13. Magnolia
13
MAGNOLIA
G arrek had said, “I’ll get him,” with the weary sort of certainty that came hard-won from a man who’d apparently had to do things like this often. It gave me the unfortunately false idea that he’d be able to catch Killian quickly.
He didn’t.
Killian, it turned out, could be one hell of a wily little bean. He bounced and bopped and changed direction so fast it made me nearly dizzy to even try to keep up with him. Garrek was fast, and strong, and the hard muscles in those legs kept him going long after I would have collapsed into a puddle of human goo.
But he never quite got there. At one point, when Garrek nearly had him, Killian managed to jump right over Garrek’s reaching arms and tail, drawing his legs up against his body and smacking Garrek on the top of his head with the end of his tail for good measure as he sailed by before landing in a puff of dust and taking off again .
“I’m too old for this,” Garrek panted, skidding to a stop and instantly reversing course.
“Oh, come on!” I cheered merrily from the sidelines, glad that Garrek was now the one epically failing instead of me. “You sound like my grandpa! You can do it, Garrek!”
“No, you can’t! And you are too old!” Killian screeched. The kid didn’t even sound like he was out of breath. “You’re so old you already smell like you’re dead. You should use some of Magnolia’s nice soap.”
“Killian!” I cried, trying to hold back laughter. “Don’t talk to Garrek that way!”
“I already have some of her soap,” Garrek snapped, his claws a hair’s breadth from making contact with Killian’s tail. Killian snapped it back against his bare booty and kept on running.
“Use it, then!” Killian called, with the relentless, hilarious meanness only a child could be capable of. “You’re one hundred cycles old but you smell like you’re one thousand.”
“This coming from the child I have to move mountains to convince to bathe!” Garrek exclaimed. He stopped running and placed his hands upon his knees, breathing heavily as Killian ran literal circles around him. Garrek caught my eyes, no doubt noted the laughter in them, frowned, and told me, “I’m thirty-six cycles. Not one hundred.”
I wasn’t precisely certain how cycles measured against years, but if I had to compare Garrek to a human man, I’d probably place him in the mid-to-late-thirties range .
“Noted,” I replied, nodding encouragingly at him and forcing my expression into something I hoped looked kind, maybe even beatific, instead of a giddy Oh God I am about to pee my pants from laughing smile.
“You’re not thirty-six!” Killian scoffed. “You are one hundred and twenty, twenty-twenty thousand, eight billion, and four. You’d probably be dead by now if you didn’t have to stay alive to take care of me!”
“Is that… Is that how Zabrians say numbers?” I asked Garrek as he straightened up, chest working like bellows.
“No,” he seethed. “Clearly, Killian was pulled from the Zabrian Academy and sent here before he could finish the early-cycle mathematics portion.” Then, more loudly, he called to Killian, “We are trying to take care of you right now!”
The we hit me kind of funny. Made my tummy go tight and my cheeks warm.
Garrek started running again, his words broken up by his heaving breaths. “So… stop… running… take your… medicine… and… letusdoit !” The last words came out in a half-desperate, half triumphant rush as his claws closed around Killian’s tail.
Not all the way, though. Killian darted his tail away, snapped it up to bop Garrek on the nose, and continued hauling ass with frankly admirable levels of energy.
Energy that Garrek no longer possessed.
“This isn’t working,” he growled, stopping to hook his hands into his belt and glaring so hard I was half-worried the man might break his own eyebrows .
I barely, barely stopped myself from saying, “No shit.” Instead, after taking a reflective moment and trying to be mindful of Garrek’s mood, I asked brightly, “Do you have any other ideas?”
He rubbed at his jaw, casting his gaze across the ground until it landed on my towel. It was in a heap on the ground, having come loose the moment Killian wiggled out of my hold and started his crazy fucking sprint around the camp.
Garrek picked it up.
“I’ll use this,” he said. He shook the towel in front of himself. If he was trying to demonstrate his strategy to me, it wasn’t working. All it did was make him look like a bright-eyed, blue-skinned matador.
“You’re going to… be a bull fighter?” I finally asked, giving up on trying to guess. Garrek looked at me like I’d just said something insane.
“Fight one of my bulls?” He gave me a withering, are-you-serious? sort of stare. “I prefer keeping my guts inside my body.”
“OK. Enlighten me, then,” I said, gesturing at the towel he still held.
“I’m going to use it-” he swished it around experimentally, “-like a net.”
“Like a net?” I asked in disbelief. “After that child just jumped clean over your arms like a cat spooked by a cucumber?”
“I don’t understand a single thing you just said,” Garrek grumped, clutching at his crappy towel-net defensively. “If you’re ready to give me any useful suggestions instead of saying nonsense words like cucumboner, I’m listening.”
“That isn’t even what I said!” I cried, face flaming. Cucumboner? Fucking really? “Who’s saying nonsense words now!”
I paused, rubbing my free hand against the bridge of my nose and sighing.
Cucumboner. I can’t with this man.
“Don’t you have anything useful for catching, like, runaway bracku?” I asked, raising my eyes to him again. “Can’t you lasso him or something?”
As soon as I said, “lasso him,” Killian froze.
And then, he changed tactics with the speed and adaptability that would impress even the most seasoned starfighter or shuttle pilot.
He leaped off the ground and started climbing the nearest tree.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Garrek growled, his voice so deep and cutting with authority that I felt my nipples harden in response.
No. It’s just cold and I haven’t warmed up from my dip in the creek yet!
Killian paid that bossy baritone no mind. He scrabbled up the rough, bark-lined trunk of the tree. When he reached the first big branch, he easily hoisted himself up onto it and kept on going.
“Climb as high as you want, Killian,” Garrek barked from below. “My tail may not be long enough to lasso you from down here. But my rope is.”
“I’m not so sure the lasso thing is a good idea now that he’s, er, left the ground,” I said uneasily. Killian was already at least five metres up and getting higher every second. “Won’t he fall?”
“Yes,” Garrek replied instantly. “He will.”
“Garrek!” I gasped. No matter how much stronger Zabrians were than humans, a fall from that height would do some major damage to Killian, if not kill him.
“He’ll fall,” Garrek repeated with disappointed impatience, as if he couldn’t even believe that I was pressing him on this, “but it won’t matter.”
“How can that not matter?”
“Because,” he said slowly, his whitened gaze boring into mine, “I’ll be there to catch him.”
“Oh,” I said, a little breath of sound, barely a word at all.
“Killian,” Garrek roared in warning, “I’m getting my rope. If you are not descending by the time I’ve tied the loop, I’m going to haul you back here like a runaway bracku. Your choice.”
Killian’s choice was, apparently, to ignore the warning and keep on climbing.
The tree Killian had chosen was a big one, and almost entirely bare of the dark leaves or needles or fruit that some of the other trees had. It was a pale, knobby trunk with large but sparse branches. Which meant my view of Killian was unimpeded.
It also meant my view of something else now moving against the trunk of the tree was unimpeded.
“Um, Garrek? What’s that?” I asked, squinting at the tree and trying to make sense of what I saw. It looked like the bark on the trunk of the tree was moving. Killian had already gone past that spot and had paused for breath on the branch above it.
“What?” Garrek asked distractedly. I glanced over to find him working an impressive length of rope between his claws, looking as psychotic with dark purpose as an Old-Earth hangman who really, really loved his job.
“That thing on the tree.”
Garrek didn’t seem so distracted now. His head snapped up and he instantly rose from where he’d been crouching, closing the distance between us with ground-swallowing strides.
“What thing?” he asked, so sharply it made my heart jump into my throat.
“I don’t know! It looks like the bark of the tree is peeling off or something.” I pointed to the spot. “Is that normal for trees here?”
I was starting to worry that the bark sloughing off meant the tree was too old or dead to hold up Killian’s weight near the top.
Garrek’s eyes followed the pointing line of my arm.
His eyes blazed suddenly brighter, and his breath rushed out of him, guttural and jagged.
And then he was sprinting. Exhaustion forgotten, rope forgotten.
“Killian!” Garrek’s voice was desperate thunder in the camp.
It finally got Killian’s attention. The boy looked questioningly down at Garrek, who was now scaling the side of the tree with a determined, fierce-limbed speed I wouldn’t have thought him capable of after busting his ass for so long trying to capture Killian.
“What?” Killian called, oblivious to whatever the hell was happening on the trunk so near to him.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.
It wasn’t bark peeling away from the tree, I realized with dawning horror. It was some sort of animal or insect, craggy and brown to camouflage with the trunk. The main, flat portion of its body was easily as wide as Garrek’s back, and it rose, spider-like, on ten long and spindly legs.
Now I was running, too, following Garrek. Not that I was capable of even climbing to the first branch on this towering tree. I could only stand there and watch.
Garrek was nearly halfway to Killian. Killian still hadn’t noticed the tree bark tarantula. He only saw Garrek pursuing him.
And he started to climb higher.
The creature, lured by the scent of the defiant child who’d just disturbed its slumber, began to follow, its sickening legs picking easily over the bark and branches.
“No, Killian!” I screamed. Garrek swore and started climbing faster. As his hands and feet scrabbled for purchase, his tail smashed down into his boot and pulled out his knife.
He hurled the knife, and it was like he’d hurled my heart right along with it.
My lungs shrivelled when the knife glanced off the shell-like back of the creature. It didn’t even slow it down.
It did, however, send the knife hurtling terrifyingly back towards Garrek’s head. With his hands currently busy making sure he didn’t plummet to his death, all he could do was try to catch the falling blade with his tail.
Which he did, thank God. But not without paying a pretty price. Blood poured from his tail as it slid up the knife to grasp the handle instead of the sharp edge.
Fear, unlike anything I’d ever known, moved through me like poison.
I’d been a nurse. I’d been responsible for people who were in the most dire circumstances of their lives. I’d watched patients slip away even as I did everything I could to save them.
And I’d never before felt quite like this. Never before felt this blinding, mind-smothering, all-consuming terror.
Terror that told me if something happened to either one of them…
I would not fucking be OK.
And something had already happened to one of them. Garrek was bleeding, even as he climbed ever higher in pursuit of Killian and the monster that stalked him.
“Killian!” I tried to call his name, but it came out as nothing more than a strangled squeak. I sucked in a big breath and tried again. “Killian! There’s something on the tree! You need to get down!”
Finally, Killian paused long enough to take stock of the scene below. His eyes scanned my taut face, then went to Garrek. I knew the moment he saw that Garrek was injured, because his whole body jolted with a sick sort of awareness.
Then, his eyes went to the trunk.
He saw the thing.
And in a moment that stole my breath from my chest, a moment I knew I’d never forget, he turned his body from the tree.
And jumped.
In his terrified haste, he hadn’t aimed himself at a lower branch. He’d simply hurled himself into empty air.
There was nothing there to catch him.
He fell, and I felt myself falling, too. Like I was in one of those terrible dreams that wouldn’t end until you hit the ground, startling awake the moment your dream-self died.
But it wasn’t a dream, and I watched Killian fall, and it was real.
I started forward as if to catch him, even though I knew I couldn’t, even though I knew it would probably just kill us both.
From his precarious position, Garrek saw it all.
Without even a moment’s hesitation, his tail dropped the knife, relinquishing his only line of defense. And then that tail snapped, broken and bleeding, cracking like a whip through the air.
When it hooked around Killian’s ribs, halting that horrible plunge, I nearly collapsed.
Garrek hissed in pain as Killian’s full weight stretched his torn flesh. But he didn’t flinch and he didn’t fucking let go. With a colossal show of strength, he hauled Killian against his body, then backed Killian up onto the closest branch near his feet so that he was now between the monster and the child.
Killian scrambled in a half-crouch towards the end of the branch, moving as far from the trunk of the tree as possible. His hands hooked around the solid wood of it while his tail looped itself in desperate coils around the hook on the back of Garrek’s belt.
I couldn’t tell where the creature’s eyes were, but it obviously realized its prey was no longer above it, but below. It didn’t even have to turn itself around. It just immediately started skittering down the tree as easily as it had gone forwards and up. My skin crawled as it hastened towards the branch where Killian and Garrek were now trapped.
Through undulations of fear and relief, Garrek’s words suddenly filtered, spoken in a gruffly harried tone.
“You have to jump again,” he told Killian, “but onto a blasted branch this time! Don’t just fling yourself out there! There’s a branch directly below. You can make it.”
“You have to jump, too!” Killian keened. His tail tightened on Garrek’s belt hook.
“I have to stay here and make sure it doesn’t follow. You go.”
Killian didn’t move. The spider got closer.
Garrek sounded like his last, raw nerve had just been pulled out of his body with a pair of rusty pliers when he spoke next.
“Killian, so help me Empire, if you do not listen to me now, for once in your cursed life, then I will push you off this branch myself.”
He would really do it, too. Even now, the hand that wasn’t plastered to the tree to stabilize himself was busy yanking Killian’s tail free from his belt.
“I don’t want to leave you!” Killian said in a broken little voice that damn near broke my heart.
“You have to,” Garrek replied, undoing the last knot of Killian’s tail on his hook. “If I don’t stay here and take care of this, it will only follow us down. I won’t have it touching you. Or Magnolia.”
There was a pointedness in the way he said my name, as if mentioning me would mean more to Killian than his own safety.
And maybe Garrek was right. Because Killian finally listened. He lowered himself off the branch, hanging on by his fingers. His tail stretched, seeking purchase against the next branch. Once there, he moved quickly, half-climbing, half-jumping down the rest of the way. As soon as his feet hit the ground, he was running for me. We collided, and I wrapped him in my arms, barely holding back a sob.
I wanted to let my legs go boneless, just fall to the ground and hold him, but he was swatting and yanking at me.
“We have to go, Magnolia,” he said in a rush. “You can’t stay here. It’s not safe.”
He began to push me. He was much stronger than I’d realized. I stumbled backwards, then nearly fell when my boot landed on something hard.
The handle of Garrek’s knife.
“Oh my God. Killian, stop, wait.” I snatched it from the ground, my stomach lurching when my fingers made contact with the stickiness of blood that coated it.
How many times had I gotten blood all over me at work? It had never made me nauseous like this.
But this was Garrek’s blood.
And that was different.
“Can we get this to him somehow?” I asked, my eyes clawing their way back up to where Garrek was within arm’s reach of the creature. The creature seemed to have paused in place. Maybe it was sizing Garrek up and didn’t like its chances as much as it had against the much smaller Killian. Garrek was very still, apart from the blood dripping from his tail.
At least, he was still until he made a fist and punched the spider thing right in the middle of its… face?
The creature reacted instantly, giving a chittering howl that set my teeth on edge. It rose up high on its legs, revealing a set of red pincer-like claws beneath its body. The claws stretched and clamped, seizing upon Garrek’s vest.
In my desperation, I nearly hurled the knife. I even cocked my arm to do it.
“Give it to me!”
I hesitated at the words, turning to find Killian’s jaw set with determination .
“Garrek told you to stay safe and out of the way!” I argued.
“I’m not going to fight with it,” Killian explained quickly, his words sliding into each other. “I’m going to throw it.”
“Garrek already tried that!”
“Not at the idra. Back to Garrek.”
“Are you sure? What if you throw it too high? Or you hit Garrek by accident? What if-”
Killian’s eyes flashed. His chest puffed up.
“I used to wait for Garrek to fall asleep and then I’d steal his knife – that knife – and practise throwing it at tuhla fruits on top of fenceposts. I did this every night.”
“Um. Does Garrek know about this?”
“Of course not,” Killian said impatiently. “I just said I waited for him to fall asleep first.”
The sound of tearing leather made both of us jump. The creature was ripping Garrek’s vest from his body. For some unfathomable reason, Garrek appeared to be trying to pull it back.
“Do it,” I told Killian. I slammed the blood-soaked handle into his palm.
Killian raised the knife, took a slow, strengthening breath, and focused ahead. He suddenly looked much older, his gaze steady, his body poised to throw.
It was so quick that I nearly missed it. If I had blinked, I would have.
For the tiniest of moments, Killian’s eyes flickered with a warm, rich colour other than white.
That electric white returned.
And then he threw .
Killian shouted Garrek’s name at the exact same moment that I screamed, “Knife!”
Garrek paused in his leather tug-o’-war just long enough to twist and raise his arm.
Blessed fucking be. He caught the knife.
By the handle this time, too.
An ecstatic cheer ripped from my throat. I threw my arms around Killian, jumping for joy as Garrek hefted the knife. He brought it down hard and fast against the pincers, and the creature recoiled.
The next movements were a blur, punctuated by the occasional hiss from the creature or grunt from Garrek. His knife flashed in the moonlight. His tail thrashed, his back and legs straining as he stabbed.
I yelped when something heavy fell to the ground.
It wasn’t Garrek. It was the body of the idra.
Garrek followed soon-after, his boots hitting the dust. He hoisted the dead, spindly-legged thing onto his back and stalked into the trees. A few minutes later, he was back, spiderless, with his knife put away in his boot.
When he cleared the trees, I didn’t run to him the way I’d run to Killian.
I moved towards him slowly, as if in a trance, as if there was nowhere else for my shaking legs to take me except to him. No matter how long it took to get there.
He stopped walking when he saw me approach. Something raw, maybe even pain, contorted his features when his white eyes met mine. His breath snagged, and he watched me without moving.
But when I finally stopped before him, it was Garrek who reached for me, not the other way around. The sob I’d held back for Killian broke out of me when Garrek’s arms clamped like iron around my back. He didn’t say anything and neither did I. He just held me as I shook, emptying myself through my tears.
When I finally stilled, I thought for the briefest of moments that I felt his mouth pressed against the top of my head.
And then he pulled away.
“Sorry,” he said, grimacing. “I got blood all over your pretty sleep clothes.”
I glanced down at myself, finding streaks of black contrasting with the pink silk.
“Oh, God, don’t worry about that,” I murmured, more than a little stunned that he’d used the word pretty to describe anything at all, least of all something to do with me. Not that I was all woe is me about my own looks. Because I wasn’t. I’d been told my whole life I was beautiful, by my parents and grandparents and patients and friends. I loved my face and my body, my eyes and my skin and my hair. It didn’t really matter that I was pretty, it wasn’t what was most important about me, but I’d always believed I was anyway.
And Garrek did, too. At least, he thought my pyjamas were.
I poked at the drying blood on my jammies, trying to figure out how Garrek had gotten blood there when his bleeding tail was behind him. I narrowed my eyes at him in the dark, then gasped when I saw the deep gash on his chest, oozing with black blood .
“Garrek!” I cried. “When the hell did that happen?!”
“What? Oh, this?” He looked down and probed the wound with the claw of his index finger. “It happened when I was trying to get my vest back.”
“Yeah, about that,” I replied, “what the heck was that all about? Why were you fighting for your freaking life over a vest, Garrek?! You should have let the spider-”
“The idra.”
“Whatever! You should have let the idra just eat it and then used that moment of distraction to figure out your next move. Or maybe even try to escape!”
“If I’d climbed down after Killian, it would have simply followed. It could have reached you. Or it could have gotten among the bracku and caused a stampede. None of those were acceptable outcomes.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you spent more time trying to save a piece of fabric than yourself,” I retorted. Anger was rising rapidly inside me now, and it surprised me.
But there was no denying it. I thought about Garrek putting himself in harm’s way to yank back a piece of clothing and I was suddenly, absolutely, planet-shakingly furious.
“Relax,” Garrek muttered, which was probably the worst possible thing he could have said to me in that moment. “I saved what I wanted.”
He stopped poking at his wound and raised his other hand, unfurling his fingers to reveal a torn square of leather that had been hidden in his fist.
“That’s it?” I croaked in disbelief. “You were playing tug-o’-war with a lethal predator to save that ? This tiny little scrap ?”
I stabbed my finger accusingly at Garrek’s hand as I spoke. I’d meant to only point at his palm, but I ended up poking him pretty hard. It jostled his hand, and the leather fell to the ground.
It fell faster and heavier than it should have.
I looked down to see that it wasn’t just a random scrap but the shredded remnants of the vest’s pocket. And from that ruined pocket tumbled a little pink half-moon.
Soap. It was soap.
The one I’d made for him.
“Like I said,” Garrek grunted, bending to retrieve it. He snatched up the soap and left the leather on the ground. “I saved what I wanted.”
The anger left me all at once. I didn’t want to confront what replaced it.
Luckily, I didn’t have to. Garrek’s gaze darkened back to purple and then shifted somewhere behind me. He walked around me, leaving me to stare after him.
“Well, Killian.” He approached his convict-ward and raised his hand. Killian tensed and scrunched his eyes shut, as if expecting pain. But when Garrek’s hand landed on the top of Killian’s head, the touch was gentle.
“Compared to all that,” Garrek said, a weary sort of irony colouring his voice, “the ear drops should be easy.”