by G Clatworthy
I felt more eyes on my back and turned. There was a black wyrm winding its way from the other side of the car park and across the stone steps by the entrance, blocking my way back in. I wanted to leave anyway so I started back towards the large iron gates, which were always open, heading towards the road.
The two wyrms left their spot under the dirt spattered Nissan and started towards me. Now they were in the light, I could see the colour of their scales. One appeared orange, although that might have been a trick of the orange street lamps. The other was a dark red, almost black. They were both the size of large cats but I had never worried about a gang of street cats before.
They moved slowly but deliberately like the predators they were. Their bodies steamed as the rain pelted them. At the same time, another black wyrm circled around from the other side of the car park. It had one large amber eye and a large scar down the left side of its face, across its other eye. It was making its way towards the gate, its body low to the ground and its one eye on me. This one was the size of a large dog. I guessed it was their leader judging by its tail curling with its point upwards. Alphas always pointed their triangular tails upwards rather than down.
I had read in the local paper about packs of wild wyrms roaming in Bute Park amidst calls to put the creatures on a registered animals list, but I’d never seen more than two together. I had never seen this many in one place outside of Uncle Owain’s compound. They were clearly working as a pack and circling me. I wasn’t sure half-dwarves were their usual dinner but if their fire was as hot as Errol’s, I was screwed.
I felt in my pockets and was disappointed but unsurprised to find that I only had my phone in its red and yellow case with my cards stuffed in the inside and my keys. I promised myself that if I survived, I would take my axe with me everywhere.
I took the phone out and tried to decide who to call as I inched towards the gate. I walked slightly to the left as the leader wound to the right. As I tried to activate the emergency call function with shaking hands and whilst keeping my eyes on the leader, I accidently turned on my torch.
Not what I had intended to do, but I shined it directly into the alpha’s eye. It winced and lowered its black head. That was all the distraction I was going to get and I took it. I started to run. I was past the alpha and out of the tall iron gates. I ran along the university’s drive towards the road and was halfway there before they caught up with me.
One snapped at my calf. I was glad for the thick leather boots I was wearing. I spun faster than it was expecting and stamped on it hard. I brought my foot down again on the red head that was trying to bite through my boot. I heard something crunch and it let go, shaking its head and whimpering.
As I was stamping, one of the black wyrms had grabbed my coat with its powerful jaws. I felt it tug as it tried to pull me to the ground. I tried to resist, whilst turning so I could keep an eye on the other two wyrms that were circling me. The beast was strong despite its smaller size and I wasn’t able to pull away. I leaned towards it suddenly and it was taken off balance. I used the moment of confusion to jab my thumbs into its eyes, a weak spot I was glad I knew about. It cried in pain and let go of my coat, taking a piece of red wool with it.
Two down. I hoped.
As soon as the black wyrm had released me, the remaining two pounced at once. I was knocked to the ground and swore as the tarmac grazed my side. Luckily I hadn’t been winded and rolled with the fall. I managed to get my arms up as the smaller orange one tried to snap at my face. It connected with my forearm and I cried out as its teeth sank in.
I pulled my knee up and heaved myself onto my front, taking my assailant with me. I let all my weight fall onto the orange wyrm and it let go, more concerned with being squashed than biting my arm. I manoeuvred my free arm onto its neck and leaned into it. It started scrabbling at its throat with its forelegs and trying to claw me with its back legs, but my weight prevented it from getting purchase.
As I leaned in further, I felt something grab my foot hard. I turned my head to look over my shoulder and saw the large black wyrm had clamped onto my leather boot. I turned over, not releasing the orange one and aimed a kick at its head. It connected hard.
The wyrm backed off but was now thoroughly pissed at me and I saw its nostrils smoke as it prepared to breathe fire.
“Schiztz!” I cried and launched myself upwards, pushing the orange wyrm underneath me into the hard tarmac. I felt rather than heard something break. I focused on running away rather than feeling guilty as I fled towards the road. The wyrm followed me, waiting until I was within range of its flames rather than wasting an attack.
I made it across the road before my lungs and legs gave up. I had to stop outside the concrete pillars that marked the stairway that led to the Students Union. I turned and forced myself to take deep breaths as I faced the alpha. It had slowed down and was calmly walking towards me across the lanes that were empty of traffic on this spring night.
It stopped in the middle of the nearest lane to me and opened its mouth wide. I closed my eyes and raised my arms to protect my face when I heard an awful noise. Somewhere between a bang, a crunch of bone and a shriek of pain.
I opened my eyes and saw a city bus had rolled to a stop just past where I was standing. I walked over to it and spotted the wyrm under its second lot of wheels. It was crushed and no longer a danger to anyone.
The blue bus had a dent in the front and one of its tyres had burst as it had run over the creature. It wasn’t going anywhere tonight.
The passengers were starting to get out of the brightly lit bus and lined up on the pavement, sheltering under the large concrete stairwell of the Union. Several of them looked at me with fear and I realised I must look awful. My coat was wet and torn, my arm was bleeding. My hair was halfway out of its braids and my pinstriped leggings were ripped where I’d hit the tarmac.
The adrenaline was starting to leave me and I began to shake. I probably looked like I did drugs and I didn’t blame the bus passengers for judging me and wanting to keep their distance.
I sank down to the ground and leant against one of the uncomfortable concrete pillars, not caring that my boots were in the rain. I was already soaked and more rain couldn’t hurt.
The driver was muttering about stray dogs and rubbing his head as he surveyed the damage to the front of his bus. He started to call for a replacement and I thought about staying to catch the bus to Aloora’s house.
A concerned lady with permed blonde hair looked at me and walked over.
“Are you alright dear?” she asked, radiating concern.
I thought about telling the truth. I wasn’t alright. A pack of stray wyrms had just attacked me and my best friend was either missing or ignoring me. Tonight sucked and I had a feeling it was going to be a long one. Instead I sighed heavily and forced myself to my feet.
“Fine thanks, just trying to find my friend,” I replied in a flat voice. I had to focus on walking and couldn’t give any energy to making my voice sound convincing.
“Well…if you’re sure dear,” The lady replied, looking at me as if she didn’t believe a word of it. I definitely didn’t believe it but I had to find Aloora.
I turned and walked, slowly this time, towards her ground floor student flat in a Victorian terrace off Miskin Street. This had once been a relatively smart street with neat terraced houses clad in brownish grey stone-effect brick and with large bay windows jutting into the small front gardens. Now the gardens had been paved with concrete slabs and were student housing, meaning they weren’t well looked after.
Weeds sprung from between the paving. The houses looked eerie in the murky, orange half light of the electric streetlights, with strange shadows forming at the entrances as porches hid the doors from view. Lights shone softly from behind cheap curtains and music was blaring from one of the houses. A metal tune I didn’t recognise. The shabby front gardens of student housing and the multitude of black bin bags piled on the pavement added to the uneasy atmo
sphere.
A small tabby cat crossed the road in front of me as I turned into the street. I watched it carefully. I made sure I stayed in the street light and had the emergency services number tapped into my phone ready to call in case I was attacked a second time.
My left arm throbbed and was still bleeding, slow drops dripping onto the hundred-year old patterned tiles in the porch of Aloora’s house as I lifted my good arm to knock on the door with my knuckles whilst I held my smartphone.
I paused. The door was ajar. That was unusual. I gripped my phone more tightly, my thumb over the dial symbol and I pushed the door open.
Chapter 4
I groped along the wall. The wallpaper was rough against my skin, being the hard wearing raised type that was often used in student accommodation and I felt my way towards the hallway light switch.
I found it and turned it on. The light worked and the bare lightbulb shone brightly showing me that the hall was empty and I had smeared blood on the wallpaper as I’d edged towards the light switch.
I grimaced, not so much from the pain which had now become a dull constant in my arm and down my side where I had hit the tarmac, but I might have cost my friend her deposit.
Aloora’s room was on the ground floor and I walked the few paces towards the plain wooden door with a ceramic plaque attached declaring “Gnome at work”. It was also open. I had a bad feeling as I approached. There was a large dent and a crack in the wood as if it had been kicked or something, or someone, I added mentally, had been thrown against it.
I pushed the door open warily but whoever had been there was long gone. I walked in and flipped the switch. The light illuminated a ransacked room. Aloora wasn’t naturally neat, but she took care of her books and the scrolls and manuscripts she owned or borrowed to study. Her normal organisation system was organised chaos with stacks of papers on her desk and on the two deep bookshelves either side of the bricked-up fireplace with a coal-effect electric fire fastened to it.
Now the floor was covered with books and papers as if someone had been looking for something. The drawers of her desk were open, revealing more papers and stationery supplies crammed in.
The contents of her bedside table were all over the floor along with clothes from the small chest of drawers that contained her wardrobe of jeans, slogan t-shirts and dresses.
Her plain duvet was halfway off the bed and the red ceramic lamp by her bedside table was broken. There had been a struggle here.
Irrationally, I felt guilty. Perhaps if I hadn’t stayed late at my shop, we could have met on time and she wouldn’t have been here when the intruders entered.
I glanced at my phone, willing a message to be there telling me Aloora was at the Rummer waiting for me. Nothing. I put my phone down on her Swedish flat pack desk and began flicking through the papers left in the drawers.
There wasn’t anything useful as far as I could tell. I picked my way over a stack of lacy underwear that had been strewn on the floor and started to rifle through papers there. I looked at symbols I hadn’t seen before and Aloora’s neat cursive handwriting next to them. I knew she translated many old languages as part of her doctorate so I wasn’t surprised and none of it meant anything to me.
A symbol that looked like a person tied to a stone in red caught my eye and the word sacrifice next to it. Then, a scrawl as if Aloora had been piecing things together “blood needed?”. I had no idea what that meant either but blood and sacrifice never sounded good together.
What had happened to Aloora? As far as I knew she wasn’t mixed up in anything dodgy. Her library books were always returned on time and she was adored by her social media fans. Could one of them have done this? I wondered. She always blocked any trolls, the keyboard kind not pervy bartenders, and most of the arguments on her accounts were around the accuracy of translations rather than focusing on her.
I heard a noise outside. I grabbed the nearest thing I could find and whirled to face the door. The noise lumbered closer, accompanied by heavy breathing. I held my breath as a face appeared in the doorway, then released it in a sigh.
“Marco, thank Berathar!” I exclaimed naming the dwarven god of luck unthinkingly in my relief. Marco was one of Aloora’s housemates, an English literature scholar and aspiring actor.
“What ‘ave you done to Aloora’s room?!” he gasped with his slight Italian accent. His hands fluttered to his chest dramatically. I sometimes wondered if those were real gestures or if his drama group membership meant he felt he had to act all the time. “And what were you going to do with that?!”
His eyes were on my hand and for the first time I looked at what I had grabbed. A plastic rounders bat that had been painted black. A prop from a Halloween costume last year when Aloora had been a zombie baseball player with grey skin and gruesome, prosthetic wounds. I had stuck to what I know and gone as a steampunk goth, not much of a stretch from my usual attire but with paler make up and copious amounts of eyeliner. There was a picture of us together at that party pinned to the cork notice board in her room. Aloora was waving her bat and both of us were making kissy faces towards the camera.
It might have looked menacing but hitting someone with a plastic bat was more likely to annoy than hurt them. I put it down on the bed, rubbing my hand on my ruined coat to get off the paint flecks that now spackled them.
“Erm, I was going to attack the intruder with it,” I mumbled, realising this sounded as stupid as it looked. “And I didn’t mess up her room, someone else did.”
Marco raised one perfect black eyebrow and took in my torn coat and ripped legging before widening his brown eyes again.
“Your arm, it’s bleeding,” he stated, waving his hand towards it. “Come, come,” he gestured for me to follow and I stumbled out of Aloora’s room. As I nearly tripped on a pair of jeans, I noticed something glinting on the floor. I bent and picked it up carefully. It looked like a piece of jewellery, a small cut diamond in a silver leaf. The work was exquisite and clearly elven. I turned it over. There was no maker’s mark or even the required hallmarks that let buyers know the quality of the metal used. I looked more closely, it wasn’t silver, it was steel. There was a purple braid of silk threaded through a loop made from the stalk.
I had never seen Aloora wear anything like that. She favoured costume jewellery, big chunky rings and oversized earrings, not petite crafted charms or pendants. She also spent all her money on scrolls to help with her academic pursuits, so I couldn’t imagine her finding any spare cash to spend on elven trinkets. Elven steel wasn’t cheap.
As I gazed at the pendant, I felt faint magic coming from it. I didn’t know what it was, but enchanted elven jewellery was expensive. I pocketed the leaf and picked up my phone before carrying on down the shabby hallway to the shared kitchen.
Marco had taken off his fashionably faded leather jacket and retrieved a first aid kit from one of the pine fronted cupboards and was setting everything out on the table in a haphazard manner. I winced at the disorder as I would have liked to straighten everything up but I appreciated the effort.
“Take your coat off,” he ordered, “You need to go to….a healer or whatever you people see, but we can stitch you up for now.”
I appreciated his attempt to be culturally sensitive and I fervently hoped he didn’t mean literally stitch me up as I carefully took off my ruined coat.
“They’re called doctors,” I replied and for the first time looked properly at my own arm. My short sleeved corset top meant I didn’t have to roll back any sleeves to see the wounds. There were teeth marks in my skin but the blood had slowed and they weren’t as deep as I had feared.
Marco looked at me with scepticism and handed me antibacterial wipes, a bottle of water and a smaller bottle of vodka. I frowned.
“You need to clean the wound,” he stated simply.
“Can you do it?” I asked hopefully.
“Ewwwww, no. I cannot stand blood.”
“Can’t you pretend you’re in Casualty or somet
hing?”
“Yes, once it is cleaned, I will bandage it like an ER doctor,” Marco drawled as he mulled over which bandages to use whilst unwinding his grey cashmere scarf from around his neck.
I sighed, bit my bottom lip in concentration and began wiping with an antibacterial wipe, wincing at the sharp sting as it touched the open wounds. Once most of the blood was off my arm, I asked for the water bottle to be opened and a towel. Marco handed me an old tea towel from a drawer. I hoped it was clean as I rested my arm on it and spilled the water into the wounds. Fresh blood, diluted with water rushed out and I grimaced.
I patted my arm dry with another towel, this one was newer and had Gryffindor written all over it. I trusted Aloora wouldn’t mind me using her tea towel to clean myself. Marco unscrewed the vodka bottle and held it to me. I screwed up my face in anticipation of the pain, keeping one eye squinting so I could get the alcohol into the cuts and poured. I inhaled sharply as the vodka hit the wound and I moved to the next tooth mark.
Once I had doused myself in vodka and smelled like a student bar on a cheap shots night, I nodded to Marco. He had rolled up the sleeves on his crisp violet shirt and he nodded back, getting into his doctor role. As he began to put a large bandage over the teeth marks, I noticed a small green bottle I hadn’t seen before.
“Marco, what’s that?” I asked, using my good hand to point to the bottle.
“I don’t know, it says Madam Mim’s Cure all on the bottle,” he mouthed the unfamiliar words carefully and held it up to me, “but no ingredients. I don’t like it.”
“It’s a magical remedy,” I replied, gritting my teeth as the vodka was still making my arm hurt. “Pour it on the wounds then pour me a shot.” It looked just like my dwarven grandmother’s go to medicine for everything from a cough to a graze. I knew it worked too, at least for stopping the pain and minor bleeding, having had it used on me many times when I was a child. It tasted like a mixture of mint, aniseed and whisky and I held my breath as I downed the shot Marco poured me.