, what can they do, force you off the team?”

  “I’m going to try to keep things normal,” he says. “But this isn’t a phase. I almost didn’t say anything to you tonight at all, and maybe I shouldn’t have. That’s right. I’m sick. You’re free to go home now if you want.”

  “So you’re cutting me off?” I’ve never seen him like this. I hardly know how to read him.

  “If that’s what I need to do,” he says. He turns and opens the door re-entering his house.

  I don't try to keep him this time. The moment the door clicks behind him I turn and march resolutely to my home.

  My family’s house is smaller than the home Tristan shares with his parents, even though four of us live there—usually live there. My brother Jordan is a sophomore in college studying economics, and this weekend my parents are out visiting him. I’m lucky they left me here alone. I have my spare key and my mom’s sedan I can drive if I need anything. And no one minds if I plop down on my dad’s old armchair with my laptop and type in a series of search terms. First I need to confirm I know how to spell it: wendigo. The first few sites were about wendigos on TV and in popular fiction, but as I scrolled down through the options I eventually found a site on real-life supernatural beings—ghosts, Bigfoot. . . and wendigos are on the list. I click and wait a moment before the information loads.