In the back, Dave had pulled the shoe off Leif’s foot and was pummeling the crazed, fuzzy beast into unconsciousness without the benefit of depth perception. One troublesomely satisfying blow later, the razorwing collapsed.
It was a moment before Ian finally asked, “Is it dead?”
The cameraman stared, catching his breath. “Ain’t dead. Dead’d mean it’d split. Or explode.”
“It’s a miracle that thing didn’t spit at you.”
Suddenly the piteous monster convulsed, coughed once, and hacked something up before collapsing back down again.
Dave peered at the discharged object. “Got my watch back.”
Diligent readers who recall previous statements about Thalia not being distracted when the razorwings arrived may ask themselves just why that mattered at all. Thalia, they point out, clearly did nothing but watch. Such bothersome people are plainly unaware that nearly all Muses (save Calliope, who holds a black belt in slow-motion kickboxing) are pretty much worthless in a fight. It’s just not their thing. No, Thalia’s lack of distraction merely allowed her the best vantage point for observing the spectacle, the lack of which would have seriously hampered her mood.
“Unimportant!” someone might say. This someone clearly is not Thalia. Nor, just as clearly, have they considered that a Muse in a bad mood (and a redheaded Muse at that) is not a Muse with which a sane person wishes to deal.
While it is regrettable if such earlier statements confuse any readers, those who insist on complaining should be advised that they are quite likely reading the wrong sort of book. If it makes them feel better, they could consider that Jason clearly received some sort of heroic inspiration to rush out amid the razorwings and save Leif in time, and that perhaps Thalia had something to do with that.
But only if it makes them feel better.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“I’m Jason Powers. I hunt monsters, and most of the time I know what I’m doing. Please, do not try this sort of thing at home.”
—Jason Powers (Monster Slayer disclaimer)
“You know, we do that warning at the start of every show, but I have to think that if viewers have monsters in their homes, they’ve got bigger problems than a bunch of ivory tower lawyers.”
—Jason Powers (interview, Adventure Channel Magazine)
LEIF WOKE TO SEE three kneeling blobs watching what felt like an invisible elephant stepping on his head. As his awareness returned, he recognized the elephant to be a mere savage headache, and one of the blobs took the appearance of the radiant Tracy Wallace. Flanking her were two men of whom he was decidedly less enamored. The glower coming out of the man with the eye patch gave Leif the impression that the feeling was mutual.
Leif groaned a greeting that failed to coalesce into any sort of verbal form before he finally managed, “What happened?” The last thing he remembered were razorwings swarming him. The fact that he wasn’t dead left two options. He picked one. “Am I a hero?”
To his disappointment, Tracy didn’t return his smile—if in fact that was what he had managed to do with his face. At the moment, his muscles were a bit wrapped up in contract negotiations with his brain.
“If you were a hero,” Tracy said, “wouldn’t that make you an ‘idiot risking your life’?”
Leif admired the way she brought back his previous words to bite him. He smiled weakly and tried to charm it up a notch or two. “Yeah, but you seem to go for the idiot type.”
“You’re not a hero, Mr. Karlson.”
“Though y’are an idiot, I’d wager,” said the one-eyed man.
Hey neat, Leif suddenly registered: a one-eyed man! It struck him that he had overheard the man’s name once earlier, but it hadn’t managed to stick. “I asked you to call me Leif?”
“And I asked you to stop following me. Hold up your end and I’ll hold up mine.”
He let that battle go for the moment, turning instead to a newly stitched gash on his forearm. “Er, what did happen, exactly?”
“Before or after you decided to stalk her?” the one-eyed man asked.
“I’m not stalking her, I’m—” Fine, maybe he was stalking her. Before he could ask what business it was of One-Eye’s, the other man—who Leif was fairly certain was named Ian, or Rupert, or maybe Bill—spoke up.
“You got hit with razorwing spit. Do you know what razorwings are?”
Leif sincerely hoped he managed an adequately derisive stare. “Oh, gee, maybe those things in the news all the time that attacked us just a bit ago? I wonder.”
“Charming fellow. Yes. You fell, hit your head, and suffered a few minor lacerations. I’ve stitched up some of the deeper ones for you. Nothing you won’t recover from.”
The one-eyed man grinned. “Hope ya got insurance.”
“That was about an hour ago,” Tracy added. “Jason saved you, actually.”
“Oh, my hero,” Leif muttered.
“He’s fine, by the way.”
Jealousy twisted the knife a bit. “Yeah, I figured from the way you’re all not sobbing.”
“We fixed you up,” Tracy continued, “so now you'll return the favor: Where’s your car or whatever? You’re driving back and sending a tow truck.”
“And not coming back with it,” One-Eye added.
The other guy shook his head. “He has to come back with it so the driver knows where to find us. There’s not exactly a house number hereabouts.”
“What’s wrong with your SUV?" Leif asked. "Or is it Jason’s? It’s awfully big. What’s he compensating for, I wonder?”
“Some razorwings exploded under the engine. It’s not going anywhere.”
“Yeah, thanks for that, by the way,” One-Eye added again.
“Ah,” Leif said. “You want to know where my car is?” He pointed at the SUV. “I stowed away in the back.”
“You stowed away in the—” Tracy glared at One-Eye.
“Heh. Wondered what that box was.”
Leif rated One-Eye a little higher on the likeability scale.
“Great,” Tracy went on, “it’s worse than I thought. What the hell’s your problem? You thought I’d suddenly swoon at the gesture, or were you just hoping to steal a pair of my—”
“You were leaving. It was the first thing I could think of!”
“What about just taking ‘no’ at face value?”
Leif felt flushed and hoped it was merely an after-effect of the poison. All he’d really thought about was how much he had to have her, and that if he let her leave, that’d be the end of it. Grand gestures seemed the way to go. Eventually her anger would subside and she’d realize how much he must care, right? She’d come around.
That was always how it worked in the few romantic comedies he’d had the misfortune of sitting through, anyway. It was stupid, but he couldn’t stop himself.
Regardless, he didn’t want to have this discussion in front of the other two.
“Look,” he said, “just—I can’t just walk all the way back now, can I? Not alone with those things still out there.”
One-Eye smirked. “Could give him a laser pointer, send him off.”
“We’re not sending him off by himself.” It was Jason, speaking up from where he lay on a half-shredded sleeping bag. Leif was sorry to see him sporting a few wounds of his own. It made the guy look all the more heroic. “After those things attacked? Then what, we kick a puppy?”
“I’m not a—”
“At the very least not until he’s had time to rest,” added the man whom Leif rather hoped was a doctor.
Jason shook his head. “Why send him back at all? Guy’s got guts. Maybe we can work him into the episode.”
“Oh, great, sidekick to a steroid addict. Yay me.”
Jason laughed. “Watch the cracks, guy. I’m the only one on your side here.”
Tracy shook her head. “Insurance would have a fit. Geez, what a night.”
Something about the way the whole group waited on her next word struck Leif as very sexy.
Strange that so much about her struck him that way, so much that he hadn’t even noticed on their first meeting. Well, maybe not that strange, considering the fact that he had a conversation with a god right before he met her. Was this Apollo’s doing? Still, why question a good feeling?
“Okay,” Tracy said finally, “you can stay.” She swiftly pointed a finger at Leif's sudden beaming expression. “I hear one thing about how attractive I am, how much I should give you a chance, or how damn much you admire me, I’ll stake you to the ground with catnip around your neck, understand?”
“She’s hot when she gets forceful, isn’t she, Leif?” Jason said.
Tracy’s finger shot toward Jason. “Goes for you too, Powers.”
Leif smirked. Maybe she didn’t like the guy that much, after all?
“Tomorrow he stays here while we film,” she finished.
“Then you’ll have to tie me up, ’cause I’ll just follow you,” Leif warned before he could stop himself.
“Wasn’t kidding about the catnip, Mr. Karlson.”
“Hey, no points for honesty? I’m serious. I’m not staying here.”
“We could tie you up in the SUV,” Tracy suggested.
Leif winked. “Kinky.”
“Hey!” One-Eye burst, grabbing him by the collar. Leif’s vision shuddered from the jostling. “Shut yer damn mouth and treat the woman with a bit of—”
Tracy grabbed One-Eye’s arm. Her fatigued sigh alone seemed enough to stop the man mid-recrimination.
“Dave,” she said (Leif at this point coincidentally recalled that One-Eye’s name was Dave), “let the half-drugged, helpless idiot go.”
“He was mouthin’ off.” He let go, nonetheless. Leif’s vision continued to wobble, also nonetheless.
“My problem, not yours.”
“Ah, let him come along, Tracy. He can stay behind the camera,” Jason said.
Dave grunted. “Far behind it.”
“Fine.” Jason grinned. “He can stay back with Tracy and the doctor.”
Leif smiled. “Fine by me.”
Dave scowled. “Now wait a damn minute.”
“Might I suggest,” the doctor began, “that we all get some sleep now and leave the bickering about just where Mr. Karlson shall walk for the morning? Dangerous monsters are not to be confronted with half a night’s sleep if the show’s hero is to survive to season two.”
“Doc’s right,” Jason said. “The hero needs his rest!”
Tracy sighed. “Yeah, the doctor’s right. Standard watch order while the razorwings are out there. Mr. Karlson will take Jason’s slot so he can rest up.”
Dave slowly grinned and poked Leif in the shoulder. “I’ll be sure to wake ya in plenty of time.”
Leif smirked. “Do you have to keep watch twice as long because of the, ah . . . ?” He tapped his eye.
“No, I just kick twice as many skinny butts to make up for it. Get me?”
“. . . Okay, g’night, then!” Leif had a better comeback, but for once his mind was quick enough to shut his mouth. He lay down, instantly comfortable and far too weakened from the poison to really care what he was lying on or why that owl was looking at him so intently.
The following day, the group of five moved with a purpose through the rocky hills and sparse trees. The purpose differed for each person, of course, save for “don’t get killed”. At least that’s what Thalia assumed as she traveled invisibly behind them. Leif had repeatedly suggested that Jason might have a death wish, though Thalia sensed in the TV star only the supreme confidence and love of attention that befitted any halfway-decent hero. Calm, focused, and wearing a snug vest of modern body armor, he led the group into the hills as if he knew precisely where he was going.
He didn’t, of course, but he was at least confident admitting so to the camera as they traveled.
Leif mostly kept quiet while the camera was out. The rest of the time, he wouldn’t shut up, and the others did their best to ignore him. Jason seemed focused on the path and trials ahead; the doctor, lugging along the narrow bundle of a collapsible medical cot, was plainly preoccupied by his own nerves; and Tracy and Dave were busy getting shots or doggedly not responding to all but Leif’s most direct inquiries.
It didn’t really help. Thalia wondered how Leif was supposed to play a part in Zeus’s resurrection. If Apollo hadn’t foreseen it, she wouldn’t have believed it possible. On the other hand, the young man had at least managed to crack Jason and, to a lesser extent, Tracy. (At one point Jason grabbed Leif by the arm and pulled him in front of the camera to introduce him to the viewers. Tracy protested at first, but then loudly observed that Leif could always be edited out of the footage later.) Perhaps Leif was fated to inspire Zeus to will himself back to life for the sheer purpose of telling the young man to shut up? Beyond that, Leif didn’t seem up to what Apollo required of him at all.
“So you’ve got a gun or something hidden under that riot gear you’re wearing, right?” Leif asked after a time. “You can’t possibly just use the sword.”
Jason glanced at him, amused. “Knives too. Crossbow now and then. But no guns on this show.”
“Well, not on the show, but come on, you can’t be going after these things without one. Sure, Rule of Cool and everything, but what happens when you run into something you can’t handle? You can’t just judo-chop it in a nerve cluster and ram a sword through it. No one’d think less of you for softening it up with a few bullets offscreen. Just another thing she could ‘edit out,’ I’d think.”
“I’d think less of me.”
“We run an honest show, Mr. Karlson, despite what you seem determined to see,” Tracy said.
“Uh-huh. Well, just give the signal when you need to pull the gun and I’ll turn away so you can stay all hero-like.”
Jason turned to Leif with a smile that he proudly displayed to Dave’s camera. “Haven’t met the monster yet that’s been able to kill me.”
“Ooh, impressive. Most people who aren’t dead yet can’t say that.”
Jason unsheathed his sword for a punctuating blade flourish. “Right you are!”
Thalia’s smirk matched Leif’s. Tracy just shook her head and turned away such that Leif was able to get a good ogling of her bum without anyone else noticing.
Not for the first time since Leif dashed off in a mad pursuit of Tracy, Thalia wondered at the source of his feelings. After observing him the day he first met the woman, Urania and Melpomene said nothing about any sort of attraction. Then again, attraction wasn’t their area, so it was possible they just hadn’t noticed. Come to think of it, as Muse of comedy and science fiction, realistic romantic attraction wasn’t really Thalia’s expertise either. (The closest she came to it was dealing with romantic comedies, which she’d be the first to admit had little or no basis in real romantic relationships.) So perhaps she wasn’t the best one to judge.
Yet it did seem . . . strange. Odd behavior, or merely an aspect of his character previously unseen? She wondered what Calliope would have made of it, had Thalia not agreed to take her turn watching Leif today. (She hadn’t felt much like flying back home anyway, and the break from musing was nice enough. Plus Calliope promised her a favor in exchange.)
They continued over rocky, scrub-covered terrain, passing in and out of what few shadows the light tree cover afforded.
“How much farther, you figure?” Leif asked after a while.
Jason kept walking. “Don’t know. No sign of tracks yet. That rise up ahead might hide a cave, so that’s where I’m making for.” He said it again for the camera at Tracy’s suggestion, with a couple manly huffs of exertion for flavor.
“What if the monster isn’t there? You could be hiking around all day and not find anything.”
Tracy heaved a sigh. “You’re perfectly welcome to go back to base camp, Mr. Karlson. Encouraged, even.”
“No, I’ll stick with you. Just seems like a big hike and hassle for nothing, though. Assuming you do find it, what do you figure’ll
be in its lair?”
Jason clambered up a rock for a look around and then turned to help Dave up. “The beast will be there, eventually. Kind of the point here.”
“No, I mean what else? It’s got a lair, and the lair’s your objective. This isn’t some random encounter with a wandering monster like last night, so the lair has to have something of interest in it, right?” Everyone else was too busy scrambling up the rock to try to hide their disinclination to answer. “There’s always some sort of reward in places like that.”
Jason played to the camera as he helped Leif up. “Ridding the world of monsters is its own reward.”
“Yes, that’s why we’re doing this all on TV!”
“Don’t talk to the camera, Mr. Karlson.”
It wasn’t such an outrageous thought, Thalia considered. Monsters did tend to be attracted to nodes of power. Such nodes had their own special ways of luring things of value, one way or another. It was no accident, for example, that a little patch of Nevada desert had turned into one of the top destinations for vacationers to turn over their money. (Ships and planes that vanished in the Bermuda Triangle were the unfortunate example of what happened when similar phenomena were buried beneath large quantities of water.) Thalia could sense no nearby location of comparable magnitude, but smaller nodes were everywhere, and she was no expert. Most monsters were far more sensitive.
Growing bored with shadowing, Thalia flew up toward the rise herself. Indeed, it did hold a cave—of sorts. It wasn’t so much a cave as a smallish canyon that wound its narrow way into the rock to a wider section in the middle, which itself connected via another narrow passage to a second wide section at the end with no further exits. Each wider section featured shallow openings barely sheltered by rocky overhangs. Animal bones lay scattered about, picked clean by nature and whatever had brought them there in the first place.
Flying a bit higher, she spotted the hero’s quarry hunched atop the thirty-foot wall of the canyon's middle section. For the moment, the creature’s gaze was elsewhere.
Invisible to the creature, Thalia made a close pass to study it. By the design, she judged it to be Athena’s work, at least primarily, though she noted the beast’s armored hide wasn’t entirely without flaws, especially on the left side.
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