As soon as the chain’s weight falls away, my spirit lifts. The manacle remains attached to his left hand, the unclaspedend dangling. The dagger’s hilt is smooth and steady beneath my fingers. In an instant, the panic swirling inside me turns to anticipation. Rune’s sword whispers as he pulls it from his sheath and turns to watch the trees. I put my back to his, scanning the darkness on the other side.
“Pull in,” Rune commands. “Backs to centre.”
The others tighten their formation, facing outward. Elio is on the other side of Rune. Tavi situates herself on the far end, her dual blades nearly invisible in the dark.
The moment we still, the first creature punches through. It snaps branches as it flies, airborne till it lands on top of a man whose chest cracks under its weight.
Then chaos.
A body slams to the ground next to me—a woman that twists, scrambling back on her hands and knees until a— atongue—wraps around her leg and yanks her flat. The air rushes from her lungs in a whoosh and I don’t think before slicing the blade through the appendage. It springs back, painting her with bloody green, but she doesn’t rise. Instead, she screams, clutching her leg where the fabric of her pants comes away in slimy sections streaked with red. The tongue spasms and falls to the ground, leaving behind a mess of dissolving flesh. She wails again, jerking her hands back as the saliva seeps into them too.
“Odi!”
I spin to find a sword tip retracting from the chest of a mottled-green creature poised to strike me, its many eyes wide and terrifyingly emotionless. With a sweep of my blade, its bulbous neck opens under itsimpossibly wide mouth, spilling gore with a stomach-turning gurgle. Its long arms drop, claws dragging the ground, and the frog-like upper half buckles over its thick legs.
“Their spit is acid!” I shout to Rune as the creature between us falls away.
“Then keep your wits about you!” he snips back as he pulls his sword from its body, like my surprise is a distraction. He’s not wrong. He bounds away, and I don’t turn back to the woman before racing after him.
We charge for the shadowy silhouette of a second creature, whose far-reaching talons shred a man’s thigh before we reach him. With a grunt, the man swings hard, embedding his axe into its shoulder, but the thing doesn’t flinch, just slaps him down into an unconscious heap on the soggy ground. Rune engages a step before I do, parrying its first swing and ducking beneath the second, lunging forwards enough to drive his sword backward into its leg. The move is more dexterous-thief than massive-fighter but he pulls around flawlessly, his feet faster than I’d expect from an ocean-born siren. I can’t help the rush of admiration, nor the fierce, twisted glee. It’s Nisse, not Odelia, that gives him a blood-splattered grin, then leaps in.
I catch it as it stumbles forwards, avoiding the claws threatening to scramble my insides. When I slash a shallow gash over its shoulder, its many eyes wink closed, but only the two largest open again, trained on me. Then the air shifts, kissing my cheeks as I narrowly avoid first, one, then two furious swings of those long claws.
My body moves on instinct, years of muscle memory taking over and narrowing my world to heartbeats and half-seconds. I’m able to sink the blade just over its hip and deal a glancing blow to one of its forearms before a fallen log does its best to tangle my footing.
A fierce burning rips through my thigh, but Rune is there, slicing at its back, green dripping off the white of his blade. I step back again, wincing at the way blood streams from the slice and down the side of my leg. It follows, its dead eyes locked on me like it knows I’ve lived my entire life in the body of a prey animal.
It brays in surprise when I lunge, using the scant momentum and every ounce of strength in my legs to barrel into its waist. Its thick knees buckle, and the log is there to send us both into the wet, rotting earth. I shudder at the sticky-slick sensation of its skin, then roll, trying to put myself far out of reach before it can lash out. Tavi and Rune each land killing blows—Rune to the neck and Tavi to the arteries of its inner thighs, which bleed it before it can rise to attack again.
“The last one is down, and so is Elio,” she says, her voice betraying no emotion. Rune curses, breaking into a sprint the moment Tavi gestures towards where Elio lays against a rock not far away. The gash on his head still leaks blood. His face contorts with pain even in unconsciousness, likely from a trio of long, parallel slashes over his chest. The tooth on the chain around his neck is vibrant red.
“They’re shallow,” Rune says, ripping the man’s torn shirt away and pouring the entirety of his waterskinover the wounds.
Elio groans, but sits up, wavering as Rune uses a hand to steady him. Tavi graces him with a glob of the foul smelling ointment, her mouth ticking up as he objects.
Rune crosses his arms, watching as if to ensure Elio is really awake. “You guys get him wrapped. I’ll go check everyone else.”
An hour later, we’ve tended the worst of the wounds and counted the dead. The woman with the acid-burned leg walks with a limp. Her hands are a scalded, but she nods to me at one point, offering a relieved smile as if I hadn’t turned my back while she was down.
We’ve lost four more, and there isn’ta single one of us who walks away unscathed. The forest sounds come back, wary at first, then insistent, as if they’re determined to carry word of our half-victory across the whole of the island by morning. Some of our group take to the trees. Those too injured to climb fold their tents and use them as a cushion while they doze, propped up against the trunks. Rune and I stay below, quietly resting in shifts. Tavi sits next to Elio. She doesn’t rest at all.
When the sun rises, Rune sends a runner to return to camp to give them the news and gather a group to retrieve the dead. Their way should be easier with the path we’ve cleared.
We walk on, weary and gore-spattered. The air heats as the sun rises high overhead. Unlike yesterday, there’s no acrid, lung-rending scent paired with the humidity, and the faint sound of running water ahead offers an altogether more pleasant promise.
I let myself look down and grimace; the cream of Soraya’s shirt is stained with a dried, slug-mucous green. “I’d kill for a bath.”
“I’d kill for you to have a bath too.” Rune keeps his face suspiciously deadpan, and heat flares in my cheeks, the image of water running down his bare chest and toned stomach remarkably persistent in my mind’s eye. He hadn’t chained me again, instead slipping the manacles off his wrist and into his pack in the early hours of the morning. Something had shifted between us, but I couldn’t say what, exactly. I still don’t trust him. Still expect the crew’s wrath upon our return. None will take the deaths lightly, yet, here he is, forging forwards, as if it were his future on the line.
He glances over, like he expected more than my silence. “For you to wash the stink off, of course.” His tone is an invitation all its own. I have to wonder if he realises how it betrays him.Play with me.It says.Distract me. Fight me, if nothing else. Please.
I straighten, falling easily into our back-and-forth despite the ache in my limbs and the way sweat burns the gashes on my thigh. “Why would I, if it’s working so well to keep you away?”
He sighs, stretching his arms up high before lacing his fingers behind his head. “Actually,” he says, peering down at me as we walk, “they say monster blood is an aphrodisiac.”
The breath wooshes out of him as my elbow connects with his gut. His long arms swipe for me but I bound into a run, grinning as his long strides follow. A thrill chases up my spine alongside the memory of our last race, powering my legs everfaster.
The crew’s shouts of surprise follow us, and so does Tavi’s command for them to stand down. My wood nymph instincts bleed in, my feet sure where to land to stay near-silent, but Rune snaps branches and catches the underbrush as he goes, making both a path for the others to follow and enough noise for me to know he’s struggling to gain any ground.
