For a third time, I felt the snare start to settle around me.
Evan stirred, and it broke, more easily than before.
I didn’t feel the binding resume.
“I think I’m good,” I said. “Go help Green Eyes if she needs it.”
“You sure?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
He flew off.
I saw the goblin familiar watch Evan fly off toward the house, over the roof to where Green Eyes and the Satyrs had been dealing with the homunculus sentinel.
I saw its eyes narrow.
Bad feeling.
I ran for it.
The goblin didn’t turn away from watching Evan as it glanced at me sidelong.
It opened its mouth.
It wore braces, in a manner of speaking. Machinery wired into teeth, into mouth, and down its throat.
That machinery consisted of three barrels. One was empty. One had an arrowhead sticking out of it, and the other had a dozen needles bristling from the end.
He held the axe out to ward me off as it fired the crossbow bolt, moving head and mouth as if it were speaking. Except it was firing a weapon, with the snap of machinery kicking into motion and a crack of gunpowder.
But the Hyena and the full bearing of my body struck his axe arm. He proved too strong, too heavy with armor and too big for me to really move. All my effort and I only nudged.
I didn’t even make out the crossbow bolt striking Evan. I saw only the bird fall, with a scattering of feathers that fell much, much slower.
I dragged the Hyena down the shaft of the axe, twisting my body out of the way of the axe, cutting the back of metal-clad fingers. In the doing, I found some flesh. He loosened his grip, and I tore the axe from his hand.
He backed off fairly quickly after that.
Rage told me to press the attack. I wasn’t sure if it was rage borne of the monster part of me or the human part.
Evan.
I turned my head to check on Evan. Which was perhaps the only thing that saved my eyes. I’d almost thought the goblin had retreated out of fear. He’d retreated to have room to fire, at optimal range. The goblin familiar opened his mouth.
The needles, as it happened, were a kind of shotgun spray.
They tore into my shoulder, into my head, and the side of my neck, but they didn’t strike the flesh of my face. Branches as thick as a finger were shattered by needles as thick as, well, needles. The sort one put threads through.
I staggered back, until I was at Evan’s side, where he’d landed in deep snow. Feathers lay not so far away.
I cupped him in one hand.
“Ow,” he said. “Ow.”
The mad fluttering inside my body stirred, as I touched him.
He had a gash running down the length of his body, head to tail.
“Can’t fly,” he said.
Wordless, not trusting myself to speak, I grabbed him. I lifted him into a cage of safety within my own body.
I touched bloody and feather-strewn snow, then crushed it in my fist.
The monster demanded revenge for daring to hurt Evan, and it was hungry, angry, violent.
The human wanted revenge for different reasons, in different ways, but it wanted it all the same, just as much.
All together, though? The human and the monster together? What that wanted, what I wanted, was different.
Absently, I drew a streak of blood and snow and the occasional scattered feather across my chest. To clean my hands, because my clothes were grimy enough with Drainstuff it hardly mattered.
The mission.
The brothers were there, in my peripheral vision.
Watching.
The goblin had drawn a flail of some sort. A weight on a chain. It came for me, the weight tracing a lazy circle around it. I retreated rapidly, closer to the brothers, to the other practitioners.
Twisting, I charged them.
No revenge.
My focus here, the problem I was trying to fix, it was them. The real monsters. The monsters who made worse things possible.
“Only them!” I called out, as I saw the practitioners reacting. “At the request of a child!”
I could only wonder if those words had an impact. If it slowed the response.
I saw a diagram expanding.
Their buddy. He’d been busy while I fought.
I touched the trace of sparrow blood at my chest with knuckles that gripped one weapon, and held out the one hand in the direction of the diagram. Moving around as the diagram grew, like an explosion in slow motion.
I swung the axe underhand, catching the one in the groin.
Reaching over, I pulled the looser chain and barbed wire away from my arm. I only managed a half-foot of length.
But the goblin was giving chase, slowing as light erupted from the growing diagram. Blinded, it turned its head to one side.
I hooked my arm over the brother’s head, and pulled the chain against his neck. A human shield, between me and goblin.
The weight came around, and struck the top of his head clean off, meat and only meat striking the side of my face. Several practitioners dropped to the ground as they avoided the flying sphere.
“Back,” Needledick said. “Back. No collateral damage this time, please.”
The goblin stopped, letting the weight strike ground, then car, before it stopped.
There was a moment of silence, me still holding the body upright against my own.
“Only them,” I said. “And him.”
I looked at Mason Hall-McCullough, and I let the body drop.
“I can handle this,” the practitioner spoke.
The old man smirked, looking down at me.
“Can you?” I asked.
He smiled.
I advanced, and approached him. He stood by the trunk of the car.
I saw no trap. No diagrams.
He spread his arms wide.
“If you think it’s right,” he said. “Strike me true.”
I stabbed him in the chest with the Hyena.
Turning back toward the house, I saw the Satyrs and Green Eyes, covered in blood, Green Eyes cradling one arm.
I pointed. I got a nod in response.
I wiped the blood off the Hyena and onto my pant leg as I moved on.