Protector

by Sam Ryder

  “She’s already tapped Ass-Fan,” Beat said. I knew I could always count on her to get me up to speed on all the gossip.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Millania and Lace? Dude works fast.”

  “What is your human expression?” Lace said. “Two egrets with one stone?”

  Close enough. I got the picture. Ass-Fan had himself a threesome. I wasn’t surprised Lace would be into that sort of thing, but Millania? The tall, gilled Warrior was full of surprises these days. “I hope everyone left satisfied,” I said.

  Lace swiveled around and grinned that ravenous grin. “Oh yes,” she purred. “The one you call Ass-Fan is enough man for several women. He makes you seem like a little boy in comparison.”

  I knew she was just trying to get under my skin, but still…I didn’t like Ass-Fan as much anymore. Gods, you’re pathetic, I thought. I wasn’t even the alpha male type and already I was feeling threatened by this Spartacus-looking Warrior. I’m the godsdamned Protector, I reminded myself. So, naturally, I made a joke. “If the guy’s got more than one penis, just come right out and say it,” I said.

  Of course, Lace was pretty quick in the comeback department, almost like she’d been ready. “I can’t say that,” she said. “It just felt like he did.”

  Beat gave me a big smile.

  I flipped her the bird.

  She laughed.

  We walked on, and finally Beat asked the question everyone seemed to have been avoiding for a long time. “What happened to Belle?”

  “Butt-Plug,” I said.

  “Sounds painful.”

  “More like pleasurable.” Oops. That had just slipped out. Telling Beat about the massive orgy in the forest was the equivalent of giving her an entire stockpile of ammo and a dozen assault rifles in mint firing condition.

  “Ooh la la,” she said. “Sounds like your mission was all play with no work.”

  “Very funny.” There was no point in hiding things, so I told her the entire story, from the second we entered the forest to the moment I left alone. Although Lace pretended not to be listening, I could tell from the way her ears angled in my direction that she was.

  When I finished, Beat said, “So you pawned your stalker off on a horny giant and his harem. Creative. You have officially graduated from Stalker 101.”

  I snorted. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “I know. I was just being…”

  “Beat?”

  “Something like that. Anyway, sounds like we lost a decent Warrior after all. Sucks.”

  “Yeah.” It did. But maybe we’d also made an ally in the process. It wasn’t like I thought Bu’ploog and his crew would come running from the forest if I called, but perhaps we could convince them to help our cause in another way. It was something to think about. Some other time, I reminded myself. If we didn’t recover Airiel’s heart from the Morgoss, we might run out of time.

  I couldn’t let that happen.

  Next, I told them all about what happened with the Syrene.

  “Wait, you’re saying your hammer is now supercharged like Lace’s bow?” Beat asked when I got to that part.

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure if the mechanics are the same, but in practice…yes. I guess you could call it supercharged.”

  “Maybe you should’ve added a clause in your deal with the sexy, blood-sucking sirens that they would bless all our weapons with their holy water or whatever. I’ve been in the market for a magical shield and spear for a while.”

  “Apparently it doesn’t work like that.” I told her about my other meeting with the Three, before Airiel got completely comatose.

  “So they’re not hoarding the weapons,” Beat said. “They’re waiting for the right wielders.”

  It was a good way of putting it. Although it still felt like hoarding.

  I told them the rest of the story, all the way up to the point where I saw the smoke and started running back toward camp.

  “Hold up,” Beat said, grabbing my arm. In a gesture that was remarkably tender for the ripped woman, she trailed the pads of her fingers across my neck, lingering on the spot where I knew there were two raised bumps. The spot where the Syrene leader had bitten me. The punctures had sealed before I’d made it back to dry land, and they seemed to be healing well enough.

  Beat was frowning. “What?” I said.

  “Have you looked at yourself in the pond lately?”

  “Sorry, I forgot to do my hair this morning.”

  “I’m serious.” Which was rare enough for Beat that it gave me pause.

  “Been kinda busy. Just tell me what you’re thinking,” I said.

  “It might be nothing, but…there are these little white veins webbing from the punctures. They look like little hairline fractures.”

  It was weird, but I’d been bitten by ancient creatures that were cousins to the Three goddesses we served. “Are they raised?”

  She shook her head.

  “Probably just part of the healing process,” I said. I knew I was trying to convince myself more than them. In truth, it freaked me out a little. Everything about the Syrene freaked me out.

  Still, as we started off again, even Lace gave me a concerned glance. I shrugged it off. More than likely, I’d be dead long before the Syrene bite turned me into a vampire or something. I changed the subject. “Soooo, what exactly happened while I was gone?”

  “No one died, so that was good.”

  Funny how low our bar was for a good day. Woke up, ate breakfast, no one died…a good day. “How did the newbs handle their onboarding process?” I asked. I said it like we worked in human resources at a big company, where new hires attended mandatory training and had to play ice breakers like Two Truths and a Lie. I wondered whether that was something we should consider…Beat would have a field day with it.

  Beat shrugged. “Not bad all things considered.” I knew what she meant. The shock of arriving on a new planet ruled by monsters. Getting new bodies, almost like a jalopy transformed into a Ferrari. Learning about the Black. “Millania whispered in their ears and then we all held hands and sang Kumbaya. You really missed out. There were even roasted marshmallows. Okay, fine, it was leafrat. Again. But it was still super yum. Way better than the faux moose meat Butt-Plug gave you.”

  It was good to be back in the presence of my person again. She made everything more fun, even deadly missions. “And what about”—it still hurt to even think her name, much less say it out loud—“Vrill and her dragon? You said they came every Black?”

  She nodded. “More like at the very end of the Black. After we were all tired out from fighting monsters. We’d hear the telltale shriek and then the winged bastard would come swooping down and start trying to burn our house down.”

  “But she always left.” She meaning Vrill. We hadn’t exactly been able to check between the dragon’s legs for gender.

  “Yeah, I guess you could look at it that way. There was something else.” Beat stared straight ahead, cocking her head to the side slightly. “The second time I saw her lift her hand and shove her fingers under one of her collars. She looked like she was in…pain. For those few seconds, the dragon looked confused, like it didn’t know what it was supposed to do.”

  Interesting. “Two collars…” I murmured, my mind ticking over the facts. Somehow Vrill was linked to the dragon. I assumed the collars were like chains tethering her to Annakor and the Morgoss. Maybe one of them was like that. But what if the other one linked her to the dragon? I thought of it as a chain of command in the military. The Morgoss sends orders to Vrill through their link to her. Then she relays the orders onto the dragon.

  But why wouldn’t the Morgoss just bypass the middleman? They could put a collar on the dragon and order it to burn and destroy directly. I puzzled over the question.

  “Tor to Ryder,” Beat said. “Your next shipment of steroids has arrived.”

  I blinked and the questions vanished. Again, things to be considered another time. After we’d returned to camp, triump
hant with our latest victory over the Morgoss. Right. If only.

  The bigger issue at this exact moment was what might happen if Vrill and her dragon returned while we were gone. Yes, the new Warriors seemed to be doing pretty well in terms of getting into fighting shape, but that didn’t mean our small force could handle a dragon. All the hard work to refortify the wards could be for naught.

  We needed to find a way to kill the dragon.

  Which, I knew, might mean killing Vrill in the process.

  I didn’t know if I was prepared to do that.

  ~~~

  We might’ve made it to Annakor before the next Black if we’d run the whole way. But then we’d be tired and in need of sleep. Instead, as we did the last time I made this journey, we stopped just as the sun began to slip behind the mountains.

  I remembered with surprising fondness how Beat and I had smeared our skin with troll blood and buried ourselves, an act that had saved us from a pack of hungry hellhounds. Of course, the next morning we’d been attacked by a chittering Maluk’ori horde and would’ve died if Vrill hadn’t showed up at the penultimate moment to kick some serious demon ass.

  Ahh memories.

  This Black had the potential to be far less nostalgic.

  In any case, we stopped, exhausted from hours of walking, and laid down on the harsh terrain. None of us spoke, nibbling on the roasted skewers of leafrat Hunch had provided before we left. Sipping from our water skins. Then we slept so we didn’t have to see the curtain of Black fall over the planet.

  I dreamed. I dreamed of the night Vrill and I were forced to rush from the boulder cave we’d been sheltering in and into the darkness of the Black. I dreamed of the gargat’s claws sinking into me. I dreamed of killing. Surviving.

  I awoke to a rustling sound. Beside me, my magical hammer was glowing, creating a faint circle, like a single spotlight cast by the moon through the cloud cover on a black sea.

  Rustle, rustle.

  I picked up my hammer and shone it around to locate my companions, both of whom slumbered like the dead. Lace’s ears were twitching, picking up the sound, but not enough to infiltrate her rest.

  When we slept in the Black, we relied on the fact that monsters were noisy as hell. It was better than a warning system. But this sound…this was so soft it might’ve been the wind through the foliage. Only there was no wind. Nor foliage.

  Rustle, rustle.

  I tried to locate the direction of the noise, rotating my hammer toward my best guess.

  The leafrat’s eyes shone when the light reflected off its face, but a moment later it was gone, burrowing into the ground and leaving only a plume of greenery sticking straight up into the air. It had gone to ground right beside one of our discarded packs, which is what it had been rummaging through to make the sound.

  I frowned. Deeply. Not because I was troubled by the little rascal’s attempted thievery, but because of its timing. We were still well into the Black, as evidenced by the fact that I couldn’t see a damn thing except by the light of my hammer.

  Leafrats weren’t dumb. They didn’t come out at night, not when the plains were being prowled by a dozen varieties of monsters that didn’t discriminate in their thirst for blood. For some reason, however, this little rodent’s instincts had told him it was safe to come out and poke around.

  No monsters, I thought. Usually, that would be a good thing, and maybe it was.

  But I wasn’t comforted. Not when we were facing an enemy that didn’t seem to do anything by accident. Unless the official Monster Workers Union had gone on strike, this calm before the storm was all a part of the demon taskmasters’ plan. Which involved us all dying.

  Bring it, I thought, lying back down. Either way, it was a reprieve, and we should take advantage of it and get some rest.

  We would need it for what was to come.

  ~~~

  We slept in late. Why not? The Black, for once, had been uneventful and we were less than half a day’s march from the dark mountains standing sentinel before us. I told the others about what I’d seen in the night.

  They both shrugged it off as just another weird thing in a world that was constructed of weird things. I couldn’t disagree. Thinking too much could make one go crazy. Then again, we were all relieved that there hadn’t been any monsters. Not for our sake, but for the others back at camp. They wouldn’t have had to fight without us. Vrill and her dragon also hadn’t come, otherwise we would’ve heard the hunting cry. Another strange, but not unwanted, result. Why look a gift horse in the mouth?

  The leafrat was gone. It hadn’t taken anything because we didn’t really have much. A couple of pots of ooze for emergencies. Water. More leafrat. Apparently the rodents weren’t desperate enough for food that they’d go cannibal on each other.

  After a light breakfast we continued our march. The bronze sun was halfway to its apex, which meant we should reach the foothills of the mountains when it was approximately three quarters of the way from horizon to horizon. Which meant we would enter the dark fortress well before the next Black. Once inside, whether it was day or night on the outside wouldn’t much matter. Not to us anyway. To our fellow Warriors, it might matter a lot.

  I trusted Millania and Eve. They would do whatever it took to ensure we returned to a camp that was safe and happy and, most importantly, alive.

  “You’ve got more white veins,” Beat said, inspecting my neck as we walked.

  “Part of the healing process,” I said, though both of us knew that wasn’t true. If all our plans came to fruition, I would ask the Three about the injury and whether I should be worried. Until then, there was no point in worrying.

  Beat told dirty jokes while we walked. I laughed at every one, because they were funny as hell. Lace pretended to be annoyed at how juvenile we were, but I could tell she found some of them funny, although I suspected she didn’t understand most of them because of various Earthly references.

  “What is this ‘priest’ you talk about?” the cat-woman asked after Beat had told a joke about a priest, a nun and a prostitute who frequented the same bar. Let’s just say it turned out both the priest and the nun had a wild side while the prostitute was more even keel.

  “A spiritual leader in one of Earth’s largest religions,” I said.

  She frowned, and I could tell her cat brain was trying to make sense of the senseless. “I don’t understand,” she finally said. “Why would a holy man do the things in your story?”

  I couldn’t help but to laugh at that. Why did people do half the things they did on Earth? “Because he’s human and prone to idiocy,” I said.

  “Oh!” Lace said, raising a single claw in the air. “Now I get it. That is funny. Humans are idiots!” She said the last with such glee it made me smile. I couldn’t argue with her.

  “Are your people—the Protons—so much smarter?” Beat asked.

  Lace offered an affronted expression. “Of course. We are a very advanced culture. We are natural predators, of course, so the rest of the natives fear us. But we have technology too.”

  “What kind of technology?” I asked, curious now. Tech had always been my thing back on Earth. That and video games and hating my job.

  “We’re not bound by gravity, for one,” she said.

  “So you have planes?” Beat offered.

  “I am not familiar with this term. But if you’re asking if we can fly, the answer is yes. We have these suits that allow us to travel from place to place quickly. If we were on Protos, this mission would’ve been trivial. We’d already be back at camp having wild sex with Ass-Fan.”

  “Uh, pass,” I said, though I was highly impressed that a civilization of cat people could be more technologically advanced than humans. It was pretty ignorant of me, actually.

  “Suit yourself,” Lace said, licking her chops. I think she intended it to be sexy, but in this case the presence of her fangs brought back memories of when the Syrene tried to eat me.

  “Okay,” I said. “So you’v
e got Iron Man suits. That’s awesome. What else?”

  Lace ignored the pop culture reference she couldn’t possibly have understood. “We have many gadgets. Things that can be connected to your brain to enhance all sorts of things, including libido.”

  “So, like, Viagra?” Beat said.

  I chuckled. I’d been thinking the same thing.

  “What is this Viagra?” Lace asked.

  “It, uh, helps dudes that can’t, uh, you know, get it up.”

  Lace looked confused, like the thought of a male who wouldn’t respond to her feminine seductions didn’t make any sense to her. Given the way her loin-bikini hugged her perfect curves it was hard—pun intended—for me to fathom such a thing either.

  “Why are you suddenly turned on?” she asked, glancing down at my one-armed salute.

  Shit. So she’d noticed. Not embarrassing at all. Beat rolled her eyes. “Men,” she said.

  “I can’t help it,” I said, trying to defend myself. “Back on Earth, there was always a risk of an NRB. Here it’s even worse, because the ooze has had an effect on my—”

  “Your anatomy?” Beat suggested.

  “What’s an NRB?” Lace asked.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Beat said.

  “Do you need me to help?” Lace said. She made a suggestive gesture that involved her tongue in the side of her mouth and her paws pretending to move back and forth in front of her face. It didn’t help things at all.

  “No,” Beat and I said at the same time.

  This had officially become the weirdest, most embarrassing, conversation of my life, and that included both of the planets I’d lived on. “Uh, thanks for the offer, Lace,” I said. “But I’ll be fine.”

  She shrugged. “The offer is open, even if you’re only a little boy compared to Asfandiar.” With that, she sped up, leaving us behind.

  “You’re pathetic,” Beat said, faking a punch at my groin. I flinched, as usual.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  ~~~

  Annakor was exactly the same as I remembered. Though I’d been there not so long ago, it was just as intimidating. The whole narrow path that dropped off to deadly falls on either side with creepy glowing eyes staring up at you thing. The demontorches lighting up the sides of the fortress despite the fact that it was still daylight. Then again, nestled between the shoulders of the mountains, Annakor was bathed in shadows, even during the day. This place probably got about an hour of direct sunlight a day—that was it.