Already her nails were digging into his shoulder, her grip slipping as Tanis tried to subtly boost her up.
“Back off, I will do it!” she screeched, though she barely believed herself. Even as she struggled to hold herself up, she didn’t want the knife to press too much against his throat.
“Tanis, what is that?” one of the orcs started to say, as if she looked more like an accessory than a kidnapper to them.
Another orc took a daring step forward, and Bianca slipped, her nails tearing a path of scratches down his arm.
She felt Tanis twist in her grip to try to catch her, and it happened all too quickly to stop it and too slow to look away. The sickening feeling of the blade in her hand dragging and then gliding effortlessly through his skin, the knife falling from her hand, covered in blood.
Bianca scrambled to her feet as soon as she hit the snow. Tanis was on his knees beside her, his hand pressing hardagainst his neck just under his jaw, drops of deep green on the white ground.
He pulled his palm away, and she let go of the breath she was holding. It was just a shallow scratch. “Oh, Silvain’s tits, I cut your face. I’m so sorry–”
“Don’t worry about it,” he muttered, but a deeper shade of green started to color his cheeks and his eyes grew darker as he looked to her from the blood on his palm.
Bianca stumbled as she got to her feet, a wave of some sensation she couldn’t place knocking through her.
Her neck felt hot, and her hands were reaching to undo the ties on her cloak before she could think. How was it this warm all of a sudden?
“Did I hit my head? I’m so dizzy,” she mumbled.
“It’s the Blood Fever,” Tanis said, and she had to have heard him wrong. “You drew first blood.”
Bianca squinted at him. Why was he bringing up that ritual thing he had told her about before? Was this really the moment for that?
She looked from Tanis, to her troupe in their sleeping clothes and housecoats, looking terribly confused, to Dhane and the orcs with their weapons cautiously drawn.
All was quiet for a heartbeat, before one of the orcs called out, “This is your mate? A halfling?”
6
“It’s a little rude to call them half,” Tanis started to say, when it began to dawn on her. This orc. This random guy she had just met in the woods by accident. Mate? Yeah, he was nice. And yeah he had licked her cunt like a champion last night, in the strangest fling she’d ever had to date.
But mates. Needed, wanted, bound to you forever kind of mates? Like, take a girl to dinner first.
Still, she had wanted a distraction, and so far, minimal blood had been spilled. She had half a thought about gift horses and their chompy-er bits.
Bianca looked to Tanis, and merely meeting his eye made her heartbeat pick up. Fragile, strangely hopeful wonderings started to lift in her chest, and she swallowed them down. She needed answers first.
“Wait. Hang on. Is that possible–?” Bianca stammered, trying to get some kind of clear understanding before she had any feelings about that, when a shadow fell over her.
The heartbeat that she turned her head during felt drawn out, as her skin prickled with fear, panic lighting up her heart at the sight of the huldira looming over her shoulder.
Something so large and deadly had no business being stealthy, but it descended upon them with barely a sound.
Bianca could only stare at its maw, opening wide above her.
Her sides squeezed sharply, then the world tumbled. For a moment Bianca believed that she had been –swallowed? Knocked over? But when the ground stopped turning over beneath her, the darkness and cold surrounding her was just snow.
She laid on the ground, dazed for a few seconds, realizing she had just been bodily thrown aside.
The group of orcs had scattered, readying their weapons quickly. One already fired off an arrow into the beast’s nose.
The huldira’s screech broke through the clearing as it did, its thunderous steps crashing through plants and ice into the Halfling camp. The halflings were fleeing back into their caravans for safety, some ducking behind trees, only a few foolish enough to brandish prop weapons. Horace stood a ways back, munching on some grass, unaffected.
And Tanis was– where was he?
Bianca pushed to stand quickly, looking around for cover. She crawled under one of the nearby caravans, not quite knocked onto its side, propped up against one of the rocks.
