Page 43 of His Human Believer

Dagr doesn’t move.

“Six paces to your left.” There is nothing pleasant in his voice now. It is the first time I have heard him sound like anything but a naturalist. “Do you understand what it costs to reset? Move.”

Dagr stands with an enormous gold-eyed animal between him and the male with the sidearm and does not move one nanco.

“Then at least flame,” Vail snarls. “You know how. You have done it forty times tonight. Flame and it will follow you and you may stand wherever you like.”

“No.”

“What did you say to me?”

“I said no.” His voice cracks straight down the middle and he says it again anyway. “I’m not doing it anymore.” He steps forward, out from behind that enormous creature, between the Skyggjar and the male with the weapon. A fourteen-year-old putting his own body in front of an animal the size of a domicile.

“Go,” he tells the creature. “Go. I told you to go, why won’t you⁠—”

One enormous, long-fingered hand comes down and simply gathers the boy back behind its own body again, the way you would move a small thing out of a doorway, and then it stands over him again and turns those gold eyes on the male at the edge of the clearing.

And Dagr makes a sound of pure furious grief.

Because it won’t leave.

Vail cries out in frustration and triggers the rig. The whole thing falls out of the canopy with a shriek of cable, over the center of the clearing and the position the poacher spent weeks lining up.

And there is nothing underneath because Dagr moved and the Skyggjar followed.

Somebody in the tree line brings a weapon up.

And Vidar’s voice suddenly booms across the comms. “Hold. Do not fire at the creature.” He steps out of the tree line with both claws up and I go with him because apparently, I’ve decided to follow along. “The Skyggjar is not the threat,” he announces. “It has never been the threat. I have read hundreds of accounts of this animal and in none of them, not one, in any region, in any variant, has it ever actually taken a child. Those stories are all fiction.”

Vail turns around. The empty net lies flat on the ground and the creature stands over the boy. And then he looks at Vidar and laughs derisively. “Coalstone.” He shakes his head slowly. “You wrote that the Skyggjar wasn’t real and yet here it is, right in front of you. You even took a one-year vow of celibacy to make sure when you brought the proof of the legend, it could be dissolved.”

“I was wrong.”

“Yes, most certainly, you were.” Vail’s hand moves to his hip. “And I always knew it was very, very real. And also, highly profitable. Tonight, I plan to receive my pay out.”

And he brings the sidearm up.

Not at the creature. He can’t shoot the Skyggjar because a blaster would damage his profit. He brings it up at the boy because Dagr is the only variable left that he can control.

“No,” I scream, rushing to protect Avery’s precious stepson.

Someone in Molten Lava shoots Vail through the shoulder.

Yorick Vail screams, spins half around and goes down into the leaf litter with the sidearm dropping out of his hand.

Molten Lava is on him in about six seconds. And despite his wound, he still fights. I have watched a great many beings get taken down and I have never seen anything like this epic battle. Skoll Strikestone gets there first and gets an arm around the poacher. Vail, who is already shot through the shoulder, with one useless, bleeding arm, throws Strikestone off of him.

“He’s a Gravian,” Bergelmir growls through the comms.

It takes four of them to take him down.

Skoll gets back up and grabs a leg. Idun gets the good arm. Bergelmir puts a knee between the Gravian’s shoulders and his entire weight behind it. Vail is still coming up off the ground with three powerful Hyrrokin soldiers on him and one arm out of commission. This fight is genuinely one of the more alarming things I have ever seen a being do.

A fourth male comes in and gets the other leg and that finally finishes the battle.

“Restraints,” Bergelmir shouts. “Both. Now.”

They put two sets on him. Skoll tests them and then tests them again.