Chapter 8 #3
Pulling my hand away, I struggled to make out what I was looking at. Everything was all mixed up as the world continued to spin. “I’m bleeding?” I mumbled, as I caught that tell tale smudge of red. Wiggling my fingers confirmed the color was indeed on my hands, coming from my head. “Shit.”
“Not shit. Blood.” The softly mumbled words a distance away made me jump, then jerk my gaze in their direction.
“No shit,” I mumbled dazedly.
“Yes. No shit— blood.”
For some reason, and I’ll be damned if I could puzzle it out, perhaps I’ve truly cracked, I laughed. Then laughed again, and again, until I sounded as crazy as this moment felt.
I could feel hot, wet, sticky blood trickling down my face then. All my laughter died at the beastman’s approach, the sound of his footsteps rushing near startling me.
A shadow of something came down over me and I ducked and rolled.
Gathering Cy’s blanket around me, I made to stand, got two steps and stumbled, fell, got up, tried again, fell, and repeated the process over and over, as if the Yeti being behind me wasn’t spluttering and muttering in rapid fire growl-speak.
The Tree boys really had been speaking, I just didn’t understand.
Gray alien tech induced baldness and language forgetfulness?
Or did I never speak the Lo denaii lingo to begin with?
Dad’s notes claimed I’d known it and understood it well.
I once knew how to talk like that and actually understood what they were saying. The idea was mind boggling.
I’m a Yeti person.
No. No way. My parents and their friends were lunatics.
Hazel eyes panning back to the pink eyed Yeti man in the flesh should be argument enough for them but it couldn’t be. It just couldn’t!
My life was not a lie.
More choked, sputtering mutters from my kidnapper interrupting my thoughts snapped me out of my funk long enough to snap, “What?!”
“No mean to,” he whispered.
He sounded so much like Elm had that day back at my house. Haunted. Guilt-ridden.
A small laugh left me. It was soft, semihysterical, and bordering on a sob.
“No. Shh. Shhh. No cry. Vurhg no mean to. Vurhg sorry. Vurhg fix,” the beastman hushed me hurriedly. Was he afraid someone was going to overhear? All the effing way out here? He sounded like a little kid worried I’d tell Mom.
It was laughable. That’s exactly what I did. I burst out into loud, weird, laughs mixed with intermittent sobs.
I was one hot mess. A bleeding, cold one.
He continued to hush me, crooning and moving closer.
“Vurhg fix. No cry, female. Vurhg no mean to hurt. Vurhg fix. Go to village, healer fix. Shh. Shh.”
There was more but I was lost, only making out bits here and there.
When he tried to press something to my head that smelled strange, I fought at first. He had to pin me down to accomplish whatever it was he was trying to slop onto my head. In the end he prevailed.
Worn out from fighting him over tending to my head wound, I had to concede it was probably a good thing he’d insisted on it as I grew woozy and shaky.
Wrapping Cy’s blanket better around me, leaving it loose so I didn’t kick up a fuss, he picked me up, carting me around princess style, and even went back for that stupid pillowcase full of his plunders, and then took off to who the hell knew where, because I certainly didn’t, at a run.
Even with all he was carrying, he was barely winded as he rushed on, wind whipping over my exposed skin.
All the while, he kept crooning to me that all would be okay.
No, it wouldn’t. Nothing was okay.
My parents were liars. I lived a lie. The whole damn thing.
They’d been the reason Elm and Cy and Birch were forced to keep away. All this time. Consoling me as they had, excusing it all away to try and make me feel better thinking it was all my fault, my parents had been the cause. My mother was a literal alien, my father from another dimension.
Who the hell am I? What does that even make me?
And yet, even as I slumped dizzily in an Abominable beastman’s arms, the part of me that demanded sanity and sensibility screamed that it was all lies, none of this was real.
It sure as shit felt real for a nightmare.
Wherever he was taking me to wasn’t close by. Even running as he was, we’d gone some distance before I’d blearily demanded to know how much farther. My head was killing me, I felt oddly tired and the bastard refused to let me sleep, nausea was touch and go, and the breeze over my head was chilling.
With a grunt, a few grumbles, and no short amount of expletives, I convinced him to stop long enough to try and drag Cy’s blanket over my head. Giving one side a hard yank, the end slapped Vurhg, as he called himself, in the face.
Vurhg blinked once, then harder. With a scowl, he grabbed up a corner of my blanket and brought it directly to his nose. He looked like he was sucking the thing up into his nostrils instead of sniffing it, like it was hard for him to smell it.
Maybe it really was hard for him to smell anything, what with the way his nose looked badly broken and poorly fixed. It was crooked in several places, thick, and wide.
“No lie, you have- You have mate? Smell funny but Lo denaii,” he grumbled. More blinking down at me.
Was it just my imagination or was he looking paler than usual?
“Yeah,” I lied, “and he’s going to kick your ass inward when he finds out what you did to me.” Pretty bold for someone who can’t stand for two seconds without fumbling to my ass. My head injury had me ten kinds of bold as hell and lippy.
“But Vurhg no mean to!” he burst out.
Hauling me up higher in his arms, he took off faster than before, snarling under his breath.
The hood I’d created to protect me from the brunt of the cold flew back, he was busting ass so hard. With a snarl of my own, I fought to hold onto it.
One of the hands cradling me loosened, dropping me more firmly into the crook of his arm. This sent my legs flopping over his other arm but I didn’t care. We looked ridiculous. I could not say I was overly concerned about that.
His village couldn’t be that far, could it? Surely we’d run into somebody at some point. There were outposts all over the place out here, or so I was told. I’d never actually been adventurous enough in any kind of way that I’d have found out.
A Yeti village… here? Did Dad hike out here and talk to them?
Squished up against the male’s chest was oddly soothing. He had a heavy, loud heartbeat, just like my old man. The comparisons were kinda freaking me out. I still didn’t want to believe it.
It was getting really hard to stay awake, despite Vurhg’s snarling insistence that I not fall asleep.
“Shut up,” I muttered curtly, much as I would to Cy or Birch or any of the Elm brothers for pestering me when I really didn’t want to be bothered with.
Much like the troublesome trio, Vurhg didn’t care and heckled on.
I had to have drifted off at some point because the next thing I knew Vurhg was growl-speaking a mile a minute somewhere off to the side of me, I was laid out on Cy’s blanket once more with it loosely about my shoulders, and a beast I’ve never laid eyes on before was leaning over me, along with a human woman, their faces puckered in concern.
Coming to with a startled yelp, the beastman holding my eyelid open to peer down into my eyeball pulled back, nudging the woman with him back with him, just in time to dodge my flailing arms as I shot up.
“What the hell’s going on?!” I demanded to know.
The beast that had been leaning over me grinned. The woman behind him offered me a small smile. “You hit your head,” she answered.
“Where the hell am I?” I blustered out, flustered. My gaze darted from the pair over to Vurhg, who seemed to be arguing with a beastman even taller than him.
“Not Hell,” the beastman beside her quipped.
Smacking him lightly across the arm, the woman rolled her eyes at him. “Don’t tease her. It’s not funny.” To me, she offered, “You’re in the Lo denaii village. Do you recall anything before that? Do you remember what happened?”
Vurhg, catching the tail end of the conversation, broke off from the beastman he was arguing with to rush over and blurt, “She ‘lone, Vurhg help. She fall, hit head, hair fall off.” Vurhg’s hands shot up defensively.
“Vurhg not touch hair. It just falled off.” His miming of The Great Dewigging would probably be funny under any other circumstances.
My eyebrows shot up as I met the male’s pleading, desperate gaze, begging me to go along with that load of tripe he was trying to spew.
Thinking over what he said, I laughed a little, I couldn’t help it.
I was a bit fuzzy at the moment but I was far from addled.
“My hair just fell off?” I spluttered out with a weird fit of laughter.
“Vurhg not do it,” he insisted, fidgeting like a guilty little kid.
He thought he’d made my hair fall off? It was so ludicrous, I fell into a fit of the giggle snorts over it.
I’m surrounded by Yeti people. He thinks he made me bald. This is crazy!
The male with Vurhg came over to crouch down beside the beastman accompanied by the woman. “Why she laugh? What Vurhg break her?” Dark eyes the color of molasses darted from me to the pair. “Break her head?” he fretted.
“Lo denaii aren’t real,” I blurted between fits of the sillies. Oh, I’ve cracked, for sure.
The woman blinked, stared, then blink-blinked. “Do you know where you are?” she pressed.
Getting ahold of myself, I sobered and answered, “I don’t know.” My shoulders lifted in a shrug. “Some village.” I hooked a thumb over towards Vurhg. “That guy said you could help me.”
“They help. Vurhg get help. You mate be happy,” the beast in question chirped with what I took as false cheer.
There he went again with the pleading look.
If he thought I was going to help him, the male that nabbed me up and kidnapped me, stole my mega potatoes and Turkey Day trimmings, he has lost his mind.