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Or why it was flying at my face! The small creature suddenly reversed course, coming back at a run and slamming straight into me. “Kulullû,” it whispered in a panicked voice. “Kulullû, Kulullû!”

“No, Cassie,” I said—­to no one. Because it was already tearing back the way we’d come, like a literal bat out of hell. Which wouldn’t have been so bad, except that it was dragging me along with it!

We’d gotten tangled up, but I couldn’t see how and didn’t have time to ask. I was jerked along behind it and then under another overhang I also couldn’t see but felt pressing down on top of me. The creature was at my side, quivering in fear, but not of me, I realized. I might have startled it before, but now it was huddled up against me as if I could somehow save it from . . . what, exactly?

“Kulullû,” it whispered. And if that meant “fuck,” I agreed, I thought, as light started to push elongated fingers into the darkness.

It was the same light I’d seen up top, or at least, it looked that way. But I wasn’t real interested in seeing what was shedding it, suddenly. I was beginning to think that maybe it had been hunter, not prey, and that it was looking for us.

And it was getting close.

We stayed there, me and the small thing, soundless, breathless, huddled together in fear of whatever was slouching this way. Or squelching, I thought, because that was what it sounded like. Not footsteps or even hooves striking down, just . . . squelching. With a weird sucking sound at the end of every step that made me think of a formless ball of phlegm—­and wasn’t that just all I needed?

No, I thought.

What I needed was Billy Joe, because without him, I didn’t know how to leave this place!

And then I realized that no, no I didn’t need him, at least not now, when a familiar voice called out: “Cass! Cassi

e! Damn it, where did you go?”

Billy, I thought, my heart in my throat.

The squelching stopped.

I couldn’t see what was happening, because we were too far under the ledge. A green haze had started to filter down from above, almost too thin to see. But any light was bright down here. And then something pale, with a glistening skin that shed some kind of viscous ooze, paused outside the opening of the overhang—­for an instant.

Before scrabbling up what appeared to be some kind of cliff face, almost too fast to see.

It was headed straight for my oldest friend, the one who had come in here with me when he didn’t have to, the one who’d saved my life more times than I could count, the one who would never see it coming.

I didn’t think; I didn’t even hesitate. I burst out of our hiding place and screamed: “Billy! Run!”

There was no time to see if he did or not. There was no time for anything. The creature turned on a dime, lightning fast, and flung itself back down at me.

All I saw was a pale white underbelly, blotting out the sky. I tried a time spell, but it didn’t work—­maybe because this was a spirit battle, where time didn’t have the same effect, or maybe because I was pissing myself; I didn’t know. And then it was on me.

I felt claws rake me, the pain of a power loss stagger me, a weight far heavier than anything my human body could have withstood flatten me.

“Kill it!” I screamed mentally, letting loose the only weapons I had left, a pair of ghostly looking knives that reside in the bracelet I had stolen off a dark mage months ago. They were horribly unreliable, and as often ignored me as not, not to mention the fact that I didn’t even know if they’d work in—­

Here. I finished the thought while being deluged in what smelled like fish guts. My knives had taken my attacker right through what I guess was its belly.

That was both good and bad, because it reared up over top of me, releasing the pressure but also giving me my first good look at it. And it was horrifying. Like something out of Escher’s worst nightmare, it kept changing, but none of its forms were good. An eldritch horror of a thing, one second it was a large, lumpy undersea monster filling the narrow corridor and thrashing around with a dozen tentacles; the next it was half-­man, half-­fish, only nothing like the merpeople I’d seen. They had been beauti­ful, graceful—­and terrible, yes, but in the way a summer storm is terrible, flashing across the sky, filling you with awe and wonder.

There was neither of those things here. It had a face that would have turned Medusa to stone, with slitted, pale eyes and more slits for a nose, and a huge mouth filled with long, superthin, razor sharp teeth. The backbone was humpbacked and misshapen, halfway between fin and bone, and the hugely muscled arms ended in incredibly elongated webbed fingers, like king crab legs if they commonly came with spiked talons on the ends.

It also didn’t seem to bleed blood. My knives were flying around, stabbing and stabbing at it, but the only thing that bubbled up to the surface of the skin was some kind of strange, translucent jelly. I knew that because it spat a lump of it at me, and it burned—­God, it burned!

I screamed, because it didn’t matter now, and the thing roared back, a stuttering, nails-­on-­a-­chalkboard-­times-­one-­thousand sort of sound that had my skin crawling and my own scream turning into more of a shriek, and then it brought one of those huge arms down.

Another scream died in my throat, or maybe in my chest, which those wicked-­looking claws had just stabbed all the way through. It was a stunning blow, one that left wild, windblown echoes swirling around us. And me trapped against the ground, my mouth open but unable to speak, my body writhing like a bug on a pin—­on four of them.

“Hey!” someone yelled, and the creature’s head turned. “Hey, big and ugly!”

Billy, I thought. Run!

He wasn’t running. He was waving his arms, trying to get the creature to let go of me and chase him. And that was so stupid I didn’t even have words.


Tags: Karen Chance Cassandra Palmer Fantasy