“Thanks, Kiera. I owe you. He just took it and ran.” Connie was panting slightly from her exertion. Her hair, which had been neatly pulled into a ponytail earlier this morning, was already making an escape from it and frizzing out around her temples.
“This must be the squirrel with the nuts,” Jordan said. “I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting him last time I was here.
That had me giggling. Tooth really did have giant balls. He was famous for them.
Considering that Jordan was reacting so casually to Kyle’s mauve-colored skin, Xarc’n horns, but clearly human facial features, he must be used to seeing Xarc’n and human mixed children in his travels.
I handed the generously endowed rodent over to Kyle. “Here ya go.”
Kyle grinned, flashing the cutest little fangs, and clipped a leash onto Tooth’s harness. It had taken months to train the squirrel to use a leash, and he’d chewed through every one that wasn’t reinforced. But for an event this big, it made sense. Other groups had pets too, and Tooth was basically a snack-sized target. Worse yet, his best friend Waffle was a dog, so he hadn’t learned that not all dogs were rodent-friendly.
“Wow! Treasure Map!” Kyle exclaimed, his eyes wide.
Jordan grinned. “Sure is, kid,” he said, sending the kid a wink.
I made quick introductions, and soon, Connie was looking at the map and frowning, much like the way I had when I first saw it. “Is this what you, Sam, and Lenny were talking about?”
“Yeah. Have you seen Sam? I should go talk to her.”
I’d passed by the Great Plains tent earlier while looking for Jordan, but she hadn’t been there.
“Not sure, but I heard there’s some Tech Wizard thing in the library today.”
Duh! Of course! The library was Dottie’s and my domain, and I’d helped arrange it. But with everything going on, I’d totally forgotten.
“Coast is clear!” someone shouted.
It looked like the hunters took care of the centicreep before it even reached us. Nice work. As the door swung open, the crowd surged back outside, eager to resume their festivities.
Chapter 5: Bael’k
It took way too long to extricate myself from the group of chatty females and their barrage of never-ending questions. I’d tried to keep my answers short, but that hadn’t worked. And when I finally reached my limit, I’d made my escape by simply leaping over all of them and making a run for it. By then, Kiera was long gone. I’d followed her scent as it meandered through the marketplace.
But now that I knew how to recognize it, I smelled it everywhere, probably because she’d had a hand in setting up the market and had touched everything. With so many other humans around, their individual scents mixed in with the aroma of cooking meats and frying dough, I’d lost her trail.
I had just spotted her tiny form, her bright orange-red hair a beacon of fire on an endless sea, when the alarm started going off.
Krux! A centicreep.
I hated dealing with those, despite my innate love for fighting. There was losing myself in the battle and feeling as one with my twin swords as I hacked scuttlers, lungers, and spitters into pieces, and then there was dealing with this Earth-based scourge abomination.
The scourge often took genetic material from local fauna and made special mutations that gave them an edge on each planet. Here on Earth, they’d chosen a creature the humans called the common house centipede.
The creature’s superior design gave the resulting fusion, the centicreep, the upper hand, especially when moving through narrow corridors of the tall buildings in Earth’s many cities and towns. It scaled the buildings easily too, clinging onto edges with its many feet.
It was fast as well, and hard to fight. We hadn’t had to deal with such a lethal mutation for a very long time.
The communicator attached to my belt buzzed, and I checked it to see that the approximate location of the abomination had been sent to every hunter in the vicinity. It was coming in fast from the south. All hunters not currently in their shuttles were to report outside the settlement’s walls. Did that include me? I was supposed to be on my break.
Most likely, our shuttles would take care of the centicreep before it arrived. But usually, large hordes of scuttlers followed it and those would need killing.
With one last look at the door my fiery-headed female had gone through, I turned and started toward the exit closest to the rendezvous point. There was no such thing as breaks when it came to fighting the scourge. Instinct and fealty to the ultimate cause of eliminating the infernal creatures once and for all demanded I join the fight.
I’d find Kiera later.
“Be careful, hunter,” yelled the male human keeper of the gate as I stepped through. “There are multiple spitters detected.”
Spitters I could handle, as long as the other hunters I worked with communicated well. While the centicreeps were the hardest to fight, it was the spitters’ acid that claimed the most Xarc’n lives.
