Nevermor (21 page)

“Come on, you
son of a bitch,” he threatened, drawing his sword.  “Show me what you’re made
of!”

2

Finn was usually
easy-going, giving jokes as often as taking them, but he had his pride like the
rest of them did.  Even with all his goofing off, it was unacceptable to be
bested by a creature in front of his brothers.  He wasn’t the weakest of them,
though he had to remind them of that periodically.  He was determined to get
his dignity back –
and
win that bet.

The group had
spread out, most of them keeping on the move.  A stationary target would be an
easy catch for the tongue.  Finn guessed that if they’d all stood in a row to
wait, the tongue could have pulled every one of them to that jagged mouth in a
matter of seconds.  This was why they moved.

 Finn had a
short blade at each hip, but these were not going to do him any good for this
beast.  He couldn’t get close, but that was alright.  He had the perfect weapon
for the job.

Finn drew a
pistol from his belt.  This was a gun he’d gotten off a pirate he’d slain,
which was how the Pack had obtained most of their firearms in the beginning. 
He’d taken the gun apart and put it back together so many times that he had
learned exactly how it worked – until he’d grasped everything there was to
discover about it.  Then he’d made it better.  He’d added a rotating chamber,
and now instead of two shots, he could get ten.

Perhaps he
didn’t have as much useless knowledge as Sly, but no one could say that he
wasn’t smart.  He was a regular genius when it came to gadgetry.

A blessing from
Whisper would have done them good, but they’d had to scatter too soon for
that.  Finn would do without.  He held the pistol with intent, already sure of
what he would try.

This shouldn’t
be too hard
,
he thought to himself. 
The tongue is the danger.  If I can unload a few
rounds into it, then maybe we can get in close enough to kill this thing.

It was a good
idea, he thought – one as good as what Rifter or Nix could come up with – and
he supposed they had left it that way on purpose.  The rest of them were
supposed to find their own way of getting at it.

Rifter had
caught its attention by now, and the toad beast was focused on the fairy
light.  Finn waited, holding his aim until the tongue shot out again, and he
deftly pulled the trigger, managing to fire three rounds into the base of the
tongue before it was pulled back in and the mouth closed again.

The nightmare
roared and stomped, shaking the ground beneath them and splashing great amounts
of the swampy water out of the pool.

“
Ha
!”
Finn shouted triumphantly.  Though it wasn’t the final blow – yet – he felt he
was well on his way to getting his victory.  He started toward the nightmare,
ready to take the creature down, but quickly learned that it was too early to
celebrate.

A dark spew
began to roll out of the beast’s mouth, thick and black.  The monster spat
amounts of it from the back of its throat, and that was more effective than
even the tongue was.  Within just a few seconds, there were gallons of it on
the ground, and any one of them who stepped in the tar was immediately weighed
down by the heavy mess that collected on his boots.  Toss and the twins fell to
this, and even Sly had accidentally gotten his right foot in it as he ran
past.  The stuff was horrible, not only disgusting, and it made the boys much
easier targets for the tongue.

“Oh yuck!” one
of the twins yelled, though Finn didn’t give much thought to which.  Instead,
he sighed dejectedly.  Yes, he may have been a master at tinkering, but his
approach in dealing with monsters was a bit lacking.

From across the
way, he heard Rifter’s laughter, and he winced as it cut into his ego.

3

Rifter laughed
as he watched the others wade through the bile, convinced that he would never
have made a mistake like that.  They didn’t always fall to errors in trivial
battles like this, but when they did, he found it impossible to be angry.  He
only wanted to laugh at their misfortune – considering they weren’t in any real
danger, which he didn’t feel that they were.

He was laughing
as Whisper dove in toward the nightmare, drawing its attention again.  The
wounded tongue shot out toward him, and he twisted to the side as he dodged. 
The creature missed him, as he’d known it would.

He gloated
privately to himself, inwardly complimenting his own swiftness, but that was
before he realized that the area around him had suddenly gotten darker.  The
absence of light baffled him for a moment, but the color drained from his face
when he realized what had happened.

The tongue
hadn’t touched him, but it had caught a part of him just the same.  Whisper was
gone.

Rifter was
stricken with a fear that shot down through his body, clenching his gut.

“
No
!”

This wasn’t a
game anymore.  The fun had been sucked out of it, as always happened when one
of the boys was in serious trouble.  Whisper was even more important than
that.  She had saved his life more than once.  He couldn’t let this happen to
her!

He jumped up and
flew through the air in an arc, then let gravity take him back down to settle
on top of the creature.  He had a bit of trouble holding his footing on the
slimy surface, but he kept it long enough to stab his sword into its back.  By
that, he had something to hold onto for leverage.

His heart was
racing with his fear that she was gone forever – that he would never have her
back.  He didn’t give much more thought to it.  He drew his blade back into the
flesh of the thing, slicing it open like it was a large melon.  The creature
roared and flailed, tried to buck, but Rifter held onto the sword that was
rooted in its flesh.

Have to get
inside there.  Have to get her out!

He ripped back,
trying to pry the flesh apart with his feet to truly open the beast up. 
Instead of seeing the blood and raw muscle that he had expected inside the
creature, there was something black and swirling inside, and before he had
figured it out, he was nearly knocked back by the emergence of dozens of
smaller nightmares that shot out, swooping through the air like eagles.

“What the
fuck
!”
Nix exclaimed, drawing out his pistol to fire at a few of the bat-like shadows.

“Cover me!”
Rifter barked, trusting them to do that job as he set himself back to the
task.  There was an eruption of gunfire to ward off the nightmares that were
swopping down toward him, but he didn’t look up.  Even as the meat of the
larger beast began to turn to putty, he dug down deeper, seeking what he had
lost.

There seemed to
be only blackness inside it.  Where was she?  Where was the light!  He could
hear the panic in his own breath as he sought her, beginning to fear that he
wouldn’t find her at all, but he would have known if she was dead.  He would
have felt it.  Until then, he wouldn’t give up.

He cut in
deeper, and finally he saw it.  There was a light in the monster’s belly,
flickering and weak, but
alive
.  Rifter reached for it, and soon he had
the warm little beast in his hand.  He took flight before he could be swallowed
by the black sludge, moving off to another pool where the water was cleaner.

The nightmare
was done, and he trusted the others to take care of the flying creatures. 
Rifter didn’t give it any more thought.

He dipped
Whisper into the water carefully to wash some of the bile and stomach acid off
of her, not bothering to worry about how he was covered in the fluid himself. 
He could see that she was breathing, but some of her skin was burned, and not
surprisingly.  It was lucky that she wasn’t dead.

“Are you
alright?” he asked.  He heard her hum a bit, but she didn’t speak.  She was
weak, but alive, and that was good enough for now.  She would heal quickly if
she could rest.  Rifter put her against his chest within the coat of leaves to
hold her in.

“How is she?”
Toss asked.  They all were looking on with concern for her, having dealt with
the rest of the creatures.

“She’ll be
fine,” Rifter assured them, rising.  “In the meantime, that was some good
work.  Finn, you
almost
impressed me.”

“Hey, my idea
was a good one, it just didn’t work out like I thought,” Finn defended,
recognizing the sarcasm.

“A klutz is what
you are,” Rifter teased with a grin.  “I can’t believe you’ve survived this
long.”

“Yeah, well, you
knew that when you married me,” he responded, scraping some of the thick goop
off his shoe.

Sly smiled. 
“How long have you been holding onto that one?”

They had only
just begun jeering at each other when Nix spoke up.

“We’ve got
company.”

Rifter turned to
follow his gaze, brandishing his sword on instinct, and he saw the faces of the
ones who were camouflaged against the weeds across the way.  These were
warriors of a different sort – dark-skinned, their faces painted in white and
black instead of blood.  They were nearly naked in feathers and pieces of skin,
decorated with teeth and bones.

Natives. 
Savages. 
They were a wild people
,
even more so than the Wolf Pack themselves,
and the boys called them
Tribals
.  These people had been a part of
Nevermor for as long as the Rifter could remember.  He couldn’t deny that they
may have been here even before he had found this place, or perhaps they had
simply been born with it.  No one could say.  Either way, the two groups had
always made it a point to stay out of each other’s way.  They never spoke,
though it would have done little good because neither group could speak the
other’s language well.

They all stared
across the mire, each waiting to see if the opposing side would make a move. 
They did not fight often, though at times it was a question of stalking the
same prey.  Rifter studied them, wondering if they had been hunting the same
nightmare they’d just killed, but it wasn’t going to do them any good now.

“Let’s go,” he
instructed the Pack, lowering his weapon, but before he turned away, he noticed
one among them that drew his attention.

Set apart from
the taller masculine figures, there was a smaller one, and though the face and
body were painted, it was not hard to see that it was a girl.

They had seen
her before with the hunting party.  She was an icon among them, and the boys
had taken to calling her
the painted huntress
.  She was young, around
their age for now, but she would age.  She was not part of the Vow, unprotected
against time.  The huntress was armed, looking as fierce as the rest of the
warriors with their spears and war paint.  It might have been said that every
one of the boys had gotten a bit of his heart stolen by her.  She was a
mystery, an icy surprise – a new idea about what a girl could be.

As Rifter looked
at her, he wondered if it had been his intention that Wren should be like this
among them, as a strong female who could hold her own within their group.  He
tried to imagine the blond girl that way now, and instead found that it put him
off.

He wasn’t sure
that he wanted to see her like that.  Even though Nix was completely against
having anyone around that couldn’t fight with them, Rifter saw Wren as
something different.  She was something pure and lovely, and part of him wanted
to keep her separate from the worst that this world had to offer.  He wanted to
protect her, but he wasn’t sure where that desire had come from.

But she
shouldn’t be oblivious to it all either. 
He couldn’t do both.
 
It
was all confusing to him.

The boys had
already begun walking away before Rifter finally turned to leave with them, but
he did so with Wren on his mind, though he’d resolved to put her away from him
for a while.  What had possessed him to bring her here?  Was it because she had
truly convinced him that she was worth it, or was it because he’d only wanted
to make the rest of them angry?  He wouldn’t believe that she had come here for
no reason.  No, he had been able to call her for some purpose.  But was that
enough?

Maybe I just
wanted to be near her.

He was lost in
his own considerations until one of them spoke.

“Seems you lost
that bet, Finn,” Mech said.  “Time to pay up.”

“But I got the
last blow!” he insisted, shrugging it off.  “I shot down the last of those
gargoyles.  Technically, they were part of the thing and no one can deny that,
so I win.”

“
You
were
the one who nearly got us killed!” Mach argued.

“They are right
about that, Finn,” Toss brought up.

“That doesn’t
have anything to do with me getting the last blow,” Finn insisted.  Nix
chuckled to himself and Sly rolled his eyes over it.  At this, the twins found
that they had no further argument to make, but weren’t willing to let it go.