The light rain falling on my nose woke me, and I sat up jerkily, my heart racing as though ready to jump out and start punching people. My stomach sloshed, my head pounded, and hallucinations danced on the edges of my eyes. I shut them, the eyes that is, and wondered with dull terror what I had done
For a second I thought the little man roasting meat six feet away from me was another hallucination. I once saw pink mice scampering around my feet for half an hour after a power seizure. Then he looked up at me, his long pointed ears twitching slightly, and smiled a cheerful but carefully close-lipped smile.
“Meat?” he asked.
For a second I thought he was wondering if I was some, and then he held up a burnt portion of some animal. Hunger warred with nausea in my stomach, and for a second I had to fight to keep the bile down. “What is it?”
His eyes scrunched together in amusement. “If you have to ask, you probably don’t want any.
He put his meal back on the fire and watched it somberly, like one of those creepy gargoyles on old churches, the ones that look like they are planning how to get down to the ground without getting completely smashed. I thought about his comment for a second, turning possibilities over in my head, and then checked myself for missing limbs.
Amused, he watched me from the corner of his eye and turned the meat on the spit.
He ended up surprising me by breaking the silence first. “Thank you, by the way,” he said.
“For what?” I asked.
He raised his eyebrows, surprised in turn, and nodded beyond the fire.
You might think it horrible of me, but that was the first time I noticed the bodies. But then again, you haven’t had the last few weeks I’d had. At that point, I had barely enough energy to feel a dull, steady pulse of horror that wasn’t even enough to reawaken the slowly subsiding nausea. Cast in the red glow of his fire, covered in darkened blood and soft drips of new rain, they looked like so many wax figures left over from a slasher movie. A feeling of horror beat in my brain along with the headache and just made me want to cry.
There were at least five of them, men, sprawled in various levels of damage. They were all pale skinned, but tanned, and dressed in rough leathers. Their weapons were good quality (at least as much as I could tell from the week I’d been worrying about these things). Most had died of some kind of slashing wound, but a couple had flesh burns across their faces. I would bet those were mine.
“What exactly did I do?” I asked, just to be sure.
He tested the meat again and then set it aside. “You stumbled upon us. Literally stumbled, I saw you trip as you entered. But when you realized that the sons of dogs were trying to do to me, you got a beautiful look on your face. I swear the goddess walked with you for that second, because you lit up like her blade in the winter sky.” I must have looked confused, because he pointed into the cloudy night. “The ribbon of light, greens and blues that appears in the winter, that’s her blade. The ones closest began burning. While they were distracted, I managed to get out my sword and start gutting the bastards. So, for the distraction, I thank you. Humans call me Niski. I assume that will do for you as well.”
I’d been called a lot of things since starting this unwilling journey. Demon, prophecy and “Hey, you!” were some of the top rankers, but I’d never been a blade of the goddess before. I looked at the bodies again, more carefully this time. All of them, even the two with facial burns, had been slashed across the throat. A couple had their chests snapped open, as though someone had cut through the ribs just to be absolutely sure the heart wasn’t beating. This guy, whoever he was, was certainly good at killing people.
“Niski, are you heading somewhere in particular?”
He swallowed a bit of his meat. “Anywhere but home. You?”
“I’m trying to get to Central City. I have an issue with seizures, as you’ve seen, and I could uses someone as backup when I’m passed out.” As long as you’re not an illusion, I thought. “And you’ve obviously useful in a fight.”
He shrugged off the complement, as one shrugs off facts. Your eyes are blue, your ears are pointed, you can kill five men while they are recovering from an easy distraction.
“I could travel in that direction for a bit,” he said. “And it would be a pleasure to travel beside one who seemed, for a moment, the blade of the goddess
I laughed tiredly. Odd little man, I thought. Odd, creepy little monster. The rain had stopped, the nausea and the headache were almost gone and the horror had fallen away again. In my calmer moments, I worried how easily I got over my disgust and revulsion. I ended up feeling hollow and unnaturally calm, surrounded by so much death.
“Tell me true,” I said, remembering the cracked-open corpses. “What kind of meat are you cooking?”
He took another big bite and swallowed it after barely chewing. Then he grinned at me, flashing every last razor sharp, pearly tooth in his unnaturally wide mouth. “Carrion,” he said.
I should have been shocked or frightened, but it had been a long week, and for the first time since the power seizures started hitting I was amused and almost felt safe. After all, if he had wanted to kill and eat me, it would have made more sense while I was knocked out
“Do you always eat carrion?” I asked
“Well, it’s always dead when I cut it up,” he answered. I nodded, tired again. “That’s good enough for me. If you don’t mind, Niski, I’m going to go back to sleep.”
The power seizures always make me exhausted. You’d think that anything that completely knocks you out for hours (the wizards had told me I was out for an average of two and a half hours after each attack) would let you rest up while you were unconscious, but I dream each time, and with lights, colors and nightmares running through my mind, I can’t rest. The dreams are almost worse than the seizures.
He nodded in reply. “I’ll shout if anything shows up.”
Gremlaur, I thought as I settled back into sleep. He’s a gremlaur, and I should watch myself until those wizard brothers find me again. And even then I knew it was the prophecy talking, because I knew what it meant. But I couldn’t really care that the little, elfin man was very dangerous, and shouldn’t be in my story to begin with. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t belong in this story either. I relaxed and curled up next to the fire before the part of me that is power could work up a proper panic. And as easily as that, consciousness went the way of horror and slipped softly away.
