“Your arm, Day!”
With the surge of anger, the irrationality, I could feel the distance between us closing faster. He was running, or whatever the equivalent was when one floated.
I picked up my own pace. Get far enough away, and he’d calm down. He was only reacting to proximity.
“Your arm, my legs!”
His legs. The idea and the words carried a certain power with them. Pain.
Incapacitation.
Someone might as well have hit me across the knees with a baseball bat.
I collapsed.
“Your arm, my legs! You don’t get to do this to me, Day! You never played fair!”
Talking more as he drew ever closer.
I crawled, fighting past the pain.
It’s an illusion. Pretend.
Nice words, but it was hard to convince my body.
I hauled myself forward. My eyes fell on a tree with low branches.
I wasn’t silent as I ascended, hauling myself up with arm strength more than my legs. It didn’t help that the ghost was still screaming.
Something reacted to the noise.
When I did get high enough to tentatively try using my feet to climb, I found I moved quieter. Climbing, seizing higher branches, climbing the tree.
Cornering myself already.
I was scarcely ten feet above the ground as I brought my legs up out of reach.
The ghost approached, stopping right beneath me.
“Day! Fuck you, Day!“
The other thing approached. Big, shadowy, lumbering. It left a trail of blood in its wake, a wound that never stopped bleeding.
Fuck.
One great hand settled on the trunk of the tree, not two feet from my foot.
It was blind, face savaged. Such was the wound.
And it wasn’t moving. Fuck.
“He knows. He’s coming.“
A whisper.
I looked, and I saw a ghost perched in the branches. A little boy with a hooded coat.
No blood, no bleeding.
“Who knows?” I whispered back.
“The wolf-thing. The worst of them. He knows. Run. Have to run if I’m going to get home. Keep running, keep hiding, and I’ll be able to go home.”
With that, he leaped down. Both ghost and lumbering Other turned, but both were too slow.
He disappeared, like the wind.
Little fucker.
I was stuck where I was.
4.11
Congratulations, Blake Thorburn. You’ve successfully reverted two or three million years. You’re an ape in a tree, hiding from the scary things.
“Day! It’s your arm that’s supposed to be fucked up! Day! You’re the one who died, Day!”
Shut the fuck up.
“God, my legs!”
Again, that wave of pain. An illusory sort of pain, something that might have knocked me out of the tree if I hadn’t been wrapped around a branch.
The big thing that loomed beneath me, it seemed, wasn’t any more a fan of the ghost than I was. This wasn’t a bad thing. Wasn’t a good thing either. It was just a thing.
It lashed out, striking blindly at the air with thick, heavy arms. The ghost didn’t have the sense to get out of the way, but the Other didn’t have the ability to hit the ghost.
Nothing accomplished. Only a brief distraction for the blind Other, a bigger threat beneath me, and a bit more nervousness on my part, when one large clawed fist came a little too close to the tree I was perched on.
It wasn’t calming down, either. The pain it suffered, the wound, it was driven out of its mind, unable to calm down or relax.
I wasn’t sure how to label the thing. Yeti? Troll? Ogre? It was big, strong, and somewhere midway between human and animal. The books had said that the more brutish Others hadn’t survived the years without being enslaved or killed, but it could be argued that this one wasn’t exactly alive. Or free.
The Hyena was apparently coming my way. That was, if the ghost wasn’t simply repeating a stock phrase.
“Day! Oh god, Day! Oh god!”
The big thing lunged. Its shoulder brushed against the trunk of the tree, and I swayed briefly. I heard a faint cracking sound. Ice breaking, or wood splintering?
“Please, Day, wake up!” the ghost cried out.
Speaking of stock phrases.