Meek

Ice touched Eli's skin. "There's another one of those things?"

"That's why they fled. And it looks like ... it looks like it chased them."

"As long as it chased them far away from here. The bandits we're following, though? They came through before the fighting, right?"

She nodded. "And headed north."

"So we keep on--"

In a rush of sound, the birds took flight and a horse screamed behind them.

One of their horses, which'd they'd tied on the far side of the crossroad. Eli whipped his sparks behind them, catching glimpse of the other horse, having torn free, galloping away.

The screaming horse fell suddenly quiet.

Lara nocked an arrow and hissed, "What is it? Where?"

"I can't see--" he started, before it hunched into view.

A bear.

Dead.

Bloated.

Ten, fifteen feet tall, he couldn't tell because it was so twisted and malformed--and because he couldn't think straight through the horror.

The bear's rotting pelt was stiff with blood. The haft of a broken spear impaled its neck. White eyes, a fleshless jaw. The worst thing was the lumps beneath its skin. Each was the size of Eli's head, four or five horrible bulges shifting and squirming under that putrefying fur. Moving from the blood-bear's shoulder to its back, from its foreleg to its neck.

Well, no, that wasn't the worst thing.

The worst thing was, it roared and started loping through the mounds of ston toward them. Fast. Too blessed fast, considering it must've weight a full ton.

"Coming this way," Eli said grabbing Lara's arm.

She shook him off, focusing on her bow.

"Arrows won't do anything." He watched the bear with one spark while the other spun in wide circles around them, looking for anything that might help. "Did you see any spears, halberd?"

"No," she said.

The bear roared again.

"Move, move--this way!" He pulled her toward one of the higher mounds of stone. "Climb up. I'll draw it away."

"That's not--"

"Do as I say!" he snarled.

He dropped his sword and interwove his fingers and she put her boot in his hands and he threw her upwards. She landed unsteady on the sloped side of the stone dome. She caught herself and scrambled higher and he grabbed the sword and sprinted.

When the dead bear reached the ... the other dead bear, the dismembered bear, it roared again. Then it sniffed and started prowling toward Lara.

"Here!" Eli yelled, shoving through the underbrush between domes. "Hey!"

One spark darted ahead, looking for a defensible location or a hiding spot. Of a blessdamned miracle. The other lofted above, watching the bear charge toward him, fast as a racing dog despite its heft. And the blighted thing tracked him too well, veering around the stone walls that he'd swerved behind moments earlier.

Massive paws slapped the ground.

A rumbling growl sounded ... but no breath. He didn't hear any breath. The blood-bear roared yet didn't breathe, and that frightened him more than anything.

Then the stench hit him.

His eyes watered and a spark showed him the bear just a few yards behind. Eli sprinted forward, then leaped onto a rocky hump in front of a fallen, sagging stone wall covered in ivy. He pressed down with both sparks and threw himself over the wall. He landed hard and rolled onto his back and the bear followed, leaping after him.

He thrust upward with the sword. Using all his troll-born strength he rammed the tip through the bear's matted stomach, a deep piercing stab. Hoping to gut the thing with one long lengthwise slice.

Instead, the sword snagged in thick, congealed guts. The bear's forward momentum almost tore the sword from Eli's grip. He clamped down on the hilt as the bear landed in the now-shallow pit of an old cellar and tumpled forward

Eli leapt to his feet and darted past, desparate scanning the path ahead with both sparks. He threw himself to the side at a flash of motion and--

A paw came out of nowhere and batted him through the air.

He slammed against the remains of a brick oven overrun with weed. He almost sliced his face off with his own sword, too. He shoved his blade into the scabbard, then dove behind the oven as the bear lunged.

The oven shattered.

Bricks pelted his stomach and chest--and one cracked against his head.

He staggered backwards and the bear rose to its full height in front of him and threw its head back and roared in challenge.

So he turned and fled, slamming both sparks into one of its eyes.

It didn't even blink. It hunched its massive shoulders then hurtled after him.

He dodged behind the stalagmite of a chimney and the blood-bear clawed the stone to halt its momentum. The lumps beneath its rotting pelt jiggled horribly as it spun toward him.

Eli swallowed his revulsion, backpedalled a few steps, then threw himself sideway when the bear lunged.

The bear's swollen, malformed head slammed into the trunk of a star-elm tree. It growled in frustration, a horrible unnatural grown. Then it took a thick branch of the star-elm in its jaws and ripped it from the trunk, easy as tearing a page from a tome.

If those jaws closed around Eli, they'd tear him in half.

He couldn't heal from that. One good bite and he'd die here in the village of stone. That knowledge sent him racing past two more mounds. One spark showed him where to put his feet, when to turn, how to dive sideways through the crack in a listing stone wall.

Almost too narrow, but he wriggled through a heartbeat before the bear slammed the stone.

The wall shuddered. The top snapped and chunks of stone rained down around Eli. He rolled away and rose to his feet and watched the bear tearing the crack wider.

"This way!" Lara called. "To me, here!"

A spark caught sight of her on top of a stone dome--not the first one, another one, closer to him. Not a dome, either, the sides were straighter. The building had melted into rectangle, mayge fifteen feet high and twice that wide, with a steep sides liquified into glassy smoothness that--

"Run!" she screamed, and loosed an arrow that struck wall inches from the bear's face.

He started running and she fired again--and that time, she caught Eli in the shoulder.

"Sorry!" she cried.

He swore and the bear burst through the wall.

Shards of stone spat everywhere.

Eli hurdled a ropy hedge of stone and watched an arrow plunge into the bear's side when it followed. Didn't slow it down, of course--it was a massive bloated bear corpse. He wanted to tell Lara stop firing before she put another hole in him but he couldn't spare the breath.

He leaped through a half-melted window in a free standing wall and landed in a tangle of thorns. He tore free without hardly slowing and reached the rectangular building at a flat-out sprint. The sides were steep but not quite vertical, and he threw all his momentum into climbing upward, like a squirrel on a tree trunk.

Using the sparks to brace himself, he managed to get halfway to the roof, too--before he started sliding backward.

Into the jaws of the halo-begotten beast behind him.

He clawed at the smooth stone wall, desperate for purchase. One of his nails tore off and one of his sparks watched Lara throw a bunch of leaves at him. What the halo was she thinking?

He didn't wonder for long, because the bear rose to its full height, roared in fury, swatted him so hard that he felt his hip shatter.

The pain tinted the world red.

The sky spun as the blow slammed him upward. He saw the ground, the sky, the bear, the ground, the sky--

He landed with a grunt of agony on the roof, and rolled toward the edge, so fast that he couldn't stop himself. He dug his sparks into cracks in the roof and spread his arms wide for purchase. His hip screamed in pain and Lara dropped another armful of leaves and flung herself at him, grabbing his ankle the moment that his head flopped over the edge of the roof.

The ankle of his injured leg.

He howled in pain and balanced there precariously for a terrible, agonized moment, then managed to flop onto the roof.

While he gritted his teeth, waiting for the numbness to kick in, Lara watched the blood-bear roaring and spitting at the base of the mound. Trying to climb, but unable to digs its claws into the smooth, near-vertical wall.

He panted and gasped, and realized when she'd been throwing. Not leaves, vines. A thick length of the ivy that grew on half the mounds.

"You threw ... me ... a vine?" he asked, catching his breath.

"And if you'd gotten here five seconds faster instead of playing in that bramble bush, you could've climbed it easy as a rope."

"A vine. You are such a dryad."

"You hush." She knelt beside him. "You're healing okay?"

"Yeah. I'll be good as new in ten minutes." He glanced at his numb hip, then winced at the extent of the damage. "Or, um, thirty."

The bear roared at the base of the building, then started pacing and pawing and grunting.

"How did you get up here?" he asked her. "Without someone throwing you a rope-vine?"

"I climbed the ivy."

"Oh. It supported you?"

"I'm half your weight. Plus, I am such a dryad."

He half-smiled, then winced as he skooched farther from the edge.

"That was too close," she said. "You're tough, but that thing could bite your head clean off."

"Yeah." He watched with his sparks. "Where did it come from?"

She shrugged. "A den inside one of the buildings? Or the Bloodwitch commanded it to patrol."

"How'm I supposed to kill her when I can't even handle her pet?"

"The bad news is, we might need to actually think of something."

"Funny."

"And plan ahead, which I know isn't your--"

He frowned at a sight one of the sparks sent him.

"What?" she asked.

"The bear found a rough patch." He nodded toward the other side of the building. "It's climbing the wall."