by Erik Reid
I hurried toward them, but the blood-sucker didn’t have the same taste for pretty little kobold that it had for sweaty humans. The bloodhound pushed her away, hissed at her, then snatched my blood-streaked sweatshirt from the ground.
I raced ahead to chase it away, but it had already turned tail. The beast ran north without looking back, dipping down to all fours and carrying my hoodie with it.
I half limped toward Clara, exhaustion setting in now that our imminent danger had passed. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I think so,” she said. “That… thing. It could have bled me dry, but it didn’t want me. I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“Don’t talk like that,” I said, nearly losing my balance just from standing straight. “I’m sure your blood is as delicious as the next girl. He just wasn’t thirsty anymore. I was too… too… filling.”
My vision blacked out for a second and I fell sideways, unable to keep my body upright without the constant surge of adrenaline pumping through my reduced bloodstream. I lay staring up at the sun, letting its rays warm my ice-cold skin.
“You’re bleeding,” Dani said. She stood over me, a dark bruise discoloring her ribs. With her hands on her hips and her large breasts hovering above me, she was like an Amazon warrior.
“Let me help,” Clara said.
My mind was still dazed from the blood-letting ordeal we had just survived when Clara placed her hands behind my back and lifted me upright. She sat behind me under that solitary tree, setting her legs wide so they rested outside mine. She leaned me back against her chest and I reached behind instinctively to anchor my hands on her hips.
“It’s sweet that you want to help,” Dani said, offering the girl a warm smile, “but he’s not a child. You can’t just kiss his boo-boos and make them better.”
“I know that,” Clara said. She took a deep breath and pulled my shirt off me. The cotton stuck to my skin in places where blood had matted down the fabric, and for a moment it felt like my skin tore back open all over again.
“A kiss from me would do no one any good, but a touch might,” she said. “I… have magic.”
CHAPTER 6
“You what?” Dani asked.
“What my mother said before was true,” Clara said. I turned my head to listen better as she held me. Her voice was quiet and her head tilted low so that she mostly spoke at my back and not directly to my or Dani’s faces.
“I was touched by the Goddess at birth,” she explained, “though I don’t know why. It is very rare for a kobold to receive the gift of the Goddess’s magic, and my mother had high hopes that I would fetch a hefty price from a taker prepared to benefit from my unique skills.
“No one wanted me. Potential takers balked at my mother, furious that they wasted their time traveling from great distances only to find a kobold with a skill so weak as mine. I might be a rarity among my kind, but I rank as the least significant healer in Silura. She stopped offering me for sale altogether to prevent me from harming her reputation further.”
Clara’s hands caressed my skin while she spoke. Delicate fingers swirled over my triceps, dancing up my bleeding arm toward my shoulder blade and delts. They traced up my neck and circled the bite marks that foul monster left behind. Her fingertips left a trail of warmth and energy behind that glowed soft and pink against my skin. Her magic soothed my worries and filled my body with a sense of strength and calm.
“I stopped the bleeding,” Clara said. “That is all. I cannot heal the wound or prevent it from scarring. I cannot mend a broken bone or ease a victim’s pain.”
“Clara,” Dani said. “Even that is remarkable. With the right training you could grow that magic into something spectacular.”
“There’s training for magic?” Clara asked.
“Goddess-touched aren’t common, but draykin have a few different schools. I’ve also known parents who hired private tutors after hours. Tuition isn’t free, but—”
“Mother would never spend rounds on her own children,” Clara said. “Any child that burdened her business was quickly put out of the way.”
“You have such a soft and gentle touch,” I said, feeling mildly stronger already. “I’m sorry the world hasn’t repaid that in kind.”
“Besides,” Clara said, “it is too late for schooling. I am not a child anymore. I will perform my duties as a given and set my mind to the tasks you desire, not to my own betterment. Daniana Weyforth, may I wash the monkey’s clothing before we go?”
“First of all,” Dani said, “just call me Dani. And second of all… Yes, wash the monkey’s clothing.”
“My name is Kyle,” I said. “Come here.”
Clara knelt by my side and kept her eyes on the grass. I reached for her neck, tugging at the knot that tethered her leash to a small metal loop set within the black band around her throat. I unlaced the rope and tossed it to the grass, then reached back for the latch to her collar.
Her hands flew toward mine, holding them still while her eyes flashed plaintive and desperate.
“Seven years,” she said. “If I remove the collar sooner she will know. She always knows these things. I will honor my responsibilities, but please do not take my collar from me.”
I let go. “Seven years is a long time, but we can discuss this later.”
She nodded, took my shirt from the ground, and walked with it toward the pond. Dani sat beside me as I lay back onto the grass.
“Magic, huh?” I asked.
“I guess so.” She took a deep breath and shook her head. “I’d better start cooking so Clara can keep her strength up for the walk. If the city guards posted outside the Varrowsgard gates think I’m a neglectful taker, they might take Clara away from me. It would be the world’s shortest taking.”
“Wait,” I said. “Stay with me a moment. The bleeding may have stopped, but I’m still so cold.”
Dani smiled and leaned forward. She pursed her lips. I puckered mine, waiting for her kiss to land while I lay flat against the grass.
Instead, she blew softly, conjuring a warm breeze that took the chill off my skin.
“Dragon’s breath,” I said. “Keep it coming.”
“I told you, I’m not a dragon,” she said.
“If I’m a monkey, you’re a dragon,” I said. “Now keep blowing.”
She tucked her hair behind her ear and leaned closer, blowing fresh warmth against my bare chest.
“Lower,” I said.
She shot me a skeptical glance but did as I asked, warming her way down my abs. I reached a hand behind her head and sank my fingers into her dark green hair.
“My blood would be rushing south right now if I had any left,” I said. “Oh wait, there it is.”
She glanced down at my pants and arched an eyebrow.
“There are dead bodies here,” she said.
“All the more reason to celebrate life,” I said.
Dani shifted position and reached for my hand. Her four fingers played gently with my five.
“We never did finish what we started earlier,” I said. “Let’s work up an appetite before we roast up some food.”
She smiled, but it was forced. Her eyes held wariness and reservation in them.
“What?” I asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“When I squared off with one of those beasts, it kept slashing with sharp claws,” Dani said. “A flurry of gray hands and black nails whipped at my chest, my face. There was no mistaking what I saw. They had five fingers, Kyle. Just like you do.”
“They also had teeth like ivory crazy-straws and the hip structure of a palsied hyena,” I said. “Five fingers are pretty common where I’m from.”
“But they aren’t here,” she said. “We shouldn’t linger in the open any longer than we truly need. I hear the howls too, the ones the fisherman warned us about. There are other creatures out there looking for a kill.”
I listened carefully and found the same howling sounds in the distance. Beyond the cracklin
g fire and the splash of Clara washing the blood off my shirt in the pond, there were long and low vocalizations.
“I’ll start on the food,” Dani said, letting my hand drop to the grass. “Then we can move along.”
She stood, brushed herself off, and headed for the box of fresh fish.
Why is every girl such a tease? I wondered.
While Clara and Dani worked at their separate tasks, I reached out in the grass and felt around until I found the teeth I had knocked out of that creature’s face. I held them up and scrutinized them. The way they twisted up from the point toward the base — it was like they were specifically evolved for siphoning blood from whatever host they were drinking from.
The battle was so real, and the pain of those bites so visceral. That’s when I decided this definitely was not a dream. A dream wouldn’t hurt this much or try so desperately to kill me. A dream this heart-thumping wouldn’t last for hours and I sure as hell wouldn’t sleep through all that adrenaline coursing through me. This shit was real.
That was a relief, in its own way. It meant my subconscious wasn’t a total psycho. It also, however, meant we were in some weird fucking danger, in a world I did not belong in.
After what felt like no time at all, we ate our fill of the slain fisherman’s catch while my shirt dried on a stick above the remnants of our cooking fire. As we gathered our things and prepared to set off for the castle city, I tucked the pair of spiraled fangs into my jeans pocket.
That’s when my finger grazed against the soft card I had taken from the old fortuneteller lady. I pulled it out, intending to compare the image of the draykin castle city to the artwork on the card itself.
I couldn’t do that. The art had changed.
Where there had once been a towering stone keep and draykin women soaring into white puffy clouds, there was now an arched metal gate. It was rusted and aging, with a tangled mass of iron loops and corkscrews rising above it, forming the same fanciful skyline as the rusted theme park I had left behind.
A hand-drawn scroll stretched across the bottom of the card, just as it always had, but the text had changed. Now, it read “Thrillville.”
I squinted closer, focusing on a minor detail at the base of the amusement park’s welcome gate. It was a pair of bolt cutters. My bolt cutters.
What the actual fuck?
CHAPTER 7
We approached the southern wall of the castle city, losing sight of the northern mountains as they receded against the horizon behind us. The castle’s central tower and several high parapets along its outer walls held long purple flags that tapered to fine points and rippled against the wind like a color guard’s baton. Just like the blue flags they had sported earlier, these bore the white insignia of a fist with four fingers, wearing a crown on its knuckles.
“So what’s going to happen after this?” I asked. “We tell the guards to be on the lookout, then get Clara a nice little apron and a candy mixing spoon? Start you two off on your Hallmark-channel business venture?”
“Is that the work you need me for?” Clara asked. “Making candy? I am blessed to find a role so humble and yet so beautiful.”
“I think we’ll make a good team,” Dani said. “I’ll have to tell the guards that you both have a home with me, though. Vagabonds quickly become beggars, so they can’t know Kyle has no bed to call his own.”
“Speaking of beds, you have a nice big one, right, that fits three across?” I nudged her with my elbow playfully.
“I don’t need space in a bed,” Clara said. “A soft patch of floor would be enough. I won’t even need a pillow if there isn’t one to spare.”
Dani stopped short and held a hand to her brow, blocking the midday sun from her face. “I wouldn’t count on sleeping anytime soon.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Bow-chicka… whoa. Oh no.”
I followed Dani’s gaze toward the city ahead. The castle stood as the main focal point of the city’s skyline, centered among the smaller rows of rooftops that formed a wide ring of residential buildings and commercial shops. It was those buildings that drew my attention now though. Many of them billowed black smoke, and a few had open flames devouring their thatched roofs.
Dani started running then, and Clara and I followed suit, closing the distance that sat between us and the castle city’s defensive wall.
Of the three arched entryways that separated the dirt roads out here from the cobbled streets just visible inside the city’s perimeter, none were open. Each held a dense metal gate, with bars as thick as the spaces between them, forming a security barrier manned by a row of draykin guards standing close behind.
Haphazard carts, impatient horses, and a crowd of anxious draykin circled around each archway, though the central arch had attracted the most attention. The largest group of men and women gathered there, thrashing their tails and flicking their wings while they shouted at the guards. Meanwhile, columns of black smoke rose from the heart of the city, growing thicker by the second.
A small group of kobold givens stood close by with downcast eyes and silent tongues, but they were very few in number compared to the draykin. If Dani’s future competitors were shop owners who bought dozens of givens apiece, this assembly of draykin was somewhere lower on the economic spectrum. This was the class that did their work the old-fashioned way: with their own four-fingered hands.
Dani and I pushed toward the front. I reached back for Clara’s hand to make sure the girl, always quiet and shrinking, wouldn’t get lost in the crowd.
“Excuse me,” Dani said, gripping the vertical metal bars that formed the security gate beneath the central arch. “Hello? Excuse me, I live here. I need to get inside the city. Hello?”
The men behind those metal bars were focused on other, louder draykin. None spared Dani more than a passing glance.
“Hey!” I yelled. “You, with the ass for a face. The lady is speaking.”
The closest guard narrowed his eyes at me, squinting his eyelids and forcing the narrow slits of his pupils to widen.
“The lady can wait,” he said.
“While the city burns?” I asked. “Look, it’s not safe out here. You need to let us in. You need to let everyone in.”
“Please,” Dani said.
“Oh, I take orders from you lot, do I?” he asked. “A country draykin, a frail little kobold, and a… what are you, a pig man? Not enough fur for a mouse.”
“Don’t you worry about me,” I said. “There are long-toothed blood-sucking creep-monsters out there prowling for prey in the unprotected territory beyond the castle walls. If you don’t open these gates, you’re leaving all these people vulnerable to murder. Foul, foul murder.”
I stared at him for a moment, and he stared back. He didn’t seem to register the importance of what I just said. “Is your skull as thick as your unibrow?” I asked. “That’s it. I want to speak to a manager.”
“You don’t have to believe us,” Dani said. “Just tell the captain of the guard. It’s important.”
“I’m not a message boy,” he said. “I get paid to keep watch and maintain the peace, that’s all.”
“You call this peace?” I asked. Behind us, people grew more upset. Some had broken off into splinter groups, devolving into animated conversations about the children they needed to reach inside the city and the perishable goods they had spent their last rounds on, spoiling inside their carts under the midday sun.
“If you want peace,” I said, “let us in there. We’ll find the captain ourselves.”
“The city is under lockdown,” the guard said. “Our first priority is protecting the queen. Her royal pain-in-the-highness won’t leave her egg, and we can’t deal with more panicked citizens while we hunt down the arsonists responsible for all this.”
“Arsonists?” Dani asked.
“Stealthy fuckers,” the guard said. “A new fire ignites every minute and we don’t know who to blame. In the meantime, all subjects of the crown are ordered to shelter in Yanno
dale until the crisis passes.”
“I can’t afford a journey that long,” Dani said. “Yannodale is a day’s ride from here and I owe my givens food and shelter now.”
“I’m not her given,” I said.
“A fact that won’t help us,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at me. “Kyle, I don’t care if my rented room turns to ash, but my recipes? I can’t lose them. That’s my whole future right there.”
“Stupid woman,” the guard said. “Fretting over cookbooks when the kingdom itself could be at stake.”
“Lesson two in human-ology,” I said. “Men get stupid angry when someone insults their women.”
I reached through the metal bars and grabbed the guard by his thick leather vest, leaving Dani to gasp at my quick movement. His eyes widened as I pulled him up against the security gate, the heavy material of his protective armor barely folding against my grip.
“Listen to me,” I said. “You can’t trap your own people out here with murderous beasts on the loose, all while their homes and livelihoods turn to char before their eyes. It’s obvious you’re too worthless to call the shots, so bring someone higher ranking that responds to common sense, and apologize to the lady. She’s not a stupid woman; she’s got more cunning in her left tit than you have in your whole body.”
The guard ignored the way my clenched fist forced a small crease into his leather armor. He held eye contact with me, smiling the whole while, and revealing a row of yellow teeth that had one large gap where a bicuspid had gone missing.
“You gonna beat me up?” he asked. “A royal guard in the company of armed soldiers? No, you can’t do fuck-all to me, pig-brain. But,” he lowered his voice, “if you want to speak to the captain badly enough, I might be willing to take a little break from my post. If I were properly incentivized.” His eyes drifted toward Dani, settling on the black money pouch that hung by her hip. Then he reached a hand through the bars with his fingers outstretched and his palm up.