Chapter Twenty-Six

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I was not prepared for what came next.

In some ways, I had been overconfident, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that my opinion of myself had been lower than was warranted. It was true that I had been around violence a lot of times. It was true that there were periods of my life where it felt normal. It was even true that some of those fights had escalated far enough that I’d seen people getting killed.

But what I was discovering now was that those had been, well, fights. Many had been pretty much just brawls between vanilla humans. Some had involved other creatures—werewolves a few times, Audgrim and once another dvergr, mages—but they were still relatively small in scale. They had been solidly something you would call a fight.

What I discovered now was that this had not remotely prepared me for what I had to imagine counted as a small battle, or at the very least a skirmish.

The wolves in fur had already peeled off to the sides, using their much greater mobility to flank the group planning to ambush us. It was Jack in the lead now, with Richard on one side and Melissa on the other. I didn’t love that, but I had to admit the reasoning was sound. The mages were scary people, but they didn’t look scary to a human. Jack looked like a random homeless guy. Richard looked like someone really should have known better than to let him out of the psych ward, but not in a way that was threatening. Melissa was a very ordinary-looking girl as well, and showed zero signs of worry about the upcoming ambush.

It was, I thought absently, convenient. When you want to avoid giving away the fact that you know about an ambush, not having the capacity for a normal fear response is less bug than feature.

They looked harmless. We were counting on that to keep the mercenaries from responding quickly enough. They would want to catch someone more valuable in the ambush zone before they lost the advantage of surprise. It worked, too; they were a fair ways forward, and the rest of us had started moving, before anything happened.

And then things started happening very, very quickly.

The first few seconds of the ambush were a chaotic, confusing mess. The first sign I had that anything was happening was the sound of gunfire, a quick chattering burst that was so loud it hurt even through the earplugs I’d brought. I knew enough to be worried about that; it suggested both automatic weapons and the discipline to use them in careful, aimed ways rather than spray-and-pray fire. Both suggested these mercenaries were serious, competent fighters.

At least one bullet glanced off of Audgrim’s armor as he was moving up. Another burst, I was pretty sure, hit Jack and just…stopped. His coat looked like nothing much, but that fabric had to have been reinforced with magic so heavily that it was better armor than what Audgrim was wearing.

Jack was turning towards a stand of trees to the right. For no other reason than that, as the group moved forward and carried me along, I focused towards the left side of the path. I saw a flood of constructs bursting out of the trees there, at least ten of the things. They were the size of a human, and roughly the same shape, but that was where the resemblance stopped. Their bodies were made of some blocky grey material I didn’t recognize, their heads existed only to hold wide mouths full of shark-like teeth, and their arms ended in large claws. They were created for violence, and it showed; they couldn’t do anything else with that body plan.

They were surging forward. I had grabbed the shotgun already without really noticing it. Saori was next to me, and she’d gone for the wakizashi rather than the gun, perhaps thinking the close range made that the smarter choice. She was laughing, and it sounded like golden flame and madness. There was someone screaming out in the trees, where the werewolves were running amok.

The constructs reached us in a wave, chaotic and clumsy. Saori moved out into their midst, and while she was also chaotic, she was anything but clumsy. The kitsune was quicker and more agile than any human I’d ever seen, and she was dancing in the middle of the fight. I had no other description. Her footwork made the act a dance, and her laughter made it a celebration. She slipped between the claws of the constructs, letting their attacks miss by a hair while she retaliated with quick, light slashes.

One of the constructs was in front of me now. My aim was better than I’d expected, and the shotgun was not a terribly light firearm. The shot mostly all hit the construct, and there was enough momentum to knock it back. But not, I realized, to do much else. Wounds that would kill a human meant nothing to the constructs. They didn’t bleed; they didn’t, couldn’t, care. And so almost as soon as it hit the ground, that construct was back up.

Saori had the right idea. She was able to take limbs off with two or three quick slashes, and once removed from the main body, they were inanimate. I was snarling as I dropped the shotgun, letting it fall back to my chest, reached for a knife. I saw fur on my hand as I did, saw sparks of emerald electricity within it. Another burst of gunfire was almost deafening, but I had no idea where it was aimed; someone could have shot me and I wouldn’t have even known until I was on the ground bleeding. Behind me, an enormously loud crashing noise drowned it out entirely, deafening me.

The construct was back up and coming at me. It might have been a different one; it was hard to tell. I was not nearly as graceful or as skilled as Saori, but they were clumsy and had no real intellect to speak of. I managed to duck under its claws, inside its reach, and the knife I’d grabbed was one of my largest, a heavy steel Bowie knife that was more than up to the task.

I stabbed the construct harder than I’d quite meant to, frantic in the moment. The knife went clear through its torso. Though that might have just been the nature of the thing I was stabbing; they seemed to have very little internal structure. There were no bones that I could tell, no differentiated tissue at all, just a solid mass of something a little softer than wood. I stepped forward and pushed, lifting it off the ground and slashing it open as I tossed it back. It didn’t stand back up. Apparently cutting it open from the midpoint to the edge of its torso was enough damage to disrupt the enchantment on it.

I didn’t see any more constructs still up. There was no more gunfire, either. The skirmish had only lasted a handful of seconds. I was breathing hard, more from reaction than exertion, and my hearing was still shot. I took a moment to catch my breath, looking around at the aftermath.

It was hard to tell how many constructs we’d just put down. Most of them were in pieces, which made it hard to count. I thought close to twenty. And there were at least a few humans dead as well. Cassie was jogging out of the copse of trees I’d been facing, and there was a lot of blood on her fur, most concentrated on her muzzle and face. And in the other direction, it was…I wasn’t sure what had happened. But there was a whole stand of trees that had been crushed to the ground, their trunks splintered, and I could see a whole lot of shimmering human magic in the air.

I didn’t know the exact mechanism involved. But I was pretty sure Jack had brought down that entire cluster of trees on top of someone and I highly doubted they were lucky enough to survive the experience. I gulped a little, and reminded myself not to piss him off.

On the whole, I thought, we’d done fairly well in that exchange. One of the wolves was limping, and Melissa appeared to have taken a glancing hit from one of the claws, barely enough to draw blood. I could see the traces of anxiety in her posture now, but she was still grinning, so the fear hadn’t reached the kind of extreme state that she could actually recognize. Nobody else seemed to have been injured at all.

We started moving again almost immediately. The skirmish had only even delayed us by a few moments. No one seemed terribly stressed. Hell, I was pretty sure that Cassie, Richard, and Saori were all more relaxed than they had been before.

The latter dropped back to walk next to me as we got moving. “Hey there,” the kitsune said, quietly so as not to get in the way of hearing anything coming. My hearing was starting to recover, enough at least to understand her, and I could hear the grin in her voice. “You did pretty good there.”

I snorted. “I took one construct out. You killed, what, eight of them?”

“Six,” she corrected. “Andrew got the other four on that side. But I’m a violent lunatic, remember? Not the best benchmark. You stayed calm, you responded in an effective way, and you contributed to the fight. I’d say you did pretty good.”

I was still dubious about that. My performance had been enough that I was an asset rather than a liability, but when I compared it to what our heavy hitters were capable of, it was unimpressive at best. Saori had taken down half a dozen of the constructs, Cassie seemed to have killed at least one person in just a few seconds, and Jack was a force of nature. Hell, even Richard looked to have incinerated at least four or five constructs with tight, precise bursts of flame. Next to that, it was hard to see why I was even here.

But it wasn’t worth arguing, and we needed to be quiet. So I just forced a smile, and said, “Thanks. I’ll try to keep up better next time.”

Saori laughed, but she wasn’t done. “You doing alright? Lot of noise and movement back there. Don’t want you getting overloaded.”

“It’s fine,” I said, somewhat stiffly. And then, because she seemed to be sincerely concerned, I elaborated a bit. “Violence doesn’t seem to affect me that way. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t.”

That was true. I didn’t even feel overstimulated after this skirmish. Dissociated, and I definitely had some adrenaline going still, but there was none of the sick, overwhelmed feeling of sensory overload. I’d been in fights under worse circumstances, and it had never been a problem, never pushed me towards a seizure. If anything, it might have done the opposite; there had been one brawl in a club with seriously unfortunate taste in lighting, and I’d come out of it less sick than I started.

I didn’t know the rules, but I could track patterns. I wasn’t sure I liked the implications of this one. Maybe Saori could pick up on that, because she nodded, and she didn’t ask further. She stuck close to me, though, and that was a comfort of sorts.

Over the next half-hour or so, there were two more skirmishes. Both were as quick and efficient as the first. The second encounter barely even counted; we spotted them well in advance, and they only had ten constructs total. A small group consisting of Saori, Capinera, a few of the werewolves, and Rebecca swept through them in a preemptive strike, and the rest of us never even got involved. Most of the constructs were on the ground in pieces, either neatly severed by Saori’s wakizashi or ragged where they were ripped apart by the wolves. There were two humans with that group, and both were dead now, very dead. The first guy appeared to have taken a rapier through the heart without having had enough time to get a shot off. The latter…well, Cassie had more blood on her, and there was a lot more on the ground, most of it frozen into creepy red ice on the grass. But the body was nowhere to be found.

I quietly made a note not to piss off either Capinera or Rebecca, either. The first still seemed sad and quietly resolute, but she hadn’t hesitated a moment before killing that guy, and it only took her a moment. The latter felt like snow and death and hunger, and while I didn’t know what she was or what she’d done, I was impressed by it regardless. She went back to the rear guard after that, and I saw her occasionally, a pale, cold shadow drifting through the trees. I felt both more and less safe, knowing she was out there, knowing what she could do.

That was, I thought, a sentiment I had about too many of the people around me right now. I’d known these were dangerous people, sure. But it’s one thing to know that, and another thing to see it.

The third skirmish was a little messier, but not a lot. They had more constructs this time, a lot more, and we couldn’t count on the mobile attackers to get through that many before they could retaliate. So it was a frontal assault, and it was messy. I ended up in the front line again, but this time I had at least slightly more idea what to expect, and I managed it better. I didn’t bother trying to shoot the constructs, just slammed into them with a knife and more pent-up aggression than I’d realized I was carrying.

I ended up fighting with Andrew on one side of me and Saori on the other, and I was at this point every bit as savage as either of them. I truly would not have guessed that I had this much aggression and frustration built up. Now that I was in a position where I could express it, though, it was hard to deny. It felt good to have a problem that I could resolve so simply, and in my own way I was reveling in it as much as Saori was.

The first construct that came at me that time was so slow, so clumsy. Even by human standards it was clumsy, and there was very little about me that was human in that moment. I slipped to the side around its claws, pulled it off balance with one hand, and then hit it with the other. It was not really very different from how I’d taken down the human before, the one who attacked me with a cheap knife on the street near my house.

Except this time I had a knife in my own hand, and no reason to hold back. The strike was very smooth, with good form and momentum. I stabbed it hard around where the stomach would be on a human, lifting it a few inches from the ground and tossing it back into two others. This time I followed up on the strike, moving up to attack the two that I’d just knocked off balance. It felt like I had all the time in the world as I stepped around one of them and slashed at its neck, and that slash literally decapitated it, the knife sticking into its opposite shoulder afterwards. Decapitation seemed to be enough to destroy them.

The angle was bad, though, and as it fell I had no leverage; its weight dragged the knife out of my hand. I didn’t care. I stepped over it as it was still falling, as the third construct was just starting to get its balance back, and I lunged at that one too. I was unarmed, but I was so much more than human, and it was so much less. I got inside its effective reach before it could bring its claws to bear, pressed up tight against it.

I had other knives, but in the heat of the moment, I didn’t reach for any of them. I just lunged forward and bit at the construct’s throat. My teeth were not as sharp as a werewolf’s, perhaps, and my jaws were not as strong, did not open as wide. But I was a beast of the storm in that moment, and they were sharp enough and strong enough to do the job. I ripped its throat out and rode it down to the ground, landing in a tangled pile of limbs. I kept tearing at its throat until it stopped moving. It didn’t take long.

The skirmish was over by the time I stood back up. There had been thirty or so constructs, and I had to wonder how the mages could afford so many, how they’d transported them all here. Constructs were a favorite tool of the supernatural world because they were cheap and easy, sure, and these seemed particularly fragile, cheaply made. But even cheap constructs added up. We’d taken down over fifty of the things now. I could hear howling in the woods around us, as well, and from the set of Cassie’s ears I knew what it meant. The wolves and the gunmen who were pacing us had found another group as well, and they had dealt with it.

So many. A hundred constructs, a dozen mercenaries at least. Everything about this screamed that it was a scale well beyond my ability to fully understand, that the mages responsible had serious resources to throw at this operation. It felt surreal, so wildly out of proportion to the small, innocuous attacks that they’d opened with.

Saori walked up to me while I was standing back up and collecting my knife. She was laughing, and she sounded delighted, eager. “Seriously, you’re hot when you’re messy,” she told me, and I got the distinct impression that if she were not wearing a helmet the kitsune would be kissing me to feel my teeth with her tongue.

Should I feel bad about what I’d just done? I didn’t really think so. These constructs were nothing like people, not even anything like animals. They had no identity, no mind at all. There was no blood, just a taste like wet cardboard in my mouth. It would be like getting upset about killing tofu. I’d literally encountered computer programs I would feel more guilt about terminating than these things, and they weren’t even particularly advanced programs.

And besides, Saori had been shooting. I could smell it on her, the residue of the gunpowder. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that she hadn’t been shooting the constructs, and the mercenaries behind them had gone down very quickly this time. The kitsune was hardly in a position to judge, even if this were something to feel guilt over.

And so I just grinned at her, with bits of grey construct-material stuck in my teeth. “Told you I’d do better the next time,” I said.

“You did,” she agreed, laughing. “And you did.”

The grin faded. We kept moving. There was a lot of forest still to go.

---

It was inevitable that the run of good luck we’d had would break. I was already waiting for it. We’d gotten three good fights in a row. I was aware that the people around me were dangerous, and aware as well that the people and constructs we were fighting were essentially just cannon fodder. It wasn’t meaningful, really, that we’d been winning so far.

Still, three good fights in a row was three more than my life had taught me to expect, and I was already waiting for things to go wrong. Some of the others were, too; I could see the tense anticipation in Andrew’s spine, smell a sort of cold anxiety hanging around Jack, feel calm, quiet dread in Audgrim’s aura. Cassie and Saori were still very obviously reveling in the violence, and Capinera’s sad, detached calm hadn’t budged. Many of us, though, were waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And yet when it did we were still caught completely off guard. Maybe the last few skirmishes had been so easy that we’d gotten complacent. Maybe it was that we were excited. The wolves were at this point sure that we were not only on the right trail, but also just a short ways away from our targets, the scent quite fresh now. Or hell, maybe it was just that this was a much more clever ploy, and we weren’t expecting cleverness from these people.

Regardless, we didn’t see it coming. The first warning any of us had was when constructs started to burst out of the ground under our feet. They must have dug themselves in and then waited for us to walk over them, perfectly patient. It wasn’t like they needed to breathe, and while they were mindless, they could follow commands.

There were only around fifteen of them, but this time they were the ones who had the advantage of surprise and position. People were shouting, stumbling and falling. Constructs were reaching up to drag them down to the waiting claws and teeth below. Here, the lack of coordination between us was much more telling. There was no organized response, no immediate and disciplined adjustment to the situation. It was just chaos.

I managed to keep my feet, as did a few others. Saori was too graceful to be tripped so easily, the wolves had four feet, and while Andrew did go down, that didn’t work out so great for the constructs who pulled him down to the ground. In that tight melee, the werewolf’s sheer strength was terrifying, and he wasted no time at all before starting to dismember the constructs under him.

But Audgrim, Melissa, the mages, and one of the werewolves were down and struggling to get back up. Capinera was able to recover more quickly, but she’d lost the rapier. It was chaos. I danced away from the nearest construct before it could rip my legs open, but I didn’t have a good angle to counterattack. I kicked one of them away hard enough to wreck its arm, and put a knife into another, but it was a chaotic mess and I couldn’t do much.

And right about then was when the mercenaries, who must have been waiting for this, opened fire on us. I had to admit I was somewhat impressed; they’d somehow managed to avoid detection by the wolves, and that was hard as hell to do. Some small part of me found the time to respect them for that.

The rest of me was already dropping to the ground, intentionally. Standing up made me a really attractive target right about now, and I was pretty sure my reinforced leather jacket would not be up to stopping rifle rounds. So I went down in a violent, frenetic whirl. There were maybe five to seven constructs still active. In my first ten seconds on the ground, I lost two knives, at least one of which was broken beyond repair; sprained my left wrist; and disabled three constructs. I thought that was pretty good, all things considered.

Bullets were still flying, though. Saori was returning fire, and I was pretty sure I’d heard a man scream, so she was doing it fairly well. I could smell a lot of blood, and burning flesh. I realized I was at the edge of the melee, and pushed myself to my feet again, looking around. I was disoriented, struggling to keep up with what was going on. Abruptly, I saw one of the gunmen, a human who looked to be about thirty and very serious. He wasn’t far from me at all. He saw me at the same time, and started to bring his rifle around to shoot me.

I lunged for him. He was disciplined, but I was terrifying, a bloody, nightmarish blend of wolf and woman with lightning dancing in my fur. He flinched, just the tiniest bit, before he got the shot off.

I was already falling to the side by then, and between that and the flinch, he missed. Not by enough for comfort, but he missed. And my feint had achieved what I wanted it to: For just a moment, all of his attention had been focused on me.

Capinera stepped up behind him in that moment and shoved him. He stumbled forward, off balance, and a hand reached up from the ground to grab his wrist. After a moment, I recognized it as Melissa’s, and I had just enough time to both feel protective fury welling up inside me, and feel kinda sorry for him.

Melissa was still smiling, but it didn’t look happy now. This had finally gotten through to her, though I suspected she still wouldn’t be able to tell whether she was frightened, angry, or both. And she wasn’t carrying a weapon, but she didn’t really need one, either.

Melissa was a sweet girl. I considered her a dear friend, and I both trusted and cared about her deeply. But I knew what she was capable of. The venom in her blood was more diluted than the storm in mine, but that fact was a little deceptive. Because Serket was a much, much stronger source than a raiju, and even dilute, that heritage was enough to be kind of terrifying. Melissa could be very scary when she wanted to. Or, on occasion, even when she didn’t.

As she grabbed his wrist, I felt a sudden surge of power, a magic that burned like venom on my fingertips and tasted like taking a bite out of a habanero, old and harsh and strong. And the man’s skin under her fingers started to blister and peel. He tried to straighten up again, but his legs were already starting to lose muscle control, and he fell. Within just a few seconds, he was largely paralyzed aside from occasional convulsions.

I wasn’t entirely sure what Melissa did to people. The convulsions and paralysis had a strong resemblance to deathstalker venom, which made sense for the scion of a scorpion goddess. But the local blistering didn’t resemble scorpion venom much at all, and I was quite sure this wasn’t actually mediated by a toxin; it was closer to the magically-induced necrosis used by one of the mages we were here hunting. I’d also only seen her do this trick twice before, so it wasn’t as though I’d studied the effects.

But I was pretty sure that guy wasn’t going to be getting back up.

The fight seemed to be over now. There were a couple constructs still moving, but they’d all lost multiple limbs, and Andrew was going around finishing them off. He finished off the paralyzed man as well, which I was grateful for. Slowly suffocating while paralyzed was an awful way to die. I stood up again and looked around, taking stock and figuring out what had happened.

It looked like there had been four humans involved, all of them mercenaries. We still hadn’t seen any mages, which troubled me. Of those four, one went down when Melissa grabbed him, and a second looked to have caught a couple of rounds from Saori’s rifle in the face. The last two…were really only visible as charred skeletons, lying in the middle of a patch of smoldering vegetation. Richard had blasted them pretty hard, and was now sitting at the edge of the smouldering area talking to the flames. In a drier forest, we’d have to worry about the fire spreading, but I wasn’t too concerned here; it would be easy enough to smother it before it could get out of control, once we talked Richard into letting us.

The victory this time hadn’t been without cost, though. Richard himself had taken a heavy slash to the shoulder, and while he wasn’t dead, he was definitely bleeding. One of the wolves had taken two rounds to the torso, and they weren’t healing right. Charged silver ammunition, I was pretty sure, which meant they weren’t getting better any time soon. They might live, werewolves were pretty tough, but they were done for today. Another wolf wasn’t as lucky; she’d gotten tagged in the throat at least once with silver, and she was already dead. Melissa had fallen badly and broken her wrist, and there was a long, nasty laceration on her thigh from one of the constructs.

I went and sat next to her while people were regrouping. “Heya, honeybee,” I said gently. “Are you alright?”

Obviously, the answer was no, given that she was seriously injured. But that wasn’t the question I was asking, and Melissa knew that. She considered for a few moments, and then, in a rather hesitant tone, said, “I’m not sure. I think probably not. But not quite sure. I feel a bit blurry.”

I nodded. It was to be expected. This was a very stressful situation for her, and she’d probably been having rolling flashbacks for the past hour, even before she was injured. Honestly, the fact that she was still in touch with reality enough to have a conversation was a testament to the intense effort she’d made to heal from what happened to her. Eight years ago, shortly after we rescued her from that monster, she wouldn’t have been able to last fifteen minutes under this kind of stress before the flashbacks lapsed into hallucinatory hellscapes.

Still, it meant she was also done for today. Even aside from the wounds, if she was starting to lapse into that state bringing her along would be extremely stupid. When Melissa lost track of what was real, she was a danger to herself and everyone around her. It was just the reality of her situation.

“You did really well back there,” I said, still in that gentle tone. “I’m sorry you had to do that, but you did a really good job of keeping me safe. Thank you.”

She was beaming at that. It was touching to see such overt pride and happiness from her, and also a little sad. Melissa’s emotional displays were so much clearer, and her emotions so much easier for her to actually feel, when she was stressed almost to the breaking point like this. She shouldn’t have to suffer so much for that, shouldn’t have to push herself to the edge to just feel proud of doing something well.

“Your leg looks a little nasty, though,” I continued. “Is it okay if I take a look at it and maybe bandage it for you?”

She hesitated at that. It wasn’t an easy question for her, I knew. And I wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a great medic. I had bandages in my bag, sure, but I was certain there were at least a couple people here who could do a better job. They might be able to set the broken wrist, for example, which I couldn’t. She just couldn’t let them. Melissa’s issues with touch were so extreme that even just letting someone she trusted give her basic medical care was a strain; a stranger was out of the question, especially right now.

“I think so?” she said after a long pause. Then, slightly more firmly, “I think so. It would be a good idea.”

“Thanks. I’m proud of you.” I dug out what few medical supplies I had, and started to look at the cut. It wasn’t a terrible one, all things considered. Nasty, painful, and bloody, but it hadn’t clipped any major vessels and it wasn’t as deep as I’d initially feared. And Melissa was pretty hardy. I was guessing she’d be fine. I still took the time to disinfect it and bandage her up, as gently as I could. Some of the others were discussing how to proceed now, but I tuned it out. We were far outside my area of expertise now, and I knew I had no real idea what to do.

So I did what I could. I patched my friend up as best I could within our respective limitations, and then sat on the grass next to her. After a few moments, Saori came and sat with us, and Capinera was standing not far away. I was guessing neither of them had much relevant expertise, either.

So we waited. I looked at the dead wolf in the grass, and felt an odd kind of detached sadness. I wondered whether I would recognize her human form, whether we’d seen each other before today. I was sure it wasn’t someone I actually knew, but we might have passed each other like ships in the night at some point. She hadn’t reverted to human form upon death, that wasn’t how it worked. Lycanthropy wasn’t a curse that you could break to reveal a human underneath. It was more of a blueprint, an alternative magical signature that overwrote the human one and reshaped the person to suit, and that kind of restructuring couldn’t be reverted. Some of the myths had werewolves returning to their natural form upon death, but that just wasn’t how it worked; this was as much her natural form as the other would be.

I’d never met her. Now I never would. That was just how things were.

I sat in the grass, holding Saori’s hand for comfort, wishing I could offer the same comfort to Melissa on my other side. Wishing that time really did heal all wounds, and that there weren’t some stains too deep to ever really come clean. I watched the sunset paint the sky with bloody gold, and listened to the mournful howling of wolves.

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