A shout roused him.
Heart thudding, he lunged out from beneath the tree, sword drawn and ready. All was quiet, except for a distant woodpecker and the crackling wings of a grasshopper in flight.
“Idiot,” he told himself. “You’re starting to hear things.” His hasty exit from the tree had earned him a shoulder full of punctures, insult to injury.
Another shout, a man’s voice sharp with a note of pain and fear, came from the forest to the right. Still not entirely trusting his senses, Zee crossed the last stretch of gravel road and entered the path that seemed to lead toward the shout.
The trail meandered this way and that, taking him first away from the locus of the shout, and then back toward it, until a little voice in his brain whispered that maybe the path itself had shouted in order to lure him in, that he would die in its endless twistings and turnings with no chance to choose another way. His head ached with a vicious, stabbing pain, as if a hot prong pierced the lump on his skull and spiked into the brain tissue beneath. The lacerations on his arm and his rib cage throbbed. He was still weak from loss of blood.
The sun had moved rapidly across the sky, and shadows pooled thick among the trees. Little light was left to find his way, and he needed to rest; in fact, it would probably be smart to make shelter. Just a few more minutes, to be sure, and he’d stop for the night. He rounded a long looping curve and almost ran smack into a man standing at the edge of a small clearing.
The man’s back was toward him, his legs braced in a wide stance. Around his feet patches of green slime bubbled, erupting into foul-smelling geysers. The man’s pants—suit pants, Zee noticed, and expensive once-shiny shoes—were coated with the green goo, and the right pant leg was shredded and soaked with blood.
Facing him was a creature straight out of nightmare. Needle-sharp teeth as long as Zee’s arm were set in jaws of blackish green, the texture of toad skin. It had no real face. Where its nose should have been there were only two black holes. Red-brown eyes goggled out of its head, independent of each other, the pupils spinning in opposite directions. It had an amphibian body, with powerful back legs, poised to leap. There were claws on its nearly human hands, but the arms were short and not well muscled. Batlike wings sprouted from its shoulders. A spiked tail twitched, catlike, hitting the ground at regular intervals and raising clouds of dust. Slime oozed out of its skin and rained down into the dust with a continuous plop, plop, plop.
Zee tightened his grip on his sword and stepped forward, putting himself between the creature and the wounded man.
“We wants no trouble with one such as you,” the thing said, in a lilting, musical voice. “We only wants what is ours.” Drool flowed in little rivulets from the corners of its wide mouth.
Zee’s stomach twisted with revulsion. “I want no trouble, either,” he said. “What is it that you do want?”
“Him what cowers there behind you.”
“And what do you want with him?”
“We wants his death.”
Zee could hear the man’s ragged breathing, close to sobs. A sharp, acid scent, like vinegar, rose from the slime on the earth around his feet, crisping the tiny hairs in his nostrils and burning his sinuses.
Poisonous, most likely. Direct contact with either the creature or its slime would be a bad idea. “It’s good to want things,” he said. “In this case, I fear you’ll have to go on wanting.”
The toad’s eyes swiveled until both of them were fixed on Zee. It clashed its teeth, more reflexive than threatening. “What has it done that you would come to its defense?”
Good point. Zee sidestepped. “What cause do you have to kill him?”
“Stomped on our children. Popped like fruit beneath his feet, they did, the beautiful creatures.”
“They tried to eat me,” the man gasped behind him. “For God’s sake . . .”
The voice was familiar, but Zee couldn’t quite place it, and he dared not take his eyes off the toad to look around. “That is a horror no mother should see,” he said, “and yet I cannot let you have him.”
“Your choice, it saddens us. You speak us fair and are a noble warrior. But we slays you, if we must. You are wounded already. Unfit for battle if I reads you right. Again we asks you, stand aside.”
Zee settled into a fighting stance, adrenaline pumping energy into his body. Already his mind was compensating for the limitations imposed by his injuries as he planned both attack and defense.
“Let us have him,” she pleaded one more time. “What matters it to you?”
He raised his sword in salute. “Defend yourself,” he said, and lunged.
The creature sprang straight up into the air, hovering like a sickly caricature of a bumblebee. It dove, unfurling a long black tongue that wrapped around Zee’s sword arm like Velcro. It burned wherever it touched and he twisted and pulled, trying to break the hold. Inch by inch the tongue recoiled, lifting him off the ground and forcing him relentlessly closer to the wicked teeth.
Zee opened his imprisoned hand and let go of the sword, catching it with his right as it fell. The wounded muscle in his arm pulled and strained against the weight, but he used his body to help him, flinging himself over and up toward the trapped arm, swinging the blade in a silver arc that sliced neatly through the tongue.
He landed on his feet, crouched and ready. The severed tongue still wrapped his arm, a ring of fire, but he ignored it, switching the sword back to his uninjured hand. Blood poured from the mouth of the toad, turning its teeth to crimson. An inarticulate cry burst from its throat and it flew in low, lashing its spiked tail.
The blow missed by a whisper. The tail lashed again, and Zee leaped into the air to intercept it. His blade bit into the bone at the end of the tail and stuck fast. The toad beat upward with its wings, trying to break free. Zee clung to the sword, throwing his weight backward toward the ground as it dragged him around, almost lifting him into the air.
He wasn’t going to be able to hold on much longer. His right arm was bleeding again, the bandage he’d wrapped around it stained red. The other arm, snared by the venomous tongue, ached and burned. He couldn’t feel his hands anymore, clenched in a death grip around the sword hilt.
There was a cracking sensation as the tail broke and the sword came free.
The creature croaked. It spun lopsided in the air just above the earth. Zee leaped upward, plunging his sword into the sickly white belly, then leaping to the side as the creature went limp and came crashing down. Its eyes spun madly and then went dark.
Zee scraped the tongue off his arm with the edge of the sword, revealing skin that was reddened and blistering.
“Help, would you?”
Zee was pretty sure what the trouble was, and when he circled the fallen heap of warts and slime, sure enough, the wounded man lay pinned with his legs beneath the carcass, unable to drag himself free.
One long look at the man’s pale face, once clean shaven and arrogant, now besmirched with blood and slime, and Zee set one booted foot onto the heaving chest and laid his sword blade across the throat.
Throats were so vulnerable to a blade. No exertion required, no real strength. A little pressure, a twist and pull with the wrist, and jugular, carotid, and trachea would be severed. A man would choke on his own blood. And Zee wanted to shed the blood of this man with an intensity that nearly overrode his control.
It was a dream, he reminded himself. A man cannot be held responsible for what he does in a dream. Cowardice, on the other hand, looking on from a distance while others are under attack . . .
Green eyes stared up at him out of a face gone deathly white, save for the scarlet acid burns standing out in vivid and ghastly contrast.
“What happened to Vivian? What did they do with her?”
“I don’t know. I swear.”
Zee applied a little pressure. Blood welled. Each crimson drop held the promise of revenge. “Tell me!”
“I couldn’t see. I was hiding!”
“Liar.” A little more pressure. His hands were shaking, torn between the desire to kill the man who had brought so much harm to Vivian, and the need to question him alive.
“I’m telling you the truth! They opened a door and threw her inside.”
“What was on the other side of the door? Did you see?”
“No, I’m telling you. All I saw was the door. That’s all I know. Please—get me out of here.”
Zee’s breath came in hard gasps; his heart was beating way too hard. How long did it take to recover from blood loss? Vivian would know. But Vivian wasn’t here, had been thrust against her will through some doorway into who-knows-where. The very thought filled him with rage.
A battle waged in his breast. Was he really obligated to rescue one such as Jared? It was a coward’s act to kill a wounded man, and yet some men needed killing. Deep in his soul he knew the right thing, much as he hated to admit it, and so he swung away and began to clean the globs of disgusting green goo off his sword blade by wiping it in the tall grass.
“Hey!” Jared called, an edge of panic in his voice. “You’re not really going to leave me here. Please.”
“Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. Don’t have much use for lying cowards.” But he sheathed the sword, turning back only to see that his enemy had stopped struggling and lay perfectly still, eyes closed, arms flung wide. Acid burns filled with a greenish fluid marred his face.
“Jared,” Zee said.
No response.
He nudged the fallen man with the toe of his shoe. No movement, no response. He shoved harder, shifting Jared’s shoulder upward. The arm and hand trailed behind, limp and useless.
“Oh, goddamn it.” Zee grasped Jared under the armpits and dragged him out from beneath the toad. Both legs were covered in green slime; the right was blood drenched, the pant leg torn to shreds.
Careful not to touch the slime with his bare hands, Zee sliced the remains of the pant leg open and shuddered in revulsion. Strips of flesh and skin hung loose and shredded. Retrieving the canteen, he poured precious water over the wound. As he sluiced the blood and slime away he caught a glimpse of bone.
The first-aid kit was useless; nothing in it even began to address the magnitude of this wound. Zee sliced a strip from the blanket with his sword. Not sterile, but it was all he had to work with. About the time he was done wrapping the wound, Jared’s eyes flickered open, unfocused and fever bright.
“Where’s Vivian?” he murmured, his voice thick and far away.
Awesome. Not only couldn’t he kill the sniveling coward, Zee realized he was going to be stuck with playing nursemaid. A slight hiss off to the right triggered his reflexes and he dove to one side, dragging Jared with him, just as one of the patches of green exploded into the air. An acid smoke rose up that burned in his lungs and set him coughing. “We’d better get out of here. Can you stand?”
“I think so.”
He towed Jared up onto his good leg, pulled an arm over his shoulder, and half-dragged him away from the clearing and into the closest path. Acid-tainted air burned in his throat and nostrils. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw a wave of peristalsis ripple along the toad creature’s belly, which had expanded into a tight balloon.
“Faster,” he gasped. The path was rough going, laced with roots and stones, barely wide enough for the two of them. If they could just make it around a curve about a hundred yards ahead, they’d be sheltered if that thing blew. Jared was a weight dragging him back, limping and unsteady. A hollow boom shook the earth beneath their feet and he abandoned running and dove off the path and into the undergrowth, pulling Jared after him. They fell in a tangle of arms and legs and lay still, listening to the splat of thick slime dripping off branches to the earth below.
“What the hell was that?”
“Toad exploded,” Zee said. “Come on, we gotta go before all that extra slime smokes us out.”
“Don’t know if I can—”
“You don’t have a choice. Come on. Crawl.”
The only thing to do was to work their way deeper into the underbrush. The path they’d been on was contaminated—he could see the puddles of slime already beginning to bubble and smoke—and there was no other path available.
Wounded and weary as he was, Zee goaded Jared deeper and deeper into the depths of the forest. What they would find there, he didn’t know, but they couldn’t go back and they couldn’t stay still and it was the only thing he knew to do.