7. What the Motherblazin’ Duckballs Am I Lookin’ At?
7. WHAT THE MOTHERBLAZIN’ DUCKBALLS AM I LOOKIN’ AT?
~ ELOWYN ~
“I don’t think the fire’s gonna keep them away,” Reed announced, a panicked edge riding his warning.
Since I’d awoken and discovered myself in the Wilds, Reed had been the calmest of all of us. The stretch of no-man’s-land between Embermere and the clans where he’d mostly raised himself was apparently dangerous in similar ways, just not to the same degree.
To now hear his calm shattering sent my pulse racing—which kicked in the instincts honed from a lifetime of training.
I was injured, sure, but I’d forever be a warrior. And soldiers fought when they were wounded all the time. It was the way of our profession.
“Where are they coming from?” I asked as I peered out into the darkness surrounding the makeshift circle we’d established with our log seats. With the fire at our backs, it was challenging to make out anything beyond movement at the edge of the forest. For that distinct disadvantage, the fire was supposed to keep away the monsters.
Trading my throwing knives for a single dagger, I added, “Air or ground?”
“Ground,” came Xeno’s sharp voice, still coming from above us. As a dragon shifter, he’d stay up in the trees to continue being our eyes. He could always transform and fly down.
Only then, he’d be a full-blown dragon several times the current size of Saffron.
Reed and Roan flanked me, their backs to either of my sides. To get behind us, our attackers, whatever they were, would have to travel past the fire.
Roan gripped his ax and growled. Reed had also opted for a blade instead of his usual bow and arrow.
“Finnian,” I called out without looking behind me. “Protect Saffron and Pru.”
“With my life,” he answered immediately. A fraction of my panic relaxed at the earnestness of his reply.
I narrowed my eyes to make out long, dark limbs slashing and slithering, much like snakes— fucking great —but at waist level, as if the snakes had feet. Whatever they were, they hissed and chittered, hissed and chittered.
When the fire popped, I clenched all over before once more recalling my training. Zako’s smooth lilt drifted through my memory: When you calm your breathing, you calm yourself. Focus on your breathing. Watch your opponent.
I breathed. And I watched, forcing down my revulsion, a niggling terror I couldn’t give in to, as the flickering shadows of the fire illuminated big ... bulbous ... things ... with too many arms crawling toward us. Whatever they were, they hissed and chittered some more, making the hairs on the back of my neck stiffen.
“I think they’re coming up through the ground,” Finnian exclaimed, and I risked a glance downward.
I exhaled deeply when I found nothing crawling up through the dirt at my feet.
“Can they come up next to the fire, ya think?” Roan asked.
No one answered. None of us knew.
Now I had to divide my attention between two planes of vulnerability.
Dark lines like rope, the diameter of my leg, undulated toward us, as if testing the air.
“Fuck no,” I mumbled under my breath as Reed and Roan scanned to the left and right.
Clutching my dagger tightly, I backed up slowly, careful not to trip, and quickly spun to grab a burning log from the edge of the fire. Even its unlit bottom was hot, but I held it like a torch as I resumed my station.
I edged the light forward—and stilled completely, feeling my eyes widen, my pulse jolt in my neck, my breath seize for a moment before I made myself push it through and out.
“What the motherblazin’ fuckballs am I lookin’ at?” Roan asked, but his usual gruffness was absent, replaced by a gentle whisper meant not to provoke ... whatever the dragonfire we were looking at.
“What is it?” Finnian asked, equally quietly, following Roan’s lead.
“Some kinda humongous tentacled beast,” Reed answered.
“More than one,” Xeno called gently from above.
I was staring straight at dozens of eyes that looked directly back at me. Out of sync with each other, they blinked. Some eyelids shuttered vertically, others horizontally. Most of the eyes were small, dark, beady, awful, glistening orbs, but others were as large as a horse’s.
“Dammit,” I muttered under my breath while holding the monster’s unnerving stare and discerning a pattern to the placement of its eyeballs—a spiral that wound across the crown of its head and halfway down its face, ending above a gaping, lipless mouth.
“What is it?” Reed asked as he moved his blade in an arc to either side of us.
“The horses,” I scarcely whispered. “We need to protect them too.”
“I’m not sure that’s going to be possible,” Reed said around a frown.
“We can’t just leave them out here with these things!”
“We might not have a choice,” Roan said.
“There are more coming up from underground,” Finnian shouted.
I jerked to glance downward and behind, waving my torch out in front of us again, this time stretching farther.
Loosely akin to an inky black squid or octopus, with too many legs to count as they all slithered at once, the creature before me yanked its head out of the trajectory of the fire.
It hissed—like something wet sizzling on an open flame.
I speared the torch forward. It slid out of the way faster than should have been possible for something as large as a horse and with so many legs. When I pushed the fire toward its face again, it spat—missing me, but landing on Reed’s outstretched arm.
Reed yelped, frantically wiping the black glob of phlegmy goop on his britches.
“Are you okay?” I asked urgently but kept my attention on the beast, whose eyes were all open at once, glaring at me and the wavering flame I held. Even in the flickering lights, the monster had no color but the sludgy blackness. The flame didn’t reflect upon its surface, though its wetness suggested it would be shiny.
Its flesh ... absorbed the light.
“Don’t let ‘em spit on you,” Reed hollered. “It burns like hell.”
“You’re surrounded,” Xeno called down.
“How many now?” Roan asked.
“Thirteen, maybe fourteen, fifteen.”
“Bollocks. Looks like we’d better get to slicin’ n’ dicin’, then.”
“And if they’ve got more of this nasty stuff inside them…?” Reed asked as he dripped saliva onto the blackening patch on his forearm, trying to deactivate the poison.
“Then we’re screwed,” Roan said while the creature staring me down extended several of its many arms in his direction. Its arm span was longer than any of us were tall.
I lunged forward, managed to poke it with the flame before it could stretch into a concave curve around the arc of my torch. It recoiled, squealing so piercingly my ears hurt.
“Xeno,” I yelled without searching for my friend among the trees. “If it comes to it, you get Saffron outta here. Go straight to Nightguard and don’t look back.”
“I’m not going anywhere without you.”
I was about to remind him he was a dragon protector and that Saffron was the last of his kind, when the whines of the monster I was burning ceased and it struck forward as fast as a viper.
With fire and steel, I defended and attacked, but the monster had too many arms. Its night-colored flesh sizzled and cooked, it wailed and squeaked—and yet it managed to weave a tentacle around my bare throat and suction onto my skin.
I thrashed and hacked at its limbs, but for every one I cut, another seemed to instantly take its place. Spindly barbs latched on to my flesh, and as I tore them out my skin shredded with them.
Pru screamed, Saffron cried, and the men grunted and cursed.
I didn’t have to look away from my attacker—couldn’t, really—to confirm just how gravely surrounded we were.
While Roan slashed at a monster moving in from the left, Reed jumped up onto the log and, even while tentacles latched on to his calves, weaving up his thighs, he pulled back on the string of his bow and released arrow after arrow into the center of the spiral of eyes.
The beast recoiled ... but ultimately absorbed the arrowheads into its gelatinous flesh, sucking them inward where they disappeared from view, the fletchings disconnecting and falling harmlessly to the ground.
Amid a stomach-turning, juicy squelching, Roan grunted, “They got more comin’ at me faster n’ I can hack ‘em off.”
“Pru,” I yelled, but if she responded I didn’t hear her over the battering rhythm of warfare—the insistent pounding of my heart.
A tree creaked, branches snapping above, and I guessed Xeno must be shifting. Moments later, a shattering roar sliced through the constant hissing and chittering, and the whistling of arcing weapons.
More branches broke, and a monster squealed, telling me Xeno’s dragon had pounced. Surrounded by brush and woods as we were, he wouldn’t be able to spray his fire without setting the forest ablaze. But he had wicked teeth, claws, and a barbed tail, and he was brutally fast and fiercely strong.
“Their spit is slow-delay ... poison,” Reed mumbled too slowly, too softly.
With an arm extended to ward off the beasts, Roan and I whirled in time to help lower him to the ground—too close to the crackling fire and to the ever-slinking tentacles.
“Xeno,” I bellowed. “Don’t bite them. Poison.”
Immediately, I heard a dragon hacking, telling me the warning arrived too late.
“Roan,” I said. “Let’s pull back tighter. Protect Reed, Pru, and Saffron.”
Roan glanced at me, nodded, and swung his ax, cutting right through a beast’s mouth, slicing through its face. The monster faltered, sticking out a stumpy, purple tongue as if on reflex. A rich, violet ichor dripped down its body, before the top half of it, including all its eyes and many of its arms, slid off its bottom half—and continued inching toward us.
“Holy Etherlands, that so ain’t right,” Roan mumbled, but he was already helping me drag Reed around the fire to huddle next to Pru, who double-fisted torches while Finnian took a flying leap off a log and slammed his sword into the top of a monster’s head.
All at once, every one of its many eyes shut and its legs drooped, seemingly rendering it instantly lifeless.
“Straight through the top of the head is the kill shot,” Finnian cried over the hissing, chittering, and slithering-snaking that crunched across the forest floor.
I was in the process of driving my torch into the nearest beast’s gaping mouth when Finnian bent over the now-dead creature to remove his sword.
As soon as he tapped his blade, the monster burst like overripe fruit, spraying its guts, gore, and poison in all directions. Heavy gunk rained down, painting my patches of bare skin—everyone’s flesh. Some got in my mouth and clung to my eyelashes.
Even as we wiped and smeared the goop across our faces, Roan and I met eyes. Reed was at our feet, shaking violently but otherwise unable to move.
“We’ve maybe got three minutes before we’re all good as rocks,” Roan cautioned above the loud sputtering of the fire. It, too, was doused in innards.
Pitch-black, slimy mounds slithered toward us from as far as I could see. Moonlight glimmered across them, the entire forest around us undulating like the ocean.
Dragon-Xeno lumbered toward me from behind Finnian, stomping on heads, crunching arms with his clawed feet, his wings batting to lend him stability. Even across the distance, I could make out the desperation in his eyes, the fading firelight flickering in their depths.
The dragon wobbled, and flew a few feet upward before careening toward a mass of writhing, anticipating beasts, their teethless mouths draped open and waiting, their tentacles oscillating as if in morbid greeting.
The forest floor itself appeared to be ever reaching for us, overwhelming us.
A black arm snagged Roan and yanked his feet out from under him. His face slammed into the ground, where another tentacle was breaking the surface of dirt, slinking through.
I blinked and found my eyelids unreasonably heavy, even considering they were coated in creepy monster.
The toxin is affecting me. That realization pumped a fresh wave of alertness into my system, but it wouldn’t last long—certainly not long enough.
Blade and dwindling torch aloft, I spun in place, taking stock. Reed was on the ground. Once I was unable to ward off the beasts, they’d take him. Roan was kicking at one with his free leg, but his ax had been taken from him. Dark, sludgy poison coated Xeno’s wings, and tentacles wrapped all four of his legs. Finnian was fighting off several reaching limbs at once. And Pru, with Saffron still on her back, huddled so close to the fire that it might soon burn the dragonling.
We’d all been doused in fast-acting poison. Once it claimed us, we’d never walk away from here.
I could defend my friends for however many minutes of movement I had left—the horses were probably dead already—or I could bet on the longest shot of them all ... and the only meaningful one we had left to us.
My eyelids were drooping, and I felt my heartbeat slow, sluggish when it had been racing not even a minute before.
There was no time to devise a plan, to consider pros, cons, or possibilities, not even to wonder if my idea were the result of the poison already influencing my thoughts.
The land’s magic had let me down more times than it had come through for me, and I didn’t even know if the Sorumbra was part of the mirror world, or a space between it so savage that no rules applied.
I knew nothing other than it was the only chance, however remote, I had of saving us.
Sweat, tears, and monster insides dripping down my face, I sank to the ground and found the land beneath the squishy, writhing mess, swallowing my disgust and ignoring the fresh blood scenting the air—that was from one of us—and spoke to the earth:
“I am daughter to Odelia ... uh, shit.” I’d forgotten her full name and title. “I’m ... daughter to Odelia, who is daughter to King Erasmus and the true, rightful queen of these fae lands.” I had no idea whether or not that was true.
“The blood of the elves from the Golden Forest in Faerie was passed down through my mother to me, which makes me , and not Queen Talisa Zafira Tatiana of Embermere, the rightful, uh...” Shit, what the hell did that maybe make me? Or was I wasting my last breaths to speak that horrid queen’s name instead of telling the people here that I probably loved them?
“Carrier of the royal magic, lassie,” Roan rumbled from beneath a pile of sucking, slurping beasts.
“True wielder of the magic of the mirror world,” Finnian supplied, before gasping in pain.
I didn’t seek any of them out, blinking drowsily as I pushed all my remaining focus into stringing words together. “I’m the carrier of the ... royal ... magic. True wielder ... of the ... um, power of the ... mirror place ... world.”
Against my will, my eyelids drew shut. Without my sight to rely on, the sounds accentuated, and that insidious hissing-chittering infiltrated every other one of my senses. A slurping suction, then a ripping and tearing. A licking.
Oh by sunshine, oh dragonfire .
Every part of me wanted to scream, to vent my outrage and disgust.
My tongue was thick and unwieldy as I flicked it around my mouth, searching for the muscle memory of how to work it.
“Command it.” Pru’s voice arrived from somewhere very far away. “Mistress,” it snapped. “Now you must command it.”
“Icommandyouuuuu,” I mumbled as if I’d just lost to Xeno in a drinking contest, “to protec’ me n’ my friendsssssss.”
My head jerked downward. I was falling.
But before I could land face first, I slurred, “And Finnian n’ horses tooooo.”
Next thing I knew, my cheek was pressed against something slimy that shuddered ... and light brightened behind my closed eyes.