28. There’s a first time for everything #3
“Yeah,” I warbled. “And I don’t know what to do. It’s like I can’t breathe anymore. I can’t sleep. I can barely eat. And I’m so fucking sad, Gallan. Everything is so bleak, and I can’t see an ounce of light in any damned direction anymore.”
Gallan pulled me to a stop just before the street yielded to an empty lot and a small copse of trees.
He clasped my shoulders and fixed me with a look full of so much conflict, I didn’t stand a chance at holding myself together.
My lips trembled, and I clamped my hand over my face as an ugly noise clawed its way out of my chest.
“Oh, princess.” Gallan folded me right against his chest, smoothing a hand over the back of my head and the other across my back. He rubbed in soft, soothing motions while I wrapped my arms around him and utterly unraveled. “It’s always darkest before the dawn. You know that, right?”
Goddess take me.
When was the last time I’d been hugged? When was the last time I felt that squeeze of reassurance? Or a physical pillar of support? The soothing wrap of arms trying to chase away my woes?
Hugging was one of my favorite things in the realm, and my life in Odessa had been full of proper hugs, not those half-assed single-arm things people liked to pretend were the same.
To Eilir’s credit, they had tried their best with their thin, wooden body and branch-like arms, but it usually just amounted to them wrapping themselves around my arm and squeezing it until it felt like it’d fall off.
Streja might have been the last person to give me a proper hug, and that did little to soothe my state.
But Gallan held steadfast, rubbing my back and keeping me upright until I wasn’t sure there was a tear left in my body and a measure of embarrassment crept up my chest. Here I was, warbling away to a revered member of the Elixia after pulling them out of bed in the wee hours of the morning.
Someone who had arguably seen me at my worst during those days in the dungeon but likely knew little else of me beyond that.
I was well on my way to making sure everyone in Grimmoria thought I was an absolute basket case, one breakdown at a time.
“Thanks, Gallan,” I rasped as I went to break away from him. He wouldn’t let me budge. “It’s alright. You can—”
Gallan squeezed me and hissed, “Quiet.”
I tried to glance up, but couldn’t move an inch.
“I don’t mean to alarm you, love.” Gallan’s voice was still barely a whisper, but it sounded like it was coming through clenched teeth.
“But we’ve got some undesirable company.
Three, by my count. Do not freak out, okay?
I need you to ease up on those little toes, peek over my shoulder, and stay calm. ”
Undesirable company.
I didn’t need to ask for clarification to know we’d drawn the attention of some of the sick shifters I’d been so convinced weren’t real.
As for staying completely calm, there seemed to be a bit of a miscommunication between my head and my heart on that.
The fraught muscle pounded at an uncomfortable rate as I slowly rose onto my toes, still leaning on Gallan for support, and got my first glimpse of one of the creatures.
It was unlike any wolf I had ever seen—more like a distant, mutated relative of the steely gray canines who called the mountains of Odessa home.
These shifters had horrifically arched backs, with segments of vertebrae sticking up through their patchy black fur.
Pallid gray skin filled the gaps, full of weeping sores, and covered most of their heads and muzzles.
White, soulless eyes gazed back at me, a permanently gaped maw dripping yellowed saliva onto the ground.
My stomach churned, and I gripped Gallan a little tighter.
“One more?” he whispered.
“Yeah,” I croaked.
There were four of them surrounding us, and their heaving, crackling breaths drew closer, as did the stench of something unmistakably rotten.
“Listen to me.” Gallan slid his hand off my head and slipped it between us. He pried my fingers off his shirt next and guided them to where I’d fastened the bright iron dagger to my belt. “Arm yourself, princess. Slowly. Got it?”
I gripped the hilt and slid it from the sheath, keeping it close to my body. “Got it.”
“Good. Now, step around me. Back to back.”
My legs ardently did not want to move, but I forced myself the few tight steps around to mold my back to Gallan’s, my head tucked between his shoulder blades.
The diseased shifter behind us was closer, and I could glimpse two of the three others in my periphery. Whining. Drooling. Reeking.
I readied my blade, tucked down against my wrist, but I couldn’t get my hand to stop shaking.
A ring of blue fire kicked up around us, as high as my hips, and I tensed. It was feet away, but the heat still licked at my skin. The wolves let out a series of low whines and yelps, lowering to their haunches.
“Just buying us a second,” Gallan called back. “We aim to kill, okay? You are granting them mercy. And goddess help you if one of them bites you. Incoming!”
The wolf straight ahead lunged through Gallan’s nytefire, the sizzle of its sparse fur be damned. I panicked and flung myself to the side just as the nytefire vanished, narrowly dodging the fetid body, only to end up directly in the path of one of the wolves flanking us.
Its feeble-looking body was dense as fucking stone and sent me tumbling across the ground with a pained curse as my bones rattled. It came down on top of me, crushing the air from my lungs as it snapped its rotting maw in my face, but I sent my dagger into its throat without a moment of hesitation.
A crunch. A squelch.
An agonized wail.
The sick shifter went limp, and I shoved it off me in one excruciating heave, scrambling to my feet as a tremor took hold of my body. Another shifter was dead on its side too, blood pouring from a gaping throat wound, and Gallan was keeping the other two at bay with bursts of nytefire.
But they were pissed.
Their fetid maws snapped, and they let out piercing howls as they lunged for Gallan. His nytefire ate away at their mangy fur and rotting skin, filling the air with the most putrid scent, but they were unbothered by it, sending him back a step with every blast.
As I came up a few feet to Gallan’s side, getting a better grip on my blade, now coated with thick blood, I let out a series of low whistles. The wolves whined, and their attention snapped to me. I whistled again, waving my free hand in the air, and thanked the goddess Gallan was a smart man.
As I drew the attention of the two sick shifters, he worked a slow path around them, coming up behind one with stillness to his movements that left me in awe. I kept whistling, kept waving my arm, until Gallan locked eyes with me and nodded.
He tackled one wolf in a blurred lunge, wrenching its head back and artfully flipping his blade to slice clean across its throat.
As the other let out a guttural, pissed-off roar and turned for Gallan, I charged at it.
Just as he had, I landed on the bony ridge of the wolf’s spine, gripping it by the muzzle before I ran my blade through its neck.
Both wolves landed in a pile, seeping a pool of dark blood around them.
All I could fumble out in a panicked squeak was, “Are you okay?”
Gallan had his hands braced on his knees, his chest heaving as he gulped down air. “Am I okay?” he wheeze-laughed. “Goddess, princess, I am—”
“HELP IS ON THE WAY!”
I spun around to find the lone guard we’d encountered earlier racing down the road like he was the one being chased by a diseased shifter.
“We are the help, you flaccid cock!” Gallan shouted back, and the roar of his voice caught me off guard. “Get your useless fucking arse back to station and send for a Wilds envoy now! Someone needs to claim these men’s bodies and give them an ounce of decency.”
These men.
The rest of Gallan’s words may very well have been nonsense for how I narrowed in on that single concept as my attention slid to the bodies at our feet.
They were no longer wolves.
They were naked men, curled on their sides, horribly emaciated, and riddled with sores. Lifeless, milk-white eyes were wide open. Their throats gaped with wounds.
My hands shook so badly, the dagger slipped from my bloodied grasp.
Commotion had picked up all around me, doors opening and closing, voices and gasps, but it sounded so far away, like I was back beneath the surface of the pool the other night, even though I could see things happening right in front of me.
Curious faces, crowds gathering, so close but so far.
It was so disorienting, a soft touch on my back had me sucking in a violent breath.
“Princess…” came Galen’s cautious drawl. “Are you injured, love? No fight bites? Errant fangs?”
I turned to him and shook my head.
“No,” my voice wasn’t much more than a rasp, and it lowered to a squeak when I glanced between him and my bloodied hands. “Gallan, I…I’ve never killed anyone. An-and I-I don’t kn-know how—”
He clasped my face and smothered me with his palms. “You are going to fill up your lungs with all the air you can manage right now, okay? There you go. Good girl. Very good. Now let it alllllllll out. In once more, but hold it this time.”
I would’ve walked straight into the ocean if it meant Gallan called me a good girl again.
“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been a woman’s first anything,” he chuckled, and all the air came rushing out of my lungs in a pained laugh. “Oh, very good. We like laughter. You feel alive, yeah? No overwhelming urge to tear out my intestines or anything?”
Alive was certainly one way to put how I felt, tremors racking every inch of my body. Still, I nodded.
“Incredible. You were absolutely brilliant, princess.” Gallan tossed me a wry smile and added, “Let me buy you a round at the Wench, then a meal. Maybe in the opposite order. Bryer’ll open for us, I’m sure, and then you and I can have a little chat about what we’re going to do to get that beautiful head of yours in a better place, okay? ”