pleasant another time, and snarled, “Don’t you ever throw down on me again, you fucking worm. Not unless you mean to finish it.”
I struggled to push her away, managing to get a little space. She was a lot stronger than she looked. I said, “Hey, you were going to collapse the whole damn tunnel down on top of us. Best-case, you would have killed the kid, you psycho.”
Lynette gasped when I said that. I realized we had an audience. Raine and Baran looked amused at the altercation. Gunner appeared the same way he always did: impassive, as if the world bored him but what’re ya gonna do? Ethan was the only one glaring at us. I was glad he looked irritated with both of us instead of just me. I said, “Sir, she was going to unpin a grenade down in that fucking tunnel. I drew on her to make her stop.”
Before anyone could say anything, Gunner rumbled, “’Strue, Ethan. Lookit him. Dwarves know tunnels. She was gonna kill the kid or us.”
Birgitte’s voice came out in a screech. “I was going to blast down the fucking gates!”
“Shut up, all of you.” Ethan had that trick of being able to cut through noise without raising his voice. He pointed at Birgitte. “You, we need to keep our guide and her son alive, and we don’t need you collapsing tunnels or any other stupid shit. Get it together.”
He pointed at me. “If you draw on one of my people again I’ll kill you myself.”
Birgitte shoved me one more time and stalked away, muttering. I just let her go, unwilling to meet anyone’s eye. Ethan turned to Lynette, who was watching the proceedings with wide eyes as she held Virgil close, and he said, “Now we have to find shelter from the snakes and the wolves before night gets here. Where should we go?”
Neither his tone nor his expression changed the entire time. It wasn’t reassuring. Lynette must have been aware of her situation, though, as she nodded and looked down the street. She pointed. “There’s a safe spot that way. We’re going to have to climb a little to get to it.”
Ethan nodded and then gestured toward the road, indicating that she should lead the way. Baran took his spot next to her, on point, and the rest of us followed. We returned to our usual circuitous method of moving forward, walking back trails and arcane paths that I didn’t see before we were on top of them.
I stayed as far from Birgitte as possible, taking heart in the fact that she was ignoring me now that Ethan had snarled at her. I couldn’t wait for this mission to be over with. Maybe I would go back to Arkansas or something when we were done here. God knew that there was nothing to keep me here.
Lynette’s new path took us a couple of stories above the street. A series of telephone poles, broken buildings, and other materials formed a fragile road there above the streets of Seattle. Everything smelled of papery scales, indicating that this was a Naga passageway, and we moved as quickly as we could to avoid them.
Nagas weren’t horribly dangerous but there were usually a lot of them and it didn’t take many of their bites to get overloaded with poison. They tended to sit very still, blending into the background even if you used a thermal scope because of the way that they took on the surrounding area’s temperatures. A nest of Nagas striking by surprise could ruin our day.
Even with the sun up it was a cool day, guaranteed to make the Nagas a bit sluggish. They had magic they could fall back on but it was basically enough to stay alive until some outside heat came along.
That was the prevailing theory, anyway, which didn’t account for why so many Naga-related deaths happened at night. I made a mental note to ask Raine about it while we camped.
The safe area was a relatively cleared spot on top of a three-story building. It was free of most rubble but alongside one wall stood stacks and stacks of wood from every source I could imagine: chair legs sat next to tree limbs sat next to joists from broken houses. The wood was covered with scraps of tarps weighed down with broken cinder blocks.
Ethan pointed to several spots on the roof that appeared to be the remains of large fires. “Start piling wood, Breakers. Stack it high.”
I did so, wanting to know why but figuring that I would find out if I just watched. The others worked with a minimum of talk; I figured they were either exhausted or in the know. Virgil struggled with a log about the size of his leg and seemed content to work without any help. Lynette just sat in the middle and watched, her eyes dead with fatigue.
Once the wood was piled high, Ethan had Baran light it with the fire starter in his pack. I didn’t like the look in his eye when he stared at the flames, but Baran knew his work and the four bonfires were soon burning merrily. The others seemed content to just lay out their bedrolls in the middle of the circle of fire.
“Why are we doing it this way?” I said. “Won’t this just be a beacon?”
Ethan looked at me a moment and nodded. “All right, newbie. The walls will shield the light.” He pointed to the sides of the building and I saw that what I had assumed as the top was actually the remains of an upper floor; there were walls all around us about waist-height on me. “It isn’t perfect but it’s better than nothing. Nagas are invethermic. When it’s cold, they move faster than when it’s hot. So these fires are gonna drain their energy and slow ‘em way down if they find us.” I guess that explained why the snakes seemed more active at night.
“And they will,” said Baran, grinning a grin that I didn’t like.
“And they will,” Ethan agreed. “So we’ll have watches.”
“How come no one’s mentioned this before?” I asked. “About the thermic thing.”
“Most people don’t know. Most people figure they’re more like snakes.” I sure had. “Keep your eyes open, newbie. Learn things,” said Gunner. There was a liquid chuckle from one of them that made me shiver in spite of the heat from the fires. This expedition was starting to feel like a worse and worse idea, but I was in too deep now to just leave.
“Okay, whoever’s on watch needs to keep those fires going,” said Ethan, not reacting to Gunner’s words. “If… when the snakes get here, they’re going to be our only chance. Got it?”
We did. Ethan assigned watches and I settled down to sleep in my bedroll on the opposite side of the fire circle from Birgitte. I didn’t think she was going to kill me in my sleep, not with so many witnesses around, but she had been crazy enough to consider popping a grenade in a tunnel. There was no telling what she might take it into her head to do. I didn’t want to fight her if I could help it; the memory of her fighting the Goblins was still fresh in my mind.
I watched long enough to see her loosen her armor. She gave a small groan; she was a well-curved woman, so I figured it was uncomfortable for her to stay compressed in the armor all day. I didn’t say anything, though; I liked my liver where it was.
When I woke, Lynette and Virgil were asleep between me and Raine. Ethan was kicking at my leg to wake me up, and I reached out to wake Raine once I was conscious. We got up as Ethan and Baran were going down. Baran gave me a considering look, as if trying to figure out where to shoot me that would cause the most damage, but Ethan just turned in without any comment beyond, “All clear so far.”
I stood on one end of the circle, between two of the bonfires, and Raine stood at the other. Sentry duty is the worst. I’d rather clean latrines. Most of the time it’s just hours of staring off into the darkness while trying to stay awake. I have better night vision than the standard Human, though the flickering fires eliminated a lot of that advantage. From time to time we’d go out and pull in more wood to rebuild the fires, but that was the extent of the excitement.
Toward the end of the watch I kept glancing at Raine to see if it was time to wake up Gunner and Birgitte, and while I was distracted with thoughts of my bed the Nagas slithered out of the dark. They came the same way we’d come earlier, sliding over the gap in the walls with barely a sound besides the thump of their landing. They were about eight feet long, with two thirds of their bodies appearing to be regular snakes. They had Human-shaped torsos, heads, and arms, though they were o
bviously not Human. They had scales all over their bodies, with slits for ears and noses. They carried blades for weapons, and some of them had spears. They smelled awful, like rotting meat. I watched in shock as five of them appeared. Then I turned to scream for the others.
Raine had another half-dozen on his side, and both of his hammers out. The rest of the Breakers and our guides woke immediately; it was hard to sleep deeply when you might be attacked at any time. By the time I looked back, the five nearest me had become ten.
“Permission to use firearms,” said Ethan, sounding calm. That was all I needed; I pulled my shotgun up around my shoulder and started firing. All around me the others did the same.
The problems were twofold: we could barely tell when we hit the damn things and more were piling in with each passing moment. I struggled to remember what I’d heard about the snake-folk. They were supposed to be bulletproof; if that was the case then we were screwed anyway. I noticed that they weren’t thrilled about coming close to the fires. The bonfires were burning a little low, and the snakes blocked the way to the rest of the fuel.
I soon found that they weren’t bulletproof. They were fast. Shooting at them was like trying to use a BB gun to hit a housefly, but a shotgun has a natural advantage in that situation. They hissed