I backed up and waved for the kids to follow until we were out of human earshot.
“She’s fine,” I whispered. “But there’s someone else here. A man, I think.”
They didn’t point out that there were lots of people out here—a whole class of them. They knew that’s not what I meant, and they sampled the air, sniffing. Then Kate nodded and said, “Something spooked the tailypo. It wasn’t just scared. It was freaking out.”
I didn’t question this any more than they’d questioned me about the stranger in the forest. My daughter has an innate ability to read emotions. I don’t know if it’s an actual power or no different from a human with an extraordinary sense of smell. If she said the creature was panicked, it was.
“If we do have a tailypo in this forest”—Logan caught his sister’s look—“and, yes, it seems we do, it would be valuable. Very valuable. Which suggests that trap could be for it.”
“Could be?” Kate said.
“Presumption is a dangerous logical leap,” he said calmly. “But it certainly could be. And if the man’s scent spooked the tailypo, it could be connected. Which means we should investigate.”
“And the chick in the pit?” Kate said.
“She seems calm enough.”
“She’s pissed off. But I’d be, too. We can leave her there.” Kate looked up at me. “Okay, Mom? Is that the right move?”
I smiled. “It is. She’s fine, and for all we know, she’s with that man, and she stumbled into her own trap. She can wait. Let’s see what’s going on here.”
VERITY
One thing that will snap me instantly out of being pissed that I’ve been dumped down a pit trap: the sound of running feet. Bipedal, whatever it was, and either child-sized or actually a child. No one who wasn’t related to me was going to bring a kid this far into the forest, so I was voting “small adult.” I tensed, waiting for whoever it was to approach. They didn’t.
That left me with two options. Option one, they had no idea the pit trap was here, and hadn’t felt the need to investigate the strange hole in the forest floor. Unimaginative, but not outside the realm of possibility. Option two, they knew they’d caught something human, and were going to get a bigger gun. Something that would kill or sedate most of the pit trap–able animals in this forest wasn’t going to do a damn bit of good against something the size of me.
Our poachers, whoever they were, were going after tailypo and cleaning out the local fricken population. I had to assume that larger animals were also on the menu. When something doesn’t officially exist, it doesn’t have many people rushing to protect it. We were in prime jackalope migration territory, and mature bucks would have been more than large enough to trigger the deadfall. Ditto igneous scorpions—and after spending a day at the pet show, with its many creepy, crawly options, I had absolute faith that there was a buyer for even something as unpleasant and inclined to sting as an igneous scorpion.
The steps were not repeated. I glared at the slice of sky visible at the top of the pit trap for a moment before pulling the knives out of my shirt and jamming them into the dirt a bit above eye level. Time to get the hell out of here!
Years of free-running and parkour have left me with a degree of upper body strength entirely out of proportion with what most people would assume from looking at me. Even so, I was swearing steadily by the time I reached the lip of the pit trap and hauled myself back onto solid ground. I paused long enough to reach back down and snatch my knives from the pit wall. These asshole poachers had stolen half an hour of my time and a layer of skin off my knees. I’d be damned before I was going to give them two of my favorite throwing knives.
Oh, who was I kidding? All throwing knives were my favorite throwing knives. If there was a support group for people who had an unhealthy fondness for bladed weapons, I would have been their poster girl. And I still didn’t have cell service.
I paused. At this point, there was definitely a poacher out here, and whoever it was needed to be stopped before they damaged the local ecosystem beyond repair. But they were using purely human tactics, and they were unlikely to have any special tricks up their sleeves. Hidebehinds didn’t need to set pit traps. Cuckoos didn’t need to set traps at all. Did I really need Sarah to deal with one little poacher? No, I did not. After the day she’d had, she deserved a few hours alone in the room to watch basic cable and chat with Artie. She would definitely be easier to deal with during the drive home if I let her chill for a while.
“I can handle this,” I said, trying to sound positive. It almost worked. I clung to that attitude as I made for the nearest tree, grabbed a branch, and began to climb.
Tailypo are arboreal. Given their choice in the matter, they only touch the ground to raid trashcans and chitter menacingly at tourists. I scanned the branches as I climbed, finally spotting signs of tailypo passage about two-thirds of the way up. That was good. That meant we still had tailypo running free in the area, and that there might be time for me to get in the poacher’s way. I followed the scratches on the bark to the end of the tree, dropped down to the ground, and began making my way through the woods, this time scanning my surroundings for additional traps.
I found two: a second pit trap, and a snare sized perfectly for adult jackalope. I took perverse pleasure in triggering them both from a distance, rendering them useless for poaching purposes. That would teach them to put a pit trap where I was walking.
The deeper I went into the woods, the darker it became. Not just because the afternoon was stretching toward evening, although that was a factor; the trees here were closer together, their branches more tightly interwoven, until they blocked almost all the available light. It wasn’t really a surprise when I stepped through a veil of bushes and found myself looking at a small hunting cabin, tucked away into the brush and effectively camouflaged by the trees around it. If anything, it was a surprise that the cabin was visible at all, given how well it had been constructed to blend in.
There were several hutches out back. I could see motion inside, moving fast, like something that wasn’t accustomed to being trapped. My eyes narrowed. When Sarah and I had come here, we had been expecting to find a breeder, someone stupid enough to believe that wild animals could be domesticated in a single generation. Instead, we had a trapper.
Humans don’t react well to things we didn’t know about before they started biting us. If the tailypo was found this way, a lot of them were going to die.
Keeping my steps as light as I could, I made my way around the side of the cabin to the hutches and peered inside. Two were full of tailypo. Another held two jackalopes, their antlers filed until they were little more than stubs. They huddled in the corner of their cage, watching me mistrustfully. The fourth hutch was empty, but the feathers in the bottom told me it hadn’t been that way for long. This was where they’d been keeping the frickens.
Frickens weren’t designed to be crammed in this sort of enclosure. On a hunch, I crouched and poked through the mud under the hutch. There was straw scattered there, presumably to soak up the droppings from the animals above. I didn’t have to dig far to find the layer of dead frickens. Like all amphibians, they had dried out quickly, becoming withered, wasted versions of themselves. I picked one up. Most of the feathers fell away in my hand. I scowled.
Killing people is wrong and I know that, but damned if sometimes I don’t wish my parents had raised me with a looser set of ethics.
Setting the fricken gently back down in the muck, I straightened and turned toward the nearest occupied hutch. It was time to set a few things free.
ELENA
I exercised extreme caution following the man’s scent. I had the twins with me—I couldn’t stalk a stranger to satisfy my curiosity. I considered taking them back to the others. They’d stay if I insisted on it. But if there were people out here digging pit traps and scaring the local wildlife—wildlife that shouldn’t exist—I wanted to keep Kate and Logan close.
I was trying to stay downwind and
keep my distance as I figured out what was going on here. Before long, though, I caught another scent. The woman from the pit. Who was, apparently, no longer in it.
The woman was closer and moving through the woods in roughly the same direction as the man. I turned her way and whispered, “Stay close,” to the kids, which earned me dual eye rolls. Of course they knew to stick close. But as an expert at finding loopholes when Jeremy had been Alpha, I knew better than to presume an implied “Don’t take off” would be enough.
Soon we saw a cabin through the trees. The woman’s scent came from there. I stopped and assessed. Then I glanced at the kids.
“It’s less safe if we stay here while you get closer,” Logan said before I could speak.
True.
We continued until we were around the side of the cabin. Then we all stopped, noses wrinkling.
“What’s that?” Kate whispered.
Death. That’s what I smelled first—the stink of carrion. It was faint, though, some creature recently dead. The stronger scent was the one Kate meant. And it was . . .
I had no idea what it was. I smelled the creature from earlier. Or others like it, the smell mingled with dirt and feces and rotted food. But there were other scents, too, creatures I didn’t recognize.
When Kate started forward, I laid a hand on her shoulder. That was all it took. She glanced back with an apologetic nod.
As tempting as it was to focus on those smells, there was a more important one coming from the same direction: the woman. I eased forward until I could see her back. She stood in front of hutches. Animal cages. That’s where those smells were coming from.
We had a creature of legend—the tailypo—and more animals with scents I’d never encountered despite years exploring the forests of upstate New York. In one of those cages I could see what looked like . . . well, a feathered frog. I wouldn’t know for certain without closer inspection, but I accepted that the other beast had been a tailypo and I smelled others in those hutches. Someone had captured at least one creature found only in folklore and was keeping them in cages. From the looks of the run-down hunting cabin, this woman wasn’t a scientist who’d made an incredible new discovery. The smell seconded that—the stink of neglect and, yes, death, and my hackles rose as I watched her fussing with the cages.
I backed up, waving the kids with me. Even Logan followed with obvious reluctance and kept glancing toward those cages. I was about to tell the kids I needed them to stay back while I figured out what to do. Then I heard a click. I stiffened, my hands going to their shoulders, ready to shove them to the ground. But the click came from the hatches. The woman was opening them.
We crept back to where we’d been and saw her reach into one cage and take out what was indeed a feathered frog. Then she set it free.
I exhaled. Well, that made things easier. I’d had no idea what I’d do about this, only that I’d have been compelled to do something, that I couldn’t leave those creatures in those cages to die . . . and more importantly, couldn’t do that with my children watching. If she was setting them free, then I could skip what might be a dangerous—
Another noise sounded deep in the forest. Footsteps. Heading in this direction. I inhaled deeply and caught the scent of the man from earlier. The one who’d frightened the tailypo. Now, I know as well as Logan that we can’t jump to conclusions, but it was a safe bet the man was the one who’d put those creatures in those cages. I circled around the cabin, the kids at my heels, and got close enough on the other side to confirm that his scent trails ran all around the place.
Those footsteps were coming fast. And the woman freeing the creatures was taking her time, checking them out before she let them go. She couldn’t hear or smell the man. And he wasn’t going to be too happy when he returned to see what she was doing.
I whispered a quick plan to the kids, and then watched as they took off to find a tree to scale, getting out of harm’s way. Once I saw them going up, I went after the man.
VERITY
There had been a few frickens left alive and clinging to the roof of their hutch, terrified out of their tiny amphibian minds. The rest were either sold or dead; I was going to have to let Alex know that he needed to watch the reptile communities he belonged to for people talking a little too enthusiastically about their rare new acquisitions. The jackalopes were in better shape. They were more accustomed to being hunted, and had long since evolved a “run when you can, give up completely when you can’t” approach to predation. Maybe that wasn’t healthy, but it meant they did better in this sort of situation.
I was placing a large buck on the ground and trying to encourage it to run away when I heard one of the few sounds that were guaranteed to get my attention, no matter what the situation: a man, screaming like he’d just learned the true meaning of pain. The jackalope heard it too, and went bounding wildly off into the underbrush. Well, that was one problem solved.
Straightening, I relatched the hutch—I needed to finish checking these animals out before I released them—and drew the gun from my belt, holding it low to my hip as I slunk toward the trees. Maybe I was gonna get lucky, and that asshole poacher was at the bottom of one of his own pit traps.
The asshole poacher was not at the bottom of one of his own pit traps. The asshole poacher was, instead, in the process of being punched in the throat by a tall woman with silver-blonde hair in a shade that couldn’t possibly have come out of a bottle. She had the build for the tango but moved like she was dancing capoeira, all shifting balance and brute force. It was impressive.
It was also disproportionate as a reaction to a poacher, or seemed that way, until I saw the knife in his hand, a big serrated dealie that would have had me going for the takedown as fast as possible, just for the sake of keeping my insides from becoming my outsides. Something rustled in one of the nearby trees. I slanted a glance in that direction, trying to be unobtrusive about it; if it was tailypo, that was fine, but if it was another poacher, I was going to have to get involved.
Instead, there was a flash of hairless skin, too pale to belong to a Bigfoot, if there were even any in this area. A kid. The lady had a kid with her. That explained the footsteps I’d heard before, and the speed with which she’d gone from zero to throat-punching. No parent in the world would hold back when their kids were nearby.
The woman punched the poacher one more time. He went down like a sack of wet laundry, sprawling on the ground. The knife skittered from his hand, shooting across the forest floor to wind up near enough to my feet that I stepped on it to stop its progress, only realizing as I moved that I should have kept still. The woman—human, dragon princess, whatever—was clearly a predator, and one with a child, to boot. Attracting attention was the last thing I should have done.
Her hair wasn’t black. She wasn’t a cuckoo. I might survive this. And so, as she turned to look in my direction, I plastered on my best reality television smile and offered a sunny, “Hi.”
ELENA
When the guy went down, the knife went flying. I turned, ready to kick it out of the way, in case he rose. That’s when I saw the woman from the pit. She stood there with her foot on the knife, and she smiled—a big, bright smile, as if she’d happened upon me enjoying a forest stroll.
“Hi,” she said.
I resisted the urge to look up and check on the twins, but I must have glanced in that direction because Kate gave a soft birdcall, telling me they were all right. I looked back at the woman. Then down at the blade under her foot.
“That was his,” I said.
“I saw that. Nice work. You meet some real creeps out here.”
Her accent suggested she wasn’t local. She kept smiling, as if she saw absolutely nothing odd about me trouncing some potential predator lurking in the woods. Behind that smile, though, there was a touch of unease. Completely justified considering what she’d witnessed. She was probably wondering if the guy on the ground wasn’t the only dangerous one out here.
I was about to say
something when a noise sounded in the treetops, and I looked up before I could stop myself. It was just the tailypo—or one of them—racing along a branch. From where we stood, we could only see the general shape and that incredible tail.
“Huh,” she said. “Weird-looking raccoon.”
“We get them up here,” I said. “A regional variation, I think.” I looked at the knife again. “You’d better keep that, in case this guy wasn’t alone. He looks as if he’ll be sleeping for a while, but you might not want to hang around. There’s a ranger station that way, I think.” I pointed.
She picked up the knife. “Thanks for the tip. It’s easy to get turned around in these woods.”
“It is,” I said. “Well, take care. And watch out for the mosquitoes. They seem to be out early this year and they’re nastier than usual.”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s an ecological reason for that. It’ll sort itself out.”
I said goodbye and left, picking a path that took me into thick brush. When I was sure she could no longer see me, I stopped to wait. A few moments later, the kids came, running silently. We continued on until we were out of earshot. They kept looking back. Not at the woman—they’d probably forgotten her already—but at the cabin.
“Can we come out tomorrow, Momma?” Logan asked. “She emptied all the cages but there were things in them . . . We’d like to look around more.”
I ruffled his hair. “We’ll do that.” I glanced into the forest, peering around, trying to catch a glimpse of something new, something wondrous. Then I turned back to them and said, “We’ll definitely do that.”
VERITY
Killing people is rude and bad and wrong and leads to lots of paperwork, which is why I didn’t kill the poacher. I just stuffed him into one of his own hutches, where his friends would eventually find and release him. Assuming he had any friends. This was the sort of thing that led to stories about monsters in the woods, which discouraged poachers from coming around. The local ecosystem had been damaged, but it would all work itself out, given a little time to regenerate.
Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories Page 6
