Boden glanced up at the three who fought the struggling nain rouge. “Subdue him and bind his voice. Take him to be questioned. Leave his weapon for me.” He looked back at me. “I am sorry. He eluded us at the end of the battle. We have been hunting him. How do you fare?”
The thoughts clicked together in my head. “We need help. Like a small army. I want to accept your deal if you’re still offering it.”
He looked interested, if wary. “I might be.”
“I want to be sure I understand it,” I said. “You need a human willing to carry some object from here across into your world and leave the object there. You are guaranteeing that the person will get to leave your world and return here safely as soon as that’s done. And in exchange you’ll send your people out to help us fight the bogeys--except for the guard that stays back in the woods. Right?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s the object?”
“Not of your concern.” His face grew hard. “Suffice it to say that if I told you, you might not even believe me. It is as insignificant to you as one of the masks you left for us.”
“Then why does it matter to you? Maybe I should be worried about its real value. Am I going to have to steal something that matters to someone else?”
“I will not say,” he said. “All I can tell you is that it is not to be used against your kind. How badly do you want our help?”
I knew what my friends would say. I knew there had to be more to the request, and that I didn’t have a good way to find out what it was. I shouldn’t do it.
“Agreed,” I said. “But we have to go now. I need you to engage any of them that aren’t possessing people, and destroy them if you can. Many people are possessed. I need them kept busy but do anything you can not to hurt them.” A new thought occurred to me. “Do you have anyone you can send who could help people who’re entranced, maybe bring them somewhere safe?”
He nodded. “That is possible.”
“Oh, one other thing. There are some wild fae who threw in with us as allies. They’re being useful, so if you could maybe not kill them, that would be good too.”
“We will reckon with them afterward,” he said. “Then we are agreed?”
My heart thumped. “It’s a deal.”
The other three fae hauled the nain rouge back toward the woods. His skin had grown over his mouth and his wrists and ankles were bound. His eyes blazed at me with pure hate as he thrashed and made guttural sounds that had no escape. Boden ignored him and whistled a series of notes.
Within moments, the camp around us came alive. We were surrounded by ranks of land fae who waited silently, armed with makeshift weapons and waiting for Boden’s command. “Take these,” he said to me. “I will organize the rest.” He turned and commanded the fae in a language full of chirps and clicks and singsong, and another burly fae that looked a little like a bear dropped to all fours in front of me, crouching down and looking back at me. Boden strode after the other fae with their captive, and another half-dozen followed him.
Tentative but grateful, I grasped handfuls of mossy thick fur and straddled the big fae’s back. “Thanks for the ride, buddy.” I turned to survey the rest of the assembled fae, who probably couldn’t understand a damn thing I said. I waved toward the center of camp. “This way, everyone!”
With that ringing St. Crispin’s Day speech, my mount loped forward, and I rode through the deep night at the vanguard of a sweeping and silent fae hunt to take on a death demon’s hungry legion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
We poured out into the center of camp.
It was a nightmare. Bogeys circled, prowling and shrilling, looking for hosts. The possessed worked to control their limbs, and their faces were malevolent and alien. Those who weren’t possessed but were entranced continued their clumsy nodding dance to the drums, only the beat had grown more frenzied and so had they, faces dripping with sweat, mouths hanging open to suck in air. More people had shaken off the trance and were either fighting or trying to run from those who were possessed, all of them confused and terrified.
There was no longer any rhyme or reason to any of it that I could see, just destruction and chaos. He wanted to sow fear, cause harm, cause death. There was an increasing chance of people being trampled if they tripped or collapsed. Fear flared in my heart as I saw how close to the fire some of the entranced people wandered.
The land fae spread out, circling the area and diving into battle. For rustic, untrained fighters, they showed a remarkable lack of fear. I saw rogue bogeys engage with them. Okay, it wasn’t going to be a clean sweep on the land fae’s part, but the bogeys were struggling too.
I heard an insistent chirping sound from down by the feet of the burly fae carrying me, and looked down as I slid from its back. The chirping creature came barely higher than my knee. It had skinny, shiny, jointed legs like a cricket, a chitinous body with iridescent wings folded back and patches of what looked like fur growing on its torso and head, and huge bulbous eyes. It motioned to me to follow it and strode-hopped a few long paces before turning back and beckoning me impatiently forward again.
As I fell in behind it, the creature produced some kind of instrument. It rubbed its face against it and created a rich, melodious sound. It chirruped and whirred along with it, and the song it made was haunting. I saw one of the closest entranced people stop moving and turn toward it, head tilting. I nodded to the creature and pointed to the entranced person to show that I understood.
It bobbed its head as well and lowered the instrument as it turned and came back to me. It gestured at me until I figured out that I needed to get down on my knees where it could reach me. Its strange large eyes glittered as it put its--hands? Forelegs?--to its mouth and then leaned close to me, reaching to either side of my head and touching my ears.
I started to jerk away as I felt something warm and slightly damp and sticky, but the creature shook its head and scuttled closer. I tensed and made a face but allowed it. I didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, what it was putting on and in my ears, but it sealed them. I couldn’t hear a thing. It bobbed its head and gestured to me once more to follow it.
The absence of sound felt weird. I didn’t like it. It made me clumsier, bumping into the bodies around me, and I stared hard at the little fae because I wasn’t sure I could find it again if it slipped out of my sight. I had to stop myself from picking at my ears.
Then I saw a huddled cluster of the sinister, orchid-mouthed sirins with their jaws stretched wide, and I realized my advantage. The small fae raised the instrument again, using its small size to weave almost unnoticed through the crowd.
I couldn’t keep up with it. It was too small and swift and it was swallowed up by the crush of bodies that crashed together like the Red Sea reuniting. Then I caught a glimpse of Sara toward the edge of the crowd. She shook her head and stared around herself in confusion.
Pushing my way through bodies, I ran to her and grabbed her arms. “Sara!” I had no idea how loud my voice was as it echoed inside my head. “Are you here with me?”
She clasped me in a hug and said something. I could feel it rumbling in her chest.
I held her off and pointed to my ears. “I can’t hear you! Just listen. Joe and Cherry. We need to find them. Get them to the showers, under the water. Okay?”
She nodded. I took her hand and we searched the crowd.
We found Joe first. He was still entranced, and surrounded by bogeys, but they weren’t trying to possess him. They were crowding him, pushing him, attacking him, driving him toward the fire. Possessed people snarled at him but fell back out of the way. He was going to walk straight into the flames.
I leaped forward at the closest bogey, hitting from behind as it lifted a bloated limb to slam down on Joe’s head. I punched through its back and burrowed my arm in until my hand closed on the stone at its center. I tore it free
and ignored the thing’s futile flails before its form simply fell apart and disintegrated. “Water pistol!” I shouted to Sara.
She shoved her way in, firing her pistol at the bogeys to drive them back, and pulled Joe’s pistol from his waistband. She ducked and dodged, firing in two directions at once. Joe kept walking toward the fire.
I put the stone in my pocket and went after another bogey, but one jumped me first. It slithered around me and I was choking, its tendrils wrapped around my throat and covering my mouth and nose. Tiny spots exploded behind my eyes. I clawed at it, dug into the rubbery matter and closed my fists on nothing. Its coils tightened around my ankles and we went down together, crashing on hard-packed earth. I slammed one palm into its shapeless head, pushing it away as I tried to pry it off my face with the other. I bought myself one quick gasp of air before it shifted and pinned me under itself, squeezing me like it intended to squirt my soul out of the top of my head.
I needed that stone, but lack of air was making me panic. I thrashed harder and got even more trapped. It was trying to pull my hand off of its head. I gripped it as hard as I could and my fingers sank into it. I was getting disoriented, hazy. My fingertips brushed something hard and I closed my hand around it. I pulled it out. It felt like a very long time that I lay there, bound up in the thing’s coils, clutching the piece of gravestone. And then it was melting away into nothing, leaving me limp and gasping on the ground.
With trembling fingers, I shoved the second stone into my pocket. There were feet all around me, too close, and I had to roll and scoot out of their way. I struggled up to my hands and knees and then to my feet, dodging the stampede. My breath was so loud in my head.
Someone’s swinging arm caught me full on the side of the head and almost sent me to the ground again, but I staggered in a wide arc and got my footing back. I found myself in the path of a crude fae blade swinging down toward another bogey, and jumped back just in time. The slice of the blade cut into the bogey like it was a bladder, spilling watery goo that vanished on the ground. The gravestone thunked to the earth and I swooped down and scooped it up.
But in those moments, I’d caught the notice of a possessed girl. Her yarn dred falls were tangled and a few pieces hung in her face, her darkened and crazed eyes staring out through the locks. She was stumbling toward me. She was smaller than I was and I thought I could probably hold her off, but I didn’t want to actually hurt her. From the look on her face, she had no such qualms about my safety.
I had to dodge and weave, slapping her hands away from me and shoving her back, ducking into the crowd for cover. I saw her mouth move but I couldn’t hear anything she said. She threw herself toward me and got one hand in my hair. I yelped--so odd to hear it only echo inside my head--and grabbed her wrist, squeezing to try to make her free me. Her face was so hardened, human features so cold with inhumanity, that I felt my pulses race with the desire to get away. This thing inside her wanted to kill me. And there were hundreds more like her.
Somehow I needed to get her off me. I had to get out of this crowd, get to Joe and drag him to the showers. The possessed girl was impossibly strong, forcing me down to my knees and pulling my head hard to one side. Her other hand was going for my chin. She was going to just snap my neck and drop me like a sack of meat.
My hand shot up, the heel of it catching her hard in the solar plexus. I grabbed her shirt so I could hang on. With a surge of desperation fueling it, I called up a big burst of living energy and pushed it into her. I could feel the resistance. It was a lot harder than dispelling a bogey outside of a host. I pulled up even more and thrust it with as much force as I could. This time the sense of resistance faltered and her knees buckled. I yanked her down in front of me and let go of her wrist, putting that hand on her head and pushing life energy with both hands. She--or rather the thing inside her--opened her mouth to scream in anger, but then her eyes rolled back, her head lolled, her jaw slackened, and long trails of vapor rose from her mouth like steam and unraveled in the night air. I caught the girl as she pitched forward and struggled to my feet. I felt dizzy and weak and I knew I couldn’t repeat that little performance more than a few times, if that.
Her limp body kept threatening to slide out of my arms as I half-carried, half-dragged her out of harm’s way. I had to keep stopping to hike her up. My arms trembled with the effort and I didn’t think I could keep going, but I had to get her out from the hordes of feet that could trample her if I left her on the ground. Without being able to hear anything, I couldn’t tell when someone was coming up close behind me or to the sides, and I was buffeted like a pinball. Elbows slammed into me, shoulders shoved me, and I was pinned so tightly on all sides that I could feel my breath getting shallow, anxious. A rage-filled face spun in front of me, mouth gaping though I couldn’t hear its bellow, and then something socked me in the eye. Showers of colored sparkling light motes burst across half my vision and my cheekbone and eyebrow throbbed with a pain that blurred my eyes with tears.
That moment of blindness, coupled with my blocked ears, destroyed any sense of reality I had. I clung to the unconscious girl but my arms felt weak and watery. I struggled for every breath, and forcing my legs to move was like trying to walk through deep mud. My head whirled and made me feel so sick that I thought I would die. My heart felt ready to explode with its deep heavy hammering.
Somehow I pushed forward, though I was starting to fade in and out and things were getting confusing. I couldn’t tell what I was looking at. I wasn’t even sure where I was going or if I was walking. I really wanted to run but also to just drop down and curl into a little ball.
The next thing I knew, I felt a cool breeze across my sweaty face. Things started coming into focus again, although I couldn’t tell what direction I faced or what anything was. I looked down and realized that the girl I carried had slid to the ground, with my hands holding her arms over her head. How long had I been standing there? I wasn’t sure. I was away from the crowd, but just, and my brain pieced together that it was partly because the crowd was spreading. Some people were running, others wandering off, small fights breaking out in the shadows, shouts coming from the distance.
That seemed bad. There was a lot of stuff out there that could be destroyed or used to hurt people. And what if the bogeys decided to take their new bodies out for a joyride beyond the borders of camp? I had no idea what they’d want to do while they were in human form, but none of it was likely to be okay with the true owners of those bodies.
I had to get it together. I started to remember what I was supposed to be doing. Right. But first, I looked around and saw a few tents nearby with chairs knocked over. I tightened my grip on the girl’s arms, mentally apologized to her for not being a big buff action hero, and dragged her across the grass to the tents. I managed to right a chair and haul her into it. Wasn’t much, but at least she wouldn’t get stepped on.
Joe. He was still in danger, and Sara only had so much war water to fight with. I stumbled back toward the heart of the crowd, toward where I thought he had been.
As I searched for them, Sara ran toward me, pulling Joe after her. He still looked dazed, but more alert than before. She pointed to the showers and shouted something.
“Still can’t hear you!” I shouted back. “Get him under the water and then both of you get to the yurt. I’ll find Cherry and meet you.”
A sunken, bony-looking bogey chased after Sara and Joe. I rushed it, tripping over my own feet, exhausted and foggy. We crashed to the ground together and I just kept hitting it with fists that felt weak and awkward. It snarled and snapped at me, stubby fingers digging into my skin. I tore at it. It was dusty and dry like an old book. In the end I pushed its face aside with one hand, leaning on it, while with the other I ripped away withered chunks until I found the stone and yanked it out.
Another, and another. I stayed to the shadows, hiding behind tents and inside structures, trying to avoid any huma
n shapes and anything in a cluster and to ambush the bogeys one by one. So tired. My whole body ached whenever I forced it out of a crouch. I wanted to cry, scream, give up, run far away. The silence was like watching a movie on mute. Where was Cherry?
I got careless. I was fighting one and not paying attention to my surroundings, and of course I couldn’t hear the others coming until they were all around us. They closed in so fast. I flailed and kicked but they pinned me down, leering at me with cold and empty eyes.
Possessed people shambled at me from all directions as though drawn by the bogeys. They reached for me, their mouths slack and wet with spittle, their eyes hungry and hateful.
A boy in his early teens wandered past. His shirt was too big for him and he had the vacant, distant look of one of the entranced. One of the bogeys left off me, catching him and pulling him closer. I shouted at the boy, knowing it might be pointless but trying to rouse him from his stupor anyway. The bogey forced the boy to his knees and drove one blunted limb into the crown of his head from behind him as though digging around in his brain, then bent forward and oozed in. The boy’s mouth sagged open and he shook his head from side to side, his arms flopping useless at his sides as the bogey invaded him. When it was within him, he fell face first to the ground and lay there with the bogey’s body melting over him.
And then he got up. Awkward, pushing himself up into a low coiled stance. His face turned toward me. No child’s face should ever have such an expression on it. I let out a shriek-gasp that dissolved into a hysterical giggle. He crawled closer to me.
I was held in place by a dozen appendages, one of which slid over my mouth and partway in, too hard to bite down on, gagging me. The possessed boy pulled at the hem of my pants, which had migrated partway up my leg, and bared my calf. He squatted there, staring at my flesh, and one hand grasped my ankle while the other began to dig into my shin. I screamed, muffled, as blunt nails pressed deeper and deeper, trying to break skin. Trying to flay and peel off pieces of me. The pain was fiery.
MetamorphosUS: Book 1 of the Mythfit Witch Mysteries Page 40