by Erik Reid
Dani took out her recipes and started rifling through them. Then something jumped up from the bushes and Dani fell backward. It was a woman, and she held her hands out in front of her like she was ready to pounce.
I raised my fists while Dani crab-walked backward to gain some distance. “I don’t want to fight you,” I said, “but I will. Probably.”
The woman glanced at each of our faces in turn, then she lowered her arms. “I thought I finally found one, but you’re not simki at all.”
“So… that means I don’t have to face that difficult question of ‘when is it okay to hit a woman’?”
She laughed. “I don’t want to fight, I’m in the middle of a game. Maybe you can play too! I’m Kaylee.”
“This isn’t a good time for playing,” I said.
“It’s always a good time for playing,” she replied. “Especially now. It’s the biggest game of hide and seek so far, and they’re all doing such a marvelous job. It’s great fun. Help me find them!”
She was jumping up and down now, despite having one foot inside a full-grown synapper bush. Her other foot was bare, leading to a long pale leg that vanished under the hem of a yellow jumper dress. One strap held it in place over her shoulder with a large yellow button, leaving her opposite shoulder bare.
A long tail, covered in short brown fur, extended from beneath her dress, matching the brown of her short, messy hair. Ears, rounder and smaller than mine, poked out on each side.
Other than that, she looked very human, just like Dani looked aside from her few dragon-esque features. Kaylee’s skin was pale and tight, revealing her long, slender muscles up and down her limbs.
“I’m Dani,” Dani said, standing and brushing the leaves off her legs. “I’ve never actually met a monkey girl before.”
“Hey,” Kaylee said, pouting and lowering her eyebrows. “That’s very offensive.”
“What?” Dani asked. Her cheeks reddened. “But I… I didn’t…”
“I’m just playing,” Kaylee said. “I don’t really take offense to that. I know it’s kind of a slur or something, but what’s a little rough language among friends, right?”
I turned to Dani. “So when you called me ‘monkey,’ you weren’t just being cute. You were being a little racist.”
“I didn’t know it was a slur,” she said. “I promise. Oh, now I feel sick.”
“Whatcha doin’ all the way out here, if you don’t mind my asking?” Kaylee asked.
“Plucking a few synappers,” Dani said. “Or at least, trying to. They’re prickly, and stuck to their branches, and these don’t seem to be ripe.”
“If you’re looking for nice plump seedpods, look inside the enclave. That’s what we call our home. These plants grow much better in the shade. Come on!” Kaylee raced away from us and into the thicket of trees that cast the ground below into dense shadow.
“Go, we’re heading that way anyway,” Gretna said. “There’s a small pond at the heart of that enclave of trees for the horses to drink from. I’ll tether them now so they can drink without the risk of them wandering too far.”
“Let me help,” Clara said, taking the reins to the horse she and I had just ridden. She and Gretna set to their task while Dani and I followed Kaylee. She stood next to a pair of leafy bushes and bounced on the tips of her toes while she waited.
“Synappers?” I asked.
“Synappers!” Kaylee said. She crouched low and thrust her arms into the underbrush, so Dani and I did the same.
My left hand hated this task. The seedpods had sharp spikes to them that pinched my skin. My right hand — the one ruled by Oscar’s strength-boosted glove material — kept crushing the pods no matter how lightly I pinched.
I had a newfound appreciation for the challenges the Hulk faced. Selena and I had been too hard on him.
“Nnn!” Dani grunted and lost her balance. “Finally, got one free.”
“I’ve got four,” Kaylee said.
I had an idea.
“I bet I can gather more of these than anyone else,” I declared.
Dani shot me an odd look, then her face softened into a smile. “No, Kyle. I plan to collect the most synappers.”
Kaylee looked up at us, her eyes wide. “Nuh-uh. I can pluck harder and faster than either of you can!”
“Maybe we should make this a little game,” I said. “Whoever collects the most wins.”
“I’d like that,” the simki girl said. Her hands twitched in fast, excited movements and she started bouncing on her heels.
“Let’s all split up and claim separate spots,” I said. “On your mark, get—”
She ran to a bush halfway hidden by the massive trunk of an ancient tree with a little hut perched between high branches. While Dani and I wandered further away, I set another waypoint marker.
Simki Sylvania, I thought. Oscar handled the rest, illuminating a fresh waypoint marker beneath my feet.
“Look at her go,” Dani said, watching Kaylee’s fingers snap seedpods from that bush with focus and haste, building a small pile of ingredients Dani could use to speed up our reflexes with pleasant little candies that wouldn’t coat our tongues in edible sand.
“We don’t have to do anything,” I said. “As long as she thinks it’s a game, she’ll work hard enough for all of us.”
“I know,” Dani said. “It’s almost mesmerizing how quickly she works.”
“I should feel bad about this, right?” I asked. “It’s freeloading.”
“She seems to enjoy it,” Dani said. “And I think she’ll enjoy winning this little competition even more.”
“So the nicest thing we can do is nothing at all? Finally. That’s exactly my speed.”
“She needs a win,” Dani said. “She’s all alone out here.”
“With all those huts high up in the trees?” I asked. “I’m sure there are plenty of others here somewhere.”
“There were,” Dani said. “I think they all left abruptly. Like, middle-of-the-night abruptly.”
“And no one told Kaylee? She thinks this is just another monkey game. That is fucked up.”
“Simki,” Dani said. “Remember, ‘monkey’ is an insult. The real question is, why did they all abandon their home? The ground is fertile, they have a water source, access to food, shelter.”
I listened out for any sign that Kaylee’s people were lying low. A rustle of branches, a scurry overhead, a laugh or a sigh or the growl of a hungry stomach. Instead, I heard something else.
I put a hand on Dani’s shoulder and locked eyes with her. “Do you hear that?”
Dani’s chest inflated with a sharp breath. “Howling.”
Dani and I raced back toward Kaylee. Gretna was just tying up the horses by a small pond with Clara’s help. “Time’s up!” I yelled. “I didn’t find any synappers, did you Dani?”
“No,” Dani replied, “what about you, Kaylee?”
“Yes!” The simki girl practically screamed with glee. A mound of pods rested in her cupped hands. “I win, I win!”
“But now,” I said, “we have to get to higher ground. I heard some bad people coming.”
“What are you talking about?” Gretna asked.
“Listen,” I said.
Her face tightened as the background howling reached her ears. “Climb, everyone.”
Kaylee gave a puzzled look, but then her eyes sparked again. She handed me the seedpods and then darted toward the trunk of a large tree and climbed up the knobs left behind by old branches that had snapped off long ago. If this were a race to safety, she would have won it.
Clara was close behind, touching her delicate kobold fingers to the rough bark of that tree and climbing nimbly without relying on the handholds and footholds. Dani leapt into the air and flapped her wings hard, gaining enough altitude that she could grab hold of the tree halfway up, and Gretna climbed from the bottom, weighed down by her heavy armor.
I climbed last, taking a moment to stow the synapper pods in the horses’
saddlebags first.
I relied on my right hand most on the way up, straining far less than I should have thanks to Oscar. Though, he did nothing to calm the chill that shot up my spine from the sound of an oncoming horde of bloodhounds. The howling got louder fast, a chorus of eerie, high pitched tones coming from multiple creatures all calling out at once.
At the top of the tree, we huddled inside a straw-roofed hut. It was small, with a box of under-ripe fruits in one corner and a hammock stretched across the opposite wall. The doorframe was wide enough that we could all see far beyond the outer rim of the trees that formed this forest-like oasis. We stared in collective fear and disgust as a dozen bloodhounds bounded toward us on all fours.
They were vile, hideous creatures. They ran in a lurching gallop, their human-shaped limbs too long and gangly to run gracefully on all fours, but the curve of their hips prevented running upright. Beady eyes and snarling mouths came into better focus as they neared, constantly howling and scanning left and right, a pack of vicious predators in search of fresh prey.
We huddled in our treetop hut, quiet and tense. Kaylee clutched my upper arm with both hands and leaned close to whisper into my ear. “What animal is that?”
“Monster is a better word,” I whispered back. “They’re bloodhounds. Vampiric mongrels that will drink your blood and leave you for dead.”
“Unless you’re a kobold,” Clara said. “I could have stayed below and they wouldn’t have cared for my blood.”
“That was once, and you were lucky,” I said, catching her eye contact and holding it. “I still don’t know why those beasts left you alone, but we can’t count on a repeat.”
“What about horses?” Kaylee asked.
When I looked down again, the pack of twelve bloodthirsty fiends circled our pair of horses. The animals retreated against the thick tree trunk they were tied to, but the ropes that held them in place were short and didn’t permit a wide range of motion.
“Benoch’s compound is too far to walk on foot,” Gretna said. “And all of our supplies are in those saddlebags.”
“I wish we hadn’t tied them up,” Dani said. “We might lose our mounts and our gear, but at least the horses would have had a chance at escape.”
“Those poor defenseless horses will get hurt,” Kaylee said. “They might die.”
Her grip on my arm tightened and her body began to shake. The pale skin of her cheeks grew flush.
“Look away,” I said. “This will be brutal.”
“No,” Kaylee said. “No, no, no. A suffering I cannot abide.”
It wasn’t just her cheeks getting red now, it was her whole face. Her arms and legs. The whites of her eyes.
“Kaylee?” I asked. She didn’t respond, didn’t even react to my voice. Her eyebrows dug deep until they pinched the skin between them tight. She shrieked like a woman possessed and released my arm, taking a step toward the edge of the hut’s doorway and bending her knees.
I reached out and snatched her wrist with my left hand. “Don’t,” I said.
She looked back and bared her teeth at me, releasing another loud shriek while a burning red light grew bright within her pupils. Taken aback, I let go of her wrist.
Then, she jumped.
CHAPTER 13
With her limbs spread wide and her long brown tail standing straight behind her, Kaylee fell several stories from the straw shack in the tree’s canopy, releasing a high-pitched war cry the whole way. Bloodhounds snapped their attention upward at her and I held my breath. She was a mackerel diving into a school of hungry sharks.
“Why did you let her go?” Dani asked.
“I don’t think we could have stopped her,” I said. “That look in her eyes was nothing short of murder.”
Kaylee landed on one of the bloodhounds and knocked it flat to the ground. She straddled her legs around the monster’s waist and punched it so hard in the face that its nose cratered inward.
Terrified horses stomped and neighed, trapped in a tight radius around the tree from the thick cords of rope Gretna had tethered just minutes earlier. Kaylee stood and spun around, eyeing the horses carefully. They didn’t pose a threat to her, and she seemed to sense that, giving them a slight nod before surveying the eleven bloodhounds that formed a circle around her.
Those gray-tinged fiends regarded her with hunger and hostility, but not fear. A few feinted in small, jerky movements to test Kaylee’s reactions, but Kaylee didn’t react at all. I surveyed the horde almost impassively, ignoring their twitchy motions as she gaged their positions and her plan of attack.
The next bloodhound to move meant business. After two quick steps forward, it leapt at Kaylee with clawed hands aimed right at her face.
She crouched down as that monster flung itself at her, then she reached with both hands and braced her palms against the underside of the bloodhound’s stomach. She prevented it from arcing downward and instead tossed it aside, using the fiend’s own inertia to send it headfirst into two other bloodhounds. They fell like bowling pins, squealing and howling in a pile of flailing limbs.
Every inch of her pale skin was bright red now, and when another creature encroached to her side, she reached behind its head and pulled it down and toward her, crashing her knee against the underside of its chin and crushing its lower jaw against its upper teeth. Two white, spiraled, incisors pierced its lower lip. The injured monster stumbled backward and covered its face with both hands.
Kaylee’s breathing was deep and quick, huffing in and out of her small frame through nostrils flared wide while her open mouth bared her teeth. Everything about her expression, her posture, and the crimson coloration of her exposed skin was a dire threat.
“No wonder everyone left,” Dani said. “She’s cursed.”
“How does something like that happen to such a lively spirit?” Clara asked.
“Not everyone touched by the Goddess harnesses their energy to heal,” Dani said. “Someone, somewhere, drenched her in dark energies.”
“Fury has her now,” Gretna said. “Destined to lose herself under a malicious spell she can’t control. What a sad fate for a happy little simki.” She shook her head while she spoke. “Oh, well. She’s too dangerous to keep with us, and we have enough on our plates as it is. We have to lose her.”
“We should help her,” Dani said. “She’s just a sweet girl.”
“She’s a killing machine,” I said. “I’m with Gretna on this one. We don’t owe this girl anything. I have Oscar, and Gretna has her sword, but Kaylee could seriously hurt you and Clara before either of us could stop her.”
“If Gretna’s sword and Oscar are so powerful,” Dani said, “why aren’t you down there helping Kaylee take down all these bloodhounds?”
I looked away. Her tone was too soft and innocent to embed any malice. She wasn’t accusing me of cowardice, but she didn’t have to. I was fully capable of making that accusation of myself.
It’s not like I wanted Kaylee to get hurt. She was nothing but helpful so far — happy, playful, overly trusting.
Below, Kaylee grappled with a pair of bloodhounds and swatted their arms away before they could scratch her bright red skin. The bloodhound with the imploded nose crawled toward her along the ground, blackened blood seeping from the indentation at the center of its face. While Kaylee battled the two fiends at her front, that ground-level threat inched closer, its hand reaching out for her ankle.
Something bubbled up inside me. Maybe it was bravado, my ego resisting the implication that I was as yellow as Kaylee’s dress. Maybe it was justice, my soul crying out against the possibility Kaylee would die as a result of my inaction. Whatever it was, it forced its expression in the form of me yelling out, “Kaylee! Behind you!”
She didn’t flinch at the sound of my warning or turn back to stop that creature in its tracks. Instead, she reached forward, grabbed her two targets by the shaggy gray hair on the sides of their heads, and smashed their skulls together. A sickening cracking sound shot
through the air upon impact, then they fell limp to the ground.
Kaylee knelt down between their inert bodies and brought both arms back, balling her fists one moment and plunging them into the bloodhounds’ chests the next. Their ribs snapped as she punched deep into their cores. If it wasn’t clear that those monsters were dead before, it was clear now; they didn’t so much as flinch.
When the crawling bloodhound with the cratered nose finally grazed its outstretched fingers across Kaylee’s ankle, she spun around, squinted her eyes at the beast, then stomped her heel into its temple.
My warning had accomplished nothing. Or, rather, the thing it accomplished was worse than the something I was going for. The other bloodhounds had turned their attention upward, just now realizing that a few juicy skin-sacks filled with hot red blood hid amidst the treetops.
They started to climb. It wasn’t a natural talent of theirs, but they made do, gaining height a foot at a time while their eyes stayed fixed on our little shack and their mouths tightened into howls.
One monster approached Kaylee from behind and wrapped its arms around her waist. She flailed and reached her arms behind her, grabbing hold of the creature’s ears but struggling to do much more. It opened its mouth and leaned forward to bite her.
The trunk below us held three bloodhounds climbing slowly, their long nails getting stuck in the thick bark that led from the ground to our hut. I couldn’t climb down to help Kaylee, but that didn’t mean I was powerless. I snatched the box of fruit behind me and threw things at the bloodhound that intended to drain Kaylee’s veins.
One unripened whatever-it-was smashed into the ground and sent pulp and seeds in every direction. Another was juicier, splashing upon impact. As Kaylee whipped her head around to pull herself away from the bloodhound’s oncoming teeth, I pitched a third fruit. It crammed into the monster’s mouth and forced it to choke and release Kaylee. She spun back, kicked the creature in the groin, then grabbed its head and snapped its neck.
The bloodhound fell at an odd angle, hitting the ground with its eyes bulging open and a large fruit still rammed halfway down its throat.