“You’d think I should kill her even if there wasn’t an excuse. You have a choice here. Agree to obey me and do me and mine no harm for the next year, and I’ll free your hands. Refuse, and I leave you here for something to find.”
“Might take my chances.”
“You might. Decide now. Offer expires when I’m done counting down from five.”
“Five seconds? You whore!”
“Four seconds.”
“Choke on a shit-covered dick!”
“Decide fast or the genie, elf, wraith king or whatever else that finds you decides your fate.”
He turned to the foreign swear words again.
“One second…”
“Fuck! Yes.”
“Say it, just so we’re clear.”
“I obey you, one year.”
Well, that had been easy.
In fact, she was so caught off guard by how easy it had been that she mentally stumbled. She’d been expecting him to be stubborn and stay behind, and now she felt obligated to bring him along.
Just how scared was he?
“Coolio. You stay close to me. Alert me quickly and clearly to any meaningful danger. Avoid interacting with any other entity or object except when and how I tell you to. You can talk to me, but I expect a measure of respect.”
“Can I fucking breathe?” he asked.
“Yes. You can walk and carry out other simple tasks.”
“Because the air and floor are objects.”
She pulled the stiletto free from where she’d jammed it into the space between locker door and frame.
He grunted.
“Work with me and we’ll relax the rules later. Make this difficult, and you’ll have a very boring year.”
“Bitch.”
“Respect, or do you want to be forsworn in your duties?”
“Said it quiet, indoor voice,” he said, looking around at the spot where the shotgun had blasted away a portion of his rear end. He was durable. Dense little bastard, underneath that loose skin. Sullen, he said, “Modicum of respect. Not forsworn.”
“Don’t swear at me.”
He made a noise like a dying cow might. She realized it was a groan.
“And no annoying sounds, either.”
“Uh huh.”
She knew goblins, and she knew he’d be thinking about a way to get around her rules and do something suitably problematic.
For now, he was being quiet, half-walking, half-crawling to follow her. She didn’t slow down for him. Let him get tired out, he’d be less of a problem later.
She looked for the child, and she couldn’t find her. Not even with the Sight.
“Quiet,” she murmured, as they ascended a half-flight of stairs, approaching classrooms.
Voices?
She moved along the wall, approaching the first classroom.
No.
She was nearly silent as she approached the next. Her leg ached more from the more controlled, precise movements.
At the next classroom door, she could hear the voices more clearly.
“-Else besides the scary gun chick and the cute little whatsit creature?” A young male voice.
“It definitely wasn’t cute. Very definitely wasn’t. But it was just them, I think. I didn’t look for long.” Girl’s voice.
“Damn it. If we could just ask… are you sure she wasn’t friendly?”
“If she was thirty, muscley and wearing a bloodstained tank top and headband and carrying a gun, and she was doing what she was doing to some Nazi supersoldier or something in a movie, I wouldn’t think twice. But she’s like, your age, Noah. And she’s a she, and that thing was small and it’s worse.”
“And she’s human?” Male voice, less young than the first.
“Like I said, I only looked for a second and then I ran, but she had this metal wand, and I think that’s it.”
The girl in the checkered scarf looked down at her pipe shotgun.
She reached out and knocked on the door. It creaked a bit as the touch made it open a fraction wider.
No response, not a noise.
She pushed the door open, checked for possible traps, magical or otherwise, then rounded the corner, entering the classroom with arms extended, pipe in one hand.
They’d backed up, plastering themselves against walls. Virtually silent in the process.
Two boys, two girls.
They looked terrified to the point that she wondered if they would have heart attacks. Each was frozen like a deer in the headlights.
Three were young, about ten. One of the ten year olds resembled the older boy, Noah, who was in his mid teens. Definitely younger than her, despite what the kid had said. The foibles of youth.
“I mean you no harm.”
They didn’t budge.
Jesus. The fear on their faces.
Were there more people like this around the city? People who’d seen the Other stuff and managed to stay alive?
For any Other that liked their mortals running scared, these guys would be like candy.
Poor frigging saps.
She looked for and found Buttsack standing in the doorway, a few steps behind her.
“Hey, this is the goblin I was talking to. Buttsack, say hello.”
“Hello, whelps,” Buttsack said, in a low growl.
“Say it nicely.”
He gave her the dirtiest look he could manage, then plastered a smile on his face, wide enough to make his eyes scrunch up. It somehow made him look far, far more terrifying. He clasped wounded hands together, twisting them in front of him. In a higher pitched voice, he said, “Hello, adorable little sweethearts.”
There was a pause.
Frigging goblins.
“You named him Buttsack?” one of the younger boys asked.
Frigging goblin names.
“No. He came with the name,” she said, sighing a bit. “Look, kids, whatever you think you saw, Buttsack and I are sort of allies right now. You could even call us friends, since we have common interests. Getting out of this place alive being one of them. Right? You can tell them.”
“We’re allies, just like she said,” Buttsack said, nodding a little too energetically. “She might want you to be friends too.”
He sounded like he was trying to coo as he said that last sentence. It came out strained.
Motherfucking goblins.
The kids looked more scared.
“Look,” she said. “I mean you no harm, unless you come after me or try to stab me in the back somehow. You’ve got questions, I’ve got answers. When I’m done supplying the answers I can give you, I want to ask you some minor stuff. Deal?”
She saw them break their frozen positions to glance at one another.
“Who are you?” This from Noah’s little brother.
“I’m the girl with no name, unfortunately. Long story. I’m, in some ways, a lot like you. A bad, scary, frigging strange situation got dropped on my hometown, I barely made it out alive.”
“This is happening in other places?”
“Nn-Yes, but not like you mean. What happened to my hometown was… different.”
Her memories of the scenes, of the blood, flooded back to her.
Painful, ugly, but maybe it was good to touch base with that particular connection. As connections to things went, her name wasn’t a big part of her attachment to hometown, and her hometown wasn’t something Padraic could or would necessarily take away from her.