Kill the Wild

by S T Branton

  Of course, I’d have to be more careful about moving, but I was pretty good at that already. Years in The Deep taught me how to stand so still I seemed like part of the scenery, and if these things were as vicious as it seemed like they might be, I would need to be extra scenic.

  The entrance led down a gradual decline, and halfway down a road appeared under my feet. I almost didn’t notice it, but when I did, I marveled at its craftsmanship.

  It was solid, but felt almost a little springy, like rubber, but camouflaged with dirt and what looked like intricate paintings of local flowers and grass. It was also set into the ground, so it didn’t raise and change the elevation, despite how it wound over hilly terrain. I tested this by stepping a few feet to the side and feeling the solid ground, then stepping back on the path. It was so cleverly hidden that I wouldn’t have noticed it had I not stepped onto it.

  While the pathway was impressive, it was nothing compared to what I saw when the tree line thinned and the world spread around me. I ducked behind a massive oak right before I walked out into an area with no trees.

  I had almost wandered out into what was essentially a clearing but was dotted by tall standing trees reaching high into the sky and marking an entrance point for those who knew it was there. Beyond were smaller trees, thousands of them, with vibrant green plumage on top that fell in bowl shapes over what they hid beneath.

  Every tree had a building of some kind built around it. Some looked like homes, some like stores, some like offices, but they all shared one thing in common—the trees. A few of them looked like they took up several trees for one construction, and I imagined what kind of space it must be inside. It was incredibly impressive but eerie.

  The entire area was empty. Not one dryad walked around. No business was being conducted, no children played. Everything was still and quiet. I checked my pocket for the secret weapon I packed for a fight, in case they were lying in wait. I knew if it got down to fisticuffs, I could probably handle myself for a little while, but eventually, I would need to break out the big guns. When that happened, I needed to be ready, and with my secret weapon, I had as good a shot as any.

  On the other side, in the pocket on my hip, Splinter sat with his little hands on the edge of the pocket, his face peeking out. He was more than happy to accompany me and be an extra set of eyes, but it didn’t seem like he was particularly a big fan of running around an empty Vrya village by himself. I didn’t blame him. This place was giving me the creeps.

  I snuck behind one of the buildings and tried to peek inside. The bottom of the windowsill was too tall, and I had to reach up and do a pullup to see what was going on inside. When I got up there, though, a curtain had been drawn and the room was dark. Trying a couple more windows around the house provided the same result. I finally found one that didn’t have a dark window, but a lighter one, nearly clear to allow in light.

  It was a store, and the door had a wooden “CLOSED” sign up. It looked almost like a pharmacy, with shelves of bottles of different ointments and liquids and bandages, and in the back, there was a long bar. A machine stood on one side of it, and I suddenly realized it was a soda machine.

  This was an old-school pharmacy like the ones in the TV shows my father used to watch about the fifties. It looked quaint and adorable, but still new. It was as if coming into this town not only transported me to a world full of Vrya homes and businesses, but also to a different decade altogether.

  I hopped down from the windowsill and made my way behind the next building. This one was long and higher than the others, with stairs rising to both a front and back door. Deciding to press my luck a little, I climbed the back steps as quietly as possible. Peering in the door, I saw what looked like three rooms, each one with a door open to reveal an office. A lobby area was on the front side, and a hallway between the rooms led to the door where I stood. The dryads who lived here were not only surviving, they were living mostly normal lives, but in a small commune of their kind. I didn’t know how I felt about that. My instinct was to distrust and fear Farsiders and dryads especially, but this didn’t look like the work of evil beings. This looked like the work of beings who wanted to get along. Perhaps the Vrya weren’t like the other dryads I had known before.

  But they kidnapped Ally. And knocked me out.

  There was that.

  From this vantage point, high up, I saw a building in the center of what constituted a town for the dryads. Everything else was so expertly hidden from above that this building seemed conspicuous. A plane flying overhead wouldn’t see anything out of the ordinary with the area, but a structure that big they might. Then I noticed the roof, which was painted brown and had more of the intricate artwork from the pathway.

  I climbed down the steps and snuck my way to the main building. There was a faint murmuring sound here, and I quickly ducked behind a wall, narrowly avoiding being seen by a Vrya guard. I peeked around the structure and saw there were two of them, but at the moment they were both preoccupied with having a conversation I couldn’t hear in a far corner.

  The murmuring wasn’t coming from them, however. It came from inside the building. A voice, loud and booming like thunder rang out in laughter, and I steeled myself. A person who laughed like that was a person who threw their weight around. In a small community like this one, that laugh indicated a person who would know what had happened to Ally.

  I took the opportunity of the guards being busy to sneak around to the front of the building. I could tell there were several Vrya in there by voice and movement. I counted individual footsteps around the room without looking in, only listening to sounds too far apart to be one walking subject. I counted five, but that was a minimum. There could be more.

  Good thing I brought my secret weapon.

  Not yet, though. That was last. First, it was time for some good old-fashioned fighting. I placed my hand on the doorknob, an ornate brass circle on the dark, stained wood, and turned it slowly. The faintest of clicks of the door unlatching was my cue. I swung the door open and darted inside, heading for the direct middle of the room. The laughing, booming voice had come from there, and I saw as I ran that it was a portly, older dryad. I flew through the air, my leg muscles responding so well I barely felt like I put any effort in, and flung out a kick that landed directly on his jaw. He flew backward, crashed to the floor, and rolled over himself to sprawl out.

  Before they could gain any sense of what was happening, I attacked two of the other dryads in the room, letting loose a punch to one and ramming my knee into the gut of the other. While their hardened bark bodies were stronger and more painful to dole out punishment to, they still felt pain like humans. Granted, it took more to hurt them, but for me that only meant I had to hit harder. I didn’t mind hitting harder, especially if the thought of Ally’s terrified face fluttered into my mind at any point.

  The hard part about fighting any dryad was the height. These seemed to be around seven feet, and I had to leap to make contact with their faces, which often meant my shots were naturally weaker. Considering they were stronger, it meant I had to try to hurt them. Thankfully, these guys seemed like they weren’t particularly interested in a fight and the two shots were enough to send them away.

  That wasn’t true for the other two, who charged me and tried to grab my arm. I snapped it backward in one arching motion and jumped, spinning in the air and thrusting my foot out to connect with the first one’s knee. He cried out in surprise and pain as he crumpled to the floor, making his head the perfect height for me to jam my elbow into as I reared back to punch the stomach of the other.

  The one-two shot did damage, but not enough. The shot to the stomach of the standing dryad only seemed to anger it, and it grabbed me by the shirt and threw me across the room. I landed with a thud against the wall and tried to stand, moving away barely in time to avoid a kick that would have taken my head off. Instead, he kicked through the wall of the room, and I grabbed a chair sitting nearby and whacked him with it as hard as I co
uld. It exploded on him, and he slumped, his leg still stuck in the wall.

  I turned to the first dryad I had attacked, the portly one with the big laugh. He was on his back, his hands behind him holding him up, and he stared at me with a mixture of confusion and disbelief. I pulled my secret weapon from my pocket and showed it to him, and his head began to shake.

  “Tell me where Ally is, or I will set this entire town ablaze.” I lit the flip-top lighter in front of the squirt gun. The unmistakable smell of lighter fluid leaked out of the tip, and I saw fear cross his eyes.

  “You don’t understand,” he began, and I shot a stream of the fluid at him. His cries of fear proved to me he knew what it was.

  “I said… Where. Is. Ally!” I flicked the lighter to life again and held it inches from his face when a voice behind me stopped me.

  “Sara, wait!”

  I turned in shock. In the doorway stood Ally, and her eyes pleaded with me to stop.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Splinter was in his element. Several young dryad children scooped him from my hands and brought him down onto the floor with them to play. They rolled a small ball back and forth while encouraging him to chase it. He happily extended his wings, spread out his little fingers, and soared through the air to land on the ball. A few times he got too enthusiastic with it and ended up rolling along with the ball to the next Vrya child. They picked him up and dislodged the ball from his grip and continued. I watched him, a little misty-eyed. I would have to get him a ball for Christmas.

  A plate settling onto the table in front of me brought my attention back to the group I sat with. Ally sat beside me as we gathered with a council of Vrya for tea. That was not what I expected. There were many things I might have thought the dryads did with their afternoons, but having tea wasn't one of them.

  Oh, well. Learn new things every day. That was the shiny new thing for me to put into my brain for today.

  A slightly older woman with the face of a sweet oak offered me a smile as she tipped a teapot over the edge of a dainty cup in front of me. The teacup had a long line down it where it was cracked and carefully mended. It said something about the woman in front of me. She turned to Ally and offered her a bigger smile as she filled her cup with the brightly colored fruit-fragranced tea.

  "Thank you, Qulma," Ally said.

  I was shocked by the casual, friendly exchange. I had come into the community switchblade blazing, ready to storm the castle and save my best friend. Not only did I not find a castle to storm, but what I did find was a group of perfectly welcoming dryads. Who invited me to tea. And had children who were playing with my pet. I didn't know what to think anymore.

  "Are you sure you're all right?" I asked Ally.

  It wasn't exactly the most diplomatic or polite question I could have asked, especially considering the plate of cookies being held out to me by the woman she called Qulma. If anybody called me out for it, I would totally blame prison culture.

  The truth was, I would have been that blunt before getting kidnapped by the Philosophers Guild. But the dryads didn't know that, and I would milk that excuse for all it was worth. After all, most of the time it was true.

  “I'm positive. The Vrya have treated me nothing but well. I have to say, Slick, I think we might have misread the situation.”

  “What about them attacking us in the woods? I don't think I misread having to fight them and then getting my head smashed into a tree,” I pointed out.

  “They were defending themselves. What would you do if notorious Farside murderer Sara Slick was walking toward your village?”

  I blinked at her a few times. "I mean, I am allegedly notorious Farside murderer Sara Slick, so I would probably be concerned about why I saw myself coming for my village."

  Qulma jumped in. It was easy to see this woman was the Elder, the leader of this group.

  "Ally has told us the truth about you, Sara Slick. And now it's time you learned the truth about us. There are dryads all over the world, but the Vrya have been living together for a long time, trying to exist peacefully. We have no interest in Hobbes or his crusade. We want no part in any of that. We don't want war. All the members of this group have ever wanted was to find a safe place to raise our children. Because of this, we've spent the last centuries as nomads, traveling from wilderness to wilderness, and casting out our kind who caused trouble."

  She spoke about the group's travels as though she'd been a part of it, but I knew the dryad lifespan wasn't endlessly long. Somehow, her linking herself to them and creating a single unit of their group, made her seem more real. Her words seemed more sincere, more honest when she spoke about the group like one large family with a continuous thread through them.

  "And you ended up in Hunt," I said.

  She nodded. "The group settled here, drawn to the quiet and low population. It's easier to cope and stay safe when there aren't too many humans around. For years, we traded with the people in the town. We lived in peace. Then the murders started. We don't know why or who's behind it, but one by one, our people are dying. We hoped it was an accident or misunderstanding, but..."

  “I saw the body of the latest victim,” I said. “It was no accident.”

  “That was my fear as well.”

  Qulma's voice cracked, and she lowered her face, overcome with emotion. It was apparent she was distraught, torn apart by what was happening to her people. I felt for her—for all of them. The pain was so clear, and the broken, tattered bits of my soul still reeling from loss reached out to them.

  "What about the earthquakes?" I asked.

  "We don't always have control over our power. That's part of the reason we live so far away from others. Strong emotions sometimes bring it out unbidden. Recently, our grief has been so great we couldn't stop it. That's how it started, anyway. After the second and third of our kind were murdered, some members of the community started advocating for retaliation."

  A slight shiver rolled along my skin at the mention of them planning to retaliate, but I didn't get much time to think about it. The young man I recognized from the mine jumped into the conversation.

  "Why shouldn't we fight back?" he demanded. "They’re slaughtering us without remorse. When does it stop?"

  "This is Akker." Ally gestured to the young man. "He's...intense."

  Her evaluation of him didn't slow Akker down. He glared at each of them, both imploring them to understand what he was saying and daring them to question it or come up with other reasoning.

  "The Nearsiders are clearly hunting us. We could bury their town without even trying."

  "That's not our way," Qulma rebutted.

  I sympathized with him, understanding the wrenching heartache and anger that came from watching people be destroyed and not knowing what to do. The helpless feeling was horrible, and anger soothed it. But that anger was dangerous, and I knew it couldn't be the whole town that was to blame for the murders.

  "It's not all Nearsiders. They aren't all like this, and it isn't the entire town of Hunt that is hurting you. I'll help you find who's responsible. And I'll make sure they find justice."

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  For the first time in a long time, I woke up before opening my eyes and kept them shut, but not because I was afraid of what I would see when they opened. Not for fear of the clock and how little sleep I got depressing me. I woke up and wanted to lie there without acknowledging the world for a while simply because I was so damned comfortable.

  I didn’t want to get out of this bed and the luxury of pulling one of the dozen or so pillows under my chest and wrapping my arm around it, then dozing back to sleep was enchanting. My thoughts started to turn back to the nonsense dream that I had slipped out of when another enchanting sensation drove me to open my eyes.

  Bacon.

  Someone was cooking bacon, and it was close by. The allure of breakfast was the only thing short of an absolute emergency that could get me out of this bed. I reluctantly opened my eyes for the first ti
me that day. The sun was high overhead, meaning I had slept longer than usual, and I stretched, rolling over into yet another impossibly comfortable position I could easily doze back to sleep in.

  Laughter rolled into the room from the direction of the wonderful smells, and I recognized it as Ally’s. She was already going to give me crap about sleeping in past her as it was. At least getting up now would maybe keep her from the dad jokes.

  “Good afternoon,” she said as I shuffled into the kitchen, and I checked an imaginary list in my head. Dad jokes were coming, and I had no control.

  “It’s still technically morning,” I said. I was right, it was nearly ten-thirty, but that didn’t deter Ally, who was generally up roughly around noon, and was reveling in being up before me.

  “Sure, sure.” She flipped a piece of bacon on the stove and grinned like an idiot. She was enjoying this. “Technicalities.”

  The dryad woman in the room with her was busy beating eggs in a bowl beside her, seemingly not wanting to get involved in our snipping. Ally wasn’t about to let a partner get past her in this moment of glory, though. She nudged the dryad woman, who looked up at her with an innocent expression.

  “Hmm?”

  “About what time do you think it was when I came in to help you?” Ally asked.

  I was expecting her to say something ridiculous but laughed out loud when I heard her response.

  “Oh, about twenty minutes ago,” the dryad said. Ally crossed her arms over her chest and nodded primly while working hard to conceal the smile behind her lips.

  “See, Slick? Twenty whole minutes before you. Downright perky.”