But he was Faerie, and this wasn’t the sort of thing that was useful. He caught the barrel with his good hand, his eyes staring into mine. His ear wasn’t even bleeding.
“Evan,” I said, but it was only a whisper.
“Through the squeeze,” Evan said.
“Need… useful…” I grunted and gasped the words, hating how small my voice sounded. “input.”
The pain built again, faster, harder.
A crack sounded through the area, like a gunshot, and my fingers leaped into the next category of agony.
Lesson learned, I thought, which was ironic, because I could barely think. How was I supposed to learn when I couldn’t think?
“Comhroinn!” the woman shouted, over my scream.
Angry. The thought barely connected.
She was angry.
Not at me, either.
So I did the second-least intuitive thing I could do, here. Short of actually letting him stab me in the eyes, I moved my face closer to said stabbing implements, where my hand gripped his.
I could feel his breath on me, feel the weight of his body. As with the Imp, when I’d stepped outside the rabbit-gut circle, I felt like every iota of movement in his direction came with a corresponding loss of sanity and courage.
But, just as I’d pushed through that with one singular goal, I acted with a goal here.
I kissed the back of my hand, getting a very up-close view of the way his hand was regenerating, piecing itself together with the glamour he was taking, and all of the bits of my hand that he was scraping up along the way.
Then I spat.
Blood from the back of my hand, where it flowed from the stabbed webbing, sprayed onto and over his shoulder, in the direction of the Faerie woman.
She reacted, angry, no longer willing to hold back. Her face contorted with anger, glamour helping to twist her features a step further. For a moment, she resembled the sort of faerie that cursed newborns to die from a pricked finger.
She didn’t attack me, though. She attacked my assailant, blood feeding the connection between them, leading to the natural conclusion. Jealousy, anger, frustration, a desire to have some of the relief he was finding.
I was free, as they tumbled to the ground. Flight instincts took over.
I didn’t make it one step. My flight was interrupted by a minor snag. Literally. The branches of holly that stuck out of the back of my jacket caught on the tree branches. A velcro attachment of hook to hook, in a dozen places.
I tore free with a roar.
Without the Faerie in my face, I was able to take in my surroundings.
A little ghost boy with a hooded jacket. Two fighting Faerie. Another Faerie lunging for me, getting pulled into the fight instead. Trees. And a whole lot of Others.
They came with a kind of fog, standing behind and between trees, surrounded by the moisture and the rolling snowflakes. Not zombies, despite the glistening, angry wounds that each sported, the sometimes shambling gaits. As with the Faerie, I saw resentment here and there, glares, anger, hope. A mix of emotions, a wariness about the Others they stood next to.
Many heaved and panted for breath, some whimpered or moaned.
It wasn’t so much that they were on the same side, as the fact that I was on the side of the healthy, the unwounded. That made me something to be torn down, in their twisted perspective.
“Through the squeeze,” Evan said.
“I don’t object,” I said, trying to take in the numbers and find a gap, failing. “What squeeze? What are you talking about?”
“Just over there,” he said, very quest. “Just- just- through the squeeze.”
I had an eerie sensation of someone with a stutter, trying and failing to communicate.
Was he lucid-ish, right now, but forced to communicate through riddles?
He was looking in one direction.
“Over there,” he said. “Just over there.”
On the other side of the ring of Others.
This wasn’t a situation where I could deliberate. Standing still was bad.
I charged.
Red rover, red rover. Send the stupid-ass diabolist over.
I jammed my hand into my pocket as I broke into the all-or-nothing run, intent on getting ammo, and I felt the agony explode in my hand. I was mid-stride, and very nearly forgot to bring my left foot forward again. As it was, I stumbled, lost momentum.
Broken finger, at the very least.
I pulled my hand out of my pocket, my index finger bent in a place it wasn’t supposed to bend, a single shot clutched between ring and pinky fingers.
I had a better sense of what I was doing this time around, as I popped the shotgun open and fumbled a shot inside, butt of the weapon jammed under my armpit.
The ghost ran alongside me. Flickering, keeping pace, showing different images of him standing still as he paused mid-stride to let me keep up, let me forge the way.
Too many big Others in the way, here. Not as big as the Hyena, not as big as the blind brute I’d run into before. Still… big enough.
I wasn’t about to be pinned down again. I fired off to one side, aiming to catch them off guard, then made a sharp change of direction, springing off of one toe. I swung the shotgun like club at the one I’d hit hardest with the shot. Not a big one. A smaller thing, with wood armor or wood skin or something. A bit more wind power, a bit of an impact.
He stumbled back into others, and I hurried through the gap.
Finding myself face to face with others. Five feet away, ten feet away, twenty feet away. Still approaching the source of the Hyena’s cry.
Were they obedient, or had they come to attack the thing that had hurt them so badly?
Both?
“Through the squeeze,” Evan said.
Through the squeeze. I looked to see him, and he was gone.
Trouble was drawing closer, and I didn’t trust myself to reload.
Scanning the surroundings, I found myself making eye contact with a woman.
Blonde, with one eye that sort of bugged out, the other joining three quarters of her face in being covered by blood-stained bandage. The bandage bound her tightly enough that I could tell her face wasn’t the normal shape, or she’d had a lower jaw and she didn’t anymore. The damage to her neck meant her head hung at a cocked angle.
I’d made eye contact, and I couldn’t break it. I could see the connection, hard, unyielding.
I staggered to the left, blind, and I had to turn my head to keep my eyes fixed on hers. I had little doubt that if I’d been moving, or driving, the connection would have held fast enough that I might have snapped my neck turning my head as I passed her.
She had to fight the others to get closer to me, while I blindly ran to one side, unable to look where I was going. I hit branches, trees.
I had only seconds before I got surrounded and swamped by bodies. The idea terrified me. Even with everything I’d seen, it rated as one of the worst ways to go. For me, anyhow.
She wasn’t a ghost. Something else. One of the unique sorts that urban legends were based around, like the hook-handed murderer who scratched at car handles or the murderess who appeared in mirrors in dark rooms. She was simply Other. A siren call for the eye alone.
I tried to move my hand in the way, to block the eye contact. My wrist bounced off the connection as if it were something solid, and my various injuries made their displeasure known as the impact rattled each of them.
“Through the squeeze,” Evan said, a little to my left.
I headed his way, stumbling, my feet sinking into a deeper patch of snow, hitting a rock. I was hoping that some other bastard would get far enough ahead of the eye-woman that they might block the view.