Darkest Before Dawn (A Guardian's Diary Book 1)(10)

I rounded the corner of the cabin, and stopped cold. Blood! Danger! I was torn, because I knew this family. I’d gone to school with Karen, and she’d just had a baby. I could hear whimpered cries from inside, but the amount of blood that was dried and caked on the porch told me someone had died…gruesomely.

I strained my reserve and my spine, which was bent and twisted and wanted to run away, and pulled out one of my knives. I crept slowly up to the door, and listened. The whimpering noises were faint and other than that, the house was silent. I turned and peeked my head inside, only to gag as the smell of death hung putrid in the stale air.

There were a few things you got used to in this new world. The smell of death however, wasn’t one of them. Seeing children left parentless with no one to defend them was another and if I was right, Sarah was alive. Or there was a cougar in here hunting me. The second option seemed dismal as the house’s set-up was pretty open which left no place for a cougar to hide.

I braced myself for what I knew I would find, and walked inside. There in the corner was Joseph, dead. He was torn to shreds, as if a wild animal had done it. I walked over to the blinds and pulled them, and blinked back tears at the destruction I found. They’d fought hard, but in the end, whatever had attacked had won.

From the gnawing marks, and the way their bodies were mutilated, I was willing to guess it had been an animal, and not humans. Karen was in the doorway to the only bedroom in the cabin. Her body lay torn and ripped into pieces as Joseph’s was. I fought the tears, and won. I scanned the room, looking for the smallest of Danvers. But I couldn’t see little Sarah anywhere.

I stepped over the grisly remains and looked around the room. The whimpering had stopped, but it was more than possible that the baby was among the remains. She was a tiny little thing. I sent a silent prayer and turned to leave when I heard the faint whimper again.

I swung back around and looked through the room. I walked over the window and tossed it open for more light. There were several items for the baby, which meant Joseph had gone on a run before they were attacked. I searched around, but still couldn’t find any sign of her. I walked to the bed and pulled off the bedding, but she wasn’t there. I stepped around the bed and as my foot slid on something white and oozing, I felt the loose floorboard.

They wouldn’t have put a baby in a floor, right? If I’d been Karen, I’d have put her anywhere I thought she’d survive…I stepped back, and leaned down to remove the board. There in the small space was Sarah, her big blue baby eyes looking up even as she squinted from the light.

I closed my eyes in relief as pressure left my chest as I expelled the breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Hi, Sweetling Sarah, you’ve had a tough day, haven’t you?” I cooed softly. I’d often heard her mother calling her Sweetling, so I figured I’d try to comfort her with it. Babies liked familiar things…right? I wasn’t baby friendly, what the hell was I supposed to do now?

I put my hand down to check her breathing, but as I did, she wrapped her tiny little hand around my finger. I carefully pulled her out, and held her against me. Wow, she reeked. “Poor thing, how long have you been in there?” I waited, right up until I realized I was expecting this little being to talk back. I looked around the room until I found a sheet, and walked to the bed. “Don’t move,” I told the tiny, mewling infant, as if she was going to get off the bed and run away.

I collected a few things and placed them in my pack, like formula, and diapers. I didn’t see any bottles, well, correction. I saw one that hadn’t been gnawed at. Obviously the bigger animals that had killed the family had come and gone, and then little ones arrived after and had decided to tear everything else apart. Poor little Sarah fell asleep. She must have been fussing all day and conked out from exhaustion. I brought out the knife again and quickly shredded the sheet as I made a makeshift baby sling. I arranged her so I could easily get to the AR-15 if I had to.



Mmm, I’d seen women wearing them in the front, but if I was attacked, she’d be in front of the vest…the back it is! I reached down and secured the tiny being in the cloth and then brought her up as I tied the sling around my chest. She wasn’t crying, but that was probably because she was relieved I wasn’t some long toothed animal.

I grabbed the pack and walked to the front door as I mentally assessed the room again. Teeth marks; check. The bloody paw marks looked canine, and that pissed me off since they’d just tried to eat me yesterday. I looked to the corner and smiled. I could tell that some of the prints were old, and some were new. Which meant, the wolves had come back to snack on the corpses after the kill.

I knew Joseph had been trapping animals for fresh meat, and I also knew he’d worked at the fish and tackle shop, which doubled as a hunting shop as well. I found the unused traps in the closet and made fast work of setting them around the bigger pieces of the bodies. Wolves by nature were smart animals, cautious if they could smell humans. Obviously these ones were hungry enough to ignore their instincts.

I walked out of the cabin, and stopped cold. My heart dropped to my feet, and my breath froze in my throat. I stepped back towards the house, but it was filled with traps. In front of me were about ten or more men, all looking at me strangely. I had my mask still in place, so I guess that only made sense. I mean, I had a skull face, and had a ripped up sheet wrapped around me; even I’d pause to do a double take.

“And what ye be doing in there?” the leader asked. He wore no shirt but he had it hanging from his pants, and his torso was covered in tribal tattoos. His hair was black, and his eyes, even from this distance, popped with a deep emerald shade. The men behind him all held guns, which of course were pointed at me.

I took a step closer, and another one. Please, Sarah, not a peep!

I remained silent, as I worked my way closer in the direction of the path. If I could just make it to the path, I could run to the ATV. I was fast, but I wasn’t fast enough to dodge bullets, and I couldn’t turn and run because I had a sleeping infant on my back attached to me, and my pack weighed heavily on my arm stuffed with all of the supplies I had taken for her.

“I wouldna do that,” the hulking leader said in what sounded like a Scottish brogue, as he sniffed the air. At about the same exact time his eyes landed on me, a painful scream ripped from inside the house. I turned in horror as a male came limping out, white and pale as he collapsed to the ground with a bear trap clamped wickedly around his foot and ankle.

“Liam!” The taller of the men shouted.

He was bleeding profusely. He’d passed out from the shock and pain. I had a choice to make, since I knew how to save him.

“What the fuck did ye do?” the leader asked angrily as he stepped closer.

“Don’t move,” I said and watched as shock registered on his face. “I can help him, or he can bleed out—” the baby wailed and the entire forest froze. I waited to see their response, before I spoke over the screaming infant. “He’ll bleed out unless you allow me to help him. I was in nursing school, and also working at the hospital in Newport as a surgical technician. If I help him, you let me go, deal?”

“What happened inside that house, lass?” He asked instead of answering me.

“Animals ate Sarah’s family—she was hidden—and I need to get her to my people so I can examine her.”

“Deal, save him,” he growled.

I turned and slowly walked back up the steps, and then kneeled down to where the black haired male was just opening his eyes. “I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me.”

He nodded; his face remained strained with pain. How he was managing to not scream was beyond me. The metal teeth of the trap were buried in his flesh at his ankle. I ripped off my sweatshirt sleeve to be able to stop the bleeding. It wasn’t until I tried to remove the trap that I felt a flash of panic.



“I need help,” I said turning to eye the leader. I hated that I needed it, but without help, I couldn’t manage it. It was an old trap, rusty and one that had to be held open to release the animal, in this case, this man’s foot.

The leader stepped forward, and for a brief moment, I wanted to dart into the forest to keep Sarah safe, and yes, myself too.

“Easy, lass,” he said as he moved to kneel beside me. The wind was rustling through the leaves as the sun began to slowly dip into the sunset. It was also blowing the stench of death to us from the open window, and blowing it out the front door, too. “What the—”

“The couple in there, or at least I think it was only one couple. Can’t be sure, Lach, they are in bloody pieces. Looks like rogue wolves tore them apart,” the pale man said in a similar brogue to the leaders, his teeth chattering from the pain.

“That’s nae good,” Lach said as he manhandled the trap and held it open. I looked at his hands, and up at his face. He wasn’t straining in the least, and this trap was exerting at least a hundred pounds of pressure.

“A little further,” I said as I continued to watch his face. He was lighter skinned than my mystery man was, and his eyes were a deep shade of emerald. His muscles, which should have been straining, were the same sleek, muscular build. He had a tribal tattoo that went down his left flank, and dipped lower into his pants.