Read Online The Shuddering by Ania Ahlborn - Free Book Online Page A

She was too freaked out for him to pull a stunt like this. Catching the toe of her boot on something beneath the snow, she pitched forward and crumbled to her knees, her tears coming freely now. “I just want to go home,” she wept. “Jake, I’m cold and I want to go home.”
    Nothing.
    “I hate snowboarding!” she screamed into the pale blue silence. “I’ve never liked it! I’ve only been coming along because you expected me to.” Her words faded into a whisper. She blinked, swiping a gloved hand across her cheek. “Jake?”
    Still nothing.
    She swallowed against the lump in her throat, getting back to her feet. “I’m going down the mountain now,” she told the forest. “I…” Hesitating, she looked around herself again. “I can’t stay here. I’ll send somebody, okay?”
    Silence.
    Then a phlegmy, guttural groan.
    Fear speared her heart as she spun around, looking for the source. It sounded more like a wounded animal than a human, but it had to be Jake.
    The moaning continued, now sounding as if it came from above her, as though daring her to turn her gaze skyward. When she did, her breath caught in her throat.
    A creature loomed overhead, one long, angular arm clinging to a tree a good dozen feet up, while the other wrapped around a body wearing a familiar jacket and pants, the garments spattered with blood. She stumbled backward as its groan shifted from what almost sounded like pain to a full-on growl. The sound vibrated deep within the thing’s throat, its canine teeth glistening with red. And then it looked like its gaping maw almost leered when the creature dropped what it was holding, Jake’s body landing at her feet in a gruesome offering.
    She opened her mouth to scream, her eyes wide as he turned his head to look at her. His face was virtually gone, eaten away, leaving little more than a skull wrapped in tattered, bleeding flesh. She reeled back, her cries stifled by air that simply wouldn’t come. She was suffocating, stumbling backward. Blood bubbled from where his lips used to be, and that was when she caught enough of a breath to scream. He was still alive ; his gaze silently pleading for her to save him. But she couldn’t; she couldn’t . That creature was perched in the branches above him, voyeuristic, waiting to see what Tara would do.
    Her hands flew to her mouth as she backed up, the world spinning the wrong way around, vertigo threatening to lay her out. She turned, trying her damnedest to run despite the depth of the snow. But her steps slowed when Jake tried to cry out behind her—a different sound from the one she had heard before, a wet, smacking gurgle like a kid blowing bubbles through a straw. When she looked over her shoulder she couldn’t see him anymore. Two gaunt figures were perched above him. Their bodies were covered in scars, either from their prey or from each other. One of them shook its head back and forth like a dog, bloodspraying from its mouth to either side. The other shoved the first creature away with its…its hands , like an annoyed little kid. Tara watched them snap their jaws at each other, her eyes wide, horrified. Jake was convulsing beneath them as if overtaken by a violent case of shivers. He was dying, but she was too terrified, too hopped up on adrenaline to stand there.
    She felt like she was going to vomit, gasping for air as she clambered up a tree-dotted slope. The mountain went wavy behind her panicked tears, but she was sure if she kept going she’d find the main ski trail. Those things were distracted, fighting over their kill, and if she could just make it out into the open she’d be okay.
    Her heart thudded in her ears as she threw herself forward, clawing at the embankment, scrambling up the incline as fast as she could. Panic having squelched her sobs, the icy slope of the blue run came into view, offering the hope of safety with its groomed, wide-open expanse. She struggled, trying to pull herself up to its surface from the