“Oh, you have got to be kidding me.” I hopped to my feet as quickly as I could, focusing on Handless who hadn’t moved at all. She cocked her head to the side, watching me from her one-armed crouch. I didn’t dare take my eyes off her, but… Where did you go, Fuzzy? I strained to hear any trace of the Yeti’s passing, but between my ears and the oppressive demon stillness that had fallen over the area, there was nothing.
The guttural chuckle echoed out of the darkness, but I couldn’t get a bead on the location. “Come find me.”
“I did not sign on to play hide-and-seek!” My own voice bounced back at me mockingly. Hide-and-seek! Hide-and-seek! It sounded odd to my abused eardrums, like the inside of a large glass jar.
It was eerily familiar, but I couldn’t place just why. Not with more important things on my mind, like whether or not I was going to see the dawn with my internal organs inside me, or beside me.
To my left, up the mountain, a tree groaned and crashed down. I could see the new gap in the pine canopy twenty or so yards ahead of me. The newly revealed stars were so bright tonight, so far from the city lights.
I had two choices. I could stand here, and assume that eventually, the Yeti would get tired of his games and circle back around to me. Or, I could chase after him, which was exactly what he wanted. He wanted to play with me. I knew that about him, because I’d seen him do it before. It was just something he did, like being white and hairy or having really bad Hell-breath. Like that old story about the frog and the scorpion, it was simply his nature.
Handless shifted her weight, inching forward a few steps when I continued to just stand there. “That how it’s gonna be? I either chase him, or you come for me?” She inched again and I leveled my sword at her. “Bad. Sit. Stay.” I could take her. I was pretty sure of that. But I also knew that the second I committed to that fight, the Yeti was going to come back and dissect me.
And let’s face it, pursuing him was my nature. Pretty sure he knew that about me, too. I gave Handless a small salute, and deliberately turned my back on her. Every step I took, I kept expecting to feel her slight weight land on my back, her blunt teeth tear into my neck. But she never moved. The last time I glanced back at her, she was still sitting on the far side of the stream, just watching me.
Running uphill is bad, m’kay? I wasn’t that stupid. I set out at a determined walk, taking my sweet time in skirting around brushy turns or fallen limbs. Running pell-mell through the dark woods was only gonna earn me a broken leg, or worse. The Yeti couldn’t have this little brawl alone, so he could by God wait until I got there.
I found the downed tree easy enough, the soil still damp around its old roots. It looked like it had been ripped out of the ground and tossed a few yards, even. Showing off? Trying to intimidate me? Or just happy to cause as much destruction as possible?
There was a tuft of white fur stuck to a branch, and even as I reached to pluck it off, it dissolved into a puff of black mist. I jerked my hand back and rubbed my fingers on my shirt, just in case I’d gotten any of the blight on me.
The Yeti hadn’t been gone that long, then. He’d waited here, to see if I was coming. I could picture him in my mind, lounging here, dragging his head along the murdered tree trunk. Sure enough, my fingers found gouges in the bark, left by the massive curved horns.
Any other time, I’m sure Pikes Peak is beautiful. But I have to say that, in the dark of night, in the freezing cold, I wasn’t that enamored of it. I passed my katana from hand to hand, flexing my fingers to keep them limber.
The roar came from my right, and I flinched into a defensive stance before I realized it had to be yards and yards away. Even with my less than functional ears, I could tell that much. The sound bounced up the mountain and back down, making it sound like a whole herd of mini-Yetis joining the chorus. I had to wonder what the sleepy denizens down below thought of this strange noise on their mountain.
Something landed in my hair and I reflexively ducked again, swiping with my free hand to discover only pine needles. Glancing up, I found Handless above me, balanced on a thin branch like a half-shattered gargoyle. “How did you even get up there?” Her mouth opened like she might speak, but only air came out, a warning hiss. “Yeah, yeah, I’m moving.” Play the Yeti’s game, I got the message. I set out again, pretty sure that having a chat with a zombie said some bad things about my sanity.
Three more times, we zigzagged our way up Pikes Peak. Each time, he lured me on with a downed tree, a roar, or even just the flash of white fur in the darkness. And each time, Handless was there, my zombie shadow reminding me what would happen if I hesitated.
As we climbed upward, and my lungs started burning with every breath, I realized exactly what he was up to. Lowlander that I was, the very altitude was going to work against me. The higher we went, the colder it got, and the thinner the air became. I stopped for longer and longer between each leg, concentrating on my breathing. I couldn’t afford to get winded, or lightheaded. I also couldn’t afford to stop too long, lest Handless get antsy.
Luckily for me, the Yeti suffered from extreme predictability. Each jaunt was almost the same distance, crisscrossing back and forth up the mountain at almost the exact same angle every time. It wasn’t hard to guess where I’d find him next, and I used the last two legs to prove myself right.
The tree line was going to end soon, leaving me on the bare mountain face. The next time the Yeti laid his little bread crumbs out, I got my bearings and chose a path straight up the mountain, fixing my mind on that point. That’s where I’d meet him coming.
The Yeti’s pet dropped from a tree only a few yards from me as if she too knew that she was going to run out of branches soon. “You gonna narc on me?” Her head swiveled almost a full one eighty as she tilted it, almost like she was pondering my words. “ Shh. Don’t tell.” Her head swiveled the other way. Those glowing dark eyes watched me, but I got no sense of the Yeti behind them like I had before. He wasn’t watching me, at least not through her.
After a moment, her face stretched, the tendons drawing her lips back from her teeth in a gruesome snarl. It took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t a snarl at all. She was smiling. Smiling at me. Oh that was just… ew.
“Good girl. Stay.” I had to hope she wasn’t following me as I broke into a run, rushing through the trees to lay an ambush for my worst nightmare.
The wind was wicked, once I got out of the trees, whipping my hair around my face hard enough to sting, and the terrain was treacherously rocky. There had obviously been a rockslide along this face sometime in the near past, and jagged chunks of pink granite stuck out of the ground like some giant kid’s discarded building blocks.
I found a relatively flat place, and was just planting my feet when the great horned head broke through the brush at the edge of the trees. There was a brief moment of surprise, when his ears perked up and he got that comical tilt of the head like puzzled dogs do. It was almost cute. Then the large muzzle rippled into a low growl, and he prowled onto the bare rocks, nimbly clambering from one heap to another. His claws clicked on the hard granite. “Tricky, tricky… Ready to die, then?”
“I’m always ready to die.” The way of bushido is death. I had no problem with that, so long as I could take this ugly mother with me. I was done with him hurting people I cared about. Hell, I was done with him hurting people I’d never heard of before.
“Wish granted.” He sunk his claws into the boulder he was perched on and launched himself off it like a furry freight train.
It was different from the first time. I was more experienced, in better shape, more practiced. He was bigger, stronger. I had a slight speed advantage over him, and that was all that kept me one hair ahead of his swipes, dodging and parrying as best I could. Something that big should not be that fast. It simply isn’t fair. I fully intended to file a grievance with the union, if we ever started one.
I briefly wondered where Handless was, but she was wiped from my mind in the face of the ons
laught that was the Yeti. I couldn’t even get a chance to go on the offensive with him. Every shred of my energy was poured into keeping those wicked claws away, into keeping those horns from connecting with my unprotected skull. The Yeti sprang from rock to rock, and I was forced to keep turning to face him, not giving any ground, true, but not gaining either. There was no way I could try to clamber after him and fight at the same time. He could dance around me all night, and all I was going to do was get tired.
Predictability. It led a demon to target a distraught boy, knowing that I’d come to his rescue. It almost got my friends killed. Might still, if things at the hospital were going poorly. It had me tracking a demon through unfamiliar territory, and it helped me catch up to the Yeti here at the end. It was the one thing I couldn’t afford, anymore.
Being that you are samurai, be proud of your valor and prowess and prepare yourself to die with frenzy. Advice I could live by. Or die by, really.
The next time the Yeti landed, claws chipping shards away from the pink boulders, I was already on the move. I saw the demon’s eyes widen as I charged him head on, roaring my own battle cry as I came.
It almost worked.
The first two slashes opened up blight-gushing cuts across one furry forearm and the thigh below it. The dark essence poured out, flowing down the jagged rocks like a deadly, life-sucking stream. It found a low spot and started to pool. The portal would form there, the doorway sucking the Yeti back to Hell.
The demon bellowed in pain, and I ducked under his arm to take a swipe at a hamstring, feeling my blade slide through thick fur into the solid muscle beneath. I let my momentum carry me off the rock, arms pinwheeling for balance as I landed on the next one below. A rank breeze ruffled my hair, the Yeti’s backhanded swipe just missing my head as I dropped out of his reach.
Like I said, it almost worked. Before I could get my balance on my new perch, before I could turn around, I was bludgeoned across the back hard enough to send me hurtling through the air and into the rocks below. I went rolling down the jagged boulders, bruising and scraping every single part of me, and into the trees where the pine needles gouged at the already bloody places. Just as I came to a stop, I heard a distinctly metallic snap, and my sword hand came up empty.
Oh fuck.
I found the blade, easy enough. It was pinned beneath my body, and only kind fate had kept me from impaling myself on it. But it was snapped off neatly, just where the guard should have been, and the hilt was long gone, wedged somewhere in the rocks above me. If the Yeti didn’t kill me, Marty was going to.
I scrambled to my feet, bare blade in my hands because hey, it was all I had. Holding it loosely was no problem, but the second I tightened my grip to strike, I was going to fillet my own fingers. Mentally, I did a quick check, cataloguing my other injuries from my tumble down the hill.
My back and both hips were bruised all to hell, I could tell that much. Something warm and wet was trickling down my left shoulder. I was scraped from knuckle to elbow on both arms and the back of my head throbbed dully. All in all, it could have been worse.
And where was my overly hirsute dance partner?
It was dark under the overhanging branches. I didn’t realize how much I’d relied on the starlight above until it was taken from me. I blinked furiously, trying to will my eyes to adjust to the pitch blackness. I was blind here, cut off from sensation.
It also didn’t escape my notice that I was in the trees again. Handless’s turf. If she was going to get involved in this debacle, now would be the time. I could only hope I’d get some kind of warning before she pounced.
Nothing useful reached my ears. In fact, all sound seemed to be drowned out by my own panting breath, vibrating oddly in my damaged ears. Like a glass jar. Like a cave.
It occurred to me, in a flash of goose bumps and stomach cramps, that I’d been here before. Almost every night for the last four years, I had been in this place, surrounded by darkness and cold. My breath frosting the air, the sound distorted in my ears. The Yeti, hunting me.
“I know you’re there.” I couldn’t stop myself from saying it. I always said it. It was always answered with a soft growl to my left, just out of my range of vision.
I turned, because I had to. Because in the dream, I always turned toward the sounds. God, I wanted to tell Mira about this. I wanted to ask what she thought of my dreams becoming reality, ’cause honestly it was freaking me out. “Come on… come get me,” I whispered, my words echoing in the bell jar that was my skull.
A sound behind me, the faintest scrape of fur on stone. And I turned, because I knew I had to. Nothing faced me but the bare ghosts of pine trees, a lighter shade of gray in the black.
This was the moment, in every nightmare I’d had in the last four years. The moment when the sound stayed in front of me, but the attack came from behind. Always from behind, and I was always motionless, spellbound, paralyzed.
There came the faintest of clicking sounds from the darkness in front of me. The Yeti’s talons… Or Handless’s long toenails? I tasted the blood in my mouth, where I’d bitten my tongue.
This isn’t a dream, dammit! “And I’ll move if I fucking want to.”
I reversed my grip on my broken sword and stabbed backward along my own rib cage, the blade slicing neatly through the first layer of my T-shirts. The point hit something solid, and suddenly the world lurched into motion again, like a film stuttering back to life. I never looked back. The blade bit into my palms as I slammed it home, then yanked hard to the left. I dropped to one knee, feeling the swipe that was meant for my throat pass harmlessly over my head, and with a heave, I dragged the naked metal to the side and out, ripping through the white-furred abdomen.
Blight poured out in place of glistening intestines. A river of black nothingness, it ran down the white-furred legs, visibly seeking to rejoin the part of itself that had already been shed. Still on my knees, the next two slashes opened up each massive thigh, severing what would be the femoral arteries in anything actually living. The blackness gushed out with force, washing over my hands, instantly numbing the searing pain I’d caused myself.
The Yeti roared but there was panic in that guttural voice. His claws flailed in the air, trying to connect with anything at all, but in his agony, they were blind strikes and came nowhere near me.
The wickedly curved horns went first, cracking and splintering into tiny shards, which in turn vanished into motes of blight, flowing against gravity and up the hill toward the waiting dark pool. Then the ears, crisping like they’d been charred in a fire, curling in on themselves. The bellow turned into a strangled gurgle, and only a quick roll saved me from being crushed as the Yeti pitched forward, his legs being eaten from the belly wound outward.
He writhed in the pine needles, hands grasping at the fleeing essence until his fingers melted away and he could only twitch. His glowing red eyes found mine, and what was left of his muzzle wrinkled in a silent snarl.
“Remember this,” I told him. “Even on my knees, I killed you.”
The last things to go were the wicked fangs, bared in a defiant snarl to the bitter end. The stream of blight wafted its way up into the rocks, and I could smell the ozone. If I looked, there would be a pool of liquid demon up there, like black mercury in its pristine reflection. Even at that distance, I could hear the screaming, a sound just beyond my range of hearing, but something that I could feel in the back of my teeth. The unearthly call of Hell itself.
Just as suddenly, it was gone. It took the Yeti with it.
It did not, however, take his little pet. The brush to my right rustled and parted around a bald, filthy head. Handless hobbled her way into the open, settling on her haunches only a few yards from me. If I wanted, I could have reached out and touched her.
Even unarmed as she was-seriously, that joke never gets old-I wasn’t sure I could take her in the condition I was in. I rose to a half crouch, blade cupped gingerly in my flayed hands. “You let him die. You could have
stopped me.”
She didn’t move. For long moments we stared at each other across the six feet of intervening space. Then her cheeks stretched again into the mockery of a smile. The unearthly gleam of her black eyes betrayed how much hate she had for me, for all the living, but I understood. The only thing she hated more than me was him. She was free now. Free to rip my throat out, eat my flesh, feed. But I think in the end, she wasn’t sure she could take me either.
She opened her mouth, and a man’s voice came out. “Well, this is quite a pickle we find ourselves in, isn’t it?”
I couldn’t help but chuckle a little, bleakly. “Yeah, you could say that.”
It was a woman’s voice next, someone elderly perhaps. “I just don’t know what I’ll do without him. He always took care of everything.”
She was doing it on purpose, somehow. Those echoes, those memories of long dead conversations, she was calling them up, using them to speak for her. “You go far, far away, where you can’t hurt anyone.”
A man’s voice again. “A growin’ boy’s gotta eat!”
I forced myself all the way to my feet. “If you hurt anyone else, I will come for you. I will end you. You know that.”
The next voice was John Wayne’s, or a really good impression thereof. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” Finally, she bared her rotting teeth at me in one last voiceless snarl, and started fading back into the trees. Her parting shot, though, chilled me to the bone. A deep gravelly voice emerged from the darkness. “You are to beink careful.”
Ivan’s voice. I’d know it, and his butchered English, anywhere. Somewhere, sometime, Handless had been close enough to Ivan to hear him speak.
About five minutes later, a bird chirped nearby, proving that she was truly gone.
I know I sat there for at least forty-five minutes, perched on the jagged pink boulders until my legs stopped shaking and my breath didn’t burn in my lungs anymore. Idly, I peeled the flaking black skin off my arm, the demon tattoo erased with the contract I’d fulfilled. The sky was growing light in the east, false dawn heralding the passing of another night.
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