Carrie Vaughn - Discord's Apple

Something thudded against the right side of the car. Evie looked in her mirrors, out the window, but she couldn’t see what had struck them. It almost sounded like she’d hit an animal.

The same noise slammed against the left side, and suddenly a canine head thrust over her father’s still-open window. Paws hitched over the glass, it barked, guttural and ferocious, saliva spraying, eyes dark and shining. Alex pulled her father away, and Evie used the master control to shut the window. It slid closed slowly, and the barks still echoed, even after the animal lost its purchase and fell away.

The hits sounded all around them now, animals throwing themselves against the car on all sides.

“Coyotes,” Frank said.

Evie drove through the middle of a swarm of them. They came from all sides to intercept her, inexplicably committing suicide in their attempt to jump on the car, to claw through the metal. The prairie was filled with coyotes; they yodeled at each other through the night when she’d lived here. She hadn’t imagined so many of them, though. Hundreds of them came at her, a sea of fur.

Her instincts cried for her to stop the car. She hated driving over them, hurting them. But if she stopped, they’d rush the sedan and maybe find a way inside.

“They’re Hera’s,” Arthur said.

“Or one of her followers’.” Alex watched out the back window as the sea of coyotes, alive and dead, spilled away.

She thought she’d be driving too fast for them, even over the dirt, and that they couldn’t keep up. But new ones, seeming to spring from the earth itself, replaced the old.

“They can’t hurt us,” Frank said, but his tone was uncertain.

Alex huffed. “Yeah, until we try to get out of the car.”

That problem presented itself quickly as the Walker house appeared, a block on the flat horizon.

“Do I slow down or what?” Evie said.

No one answered, and she swerved, hoping for a solution to present itself in the extra few moments.

“You might as well stop,” Alex said. “We’ll run out of gas eventually.”

“What about the coyotes?”

“One thing at a time.”

Bouncing hard, passing from cropland to the dried-up grasses of the prairie, which was untilled and rocky, Evie aimed for the house. Her passengers braced against the front seat. She paralleled the road leading to the house and counted it a small blessing that no police cars were waiting there. The broken highway had helped them on that front.

The car’s shocks were shot. She didn’t dare slow down, but the vehicle slid and swerved under her, the wheel jerking out of her hand. She clung to it to try to keep it steady, like she was guiding a ship in a storm. She’d never noticed so many ditches and dips in the land, which she had always insisted was maddeningly flat.

One last burst of gas, one last rise to scale, and she roared onto the driveway, cut left toward the house, throwing the men to one side of the seat. She hit the brakes, the car lurched, and they were still. She gasped, and her heart pounded like she’d run the whole way from town herself.

Two dozen or so coyotes swarmed around the car, yipping and leaping to claw at the windows, which were smeared with their saliva and blood.

“Now what?” Her voice quailed.

Arthur, sword in hand, prepared to open the door. “Close it when I’m out,” he said to Alex, next to him.

“Are you crazy?” Evie cried.

But he’d already shoved the door open with his feet. Slashing a clear path with Excalibur, he gripped the edge of the roof and hauled himself up. The sound echoed inside the car as he hit the roof and steadied himself. Alex kicked a coyote away and slammed the door shut as soon as he was clear.

As the chalky smell of the dust settled, the coyotes’ scent became discernible—a musky animal odor of unwashed fur and hostility. One of them sprang onto the hood of the car. Evie flinched back as it lunged up the windshield, its claws smacking the glass. Excalibur swept down, caught the animal on the shoulder, and cut deep. It squealed and fell, rolling off the hood. Then Arthur was at the back of the car, stabbing a coyote crawling up the trunk.

“It almost makes it all worthwhile,” Frank said, his voice hushed. “Getting to see him fight.”

The sword flashed again, and another coyote yipped and fell.

Alex shook his head. “This isn’t a proper fight. It’s slaughter. This wasn’t meant to hurt us. It was meant to slow us down, annoy us. She still needs one of you alive, to get into the Storeroom.”

A new sound entered the fray, more barking, but deeper, rougher, from a large dog. Queen Mab came racing from the back of the house, eating yards at a time with her great stride.

She barreled into the nearest coyote, slamming her claws on it and closing her jaws around its neck. It yelped, and blood poured into its sandy fur. In a moment it lay still. Three others sprang at the wolfhound.

“She’ll be killed,” Evie said, her breath catching. “They’ll kill her.”

But Mab wouldn’t be left out of the fight. Her purpose was to defend the house.

Mab writhed and caught a coyote by the throat, even as another scraped its claws down her back. She didn’t seem to notice, wanting only to kill her enemies. Arthur’s sword swung again, another coyote fell, and Evie hoped that Arthur could kill enough of them to be able to help Mab before the coyotes finished her.

It would be far too close. For every throat Mab ripped out, two more coyotes rose up to sink their fangs into her legs and flanks. Arthur stood on the hood now, slashing to keep them away from her, hollering at them to get away.

A bright light flashed, like lightning, though the sky held no storm clouds. Arthur fell to his knees, shielding his eyes with his left arm, and the coyotes yipped and cowered away.

A voice rumbled a word that Evie couldn’t make out, but it rattled her bones. She covered her ears to make it stop. They all covered their ears, even Arthur. He kept Excalibur in hand, though he hunched over on the hood of the car, distracted. Vulnerable.

Evie thought the worst until the coyotes, the dozen or so that were left, gathered themselves and ran, bundles of wounded fur and muscle racing from the driveway onto the prairie.

A falcon hovered over the newly cleared driveway. Then another flash of light blazed, and the falcon disappeared.

Merlin stood before them, his sleeves rolled up, the top button of his shirt undone.

At once, they all left the car. Claw marks scored the paint all over it. Arthur jumped off the roof and met his friend and mentor, clasping his arms.

“A simple scouting mission, you said,” Merlin grumbled.

Evie and her father went to Mab, who was panting hard and trying to pick herself up. The hound was more red than gray, bleeding from gouges taken out of her neck, shoulders, back, flanks, and belly. She flattened her ears, peered up at them, wagged her tail a couple of times, and didn’t make a sound.

Cradling Mab’s head, Evie heard herself making nonsensical comforting noises, telling Mab what a good girl she was. She was a foolish dog, really—she didn’t have to fling herself into the fight like that. She should have stayed safe. But she was a dog with a mission, and who was Evie to criticize?

Her father took longer to lower himself to the ground, on obviously complaining limbs. He hissed with pain before adding his own voice to Mab’s praises. “That’s a girl, it’s okay, girl.”

Alex knelt beside her. “How is she?”

First aid didn’t seem remotely useful. Evie said, “I don’t know.”

“Well, her tail’s still wagging, so it can’t be too bad, eh?”

Mab’s watery gaze seemed to ask him if he were joking.