The pukwudgies shivered and cried and nestled against me as I tried to pull myself back up one-handed.
Something slick brushed my leg, then coiled around my ankle.
“Oh, fuck.”
The tentacle—I refused to call something that rubbery an arm, dammit—pulled so hard, it threatened to dislocate my hip.
“Throw us children before you die!” yelled the pukwudgie leader. He stood on the jutting stump of a floor joist a few feet away.
Asshole. But I pried the kids loose and tossed them up.
The floor beneath me creaked. I clung to my knife with both hands, but even if the shoggoth couldn’t pull me loose, it was strong enough to drag this whole section of floor down into its muddy little killing pool. The muscles in my arms felt like they would tear free from my bones, and my hip was seconds from popping out of its socket.
Thethwapof a bowstring was, to my ear, simultaneous with the squelch of an arrow tearing through the tentacle and burying itself in the far side of the pit. A second arrow followed.
The weight on my leg vanished. I pulled myself up onto the joist where Papa Pukwudgie had stood.
A torn black limb was still wrapped around my leg, from my ankle to just past the knee. The end dripped dark, syrupy fluid. My brain suggested the termichor.
It was grotesque. The smell overloaded my nose like a firehose filling a water balloon. Through the dust and darkness I could make out a shape the size of an elephant in the murky water below. Eyeballs caught the light, reflecting red and gold and green, blinking like horrifying Christmas lights. The sight made me sick to my stomach, but I couldn’t look away.
The eyes...some were almost human, while others had pupils like cats or goats, and others were nothing but blackness.
A small hand slapped my face. “Why you stop? You stuck?”
I looked away from the shoggoth, and the weight threatening to shatter my sanity eased. The elder pukwudgie had come back for me. I let out a choked sob of relief.
The pukwudgie peered past me, into the pit.
“Don’t look!” I shouted.
He just cocked his head and squinted his tiny eyes at me. “Hurry.”
Pukwudgies didn’t see well enough to lose their minds at the sight of a shoggoth. Lucky bastards.
I crawled farther from the edge, then hacked the tentacle off my leg. I sliced a bit of my own flesh in the process, but as my granddaughter would say, it was totally worth it.
“Thank you,” I said as we exited what was left of the Gauntlet.
“Welcome,” said the pukwudgie. “Love slapping humans.”
“Half-human.” My heart wasn’t in the protest. “Go. Find someplace safe for you and your family.”
It sagged. “Nowhere safe for pukwudgies.”
I pointed to the growing sinkhole. “Find someplace safer than this.”
“Good thought. That, can do.”
He and his family scurried away, leaving me to tug quills from my chest. My boobs felt like pincushions, and the little brats hadn’t even said thank you.
Thick, cold fog filled the street. The onlookers had mostly fled, and emergency responders hadn’t reached us yet, though I heard sirens in the distance.
I spotted Jenny floating fifteen feet in the air, just past the far edge of the sinkhole. She had an arrow nocked to her bow. Her eyes were shut, but her attention was laser-focused on the darkness.
I heard a faint splash. In that instant, she tilted her head, drew the bowstring, and loosed the arrow.
Temple sat on a bench at a bus stop across the street. He had one hand toward Jenny, presumably keeping her aloft and out of the shoggoth’s reach. His other hand gripped his cane. His eyes were narrowed, and he was mumbling.
