I’d rather not add that to my list of weekly fuckups, thank you.
I’d wait to see if our immediate doom was lurking outside before taking aim.
“In.”
It could stop saying that any time now. I breathed in to steady my nerves and then gagged. It was such a revolting smell I could taste it coating my tongue. Maybe this was part of the plan, to drive us to the verge of insanity by making us breathe this fetid air for an extended period of time. After long enough we’d be so desperate for a clean breeze we’d submit to anything.
I wasn’t at that point yet.
This was a new one for me, meaning whatever was outside was something I hadn’t come up against before. Twenty years of training and experience had given me an extensive mental library of gods, goddesses, demis, and their people.
My internal Wikipedia search was drawing a blank.
“Do you know what it is?” I asked Cade. I wished it wasn’t so dark; I would have liked to be able to see him.
“No.”
So we were in the dark both literally and figuratively.
Super awesome.
As suddenly as it had started, the scraping stopped and the smell vanished. The room felt too quiet, too fresh. It made me all the more uneasy for the absence of anything strange.
Then something grazed the back of my neck.
I made a loud yipe sound and wheeled around, swinging out with my gun hand and hoping to make contact with something. Of course I didn’t. I backpedaled and hit the mattress, accidentally finding myself sitting. Someone grabbed me by the collar of my jacket and yanked me backwards across the bed, but before I could lash out again, Cade said, “It’s me.”
It hadn’t been him who touched me first though.
“We’re not alone,” I whispered, my voice much too loud.
“We assssked you to let ussss in.” The speaker was mere feet away, still hidden by the dark folds of the room. Their words were like dead leaves rustling, each sibilant s-sound as raspy as a snake’s kiss.
“And we said no,” I snapped back.
“We need no invitationssss. We were being polite.”
“Guess you decided to stop being polite then.”
I kept expecting Cade to interrupt me and warn against my backtalk, but he didn’t.
“Ssssilence, inssssolent whelp.”
Apparently someone wasn’t pleased with my repartee.
The lights came back on, and I screamed, reeling backwards into Cade, who caught me easily, even with the big knife still in his hand.
The creature standing across the bed from us was grotesque in the purest sense of the word. It looked as if it had been hewn together using parts of a dozen different animals. Its legs belonged to a goat, its face was human, but with the antlers of a deer crowning it. It had human hands but instead of arms, the night-black wings of a bird. It had one human breast, but the opposite side of its chest was flat and masculine. The tail of a lion wrapped around one ankle, flicking lightly like that of an irritated cat. The creature’s eyes were lizardlike slits, and its skin was so white it looked clear.
Cade had gone stone-still at my side, his arm looped around my waist.
“I’ll give you this…” His voice was shockingly calm. “You’re never boring company, Sparky.”
“Thanks.”
My immediate thought was to ask the thing what it wanted, but since I doubted I’d like the answer, I asked, “Who are you?”
“Sssstupid mortal doessssn’t know me?”