Harold jumped to his feet, drew his sword, and charged the dragon. His charge was more of a trundle, and the monster watched him with fascination. Harold stabbed his blade into the monster’s foot, and it howled bloody murder. His triumph was cut short when the dragon kicked him, sending him soaring off into the thicket.
The dragon spread its wings and roared. It toppled a tree with a swipe of its tail.
A deathly silence fell across the forest.
Harold pushed his way out of the underbrush. He limped forward, barely able to stand. His right arm was a mess of shattered meat. Coughing, he spat up a wad of blood and teeth.
The dragon’s head danced on its long neck. It extended a hood and made a low rattling warble.
Harold used his good arm to wrench off a heavy tree branch. He raised it above his head and, with a bestial war cry, rushed forward again in his trademark loping manner. The Wild Hunt echoed his savage bellow and launched themselves at the magical beast.
It appeared this wasn’t going to be so easy after all, thought Nigel, as he chopped off the tip of the dragon’s tail with his ax.
In the heat of battle, he still took a moment to thank his gods for their blessings.
Troy and Helen jumped in the Chimera as a nearby dragon smashed and thumped its way through the forest. They didn’t hear the howls of enraged orcs, and if they had heard them, they might easily have mistaken them for the bellows of other ferocious monsters better avoided.
They tore down the dirt road, leaving the temperamental beast behind.
A few miles down the road, Helen thought she saw a motorcycle parked behind a bush. She dismissed it as a figment of her imagination.
The dragon was bigger than the Wild Hunt. Stronger. Faster. Tougher. But it had picked the wrong fight. Civilization had deprived the orcs of their birthright, and while they hadn’t been reluctant victims, they discovered a joy of battle in their very bones. Thousands of years of untapped bloodlust filled their heads with a red haze.
The dragon responded in kind, but it had been ages since it’d tried to eat anything that could put up a decent struggle. At first it thought these little blue, gray, and orange morsels would be easy prey, and it was pleasantly surprised when they weren’t. It enjoyed playing with its food, but the food was supposed to stop fighting eventually.
Yet after several minutes the food still struggled. Though the dragon had swallowed many of the morsels, all had been too stubborn to slide all the way down its throat. Even after it chewed and gnawed on them. The dragon was always forced to spit them back out. The roof of its mouth hurt from all the knives and swords driven deep into its tender flesh. And its uvula was a bruised, purple punching bag.
The orcs climbed atop its back and wings as they stabbed and poked at the monster. Its brown scales repelled all but the most stubborn strikes, but they still irritated the beast. While the orcs would lose if the fight continued long enough, deep in its primitive brain the dragon seriously doubted they were worth the trouble.
Something landed on its head. Nigel grabbed a horn and held on as the dragon attempted to shake him loose. He couldn’t even remember how he’d gotten up there. Perhaps he’d climbed a tree. Perhaps he’d run straight up its back. Or maybe he’d jumped, propelled by his lust for battle. Regardless, he swung his magic ax, aiming to split the monster’s skull. At the last second he slipped and tumbled all the way to the ground. A sharp boulder broke his fall. His rage sputtered as the landing knocked the wind out of him.
The dragon made one last attempt to devour stunned Nigel. Before it could strike, Franklin (somehow still alive) jumped between the monster and its prey. He held his flail over his head, swinging it with wild abandon. He roared in the beast’s face.
It wasn’t a powerful roar. He’d already gone hoarse from screaming during the fight, and even at his best he still had fragile human lungs in a fragile human body. But as human roars went, it rated a solid six out of ten.
The winged reptile shook off the exhausted orcs pestering it, lowered its head so that its jaws were only a few inches from slurping down Franklin. It snorted, blasting him with hot breath from its nostrils.
Franklin smacked it across the snout with his flail. The spiked ball bounced harmlessly off the monster’s hide and smashed him across the hands. He yelped, dropping his weapon.
The dragon grunted. It raised its head and licked its nose with its long, bloody tongue. It made a horrid gurgling sound and vomited black bile and red blood all over Nigel and Franklin. Then, with a curious grunt and an empty stomach, it launched itself into the air and flew away.
The Wild Hunt fell to their knees and on their backs. The forest was silent, save for their collective wheezing.
Nigel sat up. He tried to wipe the dragon vomit from his face but only ended up smearing it around. Franklin was on all fours, retching. Nigel limped his way back to the road. The Chimera was gone. If the Hunt ran back to their bikes, they might be able to catch up. But they were in no condition to run. Or to fight.
He dragged himself over to Franklin, who was retching and making a hell of a racket doing it.
“You all right, kid?”
“Oh gods, I swallowed it. It’s in my mouth.” Franklin dry-heaved. “It’s in my mouth!”
The orcs laughed, then groaned at all the pain that came with laughing.
“You were right,” said Franklin. “I am a terrible orc.”
Nigel hefted Franklin to his feet. Franklin wobbled, but he didn’t fall down. Peggy approached, handed him his flail. He took it, rubbing his bloody knuckles.
“You are a terrible orc,” said Nigel.
He slapped Franklin across the back, hard enough that Franklin spit up a little of his own vomit along with the dragon bile he’d swallowed.
“But you’re an orc,” said Peggy.
The Wild Hunt raised their weapons and cheered. Then groaned.
Franklin smiled wider than he ever had in his life.
Then he fell to his knees and threw up for six straight minutes.
22
The Chimera zipped down the preserve road, kicking up clouds of dust. They didn’t run across any more dragons, but they kept their eyes open. Just in case.
“I can’t believe you punched a dragon in the face,” said Troy.
Helen smiled, held up two fingers. “Twice. I punched it twice.” She snorted, kissed her fist. “No big deal.”
“You’re lucky it didn’t eat you. I think it was more surprised than hurt,” he said. “Who would’ve guessed a dragon’s weakness would be chutzpah? That’s twice now you’ve saved our asses with that super-strength of yours.”
“Maybe you’re my sidekick.”
Troy chuckled. “Maybe.”
A monster cried out somewhere in the forest, but neither Helen nor Troy was afraid. They’d faced the beasts and come out the other side alive. The unknown didn’t seem so terrifying right now.
“Don’t you think you owe Achilles an apology?” she said. “He saved your life.”
“He’s a dog. Dogs don’t care about apologies.” Troy patted Achilles on the neck. “Although I still think he’s not a dog, but something pretending to be a dog.”
Helen looked into Achilles’s dark-brown eyes. The dog licked her nose and wagged his tail.
She said, “If he’s pretending, he’s doing a great job. He has to be the method actor of pretend dogs.”
“No point in arguing about it,” said Troy. “It’s not like he’s just going to tell us if he’s a helpful spirit or guiding gift from the gods above, right?”
They paused, giving Achilles the chance to speak up. He barked once and shoved his muzzle under Helen’s hand.
“Have it your way,” said Troy. “But when he does finally reveal himself to be a god in disguise, you’re going to feel weird about all that time you spent rubbing his belly.”
They might have imagined it, but Achilles did almost offer a coy smile.
“Any idea if that amulet is important
?” asked Troy. “As if I have to ask?”
Helen checked the necklace they’d found wrapped around Achilles’s leg. It wasn’t much to look at. She might even have mistaken it for costume jewelry with its gaudy string of pearls and the bright red gem that appeared to be made of plastic. As treasures went, it was a bit disappointing.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t look magic. But the pricking in my hand is softer.”
“Mine too.”
Helen glanced at her curse mark. It didn’t hurt much, and she was getting used to the slight ache. The mark seemed burned deeper into her flesh. Perhaps only a fraction of a millimeter. Not enough that she could say for certain. Troy’s mark was easier to see now, possibly because he didn’t have fur to get in the way. Either way, it worried her.
She touched the necklace to the unholy symbol burned on the back of her hand. She touched it to the shield. She waved her magic wand over the amulet. There was no reaction. Not from the necklace. Or the other items. And the closest thing they got to an omen was when a horsefly splatted against the windshield.
“It can’t just be an ordinary amulet,” he said. “That’s not the way it’s supposed to work.”
“Maybe that is how it works, though,” she replied. “Maybe they just edit the pointless stuff out of legends and quests when they retell them. They leave out that part where Beowulf swam into the wrong cave and wasted a weekend wandering in the dark looking for the supernatural evil one cave over.”
Troy frowned. “That won’t do. They can’t leave out the part where you punched a dragon.” He held up two fingers. “Twice.”
She leaned back in her seat and cracked her knuckles. “That would be a shame.”
They exited the preserve without incident, though they did get a glimpse of a crimson serpent slithering across the road. Helen managed to snap a photo of the creature.
“Find what you were looking for?” asked Ranger Grainger.
“We don’t know,” replied Helen. “But we weren’t sure what we were looking for in the first place.”
Grainger returned their stuff to them, had them sign some forms.
While they were walking back to their car, the omen they were waiting for arrived. Maybe it was the interference of the preserve’s sub-dimension that had prevented the gods from noticing their quest progress sooner. Or perhaps the gods above had been distracted by their own concerns. Whatever caused the delay, when the omen hit, it hit hard.
It started with a sudden heat in Helen’s thigh. She yanked the tarnished amulet out of her pocket and threw it to the ground.
The ground trembled as an inky darkness spilled from the necklace. It spread like a living oil slick until it surrounded Helen, Troy, Grainger, Achilles, and the Chimera. Shapes shimmered on its surface until it became clear that they weren’t points of light, but thousands of eyes looking up from the depths.
A blast of searing wind knocked them down as a giant of flame with magma for eyes and a mouth filled with teeth of pointed black stones burst from the chasm before them. The monstrous thing raised its fists and brought them crashing down on the Chimera. But the thing was only smoke, and its blow passed through the car. The mortals coughed and choked. Helen nearly stepped off the edge, but Troy caught her. She wondered what might have happened if he hadn’t. Would she have gotten her hoof dirty? Would she have sunk into the muck, disappearing forever? Or would she have just plummeted into the abyss? She didn’t know, and she was glad she hadn’t found out.
The omen howled, an angry storm of divine fury and thunder. Its deafening rage ended with a whimper as it sputtered to a gasp, belched up a puffy gray cloud, and sank back into the void with a rumbling grumble.
The chasm dissolved, evaporating like an oily patch of mud. The ash and soot covering the Chimera drifted away into nothingness. The only signs any of it had happened were the ever-so-slight scent of burned minotaur fur and a scorch mark in Helen’s jeans.
“Crap,” she said. “I just bought these.”
Troy bent down and touched the amulet. It was cool. “There’s your sign, Hel,” he said as he picked it up.
“That was a good one,” said Grainger.
“Stuff like that happen often?” asked Troy.
“It’s not unusual. Though that was one of the better omens. You two must be doing something big.”
Helen said, “We don’t really know. We’re just playing it by ear.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know where we should go next?” asked Troy.
“If you want to know the dietary preferences of the South American cockatrice, I’m your gal. Interpreting the will of the gods, you should ask someone else. But I wouldn’t worry if I were you. An omen like that probably means you’re on the right track. The gods don’t waste that level of pyrotechnics otherwise.”
They thanked Grainger for her help. She wished them luck. And then they were off, following the road wherever it might take them.
Helen drove. She absently rubbed her leg where she’d been burned. She checked it at the first rest stop. The damage wasn’t serious. Just some blackened fur and a patch of reddened skin. Her constant rubbing was more irritating than the injury.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Are we sure we should be doing this?”
Troy studied the necklace dangling from the rearview mirror. “We don’t have a choice, Hel. Cursed by the gods.” He held up the back of his marked hand.
“I know, but I can’t help thinking that we’re doing something wrong.”
“I think we’re making good progress.”
“No, I don’t mean we’re not doing the questing correctly. I mean, maybe what we’re doing is the wrong thing to do.”
He tapped the amulet’s jewel, swinging it back and forth. “You too, huh?”
“So we’re both on the same page here,” she said. “This banished hamburger god cursed us into doing his bidding. That can’t be good, right?”
“Probably not.”
“And gathering all these magic relics together, it’s got to be for some purpose, right?”
“Maybe he’s just working on his artifact collection,” said Troy.
“Maybe, but it’s no secret that the gods above aren’t all that nice to begin with. They’re capricious, unreliable, and they don’t think twice about using mortals as playthings for their own unknowable purposes.”
She wrung the steering wheel in tight fists and stared at the desert stretching into the horizon.
“Makes you wonder what terrible offense a god would have to commit for the others to banish him. This god, the god the other gods decided was too much of a jerk to hang around with them, is the god we’re helping.”
“That sums it up,” he said.
They drove a little farther without saying much.
“And that doesn’t make you nervous?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I try not to think about it.”
“But we have to think about it,” she said. “We could be doing something terrible. We could be destroying the world.”
Troy laughed. “That’s a touch melodramatic.”
“Is it? Did you see the smoke monster back there? Or the way that hamburger god slurped down Mr. Whiteleaf? And that was an accident. It could have just as easily been you or me.”
“It’s a big jump from human sacrifice to the end of the world.”
“Maybe not for a renegade god,” said Helen.
“Why would a god want to end the world anyway?” asked Troy. “What would be in it for him?”
“Why would he need a reason? Gods just do stuff. They don’t worry about the consequences.”
“I’ll give you that,” said Troy. “But if it was easy to destroy the world on a whim then wouldn’t the gods have already done it?”
“So maybe it’s not the end of the world.”
He smirked.
“OK, it’s highly unlikely it’s the end of the world,” she said, “but we agree that it’s probably something bad.
Something we shouldn’t be doing.”
Troy said, “You’re overthinking it.”
“No, I’m thinking about it just enough.”
“Look at it this way. If we were doing something really dangerous, do you think the NQB would’ve issued us questing licenses? Agent Waechter seemed to know what he was doing, had a lot more experience at this sort of thing than we do. And he didn’t seem worried.”
“What if he’s a bad guy? He could be a secret cultist, a worshipper of chaos. Or something.”
“Now you are overthinking.”
“Now…” She bit her lip and tapped her finger against her thigh. “Yes, I am. Probably.”
She waited for him to say something, but he only unwrapped the amulet from the rearview and pondered it in the palm of his hand.
“This is the part where you say something reassuring,” she said.
“I didn’t think I was allowed to do that anymore. I thought I was supposed to let you wrestle with your inner demons alone.”
She shook her head.
He said, “We can sit here all day, wondering what we’re doing and if we should be doing it, and it’ll get us nowhere. Because we don’t know how or why we’re doing any of this. Except that we have to do it. That’s all that matters. We have to keep going forward, do our best, and hope it all works out the way it should. What other choice do we have? Lie down and die?”
Helen huffed. “That wasn’t very inspiring.”
“They can’t all be winners,” he replied. “Did it make you feel better at least?”
“A little bit,” she admitted.
Troy’s cell rang. The caller ID labeled the call as coming from the NQB. The smooth, untroubled voice on the other end belonged to Agent Waechter.
“Hello, Mr. Kawakami. I trust everything is going well.”
“Better than could be expected,” said Troy.
“In eight miles you’ll see an unmarked road on your left. You’ll want to take that.”
Troy didn’t ask any questions. He’d gone past worrying about stuff like this. Their quest had been full of mysterious guides and so far following them had kept him and Helen on the right path. The pattern was obvious. Face some sort of challenge, collect an artifact, be pointed in the direction of the next challenge, repeat.
Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest Page 17
