K Stewart - A Shot in the Dark

And where was my overly hirsute dance partner?

It was dark under the overhanging branches. I didn’t realize how much I’d relied on the starlight above until it was taken from me. I blinked furiously, trying to will my eyes to adjust to the pitch blackness. I was blind here, cut off from sensation.

It also didn’t escape my notice that I was in the trees again. Handless’s turf. If she was going to get involved in this debacle, now would be the time. I could only hope I’d get some kind of warning before she pounced.

Nothing useful reached my ears. In fact, all sound seemed to be drowned out by my own panting breath, vibrating oddly in my damaged ears. Like a glass jar. Like a cave.

It occurred to me, in a flash of goose bumps and stomach cramps, that I’d been here before. Almost every night for the last four years, I had been in this place, surrounded by darkness and cold. My breath frosting the air, the sound distorted in my ears. The Yeti, hunting me.

“I know you’re there.” I couldn’t stop myself from saying it. I always said it. It was always answered with a soft growl to my left, just out of my range of vision.

I turned, because I had to. Because in the dream, I always turned toward the sounds. God, I wanted to tell Mira about this. I wanted to ask what she thought of my dreams becoming reality, ’cause honestly it was freaking me out. “Come on… come get me,” I whispered, my words echoing in the bell jar that was my skull.

A sound behind me, the faintest scrape of fur on stone. And I turned, because I knew I had to. Nothing faced me but the bare ghosts of pine trees, a lighter shade of gray in the black.

This was the moment, in every nightmare I’d had in the last four years. The moment when the sound stayed in front of me, but the attack came from behind. Always from behind, and I was always motionless, spellbound, paralyzed.

There came the faintest of clicking sounds from the darkness in front of me. The Yeti’s talons… Or Handless’s long toenails? I tasted the blood in my mouth, where I’d bitten my tongue.

This isn’t a dream, dammit! “And I’ll move if I fucking want to.”

I reversed my grip on my broken sword and stabbed backward along my own rib cage, the blade slicing neatly through the first layer of my T-shirts. The point hit something solid, and suddenly the world lurched into motion again, like a film stuttering back to life. I never looked back. The blade bit into my palms as I slammed it home, then yanked hard to the left. I dropped to one knee, feeling the swipe that was meant for my throat pass harmlessly over my head, and with a heave, I dragged the naked metal to the side and out, ripping through the white-furred abdomen.

Blight poured out in place of glistening intestines. A river of black nothingness, it ran down the white-furred legs, visibly seeking to rejoin the part of itself that had already been shed. Still on my knees, the next two slashes opened up each massive thigh, severing what would be the femoral arteries in anything actually living. The blackness gushed out with force, washing over my hands, instantly numbing the searing pain I’d caused myself.

The Yeti roared but there was panic in that guttural voice. His claws flailed in the air, trying to connect with anything at all, but in his agony, they were blind strikes and came nowhere near me.

The wickedly curved horns went first, cracking and splintering into tiny shards, which in turn vanished into motes of blight, flowing against gravity and up the hill toward the waiting dark pool. Then the ears, crisping like they’d been charred in a fire, curling in on themselves. The bellow turned into a strangled gurgle, and only a quick roll saved me from being crushed as the Yeti pitched forward, his legs being eaten from the belly wound outward.

He writhed in the pine needles, hands grasping at the fleeing essence until his fingers melted away and he could only twitch. His glowing red eyes found mine, and what was left of his muzzle wrinkled in a silent snarl.

“Remember this,” I told him. “Even on my knees, I killed you.”

The last things to go were the wicked fangs, bared in a defiant snarl to the bitter end. The stream of blight wafted its way up into the rocks, and I could smell the ozone. If I looked, there would be a pool of liquid demon up there, like black mercury in its pristine reflection. Even at that distance, I could hear the screaming, a sound just beyond my range of hearing, but something that I could feel in the back of my teeth. The unearthly call of Hell itself.

Just as suddenly, it was gone. It took the Yeti with it.

It did not, however, take his little pet. The brush to my right rustled and parted around a bald, filthy head. Handless hobbled her way into the open, settling on her haunches only a few yards from me. If I wanted, I could have reached out and touched her.

Even unarmed as she was-seriously, that joke never gets old-I wasn’t sure I could take her in the condition I was in. I rose to a half crouch, blade cupped gingerly in my flayed hands. “You let him die. You could have stopped me.”

She didn’t move. For long moments we stared at each other across the six feet of intervening space. Then her cheeks stretched again into the mockery of a smile. The unearthly gleam of her black eyes betrayed how much hate she had for me, for all the living, but I understood. The only thing she hated more than me was him. She was free now. Free to rip my throat out, eat my flesh, feed. But I think in the end, she wasn’t sure she could take me either.

She opened her mouth, and a man’s voice came out. “Well, this is quite a pickle we find ourselves in, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t help but chuckle a little, bleakly. “Yeah, you could say that.”

It was a woman’s voice next, someone elderly perhaps. “I just don’t know what I’ll do without him. He always took care of everything.”

She was doing it on purpose, somehow. Those echoes, those memories of long dead conversations, she was calling them up, using them to speak for her. “You go far, far away, where you can’t hurt anyone.”

A man’s voice again. “A growin’ boy’s gotta eat!”

I forced myself all the way to my feet. “If you hurt anyone else, I will come for you. I will end you. You know that.”

The next voice was John Wayne’s, or a really good impression thereof. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” Finally, she bared her rotting teeth at me in one last voiceless snarl, and started fading back into the trees. Her parting shot, though, chilled me to the bone. A deep gravelly voice emerged from the darkness. “You are to beink careful.”

Ivan’s voice. I’d know it, and his butchered English, anywhere. Somewhere, sometime, Handless had been close enough to Ivan to hear him speak.

About five minutes later, a bird chirped nearby, proving that she was truly gone.

I know I sat there for at least forty-five minutes, perched on the jagged pink boulders until my legs stopped shaking and my breath didn’t burn in my lungs anymore. Idly, I peeled the flaking black skin off my arm, the demon tattoo erased with the contract I’d fulfilled. The sky was growing light in the east, false dawn heralding the passing of another night.

And I was still here.

I couldn’t find the hilt of my sword, lost somewhere in the stones, but I carried the blade with me as I slowly picked my way down the rockslide. My hands were stiff, and the cuts across my palms seeped blood every time I tried to flex my fingers. I hurt everywhere.

I also had no idea where the hell Marty’s truck was. How far had I come in my flight through the trees? But the great thing about being on a mountain is that down is usually the direction you want to go. So I headed down, my exhausted feet stumbling more than once on the uneven terrain.