Protector

by Sam Ryder

  She looked godsdamn beautiful as the light of victory crossed her face.

  The only problem:

  There were a hundred more of the bastards. At least.

  She seemed to realize the same thing as she whirled around, her blade dripping black blood. This time, the others didn’t hold back, releasing a series of shrieks in short succession. Plotting. Scheming. They came from all sides, literally. Some dropped from higher branches, sliding along gossamer threads that they spun behind them. Others scampered up the tree trunk. And many more leapt from other trees, landing within the reach of the torchlight.

  Belle fought, stabbing and slashing and spinning, hacking off legs and popping eyeballs and occasionally even killing some of the smaller ones. The bigger creepy-crawlies, however, were too strong, their hides to thick, and even when she stabbed them her blade was turned away by their natural armor.

  That’s when the largest of the large creepy-crawlies appeared. Or I should say only a leg appeared, as hairy as a wooly mammoth. The surrounding tree branches sagged under the beast’s weight as it clung to it, looming over us. The other creatures skittered away, as if they feared this monster as much as we did.

  I didn’t even see the attack, the snap of its massive barbed tail so rapid it might’ve been a lightning strike. Belle never had a chance. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she toppled backward. Which was lucky, in a way, because she landed on the thickest part of the branch, near where I was already slumped. If she’d fallen any other way, she’d have gone over the side and broken her neck on the ground below.

  Her eyes rolled forward again, settling in an unmoving stare on my own. Unable to move or speak, we stared at each other until the creepy-crawlies returned and began to bind us in their webs.

  ~~~

  Now that I couldn’t see again, all I had was my hearing, which was pretty much useless. There was scraping and rustling and the occasional shriek that made me want to pee myself, but I had no idea what was happening. Clearly, we’d been given the cocoon treatment, wrapped up like flies caught in a web.

  Which gave me a flicker of hope. Why wrap us up if they were going to eat us right now? No, they were saving us for later.

  You know your life sucks when you’re happy to realize you might be eaten later.

  Still, it was something. Also, from what I could tell, they also hadn’t bothered to pry our weapons from our paralyzed fingers. Instead they’d just wrapped everything up together. And I mean everything, because they’d done us both at the same time, shoving our bodies against each other until we were face to face like two lovers in missionary position.

  Eventually, however, they’d snuffed out the lingering light of the demontorch, Belle’s eyes vanishing into darkness.

  Hours passed in silence. Or it could’ve been days, it was impossible to tell. I might’ve drifted to sleep, every minute like a waking nightmare where I was buried alive in a casket, unable to move or call for help.

  And then, suddenly, I felt something.

  Something horrible.

  An ache in my leg, a burning, radiating ache that moved into my torso and then my ribcage and spine, eventually forcing my teeth to grind together. My mouth was as dry as a sandbox, my eyes stinging from lack of moisture. I managed to blink. Once, twice, thrice and then closing completely. Small victories.

  I tried to move other body parts, but I was bound so tightly I couldn’t even wiggle a finger. My arms and legs ached from being locked in this position, mummified while still alive.

  At least my question regarding whether the venom was temporary—it was—had been answered.

  “Belle,” I managed to say, my voice as raspy as a cigarette-smoking country singer.

  No answer. She’d been stung after me, and by the largest creepy-crawly in the brood, so it might take much longer for her paralysis to wear off.

  Think, I thought. Which technically meant I was thinking, even if I was only thinking about thinking. Which made no sense. Or did it? My mind was addled, still trying to fuse one coherent thought into the next.

  I could feel the shaft of my hammer pressed into my palm, my knuckles sore from being forced to grip the weapon for so long without changing position or flexing. My weapon of choice relied on my ability to swing it, generating raw smashing power through acceleration and momentum. Even if I could move it a few inches from side to side, it wouldn’t be useful in our current predicament. No, our only chance was Belle’s katana, which I was pretty sure she still had.

  If only I could get to it.

  I tried to wiggle the fingers of my other hand but could barely get them going at all. Not because I couldn’t feel them, but because of how tightly they were pressed against my hip bone.

  Still, I kept trying, because what else was I going to do?

  Back and forth, back and forth, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle…

  Yes! The overstated victory cry in my head was because I’d managed to generate enough space to slide my hand. A few centimeters only, but still…it was something. I kept wiggling and wriggling, until my hand moved a few more centimeters.

  I kept at it, ignoring the pain as best I could. I felt skin that was not my own. It was kind of rough to the touch, totally different to the last time I’d touched Belle, whose skin was as smooth as melted butter. Her loincloth bikini. It had to be. I continued to skirt along the fabric, which grew narrower as it wrapped around her hip. I tried to remember how long her arms were. Did I need to move up or down her body to find her hand? Down, of course. Most people’s arms hung past their hips.

  I stopped. My arms were longer than hers. Which meant I might find her sword before found her hand. Which wouldn’t be good. I imagined how dumb I would be if I slit my own wrist on her blade and then bled out while pressed tightly against her.

  I moved even slower, centimeter by centimeter, probing with a single finger, feeling for metal or skin or something.

  I found a knuckle. I took a deep breath, which wasn’t easy considering the press of Belle’s body against my chest. Air seemed to find its way through the webbing, so that was good. Apparently the creepy-crawlies didn’t want their food to lose any of its freshness.

  I slid my finger along the knuckle and then down her finger, past another knuckle, probing between her grip.

  Finding the hardness of her sword’s hilt. Now for the really difficult part.

  One by one, I shoved my fingers underneath hers, prying them away from the hilt, until my hand had replaced hers. Still unmoving, her fingers rested on top of mine, which made things even more challenging. There was simply no space left for me to move the katana.

  Believe me, I tried. And tried. And tried. I could feel my arms bulging and my muscles popping as I strained to move the sword up or down or anything. I needed a sawing motion, but I couldn’t get the smallest movement.

  “Uhh,” Belle said. I could feel her lips flutter against mine—that’s how close we were packed in the cocoon.

  “Belle?” I said.

  “Sam.”

  “I’m here.”

  “I know. I heard…your voice…before. But I—I—I couldn’t…answer.” She was still struggling to speak, the venom slowly wearing off.

  “You fought like a badass,” I said.

  “You saw?”

  “Every kill,” I said. “Ten, I think.”

  “Eleven,” she said, her tongue glancing off my lip. “One must’ve been out of your field of vision. But who’s countin’?” It was good to hear that accent again. Even better to hear she could make a joke at a time like this.

  “We need to move your sword like a saw,” I said. “I’m holding it now but it won’t budge.”

  “Lemme try to move my hand.” Mah hand.

  I felt her fingers twitching against my knuckles, but they didn’t slide the way I’d hoped. If so, I would have enough space to maneuver the katana. Which might be all we needed to cut through the barrier.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  Well, shit.<
br />
  “Sam…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I kiss you?”

  We were so close she was practically already kissing me. “Umm, is this really the time?” Had she completely forgotten our previous conversation?

  “Men,” she said. “Always thinking they’re all women want. Just trust me on this one. Kiss me, Sam Ryder. Like you mean it.”

  I still wasn’t understanding, but I had nothing to lose at this point. I kissed her. Like I meant it. Which I did, because she was damn attractive, even if I couldn’t see her. Her voice was sexy as hell and I could picture her moist lips and her body as it whirled about, fighting the creepy-crawlies.

  Her tongue found mine and they danced. We kissed harder, trying to turn our heads to change the angle, managing it, barely.

  Blood rushed through my veins, energizing me. I tried to slide my hand upward, but it was still held tight. I felt her trying to do the same.

  And then, instead of vacating the area near my hand to give me space, our hands managed to move. Together. It was a small movement, but it opened enough room to slide back the other way. As our lips moved in tandem, so did our hands, sawing back and forth, back and forth, incremental motions at first, but then longer strokes.

  In front of me, Belle’s lips tensed and she almost bit off my tongue as her teeth clacked together.

  “Belle?” I said. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she growled. “Keep going.”

  I wasn’t certain if she meant with the sawing or the kissing, so I continued both. She didn’t kiss back, but I didn’t stop, tasting the outside of her lips.

  I wanted to stop when I finally grew a brain and realized what was happening—the blade is cutting her leg at the same time it’s cutting the layers of web—but she snapped, “Don’t you fuckin’ stop, Sam Ryder!” so I kept going. More space opened up and I made damn sure I pushed the blade out as far away from her skin as it would go as I continued to saw.

  Which seemed to help, because she stopped gritting her teeth and kissed me once more. There was no way I would deny her anything at this moment—she’d earned whatever she desired through her bravery. So I returned her kisses, eventually managing to withdraw my other hand from my hammer as the web pod began to sag, the katana biting through each layer. I ran my hand up her body, from hip to abdomen to chest to neck to jaw, stroking her as I kissed her.

  She sighed into my mouth just as the katana sliced through the last layer and dim silver light fell onto us. Belle’s face was pale, her eyes distraught. Oh no. I looked down at her thigh, which was slick with blood, still bubbling up from the long gash that stretched along the whole of her leg above the knee.

  She’d allowed her own sword to do that to her in an attempt to save us both.

  At that moment, the sides of the web pod gave way on both sides, which was when I realized we were dangling from a tree, high above the forest floor.

  Belle’s eyes went wide as she tumbled out.

  ~~~

  I twisted around and flung my arms out. One hand grabbed Belle’s wrist as she fell, while the other snapped to the side and snatched my hammer, which had also decided to let gravity do its thing. I managed to clamp my feet around the clump of webbed material, swinging gently back and forth.

  Belle looked up at me with wide, green eyes. A river of blood continued to cascade down her leg and drip from her foot.

  “You wouldn’t have died,” I said, keeping my voice low and gesturing with my head. At least not right away, I thought. Belle looked down to see what I meant. Dozens of massive spiderwebs created canopies between the trees. If I hadn’t caught Belle, she would’ve fallen ten feet or so and then stopped as she landed on one of the webs, which looked more than thick enough to hold her weight. I wasn’t certain they could handle my bulk, but I didn’t want to test my theory.

  There was this other thing too:

  Resting along the surface of the webs were mounds of additional webbing of varying sizes. All of them were roughly the same shape—semicircles. Though the webbing was thick, I could just make out the tufts of fur sticking through.

  Creepy-crawlies. Hundreds upon hundreds of them.

  As I dragged Belle back up to our devastated web pod, understanding dawned. “They can’t survive in the daylight.”

  “What?” Belle said, her brow crinkling as she managed to grab a knot of webbing and position herself as one might sit on a hammock. She began snatching handfuls of webbing and stuffing them into the long gash on her leg. A creative way to stop the bleeding, but it’s not like we had gauze and bandages.

  I managed to drag my heavy ass up onto the makeshift platform of mangled webbing to sit beside her. “The creepy-crawlies hunt during the Black but must rest away from the sun during the day. Most monsters here need to be completely out of the sun, but some can tolerate a little light, so long as they aren’t overexposed. Those kinds like to creep in the shadows, sticking close to boulders or overhangs.”

  “Or in forests?” It sounded like farests when she said it.

  Regardless of her pronunciation, she was right. “Exactly. The leaves and branches filter the light enough so all the eight-leggers have to do is cover themselves with a bit of webbing and take a long nap until it gets dark enough to come back out.” While I spoke, I ripped off threads of webbing and began to braid them into something resembling cord.

  “To hunt,” Belle said.

  I nodded but didn’t offer the other part. That before they hunted, they would probably eat. And we were the main course. They wouldn’t be happy to find us gone. Which meant we needed to get the hell out of the farest as fast as we fucking could. “Here,” I said, handing her the first rope. “Tie it around the webbing. Make sure it’s tight enough to apply pressure.” It was the best tourniquet we had at the moment. Once we were out of the danger zone, we could get to the small supply of primordial ooze I’d brought with us.

  “Thanks,” she said, getting to work. Her fingers were nimble and she made short work of tying the first rope. Her knots looked decent. Maybe she was once a girl scout and had earned a rope-tying merit badge. When she finished, she began braiding the next one.

  It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Belle cry since those first few days. Even now, when she must be in terrible pain from her injury, not a single tear leaked from her eyes. Despite all the horrors of this world, I had a feeling she’d been through worse. She was tougher than everyone, myself included, thought she was.

  While she worked, I looked up to try to judge the position of the sun—who knew how long we’d been entombed in our web pods? My gaze landed somewhere else first:

  On the dozens of web pods, similar to how ours had presumably looked before we sliced it open, swinging back and forth from branches.

  We weren’t the only ones on the menu.

  “Who do you think they are?” Belle asked, her gaze having followed mine after she tied off her second rope.

  I shrugged, feigning nonchalance, my heart pounding in my chest. “Other monsters? Or animals, maybe. I mean, it makes sense there would be other animals here. Like the leafrats. To the creepy-crawlies we’re probably a delicacy.”

  “Good to know,” Belle said. “Is the sun on the way up or the way down?” Her eyes had made it past the other web pods to where I’d been trying to look before.

  I squinted. It was hard to tell through all the foliage. All I was sure of was that the sun was pretty far from its midday peak. If it was making its descent, we didn’t have long. Maybe an hour. Two if we were lucky.

  But how to get down? The tree we were attached to looked decent for climbing, with plenty of rows of well-spaced branches and a knotty trunk. The issue was our current position, which was probably fifteen to twenty feet from the trunk, at least ten feet below the branch we were hanging from. Below us and slightly off to one side was another thick branch, but it was a twelve-foot drop, which would make landing difficult.

  “I think it’s better to go up fir
st, then down,” I said.

  “Shimmy up the web that’s holding us?” Belle said.

  I reached up and grabbed it, giving it a hard yank. Which, in hindsight, was a stupid way to test its strength considering it was all that was currently keeping us from falling more than a hundred feet to the ground, crashing through the webbed canopies like Aladdin escaping the po po after stealing a loaf of bread.

  Luckily, the rope held. It was braided similarly to the ropes we made for Belle’s tourniquet. The only problem: For some reason, the kind of rope-like webbing used to hang the web pods wasn’t sticky like the rest of the stuff. Instead, it was more like dental floss, glossy and slick. Even Belle, with her strong arms and light frame, would struggle to get enough grip to clamber up it. “Shimmying is out of the question,” I said.

  Belle ran her own fingers along the thread and grudgingly agreed. “What other option do we have?”

  “You ever joined a circus?” I said.

  “Did the poison get into your brain?” Belle replied.

  Considering what I was thinking… “Possibly. We’re going to become trapeze artists and I’m going to throw you up to the branch.”

  To Belle’s credit, she didn’t reject my plan outright. But she did ask a very smart question. “What about you?”

  “I’ll figure that out next.”

  “This is crazy.”

  “Now you sound like Beat.”

  “She must be smart, though I don’t think she likes me very much.”

  “She thinks you’re weak,” I blurted out. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

  “It’s fine. I haven’t given her—any of you—a reason to think otherwise.”

  “Now you have,” I said, motioning to her leg. “On this planet, people have a tendency to change their minds in a hurry if they have a reason to. Now c’mon, let’s get moving so we’ll have the chance to tell them all our story.” If they’re still alive, I couldn’t help adding in my head. Though I had my own problems to deal with, I always worried about what was happening back at camp when I wasn’t there, even more so since becoming Protector. “Take my hands.”