A Shot in the Dark

by K. A. Stewart

  The trees there were mostly of the evergreen variety, their low-hanging boughs interlacing in places to provide an almost solid canopy. In the uppermost reaches, they were dusted with snow, fallen sometime during the day I guessed. For yards around, the only thing underfoot was dead pine needles, treacherously slippery to the unwary. That wasn’t going to work.

  The night was quiet as I jogged into the tall pines, lacking in the usual birds-and-bugs noises, but still within the range of “mundane and normal.” I was just starting to wonder where the wildlife had gone, when I remembered that my ears weren’t back to normal yet, hence the cone of silence effect. That was gonna suck quite a bit if the Yeti brought his little pets. I needed to be able to hear them coming. Last thing I needed was them dropping out of the trees onto my head.

  Accordingly, I found a small area with relatively few low tree branches. The needles crackled under foot, faintly, and I strained my hearing to see just how impaired I was. The burble of trickling water reached me, proving that I wasn’t entirely deaf, and I went to investigate.

  It was a small stream, small enough that it probably wasn’t even there all the time. A recent rain, or melting snow, or something, had given birth to the tiny trickle, no more than three feet wide and a couple of inches deep. The water ran swiftly, carrying needles and twigs with it, proof that the debris had existed here long before the creek.

  On impulse, I fished Cam’s holy quarter out of my pocket, eyeing it thoughtfully as I rolled it across the backs of my knuckles. Cam’s magic smelled like Mira’s, though I was willing to bet he’d argue that point with me. No matter the method—prayer versus spell casting—the effects had proven the same. And if his blessed coin was just like the magicked one she’d given me, so long ago . . . It had worked before. I just needed to get the big fur ball into the water.

  Kneeling, I quickly buried the coin in the middle of the tiny stream, pressing it into the soft mud to keep it from flitting off down the mountain. The water was cold enough that a thin skin of ice had started to form at the very edges. My fingers went numb, and I tucked them into my armpits to warm them, wishing more than ever that I’d brought a jacket on this little vacation. Add the freak cold snap to the high altitude, and it was going to be downright frigid on this peak tonight.

  How much time had passed? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? Thirty? My situation here wasn’t going to get any better, and my friends’ was only going to get worse.

  I found a relatively empty place, where the trees were smaller, some of them growing directly out of outcroppings of the mountain’s distinctive pink granite. Keeping the small stream at my back, I planted my feet and drew my sword. The scabbard I tossed away, honestly figuring I’d never be able to go look for it anyway. With both feet grounded against the solid mountain, my breath fogging the air before me, I opened my mouth to call the Yeti’s name.

  And choked.

  It’s not like I forgot his name. Trust me, those things get in your brain and live there like parasites, all coiled up and oozing ick. You don’t get to just forget the demonic names you hear. You can’t unknow, y’know?

  But the moment I tried to say it, my throat closed up, and bile rose, strong enough that I really thought I was going to gag to death on my own puke for a second. My vision got all spotty and dim, and the faint ringing in my ears became a loud clamor as my heart tried to escape out that way and go fleeing into the trees.

  I found myself on hands and knees on the forest floor, hacking up my sad little gas station cheeseburger. My throat burned with it, clear up into my sinuses. Oh that was not pleasant at all.

  “Why the fuck do people do this on purpose?” I muttered to nobody as I struggled to my feet again. The universe tipped and swayed a bit, then steadied, and I was pleased to find that I was indeed upright, and that I’d never dropped my katana.

  Properly forewarned and stomach empty now, I tried again. The name was there, at the tip of my bitter-tasting tongue. It was rage and jealousy, evil and venom, all rolled up into one garbled mash of consonants and vowels and razor wire and strychnine.

  I forced every single cursed syllable out around a tongue that refused to cooperate, and a throat that was doing its level best to strangle me for my effort. The moment it passed my lips, a pall of silence descended over the mountain. And I don’t mean “Jesse’s ears are all broke” kind of quiet. I mean quiet like the whole world stopped to hold its breath, the water stopped flowing, the plants stopped growing, the stars stopped moving. That kind of quiet.

  Goose bumps sprouted over my arms, my shoulders, and my stomach cramped painfully. Something bad was coming, and I’d invited it in, asked it to come have tea. I was gonna love him, and pet him, and call him George, right up until he ate my spleen.

  I kept my eyes focused on the ring of trees around me, barely breathing myself as I strained for that first sound, the one that would tell me where he was coming from.

  It turns out, that first sound was a chuckle somewhere behind me. I whirled and found the Yeti lounging quite comfortably on the far side of the tiny creek. He shook his horned head in amusement. “I knew you would call. You are predictably foolish.”

  “Yeah, and your mama dresses you funny.” Don’t look at the water. Don’t look at the water. All I needed was for him to charge me, to run through what I really, really hoped was now holy water. “Where are your little pets?” That was the loophole I’d left in the contract. If he was gonna screw me, this was the point.

  “I left two of them with your companions. They were hungry.” The white-furred behemoth stretched then, rising to his full height. Pine needles rained down on him where his horns jostled the lower branches. Christ, he was huge. “But this one . . . she longed for your presence.”

  Dammit, I fucking knew it. “What the hell does it take to kill you?”

  Handless emerged from the darkness behind the Yeti. Her left arm was gone at the shoulder, the bone a rather diseased gray color where it poked through. Putrid black fluid ran from the wound down her washboard ribs, and her right arm still ended in the jagged bony stump. Somehow, it didn’t make her look any less dangerous. She snarled at me in her silent way.

  This was not good. Even unarmed as she was, literally, I couldn’t fight the Yeti-plus-one. Any lapse of attention was going to get me eaten. “Afraid to take me on by yourself, Fuzzy?” Maybe I could get Handless into the stream too? Or maybe I could convince them both to sit down for a game of cutthroat pinochle instead. Seemed just as likely. Bet she’d have a helluva hand, har har har.

  “She will not interfere. Provided that you play my game.”

  “What game?”

  “Any game I wish.” The beast smiled, muzzle wrinkling to reveal those gleaming fangs that had ripped into me almost every night for the last four years.

  I kept an eye on Handless, but she didn’t seem inclined to move, just crouching at the Yeti’s heel like a good little hound. “Then we’re just burning moonlight. C’mon, Fuzzy. Give it your best shot.” I had to hope that Cole and the others could hold their own against a few rabid zombies. There wasn’t anything I could do but deal with what was right here before me.

  “As you wish.” He dropped to all fours, rocking back and forth on his clawed feet and enormous knuckles for a moment. I swear, as big as he was, the mountain actually rocked with him. Or, it could have been a bit of dizziness from the damaged ears. Whichever.

  I settled into a ready stance, sword held low, and waited. C’mon . . . go for a little swim . . .

  The Yeti opened his muzzle and roared, the sound echoing off the peak, crashing through the night air. The sound slammed into me like a tidal wave, and my head reeled with vertigo. The night tilted at off angles, and the ground seemed to ripple beneath my feet.

  After what seemed like forever, the echoes died away and my brain corrected itself so that all down things were down and all up things were properly up. I blinked my eyes open in time to see him spring at me. Neatly up and over the goddamn stream.
>
  Well, shit.

  19

  The Yeti crossed the distance between us in two giant leaps. The third one took him completely over my head. I dropped to one knee to avoid the claws, and his fur brushed across my face as he passed. It smelled of something musky and rank. A drunk goat swimming in a septic tank, maybe, with the distinctive undertones of sulfur and ozone. Futilely, I lashed out with my sword, trying to connect with anything solid, but the demon wasn’t intent on attacking me. In a crash of brush, he bounded into the trees on the opposite side of the clearing and vanished.

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.” I hopped to my feet as quickly as I could, focusing on Handless who hadn’t moved at all. She cocked her head to the side, watching me from her one-armed crouch. I didn’t dare take my eyes off her, but . . . Where did you go, Fuzzy? I strained to hear any trace of the Yeti’s passing, but between my ears and the oppressive demon stillness that had fallen over the area, there was nothing.

  The guttural chuckle echoed out of the darkness, but I couldn’t get a bead on the location. “Come find me.”

  “I did not sign on to play hide-and-seek!” My own voice bounced back at me mockingly. Hide-and-seek! Hide-and-seek! It sounded odd to my abused eardrums, like the inside of a large glass jar.

  It was eerily familiar, but I couldn’t place just why. Not with more important things on my mind, like whether or not I was going to see the dawn with my internal organs inside me, or beside me.

  To my left, up the mountain, a tree groaned and crashed down. I could see the new gap in the pine canopy twenty or so yards ahead of me. The newly revealed stars were so bright tonight, so far from the city lights.

  I had two choices. I could stand here, and assume that eventually, the Yeti would get tired of his games and circle back around to me. Or, I could chase after him, which was exactly what he wanted. He wanted to play with me. I knew that about him, because I’d seen him do it before. It was just something he did, like being white and hairy or having really bad Hell-breath. Like that old story about the frog and the scorpion, it was simply his nature.

  Handless shifted her weight, inching forward a few steps when I continued to just stand there. “That how it’s gonna be? I either chase him, or you come for me?” She inched again and I leveled my sword at her. “Bad. Sit. Stay.” I could take her. I was pretty sure of that. But I also knew that the second I committed to that fight, the Yeti was going to come back and dissect me.

  And let’s face it, pursuing him was my nature. Pretty sure he knew that about me, too. I gave Handless a small salute, and deliberately turned my back on her. Every step I took, I kept expecting to feel her slight weight land on my back, her blunt teeth tear into my neck. But she never moved. The last time I glanced back at her, she was still sitting on the far side of the stream, just watching me.

  Running uphill is bad, m’kay? I wasn’t that stupid. I set out at a determined walk, taking my sweet time in skirting around brushy turns or fallen limbs. Running pell-mell through the dark woods was only gonna earn me a broken leg, or worse. The Yeti couldn’t have this little brawl alone, so he could by God wait until I got there.

  I found the downed tree easy enough, the soil still damp around its old roots. It looked like it had been ripped out of the ground and tossed a few yards, even. Showing off? Trying to intimidate me? Or just happy to cause as much destruction as possible?

  There was a tuft of white fur stuck to a branch, and even as I reached to pluck it off, it dissolved into a puff of black mist. I jerked my hand back and rubbed my fingers on my shirt, just in case I’d gotten any of the blight on me.

  The Yeti hadn’t been gone that long, then. He’d waited here, to see if I was coming. I could picture him in my mind, lounging here, dragging his head along the murdered tree trunk. Sure enough, my fingers found gouges in the bark, left by the massive curved horns.

  Any other time, I’m sure Pikes Peak is beautiful. But I have to say that, in the dark of night, in the freezing cold, I wasn’t that enamored of it. I passed my katana from hand to hand, flexing my fingers to keep them limber.

  The roar came from my right, and I flinched into a defensive stance before I realized it had to be yards and yards away. Even with my less than functional ears, I could tell that much. The sound bounced up the mountain and back down, making it sound like a whole herd of mini-Yetis joining the chorus. I had to wonder what the sleepy denizens down below thought of this strange noise on their mountain.

  Something landed in my hair and I reflexively ducked again, swiping with my free hand to discover only pine needles. Glancing up, I found Handless above me, balanced on a thin branch like a half-shattered gargoyle. “How did you even get up there?” Her mouth opened like she might speak, but only air came out, a warning hiss. “Yeah, yeah, I’m moving.” Play the Yeti’s game, I got the message. I set out again, pretty sure that having a chat with a zombie said some bad things about my sanity.

  Three more times, we zigzagged our way up Pikes Peak. Each time, he lured me on with a downed tree, a roar, or even just the flash of white fur in the darkness. And each time, Handless was there, my zombie shadow reminding me what would happen if I hesitated.

  As we climbed upward, and my lungs started burning with every breath, I realized exactly what he was up to. Lowlander that I was, the very altitude was going to work against me. The higher we went, the colder it got, and the thinner the air became. I stopped for longer and longer between each leg, concentrating on my breathing. I couldn’t afford to get winded, or lightheaded. I also couldn’t afford to stop too long, lest Handless get antsy.

  Luckily for me, the Yeti suffered from extreme predictability. Each jaunt was almost the same distance, crisscrossing back and forth up the mountain at almost the exact same angle every time. It wasn’t hard to guess where I’d find him next, and I used the last two legs to prove myself right.

  The tree line was going to end soon, leaving me on the bare mountain face. The next time the Yeti laid his little bread crumbs out, I got my bearings and chose a path straight up the mountain, fixing my mind on that point. That’s where I’d meet him coming.

  The Yeti’s pet dropped from a tree only a few yards from me as if she too knew that she was going to run out of branches soon. “You gonna narc on me?” Her head swiveled almost a full one eighty as she tilted it, almost like she was pondering my words. “Shh. Don’t tell.” Her head swiveled the other way. Those glowing dark eyes watched me, but I got no sense of the Yeti behind them like I had before. He wasn’t watching me, at least not through her.

  After a moment, her face stretched, the tendons drawing her lips back from her teeth in a gruesome snarl. It took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t a snarl at all. She was smiling. Smiling at me. Oh that was just . . . ew.

  “Good girl. Stay.” I had to hope she wasn’t following me as I broke into a run, rushing through the trees to lay an ambush for my worst nightmare.

  The wind was wicked, once I got out of the trees, whipping my hair around my face hard enough to sting, and the terrain was treacherously rocky. There had obviously been a rockslide along this face sometime in the near past, and jagged chunks of pink granite stuck out of the ground like some giant kid’s discarded building blocks.

  I found a relatively flat place, and was just planting my feet when the great horned head broke through the brush at the edge of the trees. There was a brief moment of surprise, when his ears perked up and he got that comical tilt of the head like puzzled dogs do. It was almost cute. Then the large muzzle rippled into a low growl, and he prowled onto the bare rocks, nimbly clambering from one heap to another. His claws clicked on the hard granite. “Tricky, tricky . . . Ready to die, then?”

  “I’m always ready to die.” The way of bushido is death. I had no problem with that, so long as I could take this ugly mother with me. I was done with him hurting people I cared about. Hell, I was done with him hurting people I’d never heard of before.

  “Wish granted.” He sun
k his claws into the boulder he was perched on and launched himself off it like a furry freight train.

  It was different from the first time. I was more experienced, in better shape, more practiced. He was bigger, stronger. I had a slight speed advantage over him, and that was all that kept me one hair ahead of his swipes, dodging and parrying as best I could. Something that big should not be that fast. It simply isn’t fair. I fully intended to file a grievance with the union, if we ever started one.

  I briefly wondered where Handless was, but she was wiped from my mind in the face of the onslaught that was the Yeti. I couldn’t even get a chance to go on the offensive with him. Every shred of my energy was poured into keeping those wicked claws away, into keeping those horns from connecting with my unprotected skull. The Yeti sprang from rock to rock, and I was forced to keep turning to face him, not giving any ground, true, but not gaining either. There was no way I could try to clamber after him and fight at the same time. He could dance around me all night, and all I was going to do was get tired.

  Predictability. It led a demon to target a distraught boy, knowing that I’d come to his rescue. It almost got my friends killed. Might still, if things at the hospital were going poorly. It had me tracking a demon through unfamiliar territory, and it helped me catch up to the Yeti here at the end. It was the one thing I couldn’t afford, anymore.

  Being that you are samurai, be proud of your valor and prowess and prepare yourself to die with frenzy. Advice I could live by. Or die by, really.

  The next time the Yeti landed, claws chipping shards away from the pink boulders, I was already on the move. I saw the demon’s eyes widen as I charged him head on, roaring my own battle cry as I came.

  It almost worked.

  The first two slashes opened up blight-gushing cuts across one furry forearm and the thigh below it. The dark essence poured out, flowing down the jagged rocks like a deadly, life-sucking stream. It found a low spot and started to pool. The portal would form there, the doorway sucking the Yeti back to Hell.