*Treeeyyy!* Bond partner, atreyvo...friend. So many years.
But the remaining bounty hunter had dismissed Trevarr, given up on grabbing Sklayne, and turned himself toward the Garrie. He was big and partly scaled and hard-headed and he already opened his hand to grab her, already stooped just that little bit, assuming on the moment. Small person of much power, to be slung over that bulky shoulder and gone.
*Treeeyyyy!*
So much silence.
An then just the hint of response, dizzied and vague. A directive.
Not me. Atreya.
Sklayne cast a flat-eared glance at the approaching bounty hunter and leaped on the Garrie, spreading himself wide and thin and poofing into a blanket of cohesive energies. Melting into her, feeling her jerk beneath him, melting through her and leaving some small part of himself behind. A healing part. At the least, a plugging part, so she would no longer leak.
Then he thinned himself to flow beneath her. Thin cat, most wondrous cat, so sly—
The Garrie squeaked sharply in startled dismay and jerked up to her knees, brushing frantically across her front, even those places that humans didn’t touch in public. “Oh my God!” she cried. “Manners!”
Maybe not so sly.
~~~~~
Garrie tingled in every cell of her body, and twitched in most of them, and knew for a certainty she’d been touched in places she hadn’t invited anyone to touch.
But as Sklayne’s blanket form flowed away across the grass, a strange little hump in the middle as though just perhaps a cat was arching its spine to skitter away on its toes, she understood what he’d done. That he’d plugged her holes, infused her with temporary energy.
Fix-a-Flat, reckoner style.
Sklayne gathered himself to leap upon Trevarr, ready to give more of himself, to plug more leaks. But Shahh’s new glyph darts sliced the air—some shredding through Sklayne’s manifestation, some evoking a grunt of pain from Trevarr. Sklayne twisted around himself, yowling from a throat gone not-cat, and landed on broad feet and lanky legs, spinning circles in what looked like a macabre game to catch his own stumpy tail.
Not Sklayne!
And Trevarr hadn’t moved, and the fear swelled up so hard, so strong, that Garrie found herself momentarily frozen.
And then she found herself with nothing to lose. She had to give Shahh something else to do with his glyphs, to use him up. And she needed resources—for herself, for Trevarr, for Sklayne.
She snatched up the nearest echveria, arranging her fingers around it just so and pulsing a breeze into the device.
“No!” Anjhela cried, so raggedly the words were barely discernible, her head barely lifted. “You can’t hold all that! You’ll kill us all!”
But Garrie didn’t intend to hold the energy. She was a channel, not a vessel. She’d channeled portal energy in San Jose and healed the earth. She’d channeled stolen life energies in Sedona and created a vortex. She’d never quite intended those things but now she knew she could do them.
And in this moment, her goals were much more modest. She only wanted to piss off a mountain. She triggered the echveria.
The compacted portal energy boiled out unfettered and knocked her flat on her ass.
*Not stable!* Sklayne yowled into her mind as Anjhela flung herself to the ground and Shahh spent his payload of glyphs in a clumsy shield and scrabbled for more.
Garrie snarled Sklayne away, grasping at the energies and losing far more than she captured, unable to use it or guide it or hold it.
Then don’t try!
She released it all with a gasp. Almost all, but for the stolen breeze she needed to create not a shield, but a container, a stretchy ethereal bag ballooning outward and bouncing wildly with its own storm. A container quickly overfilled, expelling itself back into her and through her.
Her inner world turned bright, silver and lightning and rainbow edges that racing along her nerves and filling her bones and her heart and her soul. A roaring filled her ears, a Southwest hailstorm on a tin roof. Blinded and deafened, she worked by memory; overwhelmed by sensation, she spun that memory into intent and launched it.
Every bit of it.
Right into the heart of the mountain-turned-monster.
The roar faded enough to hear screaming, and the blinding nature of her innermost world faded enough to leave her blinking upward at what she’d done. Mountain entity, enraged. No longer just ethereal, but solidifying and massive and rearing up before them, stirring a roar of physical wind. Trees bent and creaked and grit whirled; a raven wheeled away, skimming the edge of an unnatural thermal..
Kyrokha, ready to launch. To devour.
“I meant to do that,” Garrie said, but her words landed dimly amidst the chaos and no one else heard.
But they saw it. Finally, they all saw it.
Thus the screaming.
And no little swearing. From Quinn, who stumbled back with the ax dragging awkwardly from his hand, his head tipping back and back and back to take in the enormity of the thing. And from Rick, who’d limped back to the group—knowing, from the grim look on his face, that they might well all die here but knowing just as well that scattering like ants wouldn’t keep them from getting stepped on. Lucia met him with her face as pale as pale and her eyes huge.
Trevarr climbed to his feet, glimmering with absorbed energies, his ethereal shadow a visible thing of gleaming silver highlights and charcoal shadows, a sweep of wing and stunning power, a flash of fang and eye. His sword shone even more brightly—the ethereal shadow of it a startling thing as Trevarr ignored the enraged and broken kyrokha behind him to focus on the enemy before him.
Not at the bounty hunter, fallen before the energy blast and not yet recovered from the impact. But at Shahh, whose hands again dripped glyphs and whose expression tipped into impatient ire. He was a man unused to resistance, and a man who freely bent others to his will. A man who quashed those fools who wouldn’t bend.
Too bad Garrie didn’t feel foolish.
Didn’t mean she wasn’t making it up as she went along. Didn’t mean things would work out.
Just meant this was a battle that had to be fought.
Shahh restrained the glyphs from their overflow, an effort that brought sweat to his brow and made the air pulse around him. His hand trembled; his jaw tensed. He looked straight at Garrie, catching her gaze with the faintest disdainful triumph in his own, and it was the only warning he gave. He flung glyphs at the mountain entity; he flung glyphs at Trevarr. He whirled a dance of his own making, his clothes flowing with him, snatching glyphs from what seemed to be thin air and spinning them outward—putting such ferocity behind them that they ripped through the air.
Comet-headed darts thwapped into the entity, their blunt impacts rippling outward in rings of color. The creature flinched and snapped at them, absorbing the blows. Glyphs spun out and expanded, connecting and interweaving, to fall over Trevarr—and over Sklayne, who’d leaped before Trevarr to take the impact. A yowl of dismay and pain and Sklayne suddenly looked more solid than Garrie had ever seen him—more earthbound. More trapped.
Trevarr’s sword flashed, blinding unto tears.
The remaining bounty hunter staggered toward Garrie.
And the mountain entity leaped. Leaped at them all, a looming and awkward thing still finding its feet in this corrupted form now forced upon it, not discerning in its target.
Garrie spun herself the stoutest shield, clutching the darkened echveria in a grip far too tight as she gave the thing the hardest ethereal kick she could manage. “It was me,” she screamed at it. “Come and get me!”
Maybe she’d said it out loud, maybe not. Hard to tell with the screaming and the roaring and the general chaos. But the ethereal kick landed solidly enough to rebound in flashes of color along the thing’s flank.
Its indistinct ears flattened, sweeping back in feathered ire. Its eyes formed, slitted, and reabsorbed, energy manifested into the physical and almost physical—a claw
looming, a fang emerging, no one thing in proportion with the other.
The eyes returned and filled her vision, black and red and swirling into infinity, and the talons flashed out to encircle her, plucking her off the ground—up and up and up. And okay, she really hadn’t expected that and holy farking crap and there was no such thing as heroic screaming, was there?
Not even while dangling.
Energies sparked as her shields resisted the half-manifested talons and she half wished they wouldn’t, not with the ground so very far below and no way to hang on. Shahh flung more darts from below, puny things with no force behind them. She’d accomplished what she’d meant to—she’d given Shahh something to spend himself on. But she’d also done much, much more and now she had to deal with that.
She braced herself as best she could, a clash of ethereal sparks spattering against her face, and pushed the spent echveria against the shield—holding it just exactly right, as if triggering it. The broken kyrokha shook her, frustrated by the shields and by another pale volley from Shahh. She lost her position, rattling around within the talon cage like a die about to be cast—almost but not quite tumbling out between talons and then just barely finding security, herself in behind one curving claw with her arm hooked around it and her body in the padded toe notch where the claw emerged.
She was rattled, she was uncertain of up and down, she was singed from the sparks between them, but somehow she hadn’t lost the device. No time to be fancy. She shoved it against the massive toe pad without finesse, thinning the shielding between them with blunt haste, holding it just so, wishing she’d had the chance to ask Sklayne if the things could be reused and please oh please will you just WORK!
But nothing happened. The entity closed its talons, flaring energy between them—its tail lashing in fury, one giant eye whirling, a misshapen foot lurching far below to crush the shelter.
Also far below, Shahh spun a pallid net around Trevarr; Lukhas flashed through it. The massive entity took another clumsy step, obliterating half the parking lot—and, unable to crush Garrie, made to fling her to the ground.
Garrie was as stunned as the kyrokha when she went nowhere. But the echveria clung to the toe pad like a burr and Garrie clung to the echveria, an attachment that left her dangling from an already wounded arm. She screamed, struggling to maintain shielding through the fiery, tearing sensation that came from her body giving way. She clamped her second hand over the first, reinforcing her grip and yes the ground was so very far away and yes Trevarr fought his way free once more and yes the bounty hunter turned to take him down once more and yes she just kept screaming—
Until Lucia, so far below, cried out with something that sounded like inexplicable hope and pointed at Garrie, and Garrie, twisting and crying and holding her shields, suddenly realized that Lucia wasn’t quite so far below at all. Nor Trevarr, nor the earth, and suddenly the massive eye looked as much confused as anything else, and then panicked, and then Garrie’s feet nearly touched ground and the rest of the broken entity swirled right on into the echveria like a fast-spinning whirlpool with a faint pop at the tail end of it.
Garrie fell the rest of the way and rolled into loose bundle, her limbs nothing but water and agony and the echveria only loosely held in boneless grip.
“And that,” said Shahh, much closer than he should have been and already gathering glyphs, “is exactly why you must die.”
Sklayne leaped from Trevarr’s shoulders, one bound and then two and then a pinpoint precision landing on Shahh’s back, claws biting deep. His inner voice rose above the volume of his very catlike yowl, an escalating thing of much fury. *NOT! STABLE!*
But Shahh flung his glyphs anyway.
Trevarr sprang for her, Lukhas a bright and shining thing limned with cutting energies, and Garrie somehow scraped together a feeble, tattered thing of a shield for them both.
But she didn’t shield the third echveria, the one that had been left in the grass.
*WARNED. YOU!*
Sklayne leaped away from Shahh and Trevarr scooped Garrie from the ground, sprinting back to Lucia and Quinn and Rick and his people as the completely uncontrolled explosion of portal energy shattered the reality around them.
White hot rainbow burning—
“Channel it, atreya!”
*Channel it, atreyva!*
—Scraping fiery churning—
—Channeling. Spinning out a shield, the strongest shield, a shield of ethereal steel and light. Existence turned to sound and sensation and pain until she retreated somewhere very deep inside to hold onto herself, yet still perpetually spinning out a shield that only pretended to muffle the roar, to dim the nuclear brightness, to hold the ethereal incineration at bay.
Channeling.
Scraping fiery churning
Sound and sensation and burning, burning...
Fading.
~~~~~
“Atreya.”
Oh, that voice—deep and whiskery and a bit of rumble on the side, touched by the accent that sharpened hard consonants and softened the rest.
“Release the shields, atreya.” He spoke in his own language, the one she now understood. “You made them well. We go nowhere until you let go.”
*Bite her?* The offer came in a hopeful tone.
Garrie grumbled, “I will bite you back,” a statement she hadn’t expected to be greeted with gasps of relief and Lucia’s cry of happiness.
She opened her eyes, found herself in a lap. Liked it. Looked up in to pewter eyes. Liked those, too. Felt the tickle of thick hair scattered through with braids, inhaled the scent of wood smoke and clean ash. Really, truly, liked it. “Are we alive?”
“Most of us.” Lucia gently chafed Garrie’s hand, her touch too familiar to mistake. “The hikers are fine. Rick needs some stitches...X-rays, too. Maybe some TLC. Quinn’s fine, and so is Drew, and I definitely have this shielding thing down. I am so definitely more than ready to put down some rent on that co-op spot and start baking. But first, we should get you to the hospital.”
“I don’t do people,” Garrie said, still grumbling. “Especially not people with metal claws and knives and such.” She struggled to sit straighter, and Trevarr lifted her—as easily as ever. She eyed him, such as she could from there. “You okay?”
“Weary,” he told her, and again used his own language, which told her well enough that he had no intention of admitting vulnerability out loud. “Bruised. Little more.”
“And the rest of you?” She answered in kind, the language coming more readily to her tongue..
“Waiting,” he said, and satisfaction glinted in his eye. He nodded at the others and switched to English. “Anjhela lives—you shielded her, and for that I thank you. Shahh has been destroyed, along with his men.”
For the first time, Garrie looked around them—and recoiled from what she found. “It looks like pretty much everything is gone.” Burnt to a crisp with an intensity beyond any forest fire, although the actual conflagration seemed limited to the shelter and the little clearing directly downhill. The nearest trees were blackened but still standing, and the unnatural fire no longer so much as smoldered.
She opened her hand and looked down at the glow of the active echveria. The damaged kyrokha was trapped firmly within, sealed with the kiss of her own ethereal stamp. “Okay then,” she said, nodding firmly. “We win.”
Trevarr’s mouth tightened; he looked over the burnt area where Shahh had once stood. “They’ll come for me again. They’ll come for you.”
“No,” Garrie said firmly, “they won’t.” She located Anjhela in the small, unexpected spot of brown, grassy hillside. The woman cradled her limp hand, her gaze shell-shocked, the soft torn scales at her forehead and cheek smeared with black blood and more blood oozing through her corset.
Garrie caught her eye, holding it until something of Anjhela’s normal arrogance straightened her spine and filled her eyes. Then Garrie spoke in the Keharian tongue. “You’re going back. I think there’s a
nice empty spot where his village once stood, isn’t there? When Ghehera finds you—and I’m sure they will—you can tell them that if I ever find so much of a whiff of Ghehera here, I’ll return this poor broken kyrokha to the very center of their stinking little enclave. But I won’t return the echveria it’s in. You follow?”
“I understand completely,” Anjhela said, and didn’t seem to regret it.
“Also, on occasion, Trevarr and I might want to visit his people, or Sklayne’s people, or do some sightseeing, or pick Keharian flowers or whatever. They’ll need to keep their distance, or, you know. Broken kyrokha, in their faces.”
“It would be a pleasure to inform them,” Anjhela said. “Of course, they will kill me.”
Naturally. For so many reasons. Not great with employee relations, those Gheharian masters.
“Pfah,” Garrie said. “It would displease me if they did that. You’re the only Keharian ambassador allowed to visit my world. Everyone else just dies on sight.”
Anjhela kept her uncertainty to a glance at Trevarr. He returned a steady gaze, and Anjhela nodded faintly. “I accept.”
“You see?” Garrie smiled, a bit foolish to feel so satisfied when she hurt so badly and when she knew just how long it would take to heal and strengthen and truly sort things out. But then Trevarr smiled back at her—just that hint of an expression at the edges of his eyes, the corners of his mouth, and suddenly she didn’t feel foolish at all. “We win.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter The End
Lucia’s Spanish and Mexican desserts sits in a personable co-op under a handpainted sign that reads I Love Lucia and she never takes home leftovers. Rick eats his pastries fresh.
Quinn continues to translate the Bestiary, and has a stack of additional scrolls and collected notes waiting for their turns, as Sklayne hunts them out.
Neither of them truly understand or trust Drew any longer.
Anjhela heals, as best she can. The mountain heals, as best it can, from the scars being attributed to a picnic fire. Most people even believe it.
Sklayne loves his spice-scented world and his crazy, impulse-challenged clan, but most of all he loves the two people who bond him with nothing more than affection.
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