“Walk toward it slowly. Make sure of your footing. If you feint left, it will circle you to the right.”
“Faint?”
“Oh, never mind!” Saida shoved him aside with a straight arm and rushed past him.
The flying serpent sprang from behind the mesquite’s craggy trunk, launched its coiled red body, and flapping its short leathery wings, flew at her throat. The huntress leaned left and, as she had predicted, the serpent circled her right. Saida whirled the opposite way and thrust her arm out straight.
The snake stopped three feet in front of her, fixed in midair, surprised. Its body writhed, impaled on the tip of her knife blade. Struggling to be free before it was too late, the drakon’s wings beat Saida’s hand; claws in spasm, it lunged for a grip on her fingers, but the shrunken forearms were too short. The whipping tail, encased in clattering shells, coiled around her arm. Screeching, it stretched its head forward, snapping at Saida’s hand but missing a decent bite by a hair. Two pink lines appeared by Saida’s thumb where the snake fangs scraped her skin, but for all its strain, it could not inject its venom. The tail lost its strength and uncoiled, slipping from her arm. As its wings fell limp, the serpent screamed at the merciless woman once more and slumped over, dead.
Saida pointed the knife tip toward the ground and shook off the carcass. The fang scrape on her hand itched, stung, and grew red. Morne doused his kerchief with water from his gourd and wrapped it around her hand that still gripped the Damascus blade. He reached to take it from her but retreated his fingers into his palm when he saw her expression.
“Have I ever permitted you to touch this blade?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“Why would I start now at this particularly inopportune moment?”
“Just trying to be helpful.”
She pointed the knife tip toward his middle.
“You wouldn’t do me in just because I lacked the fortitude to face that serpent?” Morne asked. “Would you?”
“If you wish to be helpful, be so kind as to wash that vermin’s insides off my knife with what remains in your gourd. But take care that none of its venom splashes on you.” The dead body at her feet was a serpent with wings and dragon claws. Not purely snake, not purely bird, not purely dragon. “I despise creatures that appear to be one thing but are something else entirely.”
Morne unstopped the scarred waxed gourd he carried and coursed the water over the blade as she rotated it from side to side. His hand trembled the entire time, but he did not quit until the weapon’s black swirling surface shone clean in the sunlight. He forced a laugh.
“I am never quite sure whether or not you are going to gut me with that knife of yours.”
“That is interesting, Mr. Morne, as I was just wondering the same thing about you.”
He squatted down and examined the carcass. It had faded three shades of red since it fell from Saida’s knife. Perhaps its fury at her had enflamed it. “At least it didn’t breathe fire. Wouldn’t that be a horror? Are they good eating? I could stand a decent meal about now.”
“I would not know. I do not consider snake a decent meal. If you try it, avoid cutting into the poison sacs.”
Morne drew his knife and hefted the serpent with it. “Where is the poison? What do the sacs look like?” But Saida had walked a few steps away in a new direction and refused to answer him. “Wait.” Morne’s next thought showed up a little late. “Inopportune moment? How come inopportune?”
Saida was gazing at the tree. “In all our encounters with these things during the last few days, have you not noticed? The little red dragons always travel in pairs.”
The second serpent charged them from behind the adjacent mesquite tree, spearing the air with one thrust of its sharp wings and a jolt from its spring tail. Saida dropped her arm with the Damascus blade to her side and Morne threw himself in front of her, jerking his pistol from his waistband in a fluid movement. His finger cinched the feather trigger without his remembering to tell it to. The gun bucked his hand and the serpent blew apart.
“Well, there you are, Mr. Morne. More snake meat for you to try if you can find the pieces. They appear a bit scattered.” She walked slowly to her horse and slumped against the side of the saddled gray.
Morne caught his breath by slow degrees. “You just stood there. You didn’t even try to stop it.”
“It was your turn.”
“You would have let me die?”
“You jumped in front of me so it is more likely that I am the one who would have died.” Saida worked her stiffening hand. “I may have already accomplished that as it is.”
She pitied Morne and despised herself for it. Murderer he had been, but a murderer with a chance at redemption, and second chances required mercy to be measured out by the barrel, not the thimble. She made herself offer him a compliment. “You did well. This time.” She could not let him get by entirely.
“I apologize, ma’am. A while ago, I disappointed the both of us.” He drew himself up and declared, “I shall do better from here on out.” He sounded the part of a schoolboy, an old and large one, reciting his memorized piece from a primer.
“Over your long and twisted career, Mr. Morne, you refused to show pity to a number of women which somehow to me makes the pity shown you all the more strange and precious. If you can be redeemed, it holds out hope for all of us. If you want redemption, if you want your second chance, then take it by the horns and hold on to it. Redemption reserves no place at the table for a coward and a coward you are still. Retain your fear and you will fall back on your old wicked, hell-bent ways. You will return to your destructive path, and that I cannot permit. That I will not permit.”
A shiver ran up Morne’s spine.
Morne bent down and picked up the remains of the serpent Saida had killed and let it dangle from his level knife blade. His mind wandered over his bloody history, lingering on the faces of his victims, women he had destroyed with no more care than he had for the killing of the snake.
As he tied the snake’s winged carcass behind the cantle of his saddle, Saida mounted her horse and kicked it east.
“Aren’t we going to chase down any more of these little red fellas?” he called after her. She must not have heard. “No more lessons today, I reckon.” He climbed onto his mount and kicked him into a fast trot, the heads and tails of the twenty-one little dragons Saida had killed and the tail of the one he had shot flopping against the flanks of the horse as he rode.
“Are there more? Did you leave any alive?” The man wrung his hands like an old washcloth.
“Not in that nest,” Saida answered. “But there are probably other nests.” Her hand burned. It had swelled during the ride back into the town. “What or who invited them to appear?”
“We had nothing to do with them. They just came.”
“Those serpents are not free creatures. They do not appear of their own accord. They only come where they are welcome.”
“We are not in the habit of welcoming snakes into our community.” The town’s head man huffed as though he had run a mile against a heavy wind. His lips twisted and his nose wrinkled at the sour sight of the snake carcasses behind Morne’s saddle.
“Very well,” Saida said. “Keep your secrets. I care not.” She moved to climb back on her horse. Morne held her reins. He had not bothered to dismount.
“Wait, please!” A woman’s voice called to them from across the wide, dirty street. She trotted toward them. “We need your help.”
“Go home, harpy!” The nerve racked man with the twisted face shouted at her.
“Shut up, old man, I will be heard!” The woman glanced at Morne but decided in an instant to affix her full attention on Saida instead. “He will not tell you why he is afraid, so I will. We need your help with more than the red serpents. There is a greater monster hiding in the mesquite wood, a more dangerous one.”
Morne frowned. “The red serpents kill with the slightest bite. How can any monster be more
dangerous than that?”
“By pretending to be something other than a monster until the very moment she strikes. At least a snake looks like a snake.”
“And what does this monster that worries you so do?” asked Saida.
The woman’s mouth recoiled as though she had just tasted a bitter herb she wished to spit out. “Like a temptress, she attacks only men and seduces their minds. Deceiving them, she overbears their weak wills; and when she has trapped them, she destroys them and casts aside the refuse.”
“She?” Morne’s ears pricked up.
“Shut up!” The town’s leading citizen rebuked the woman again.
“I will not shut up!” Her eyes pleaded for Saida’s help and she rushed to grasp the monster hunter’s hands in both of her own and knelt before her. “I beg you. They will do nothing to stop it. They will keep falling to her. She is ruining our families. Help us before we lose more men to her poison.”
Saida wrestled the woman to her feet. “Stand up! Do not kneel to me. This thing plaguing you, does it look like a woman?”
“No one has said what she looks like. Of the few who have returned from her grasp alive, none have returned sane.”
“We will help you,” Saida told her.
“We?” said Morne.
“We. Is that a problem?”
“No, ma’am. As you wish.”
Saida stared at the head townsman. “Take me to one of those who returned.”
The townsman rode ahead of them for the whole five miles it took to get to the torn man’s cabin.
“Who lives here?” Saida asked.
“A squatter. Ask him what you will, but leave us to ourselves.” He turned his horse about and rode hard for his domain in town.
Saida dismounted, craning her head around to wait on Morne.
“Thought I’d stay up here, the better to keep watch.”
The better to make a hasty escape if need be, but she kept her thought to herself. She rapped the uneven door three times.
“Go away!”
“No!” Saida peered through the crack between the ill-fitted slats. Two marble eyes peered back.
“You’re a stubborn one.” The door eased open enough for daylight to hit the man’s marred face. “You women are always making trouble, never knowing when to leave well enough alone.”
“Amen,” mumbled Morne a little too loudly. Saida warned him with a glance.
“Tell me of the monster that attacked you.”
“I’ve nothing to tell, nothing that will help.” The man turned his face away to hide a wide burn that marked him from brow to chin.
“Who can tell me?” Saida asked.
“Yonder by the western sky near the mesquite wood. A wanderer. He knows all about her.” He threw a nod in the direction of a tall hill beyond them by twenty miles. “Speak to him and bother me no more.” The man slammed the ragged door in her face.
“What is his name?”
“Ask him yourself.” His voice snaked through the cracks in his door. “This is no concern of mine.”
“Twenty miles is a fair ride,” said Morne.
Saida sighed. “Too late today. We’ll leave after daybreak.”
The next morning they returned from their camp to buy breakfast. The scarred man’s cabin, burnt to ash, smoldered with thin spirals of gray smoke. The smell of charred pine and roasted meat hung on the sun-warmed air.
“Must have been careless with his cook fire,” said Morne. He kicked at the hot planks and snatched his foot back when it knocked two blackened sticks that clattered together. Not sticks, he thought. They did not have the sound of wood. Saida saw them. They were cracked and hollow and the ends had been gnawed before they were thrown back into the inferno.
“He was careless,” said Saida, “but not with his cook fire.” She slyly scanned the skies and the horizon for shadows.
“He spoke to us and he is dead,” Morne said. “We have become dangerous company.”
“Mr. Morne, you have always been dangerous company.”
“How much longer before that thing, whatever it is, gets us?” His hands dampened and he wiped them on his trousers. His collar pasted to his neck.
Saida did not answer his question. He had never favored women who spoke too much, but this one did not speak enough. She mounted her horse and started toward the distant ridge. He was sorry now that he had not let her kill him when they first met. At least the struggle would have been over. But he had hesitated when the moment came and she had pitied him and here he stood in the middle of his second chance.
She was not looking back. A sudden thought spurred him. He could ride away in the opposite direction. She would likely let him go. He would not have to face the terror and he would be free of the monster hunter and her nagging; and the next time his own monster reared that hideous, hateful head from deep within his heart, he would be free to do as it bid. And more women would fall to his knife and the nightmares would return. Or he could find a sheriff and surrender himself to a noose. He turned his horse and followed his best chance.
The air bore an odd smell. Wood was burning, but there was no smoke. Saida walked her horse through the mesquite woods, keeping alert for any relations of the red serpent clan she and Morne had failed to eradicate. Black ash fell on the back of her hands and onto her knees, peppering her forest green riding skirt. She urged her mount into a trot.
Embers showered Saida and the scent of burning mesquite rolled over her. She kicked her horse to a canter and the leaves caught, broke away from their trees, twirled in flame like streamers in the wind and carried their flames through the air, spearing the ground. She beat off the ones that lighted on her shoulders. Her gelding startled at the fiery rain and opened into a gallop on his own, swerving and weaving, pounding a new path between the bent trees. The low branches whipped Saida’s hair and face, knocking her broad black hat from her head.
As she broke from the thicket, Saida turned in time to see the fire’s source bearing down on her from the clear sky. A column of flame blasted toward her from the monster’s mouth and her wings thrashed the tops of the burning trees. Saida twisted her horse’s head toward a large granite outcropping on the ridge ahead. As she reached its cover, the beast exhaled a gale of fire. Saida threw her cloak over the rearing horse’s eyes and bent low over its neck. The flames seared the brush around them.
The flying creature circled above Saida, aimed at her head, and uttered another blast from its throat, a hollow, vibrating roar that shook the loose rocks from the outcropping, but no fire. Saida got her first solid look at the thing; head and body of a panther, the leathery wings of an ancient dragon, the tail of a serpent tipped with a scorpion’s stinger.
“What in the world caused you?”
The monstrosity hovered and snarled, then changed her mind and, beating her wings sharply, lifted herself over the top of the ridge and disappeared. Saida’s stomach turned. She slid from her saddle and staggered to a cool granite boulder the monster’s breath had managed to miss and sat down. Her head swam in a dizzy fog, but it was not from the monster’s attack. She unwrapped her hand. The red serpent’s poison burned and the skin it had infected was dissolving into jelly.
When she looked up, Morne was sitting his horse in the distance, staring at the empty sky, his mouth hanging open. She waved her hat over her head to grab his attention. He drew up and dismounted. The sight of her hand tore his mind away from fretting that the monster might be back at any moment to burn them both to a crisp.
He knelt in front of the rock and pulled his gloves off. He poured water over the widening wound. “It’s worse.”
“I know. We have to find the wanderer. He may know what to do about that…thing.”
“But what about you?”
“He may know how to help me, too.”
Morne took her good hand and helped her to her feet and then held her horse steady as she remounted. They trailed up a draw on the north end of the ridge until the lonely shack built in
to the side of the slope revealed itself among a stand of scrub oaks. A weathered man clad in cotton and wool with a wide leather belt met them as they dismounted and wordlessly invited them into his home with a wave of his hand and a bow to Saida.
He pulled up a chair for her and pointed to her hand. “That needs tending.”
“It may be past help.”
“Allow me to try. I have been told I have a certain skill.” He brewed a tea on his low hearth. When it was strong enough, he poured it onto a piece of muslin with the tealeaves and placed it still hot onto Saida’s wound. She cringed but did not cry out. Morne turned away.
“Though it hurts now, this will bring healing and will draw the rest of the poison, but you may bear a scar from the battle.”
“Scars mean less and less to me. I already bear several from other battles.”
Bellero smiled, thinking of his own. “Some of it may have made its way deeper. It has a bad way of showing up now and again. Strange creatures, those little flying devils; far more destructive than their size hints. Be at ease. The pain will subside ere long. And now to the true reason you are here.”
“That thing flying around out there!” said Morne.
“Yes, I noticed she was on the prowl again. But forgive me. Please be seated, sir. I am called Bellero. As you have heard from my words, I have not forever been a resident of this country, but it is my home now. I followed a similar monster here years ago.”
“Well, where are you from?” Morne could think of a hundred places better to settle than out in the middle of nowhere on the side of a scrubby ridge.
“The name would be of no significance to you. It was a small place, but it was mine until I lost it.”
“What cost you your place?” Morne asked.
“Arrogance. I won a tiny victory and thought myself equal to God. I found out very quickly that I was not.” Bellero laughed. “Think not more highly of yourself than you ought.”
Both Barrels of Monster Hunter Legends (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 1) Page 51