Christabel
Hel-Blar stampeded through the field above us, and when the wind shifted it was full of rotten mushrooms and slimy pond water. I heard them shoving to get through the narrow opening to the maze.
I ran faster, clutching the back of Connor’s belt. He was moving so quickly that I was like those cars using the wind drag behind transport trucks on the highway. We went left, left, came up against another dead end, doubled back, went right, then left again. I felt the Hel-Blar closing in. Fear made my heart feel like it was too big for my chest. My stomach hurt, my lungs tightened, my legs tingled. I could almost feel their decayed breath on the back of my neck. I tried but I couldn’t run any faster.
And then Connor suddenly stopped and whirled around me, as if we were dancing, blurring around the edges as if he was smoke. Later I’d be impressed by that. He ended up behind me just as a Hel-Blar leaped to clamp its jaws on me. Connor pushed me back with one arm and threw the Hel-Blar with his other. I stumbled and tried not to stab myself with my dagger. I turned just in time to see a billow of ashes.
“They’re coming,” he said. “How’s your aim?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Well, we’re about to find out. We’ll have to make our stand here.” He nodded at the torchlight. “That way you can see better than they can. These Hel-Blar don’t like light. When we’ve got a chance, we can make our way to the next torch. Stay back behind the barbed wire there; it’ll narrow their way in to us.”
“Connor?” My palms were sweating around the knife hilt and the stones from my pocket.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for coming to get me.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And I’m sorry you’re going to die horribly.”
He actually grinned. “We’re not going to die, Christa.”
“We’re not? Maybe you’re not paying attention. The monsters are about to eat our brains.”
“They’re not zombies.”
I actually reached out and pinched him. “No geek semantics. I’m trying to say I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“You didn’t.” He turned and dragged me forward, his hand closing around the back of my neck. He kissed me hard and quick. “Are you ready?”
“Hell, no!”
And then there was no time left to talk.
We were seriously outnumbered.
The Hel-Blar bottlenecked between the two hedge walls with the barbed wire. Blood dripped onto the ground from their cuts, from their mouths.
“Don’t get any on you!” Connor warned me. He caught one under the jaw with his elbow and then used his stake when the Hel-Blar reared back. Ash made me gag and cough. Another came through the opening. He snarled at Connor and threw a stake at him. It whistled as it whirled toward Connor’s heart.
Wait, they had stakes, too? Not just teeth and contagious bites?
That was totally unfair.
I choked on a warning yell. Time was soaked in honey, slow and sticky. Connor leaned sideways and the wood grazed his arm, like a bullet. That’s how fast it was traveling and how strong the Hel-Blar was who’d thrown it. Connor was faster, though. Even as he leaned away, he used his foot to kick at my knee, knocking me out of the way. The stake went by me, so close that I could see the grooves from the knife that had whittled it in the torchlight.
“Christa, don’t freeze on me!” Connor yelled, jumping back into the fight.
Right. Standing there waiting to be eaten was bad.
And Connor was tiring. I’d always scoffed at those girls who waited around to be rescued. I hated that in books. So I should do something. Anything.
I tried to pretend I was back at home, maybe riding the subway alone too late at night, or crossing through a dark parking lot. I’d dealt with scary people before and I never froze. I’d kicked Peter when he tried to grab me, didn’t I? I could do this.
I threw stones like they were grenades. I think I was even yelling. My aim wasn’t great, but I was persistent and annoying. It distracted them just enough for Connor to get the upper hand. And when they got close enough that I saw saliva gleaming on their creepy teeth, I kicked out with my combat boots. I heard a shin bone snap when I caught a leg at a particularly good angle. It was mostly luck, but I wasn’t going to get picky about it.
Luck damn well owed me.
One of the rocks bounced off a Hel-Blar’s shoulder and caught Connor in the cheekbone, drawing blood.
“Sorry!” I threw another stone, more carefully this time. Connor staked another one, and I grabbed the torch and waved it threateningly. The two closing in on us hissed.
That gave me an idea.
I patted my coat, frantically searching for the flask Saga had given me. It was full of that nasty grog, and I was pretty sure only rubbing alcohol had a higher alcohol content.
“Behind me!” I told Connor. “Now!”
I took a big mouthful.
It always worked in books.
Not that I could think of one right now, but I was sure I’d read about it somewhere.
I tried to blow the rum out in a wide spray over the flame, hoping fervently I wasn’t about to set fire to my own face.
There was a horrible moment when nothing happened.
And then, the fire spread. It rained over the encroaching Hel-Blar and they screamed. It wasn’t much, just enough to make them pause. Connor took the flask from me and poured it over the cedars, then threw arcs of the amber liquid over the Hel-Blar. He added the fuel from a lighter in his pocket. The fire swelled and crackled, eating through the hedges and licking at the frantic Hel-Blar. The next scraggly hedge caught fire.
“Whoa. You’re even better than Princess Leia,” Connor told me as the snow sizzled and evaporated over the flames.
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t get any ideas about that gold bikini.” I grinned. “Now come on, this way.”
“What way? That’s a wall.”
“It’s cedar,” I scoffed, “not concrete. We shove through it and aim that way and just keep going through the branches until we get out of here.”
“Yup, hotter than Leia.”
We pushed through the branches, getting scratched and mauled by needles and thorns from the vines. Flower petals scattered with the snow, making everything cold and slippery. The fire crackled. There was a pulse of light glowing over the maze. Burning evergreen masked the thick slime of mushrooms. It was trickier than it seemed, contorting yourself to fit between branches that wouldn’t break off or bend easily. Marble statues of Roman goddesses missing various body parts watched us coldly.
“Barbed wire,” he said, stopping me before I ripped my face open.
My hair curled around a metal thorn and turned into an instant knot. I yanked at it, my scalp stinging. “Ouch.”
“I’ve got it.” He bent the lengths of barbed wire apart, making an opening. He wiped his hands on his jeans, leaving bloody streaks. “Go.”
He glanced behind us to make sure nothing was sneaking up on us while I climbed through the rusted iron tangle of wire and thorns.
“Think we’re almost out of this thing?” I asked, hacking away at another hedge.
“I don’t think that’s what we have to worry about right now.” He sounded tense and he was sniffing the air.
I groaned. “What now?”
“The fire’s coming this way.”
“Already?”
“It’s been a dry season.” He pushed me along faster. “The trees are like tinder right now, and the wind just shifted.”
He was right. Cold air whirled around us and then pushed from the other direction.
The smell of smoke stung my nostrils. I coughed. “Shit.”
We tried to run as we broke through woven branches and the odd clump of barbed wire. Fire snapped its own jaws at us. It couldn’t be contained or predicted, and there wasn’t nearly enough snow to put it out. The flames licked the sky. It was easy to see where we were going now—angry orange light closed in enough to give us long, frantic shadows, which darted through the cedars ahead of us.
Maddened, the Hel-Blar who’d managed to find their way around the fire before it spread out of control followed. They crashed through after us, some even vaulting the hedges altogether. Which is how two of them ended up in front of us and then turned back, drawn by the scent of the blood smeared on Connor’s jeans and beading all over my hands and face from scratches. The fire was behind us, just as hungry and deadly. We couldn’t turn back, and the maze was too complicated—as likely to lead us into the belly of the fire as out of it. A Hel-Blar woman made a grab for me. Trying to avoid her smell and the smoke, I was breathing shallowly through my mouth. It was making me feel light-headed.
Connor was grappling with the second Hel-Blar, who was built like an angry wrestler. I couldn’t help him and he couldn’t help me.
I jabbed my dagger out viciously, blindly. She leaned back, grinned her ghoulish grin, and didn’t seem particularly concerned. Damn it. Someone was going to have to teach me how to use one of these things properly. And to think, I used to worry about social workers getting me.
It soon became apparent that there was no way I could win in combat against a creature crazed with both hunger and an animal’s terror of fire. I just wasn’t properly equipped for this kind of fight.
So I’d just have to use the only weapon I could actually do damage with.
Fire.
A wall of heat was starting to make my nose and cheeks feel sunburned. The metal buttons on my jacket were already too hot to touch, scalding me when I brushed against them. The wind played with the flames, flinging them around like a dancer’s skirt. A thin pine tree wobbled precariously. Now or never.
I grabbed for a smoldering branch near my foot, ignoring the heat that singed my palm. The other end burned like one of the torches, so I threw it as hard as I could at the feral woman. She instinctively stumbled back a step, embers scattering over her. The pine tree groaned, creaked, and then gave in to the fire eating its roots. It fell in a plume of smoke and fire right on top of her. She shrieked, batting at her singed hair and the blisters on her face, pinned under the burning trunk. Pine sap flared.
I jumped in the other direction, yelling at Connor, “Watch out!”
Connor and the wrestler tumbled in the dirt, Connor falling flat on his back. He looked winded and in pain. I was pretty sure I’d heard something crack. The wrestler grinned and reached out to grab Connor’s shirt to haul him back up within reach of his dripping teeth. Connor rolled over and scissor-kicked back, catching him across the back of the knees. He fell and he fell hard. Connor flipped over and drove his stake through the Hel-Blar’s back and into his heart. There was a howl and then ashes mixing with the embers of the cedars toppling around us.
The fire was everywhere now, and I could barely hear myself think though the crackle and hiss of flames eating their way through the evergreens. I felt sick. I’d burned that woman alive. Even if she’d been trying to maul and kill me, I couldn’t feel good about it. But I didn’t really have time to feel bad, either.
“Go.” Connor crowded behind me, trying to take the blast of heat for both of us.
We crashed through the hedges and finally fell into cold, sharp air, snow, and a view of the mountains. We crawled to a safe distance and collapsed. There was enough bare dirt between the maze and the fields stretching to the forest at the base of the mountain that the fire wouldn’t spread. Still, birds filled the sky above us, squawking in panic. I heaved air into my lungs. My chest felt like an ashtray.
Connor crouched next to me, but I had no intention of trying to stand up again until my legs felt more like legs and less like Popsicles left in the sun. Snow dusted the weeds and the flowers, pretty as a cupcake.
“Are you okay?” Connor whispered in my ear. He was cold, colder than regular body temperature should be, but I felt too hot. He was like cool water on a humid day. I edged closer to him.
“I have no idea,” I answered. At this point I might have recited “The Highwayman” to myself, but I couldn’t even remember the first line. That scared me more than anything.
But it wasn’t over.
There were shadows on the burning edges of the maze and more coming down the mountainside.
“Now what?”
“More Hel-Blar.”
“How many of those things are there?” I asked, scrambling to my feet beside him.
“Kind of an epidemic right now,” Connor admitted.
“I hate this town.”
Someone erupted out of the fire-licked darkness. I threw my knife. It went a foot wide, and Aidan watched it mildly as it flew past him. “You’ll need to get better at that.”
“You scared the crap out of me.”
He retrieved my dagger and handed it back to me. “Learn fast.”
“Where’s Saga?”
“Busy.”
And then we were fighting again.
I’d love to say that I was a natural. That my attitude and my ability to scare bullies made me fierce in the face of battle.
But the truth was, my aim sucked and I was too slow.
I was outgunned and outmaneuvered. The only reason I was still standing was because Aidan and Connor kept me between them. And then it just wasn’t possible anymore. The Hel-Blar were persistent and vicious. Connor had only the one stake, and Aidan was covered in blood and mud. He was the best fighter I’d ever seen, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. And some of the Hel-Blar had stakes. Well, whittled sticks, but it amounted to the same thing. They pelted us like sharp, deadly rain. One caught Aidan in the left arm and he hissed. The blood maddened the Hel-Blar further, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. The battle was nearly too fast for my human eyes to see.
I didn’t need to see the stake to feel it pierce my skin, to feel it bite through flesh and muscle and slide past my ribs.
There was numb shock. I gurgled a sound.
Pain flared like electrical shocks. I fell to my knees. Connor and Aidan whirled to look at me. I closed my hand around the makeshift stake and yanked it out of my chest just as Connor paled and began to shout.
“Christabel, no! Don’t pull it out!”
“I’m okay,” I said, then I fell right over. Throbbing lances of fire burned through me. Blood spurted, soaking through my jacket. I was cold and confused. Connor was fighting to get to me but he was too far away. His lips were moving. He was saying something but I couldn’t hear him. Why couldn’t I hear him?
Aidan reached me first. “Stake hit an artery,” he said grimly. “She’s losing too much blood, too fast.” He pushed his sleeves up as Connor dispatched another Hel-Blar. There were two more between us. He kept fighting.
“Turn her!” he yelled, and I could finally hear him, though my vision was graying. “Turn her now!”
Aidan used the tips of his fangs to slice through the skin of his inner wrist. Blood trickled, the color of raspberries. He pressed the wound against my mouth.
“Drink.”
I struggled, gagging.
“Drink or die, Christabel.”
My mouth was open because I was screaming. Blood slid down my throat, coppery and thick. I gagged again but I was too weak to do anything but swallow. My eyelids closed as Connor finally reached us, covered in ash and blood. He plucked me away from Aidan, cradling me against his chest. He was cold. Or was I cold?
“Go,” Aidan said. “Run. I’ll keep the rest of the Hel-Blar off your trail. You have to get her back to your farm. She needs blood and it’s not safe here.” He made a sound, as if he were throwing a weapon. I didn’t have the strength to open my eyes to see. I didn’t even have the strength to care if there were a hundred Hel-Blar. “She’s my bloodkin,” he added. “And I’ll claim her as my daughter.
“Now, run!”