by Leod D. Fitz
Even if I hadn’t gotten a good whiff of the blade, I’d have known the weapon was magic from the pain that radiated through my body when it bit into my skin.
I stumbled away, releasing his arm before I slipped and slammed into the pavement.
“Andres wanted you brought in with as little damage as possible,” he growled as he followed me, “He won’t be happy if I have to do anything permanent to you. But honestly, right now, I just don’t give a shit.”
I crawled to my feet and tried to stumble away, but I wasn’t fast enough. Two of his hands grabbed onto me, as the one holding the dagger cradled his injured arm. A pair of legs swept around behind my own feet and he shoved, throwing me to the ground.
Before I could pull myself up, a foot smashed into my skull, then another and another. Apparently, my attacker had perfected the art of kicking a man when he was down.
I was just cognizant enough of what was going on to see him slip his dagger back into his coat before he leaned in and yanked me to my feet.
Two hands trapped my arms at my side, while the third wrapped around my neck and began to squeeze.
I needed to fight back. I was certain of that, but for some reason, when my brain sent the memo to the rest of my body, nothing happened.
The world, I realized, was growing darker. It had been pretty dark already, but what little light there had been was now starting to fade.
“Abydos!”
The eight-limbed man blinked and looked over at Orrin, who limped towards us, away from a massive, shuddering figure lying on the ground.
“Traitor,” Abydos sneered. “Eternity was set at your feet and you cast it aside. You betrayed your fellow gods for the sake of wisps of smoke, here today and gone tomorrow. Andres will flay you alive when he catches you.”
“I know,” Orrin replied, mildly. “I made my peace with that a long time ago. Now let him go.”
Abydos snorted. “Unlike you, I still follow orders. And my orders are to bring him to Andres.”
“Even at the expense of a comrade’s life?”
Abydos blinked. His grip on my throat relaxed as he looked past Orrin to the prone figure of Jayr.
“He’s still moving. He’ll be fine.”
“Oh, that’s right. You didn’t see Acacius and Phaedrus die, did you? Some of the most toxic poisons known to humanity come from the sea, brother, and I have made them a part of me. We can survive most things, it’s true, but if you pump enough venom into us, we will eventually die. Don’t believe me? Just watch.”
Abydos’s expression slipped into uncertainty.
“I can kill you,” the many-limbed monster whispered at last. “I can kill you and take both of them back.”
“Perhaps. Two hundred years ago, I might have decided to match my skills against your own, but the madness you’ve succumbed to has made you more dangerous. Perhaps you can kill me now. But tell me, can you kill me, and incapacitate him, and take Jayr to Andres in time to save his life? One of the three, certainly. Perhaps even two, if you’re lucky, but all three? Weigh your options, brother.”
Abydos cursed under his breath and dropped me onto the asphalt. “Next time, brother.”
Orrin nodded and the two circled each other slowly, until Abydos was standing next to Jayr, and Orrin was standing next to me.
Normally I recover quite quickly, but for some reason my body was not cooperating. The way the gash on my arm was throbbing made no sense. The cut hadn’t been deep. It should have closed itself and mostly healed by now. Instead it seemed to be getting worse with each passing moment.
“Come on,” Orrin murmured in my ear as he helped me to my feet. “Let’s get you out of here.”
The small man managed to get me all the way to my truck and into the passenger seat without losing sight of Abydos and Jayr.
Then he climbed into the driver’s side and we took off.
“What…” I coughed. “What’s wrong with me? Why am I not healing?”
Orrin glanced over at me for a moment, concern creasing his face, before looking back to the road. “Show me.”
I nodded and pulled back my sleeve to reveal the long gash on my arm.
Even if it had been deeper than I thought, it should have faded into a small scar by now, if not disappeared completely. Instead it had turned greenish grey and was oozing horribly.
“Shit. He got you with the necrotic blade.”
Necrotic blade? I stared at the injury for a moment in bewilderment.
“You need to cut away any part of your body that the blade touched. Right now, your skin and muscle is dying and rotting while it’s still on your body. It’ll never heal, and if you don’t get rid of it fast enough it will spread.”
That sounded unpleasant. Still, the thought of cutting into myself didn’t exactly appeal. I stared at the wound for several long seconds trying to think if there might be another way. Then Orrin took a quick turn and my arm slammed into the window, sending waves of pain shooting through my body.
“Sorry,” he murmured as I hissed in pain. “I still haven’t gotten used to horseless carriages.”
I was about to reach for the searing blade located behind the seat of the truck, then it occurred to me that burning this wound closed might not be the best idea.
Instead I pulled a pocketknife out of the glove compartment.
I don’t generally use knives. My fingers and teeth are more than enough for most of the tearing and cutting jobs that come up in my life. I only had the knife because my brother had forgotten it after I’d given him a ride a few months back. God knows I never had a reason to sharpen it.
I ended up tearing a strip off my shirt and twisting it into a gag I could bite down on before I began to gouge out chunks of my flesh.
Cutting skin and muscle away was bad enough, trying to perform the act while in a moving vehicle with a dull blade added a level of frustration to the experience that left me wanting to do terrible things.
But as I tore the wound away an inch at a time, I was rewarded by the slow regrowth of skin and muscle. The healing seemed to accelerate a little with every bit of corrupted skin that I managed to remove.
Finally, I hacked out the last of it. I pulled the shirt out of my mouth and let out a long moan.
“Yeah, it sucks. I know. I once had to dig out one of my kidneys after Abydos got in a sucker punch. God, that was miserable.”
I closed my eyes, reveling in the feeling of my body knitting itself back together, as it had done so many times before.
What frightened me more than the cut itself, however, was the way it seemed to shut down my entire healing system. Well, it hadn’t shut it down, exactly, just decreased it significantly.
“Of course, we’re both lucky,” the small man continued. “Humans who get cut with that thing basically turn into a giant ball of gangrene and die over the course of an hour. It’s a bitch to watch.”
“Where are we going?” I managed to ask.
“A safe place. Or, at least, as safe of a place as I know of in this town.”
I grimaced and turned my attention back to my arm. It was definitely healing now. The thick sludge that marks a ghoul’s blood was pooling into the gaping hole, hardening, and crusting over.
It was not the first injury of this sort that I’d ever had, and I knew from past experience that, while my arm would look more or less normal again before morning, the muscles I’d cut away would have to be re-earned. It wouldn’t be a huge thing in the long term, but in the short term my left arm would be somewhat weaker than I was used to.
I was so focused on watching my healing, however, that I didn’t realize where we were going until the car came to a stop. I blinked and looked around. “Oh, shit.”
“What? Something wrong?”
“This is marie territory.”
The chimera glanced around to be certain nobody had heard me. “You might not want to use that term around here. Most of them don’t care, but there are a few who find it offensive.”
I blinked and stared at the man. “You came here on purpose?”
“Of course. I have a long history of good relations with dryads. Why?”
Dryads, or more colloquially, marionettes, or maries, were neither the most personally dangerous creatures in the area, nor the largest group. But most of us stayed out of their way.
I’m not saying that people were scared of them, exactly. But just because I’m not saying something doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Dryads, as a rule, are not interested in the things that get most of the supernatural community all hot and bothered. They don’t try to accumulate money, or control over the human population. They like to have space, sunlight, clean water, and reasonable assurances that their trees won’t be cut down.
They would probably be one of those fringe groups that you run into from time to time but don’t much think about if it weren’t for one tiny detail: While dryads didn’t accumulate the kinds of things that would draw the interest of others, they were in fact made of the things that drew the interest of others.
For the neckbiters, it was all about their blood. A neckbiter doesn’t actually burst into flame when exposed to direct sunlight, but they do begin to burn and dehydrate almost immediately. A newborn bloodsucker out in direct sunlight for an hour or so can actually die from exposure. As they get older, it’s supposed to become less of an issue, but I think that’s because they become better able to handle the discomfort, as opposed to not experiencing it.
The fast and easy way around this problem is to drink dryad blood. A pint from a marie and a newborn neckbiter could go to the beach in a bikini. For a little while, anyway.
For wizards, it’s all about the wood. Not all trees with maries inside of them have magical aspects, but the vast majority of trees with magical aspects are home to maries.
For small things like wands or staffs, this isn’t an issue. Most dryads are willing to sell bits and pieces of themselves if the price is right. But the best magical woods come from heartwood, and dryads can only spare a very little bit of heartwood without doing themselves harm.
When your blood and the entity with which you are symbiotically linked are both considered valuable commodities, you have to take certain steps to insure your wellbeing.
The maries organized. They were, to a certain extent, organized simply by their nature. Dryads generally live in groves and forests with other dryads and they had been known to work together for mutual protection pretty much since forever, but at some point, they realized that individual groves simply weren’t enough to protect them from everything that wanted a piece of them, so they formed the Great Grove Collective.
The basic premise was simple: if anyone went after a member of the GGC, they were quietly catalogued. Their name and picture was passed around, and then the maries would… wait.
They would wait because the maries aren’t idiots. Neckbiters and spell slingers are some of the biggest baddasses of the supernatural community. Running out and attacking them was just an invitation to a war that the GGC wouldn’t win. But the GGC was patient, and it never forgot. A neckbiter who kept a stable of dryads to allow him access to the sun might not even realize that he’d been found out, until a hundred and fifty years later, when walking through the woods at night, he suddenly felt a sharp sliver of wood cut into his back and perforate his heart.
There would be no proof as to who did it, and the GGC wouldn’t go around declaring their involvement, but somebody somewhere would remember that time when that particular bloodsucker kept all those maries around. And rumors would spread.
Even wizards, whose fearsome reputation usually keeps creatures of the night from acting rashly, had been known to occasionally disappear when wondering through the woods somewhere. Nobody could be certain what exactly happened, but if among his collection somebody happened to find an artifact made from heartwood… it wasn’t certain, of course. Spell slingers make a lot of enemies over the course of their lives. But rumors would spread.
Personally, I had nothing against them, but I’d made a point of avoiding them anyway. After all, mostly they just wanted to be left alone, and mostly I wanted the same. It had worked out nicely so far.
But Orrin was already climbing out of the car, and, truth be told, I was kind of exhausted. I can heal from pretty much anything, but it kind of leaves me feeling drained. My body’s battle with the necrotic blade had eaten into whatever reserves I usually had and I was pretty sure that one way or another, I was going to be asleep shortly. Getting myself back to the funeral home simply wasn’t an option, and as much as I didn’t care for the idea of being in someone else’s territory, at their mercy, I liked the idea of letting them into my space when I wasn’t in any condition to control what happened next, even less.
I climbed out of the car and stumbled after Orrin who was, I saw making his way towards a small house.
Halfway to the door a woman stepped out of nowhere.
I tensed up, preparing to put what little energy I had left into a fight.
Orrin, however, smiled widely at the woman. “Cynthia, darling, looking lovely as ever.”
She nodded politely. “Orrin, glad to see you back safe. Not sure about your companion, though. He reeks of death.”
“Well, he would, wouldn’t he? Carrion eaters have a hard time surviving if they can’t be around death.”
The woman pursed her lips in disapproval. “Are you certain you can trust him?”
“Of course not, darling. But I am certain that my brothers would like to split him open and try to read the future from his entrails. And what they want, I fight with every breath.”
Cynthia stared hard at me for a long moment. “I don’t know. Something about him doesn’t sit well with me.”
“I’m not asking you to sleep with the man, my dear. I just want to put him someplace safe for a few hours.”
She sighed. “Very well. For your sake, we’ll protect him.”
I stared at the woman. I’d seen a few dryads before, but none this close. Her skin was brown and rough, and her features a bit asymmetrical, but she had a rugged loveliness to her. Even as she stared daggers at me, I found myself somehow liking her. For lack of a better definition, she seemed to me to be intrinsically honest. Like a lightning storm or a hard day’s labor.
As soon as the thought entered my head I was shaking it out again. Ghouls are not supposed to wax poetic. Clearly I needed rest.
Orrin turned and waved me forward.
“I’m sure you would have preferred to go back to your business again tonight, but Andres has some of my other brothers there, waiting to intercept you in case you escaped Abydos and Jayr,” he said as he opened the door.
“Why would he do that? Why not just have all of them ambush me at the motel?”
Orrin shook his head. “That’s not the way my brother thinks. Abydos and Jayr should have been enough to handle you and the girl. From his perspective, sending everyone didn’t notably effect the odds of success. On the off chance that you somehow escaped, the best odds for capturing you would be an ambush while you were still reeling from the first attack. Since you’ve spent the last few nights in the same place, he was fairly confident that you would retreat there.”
I nodded, glancing around the room. The house was tiny, just a bedroom, a cooking nook, a bathroom, and a closet. It fit for maries, though. They spend most of their time in their trees. Houses were more for show than anything else.
“So why did you help me?” I asked the chimera.
Orrin sighed. “My brothers have killed a lot of people over the centuries. I’d like to see that come to an end.”
I grunted, fighting back a yawn. “How did you know they were going to attack me?”
“I didn’t. At least, not that they’d attack you there. I’ve been following you ever since you and Eryx fought.”
“Eryx?”
“The lizard man. The one you met in my hotel room.”
“Oh, right.” I
yawned deeply, then shook myself, trying to stay awake. “What about…” I hesitated, trying to focus. I had another question for him. I had a lot of questions for him. They were flapping around inside my head like bats, but for some reason none of them would hold still long enough for me to focus on them.
Orrin pulled the cushions off of a couch in the corner of the room and opened it into a bed. “Here, get some rest. The girls will keep you safe. Or at the least, they’ll wake you up if danger’s coming.”
I closed the bed back up. “Ghouls aren’t really ‘bed people’. I’ll take the bathtub.”
He shrugged.
“What are you going to do?” I asked as I headed toward the bathroom.
“I have to check up on some things. See if I can find out where my brothers are staying. Make sure they aren’t going after anybody else. I’ll come back tomorrow. We can talk more then.”
“Good,” I called out as I climbed into the shallow, short tub and tucked myself into a ball. “Because I have questions. A lot of questions.”
I heard Orrin say something, but I was too far gone to make it out. My eyes shut completely against my will and the world disappeared.
Chapter 10
I woke up with a faint itchy feeling on the back of my neck. I blinked, trying to sort out where exactly I was, and why I might be itching.
The fight the night before and my trip to Orrin’s safe house came rushing back, but I couldn’t remember anything that might have made me feel this odd discomfort.
I blinked and twisted around in the tub. And almost jumped out of my skin.
The bathroom was not particularly large, barely big enough for the tiny tub, the toilet, and a sink. I would have said, the night before, that there was just barely enough room to turn around in there. But somehow three maries had managed to cram themselves into the room, and all three were standing completely motionless, staring at me.
“Jesus!”
“You’re awake,” one of them replied, her tone completely calm, a look of bored patience on her face.
“Yeah! I’m awake! What the hell are you doing in here?”