The creature raised his club and swung it across in front of him, and we all jumped back to avoid being hit. The club reminded me very much of an Alley-Oop version of a caveman club.
“I think it’s some sort of cyclops,” Trillian said. “And they don’t claim friendship with anybody. They’re carnivorous as well—and I think, cannibalistic.”
Wonderful. Not only did we have a big lug aiming for us, but he was looking for dinner. I stopped thinking and started running as he took off after me, flailing his club over his head.
“I’m not sure what to do with this thing!” In fact, the only thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want to come in contact with that club when it came swinging for me.
I heard a thud, and then a grunt, but I didn’t turn around to see what was going on. Instead, I headed for a tree that had limbs low enough and big enough for me to catch hold of. I swung myself up and began to climb as quickly as I could.
I scrambled up the tree, hurrying as fast as I could, until I finally reached a point where I felt safe to look back down. Sure enough, the cyclops was at the base of the tree, staring up at me with a disgusted look on his face. After a moment, he turned around and lumbered off toward the others.
I wasn’t sure what I could do, so I kept my place in the treetop as I tried to think of what would be the best way to kill something this massive. I doubted if my dagger would do much damage unless I was able to pierce him directly in one of his vital organs, but given he didn’t have a torso, I had no clue where his heart was, or anything else, for that matter. I supposed getting him in the eye would do, but that meant coming face-to-face with him, and I wanted to save that for a last resort.
As I watched from the treetop, I saw that Nerissa had the same idea. She had taken the opportunity when the cyclops was chasing me to find a tree of her own to scramble up into. At that moment, it occurred to me that, in my panther shape, I could probably tackle him better. I had more natural weapons in that form. I found a crotch in the tree I could nestle down in to change shape.
Trillian and Roz were trying to keep him occupied. Trillian had removed something from his pocket and he sent it sailing toward the back of the cyclops. I realized he had also brought shooting stars, and he was an exceptionally good aim. The star lodged itself directly in the nape of the cyclops’s neck.
The creature let out a roar and swiped at the back of his neck, knocking the star out. A fountain of blood shot out. Roz kept his stars razor-sharp. He shouted for Trillian to get out of the way as he threw his bomb toward the creature. There was a loud explosion and my tree rocked slightly as the cyclops was knocked off his feet. He didn’t look dead, but at least he was down.
By now I was in panther form and I leapt out of the tree, racing over to the side of the creature. Nerissa joined me, in puma form. By the time we reached the side of the cyclops, he was trying to push himself up, but he looked woozy, and blood dripped down from his eye.
Even though the thought made me queasy, I leapt for his face, snapping. I managed to catch hold of his nose and bit hard, pulling away. The tip of his nose came off in my mouth and I spat out the fleshy mass. Blood poured from his face and a jubilant triumph ran through me. I always enjoyed tearing into my prey when I was in panther form.
Nerissa took her turn, going for his face as well. She managed to catch hold of his cheek and ripped aside some of the flesh, exposing bone and muscle below.
The cyclops shrieked, pushing himself to his feet again. Apparently losing his nose and part of his cheek wasn’t enough to do him in. He grabbed up his club, aiming for me as he swept it around. I jumped, leaping over it as it swept beneath my feet. My paws hit the ground again, but he was bringing it back around and this time the club made contact with my ribs, sending me skidding across the ground. I let out a loud roar as I rolled to a sitting position, trying to ascertain whether I was injured.
While the cyclops was focused on me, Nerissa leapt for him again, landing on his back as she bit into his neck and hung on. He dropped the club, flailing as he tried to dislodge her, but at that moment, Trillian and Roz came racing from behind, landing against him hard. Together, the three of them took him down. He toppled over face-first on the trail.
I painfully rolled to my feet. Nothing felt broken, although I was going to have some lovely bruises, so I jogged back over to their side. Trillian was in the process of slamming his blade down through the skull of the cyclops. Roz did the same.
Nerissa let go of the creature, ripping away another patch of flesh, this time exposing the back of his neck. The cyclops was bleeding like crazy, and this time he didn’t stand up. He let out another grunt, and then, pinned to the ground by both of their swords, grew still.
Another moment passed and we realized we had managed to kill him.
Feeling slightly queasy, I padded to the side and took a bite of grass, then slowly began to shift back into my two-legged form. By the time I stumbled to my feet, Nerissa had transformed as well. We stood there staring at the body for a moment. Overhead, the sunlight began to wane, fading as sunset approached.
“Well, that was…exciting.” I shivered, my muscles telling me they weren’t all that thrilled. In fact, I hurt like a son of a bitch.
“Are you all right?” Trillian gave me a worried look. “I saw him hit you with that club and it looked like it bounced off your ribs pretty bad.”
“If I hadn’t been in panther form, I’d probably have broken ribs, but as it is, I’m just going to have some nasty bruises. I can also tell you this, though. Cyclops don’t taste very good.”
A nasty flavor, like raw liver, filled my mouth. I looked around for something to take away the musky flavor. One of the brambles looked a lot like a blackberry plant, and I decided to give it a chance. I swallowed three of the berries and nothing happened, so I ate a few more.
Meanwhile, Roz and Trillian were examining the dead cyclops. They rolled him over. He was really, truly dead. I grimaced when I saw that Trillian’s sword had skewered the cyclops’s eye from the back. Roz and Trillian wiped off their blades in the grass, looking as queasy as I felt.
“The Autumn Lord warned me that our worst fears could take form here, but I don’t think I’ve ever thought about fighting a cyclops before.” As I stared at the prone figure, I half expected him to vanish. But he stayed there, in a spreading pool of blood.
“I don’t think that our fears are the only creatures that inhabit this world,” Nerissa said, shivering. “Consider this. You said the Autumn Lord wasn’t allowed to enter this realm, so the only thing he knows about it is from hearsay. The Elemental Lords may be immortal, but that doesn’t make them omniscient.”
She had a point. I cast my gaze around, scanning the forest around us.
“True. In that case, we need to be doubly on guard. Come to think of it, I’m not really afraid of eagles either, nor do I think about them that much. What about the rest of you?”
Roz shook his head. “No giant eagle or cyclops lurking in my anxiety closet. Well, at least not before we tackled this dude. Now, maybe just a little. I’d rather not fight another one. They’re mean suckers.”
The forest suddenly felt like it had grown denser somehow. As the sunlight began to recede, and early evening made itself known, an unease filtered through the air, making me twitchy. The sound of rustling in the undergrowth grew louder as the night creatures came out to play. The steady drone of mosquitoes and the sound of crickets announced sunset, and a dragonfly of sorts—although it was brilliant fuchsia rather than blue—darted past, hovered in front of me, and then vanished into the woods.
“Do you feel like something just opened up?” Nerissa asked. “It’s almost as though the cyclops set off something. I felt like we were in a vacuum before he appeared, and now it feels like we’re firmly ensconced here. Does that make any sense?”
“Perfect sense,” Trillian said. “I’m feeling the same thing. I don’t know what happened, but I feel lik
e now, we’re actually here, and it’s not a comforting thought.”
“It’s almost like someone held out a clapper board and yelled ‘Action’ and then everything started to happen.” I realized I was holding my breath, and deliberately exhaled in a slow, easy manner to relax myself.
“Exactly. I suppose we should just get on with things. However, it looks like we’re going to be spending the night here, and I’d like to find some sort of cover before long.” Trillian chewed on the side of his lip, then added, “I guess we didn’t think about things like tents or raingear or food. I didn’t think it would be like this here. I guess I thought it would be more… Like when we were on the astral—a giant field of mist.”
I nodded, wondering if we had made a hasty decision. We had no food. Would we starve? Even though Perri had promised that they would feed us if they noticed us getting hungry, and hydrate us if they noticed that we needed water, it didn’t seem to translate over to the way we felt here. I had been thirsty, so I drank. But my thirst hadn’t caused the river to appear.
“I’ll see if I can pick up Shade’s scent again. The cyclops disrupted my focus.” I stood back and once again shifted into my panther form. It was a little disorienting. It wasn’t that I didn’t change shape very often, but more that I usually didn’t keep switching back and forth between the two. I realized that the constant morphing was making me feel queasy. I might feel better if I could find something to eat. I moved away from the cyclops’s body, down the trail so that I wouldn’t keep smelling the scent of his blood. As I began snuffling around, searching the ground for any food that might be familiar, daylight began to fade rapidly as dusk overtook the forest.
As I was hunting, a thought struck me. What if the cyclops had been one of the wandering souls? What if he had been lost here? In destroying his soul, had we just forever destroyed his chance to get back to his body? Overwhelmed by the potential ramifications of what it meant to journey through this realm, I sat down, panting slowly as I stared at the ground.
Nerissa knelt beside me, stroking my head. “Are you all right, Delilah?”
I glanced up at her, staring into her warm topaz eyes. She was an extraordinary woman, and I was grateful that she had fallen in love with my sister. Menolly needed somebody who could be both strong and gentle at the same time. I reached out to lick her hand with a slobbery tongue and stood, returning to the hunt for Shade. A few moments later, I caught hold of his scent again, about twenty yards ahead on the trail. I turned back to the others, letting out a chuff. As I started down the trail again, they caught up to me.
Roz had apparently remembered to tuck a flashlight into his pocket. Even though we weren’t into full darkness yet, he flicked it on to direct light on the pathway ahead of me.
He turned it off, saying, “Okay, that works. At least we’ll have light when the night drops.”
“You thought of just about everything, don’t you?” Trillian said with a laugh. “You didn’t think to sneak along any more of your armory, I suppose?”
“They wouldn’t let me,” Roz said.
“I’ve always meant to ask you about that,” Nerissa said. “When did you start playing the Matrix? I always think of some deranged weapons flasher when you open your coat.”
Roz usually wore a long duster, with a veritable smorgasbord of weapons on the inside. It can’t have been comfortable, but he seemed to enjoy being a walking armory.
“Back in Otherworld, when I was hunting for Dredge, I realized I’d need more than just an itty-bitty stake to take him out. For one thing, he surrounded himself with goons from all walks of life, not just vampires. So I prepared. I gathered every weapon that I could conveniently hook on the inside of my duster, so I’d have whatever I needed at fingertip’s reach. It got to be a habit. Now I feel naked without it.” He grinned, his eyes sparkling. “Even though Menolly finally took him out, it’s remained a force of habit. And as we’ve learned over the past few years, there are bigger and badder creatures out there than Dredge. Unfortunately, we’ve encountered a number of them.”
Nerissa pressed her lips together, giving him a single nod. I knew she was thinking about Dredge, and what he had done to my sister. No matter how much water had flowed under the bridge, and no matter how much progress she had made, thanks to that monster Menolly would always be a vampire, and always carry the trauma and scars he had inflicted on her.
We fell silent as we worked our way deeper into the woodland. The undergrowth was growing thicker on both sides, and I wondered how broad this forest was. There was no way of telling, but at least we could still hear the river some fifty yards to our right. I could still feel a pull toward it, and realized there had to be some sort of sprites or water Fae over there. Most of them were deadly, unfortunately.
Shade had definitely come this way. His scent was thick in the undergrowth.
All of a sudden, I wondered how long we had been here. The sun had been out when we arrived, but now it was almost set. How long had we been here in the outer world? In fact, when I looked behind us, the trail seemed misty, almost as though it were cloaked in gray fog. For a moment I began to panic as the thought crossed my mind that the forest behind us was disappearing. I realized I had to get out of my head, so I stopped and moved off the path, transforming back into my two-legged self.
“Are you all right?” Trillian hurried over to my side. While he was a caring man, the Svartan wasn’t usually quite so attentive.
“Yeah, I was just starting to imagine things. You’re unusually considerate today,” I said with a smile. We all knew that Trillian wasn’t one to stand on niceties. Oh, he did care; it wasn’t that he was insensitive. But he definitely wasn’t a gentleman either, at least not when it came to calling people on their bullshit.
“Camille told me she’d have my head if anything happened to you. And obviously, I want my wife to be happy. Besides, you know we all care, Kitten.”
He seldom called me by my nickname, and it made me smile. He had come a long way from the brash, arrogant, self-centered jerk that he had been the first time I had met him. In fact, when Camille had started dating him back in Otherworld, shortly before Menolly had been turned, it’d taken her a while to introduce him to the family. For one thing, our father was prejudiced. He hated Svartans with a passion. For another, she knew we wouldn’t like him.
But that too was a massive amount of water under the bridge.
“Of course she did. I appreciate the concern, though. No, I just noticed the trail behind us was getting misty, and for a moment it felt like it was vanishing.”
Trillian glanced over his shoulder, staring at it for a moment. “It does kind of look like that, doesn’t it? But I think it’s just the way the fog is rolling in.”
“I can smell that Shade has been through here. And I don’t think it’s been too long. It’s very heavy, and concentrated off into the undergrowth. I’m hesitant to continue going, though, given how close to nightfall we are. For one thing, it would be easy to miss something—like if he’s hurt.” Even as I spoke I realized that it sounded odd, because his body was back in the lab. But from what we’d seen, so far, there were a million ways to get hurt here.
“Do you want to break for the evening?” Roz asked, glancing around. “If so, I suggest we make camp near the river. We’re going to need water, and there should be some open ground that we can actually stretch out on. The undergrowth here may not be as thick as it is at home, but it’s still a tangle and I think it would hurt sleeping on a pile of brambles.” He eyed the verdant foliage suspiciously. “I know you ate a few berries earlier, but it seems to me that it might be a fool’s game to try many of the plants here. We might be able to catch fish. I’d trust that more than eating the vegetation.”
“What do you think?” I turned to Nerissa and Trillian. I really didn’t want to camp by the river, but I wasn’t sure if I trusted my own instincts at this point. I’d go with the majority.
Trillian an
d Nerissa agreed with Roz, so we made our way through the undergrowth over to the riverside. Just as Roz had predicted, there was an open space where we could stretch out on the ground. I thought about trying to light a fire. It was growing cooler by the moment.
“What do you think about a fire?”
“It will give away our position, but then again, it might keep some of the wild creatures at bay. And if Shade’s around, he might see it and come over to find out what’s going on.” Trillian pointed at some of the round smooth rocks that the river had worn down. They were about the size of my fist. “We can use river rocks to surround the fire so it doesn’t get out of hand.”
“Nope,” Roz said. “River rocks have a way of exploding when heated. I suggest that we find a few good-size rocks from inside the forest instead. Don’t pick ones that look like they were weathered by the water.”
“If we’re going to make a fire,” I said, “we’re going to need kindling and wood. And somebody’s going to have to start the fire. I’m not handy with rubbing two sticks together.”
“If worse comes to worse, I have a couple more firebombs in my pocket. I hid them from the healers. And you don’t need a match to set them off.” Roz grinned. “I didn’t tell them I was bringing bombs along with me. Somehow, I didn’t think they would appreciate it very much. But I had to have something to make me feel secure.”
“Well, I for one am extremely glad you had the bomb you hit the cyclops with. Let’s gather everything before it really gets dark. It’s already dusk and it’s going to be hard to see soon, and we just have the one flashlight you brought.”
While Trillian and Roz hunted for rocks in the forest, Nerissa and I gathered dry pieces of downed wood. We lucked out and found a rotting log that had pitch on it, which would make extremely good kindling.
By the time we arrived back at the campsite, it was already hard to see in the deepening twilight. Leaving the men to handle the fire, Nerissa and I wandered down to the water’s edge. There were fish darting around the river, that much I could see, but catching them would be another matter. Adding that I was phobic of being in water and couldn’t bring myself to get any closer than a few feet away from it, I doubted that I’d do us any good at all.