‘Yeah, me doing spontaneous magic,’ I muttered, linking my hand with his, which was warm and firm and filled me with totally inappropriate ideas about how it’d feel on my body. ‘Like that’s really gonna happen.’
‘Hey, have some faith, Gen,’ he said, plunging into the thicket and pulling me behind him.
I yelped, felt the gorse scratch at my ankles, the brambles snag at my clothes, then the magic slipped over me like grass tickling my skin and darkness swirled as we left the humans’ world. Cinders crunched under my feet as I stepped on to the path: the safe way to travel through unclaimed Between. Paths mean you get to where you’re going, and don’t end up lost or falling prey to the cannibalistic half-formed— semi-evolved spirits hungry for magic and flesh. Finn tugged on my hand and I took another step. My bones seemed to lighten as if gravity had lessened and for a second I felt energised. Then fierce sunshine made me squint, loud bellows followed by high-pitched screams assaulted my ears and I gagged on the stench of shit and sulphur.
‘Hell’s thorns!’ Finn yanked me down behind an ochre-coloured boulder the size of a small car. ‘No wonder it’s so overgrown, a herd of swamp-dragons have moved in.’
I peered round the boulder. About twenty huge beasts, the size of double-decker buses, looking like a mutant rhinos with scales, small vestigial wings and long whip-like barbed tails, were lumbering through the steaming yellow smoke of an apocalyptic-style landscape, snatching at the charred remains of trees. Around another fifteen or so swampies were wallowing in the massive bubbling sulphur craters, sending rivers of liquid sulphur cascading over the craters’ edges. The liquid sulphur shone red like streams of super-heated blood and I could just see its fey-like blue flame as it burned.
Swamp-dragon is a misnomer. The name comes from their first appearance back in the mangrove swamps in Java, Indonesia, in the 1690s. It was thought to be their natural habitat before it was discovered the swampies were just on walkabout after emerging from the Kawah Ijen volcano in the east. They’d made enough of an impression last time I’d run into them, I’d done research.
Good thing about swamp-dragons is they have less intelligence than a cow, aren’t the fastest creatures for their size, and, unsurprisingly given the nose-stinging environment, have absolutely no sense of smell.
Bad thing is they’re omnivores and will munch on anything they stumble across. Usually after stomping on it like they’re playing whack-a-mole: their standard method of disabling prey, despite being able to breathe fire. So long as we could run fast, dodge their tractor-wheel-sized feet, and stay on the cinder path, we’d be okay. Probably.
Another high-pitched scream came from above us, followed by a tiny body thudding onto the boulder then bouncing off to land at my feet. A garden fairy, his throat slashed, still twitching in the last throes of ecstasy as he died. I blinked at it, and then, as another screaming, entangled pair zipped past us, it clicked that this had to be where Lecherous Lampy the gnome was getting his out-of-season stock from. The heat from the swamp-dragons had accelerated the fairies’ life cycle, and being small and fast, the swampies weren’t likely to eat them.
They would us.
I looked at Finn. He’d dropped his human Glamour. His horns curved a good foot above his head, his body still athletic but shoulders and chest broader, muscles thicker, more honed. The angles of his face sharper, feral and even more gorgeous than his clean-cut handsome look— Lust coiled tight in my belly. Forget stinking, stomping swamp-dragons, I wanted to hole-up with him somewhere for at least a week. No, make that a month. I closed my eyes, forced the feelings back.
‘So,’ I said, adding an airy note to my voice, ‘want to go back, or run for it?’
‘Run for it?’ He shook his head. ‘Hell’s thorns, Gen, are you crazy? One slip and we’d be swampie pancakes.’
A low chuffing cough sounded behind us.
We turned as one.
A dark grey cat, striped with black and the size of the tigers in the zoo, crouched belly low to the ground about ten feet away. It stared at us out of gleaming green eyes, ears flat to its skull, tail swishing from side to side as if readying to pounce.
‘What the fuck is that?’ I muttered.
‘Haven’t a clue, Gen,’ Finn replied just as quietly, ‘but it doesn’t look friendly.’
The cat gave another low chuffing sound and its lips drew back, seemingly in a grin, exposing more of its long sabretooth fangs.
‘It doesn’t,’ I agreed. ‘And it’s blocking the exit.’ Coincidence or deliberate? I sent my inner radar out. ‘It pings as an animal. No magic, nothing like human or fae in there.’
‘My take too.’
‘I’m guessing it could be some sort of ailuranthrope?’ I said, though I’d never heard of a weretiger, or even a normal tiger, that strange grey and black colour, not to mention the big cat looked suspiciously like the one that had climbed out of the abyss on the Moon tarot card. The card had said, ‘The beasts are coming.’ Maybe it hadn’t been talking about the Emperor and his werewolves after all.
‘Whatever it is,’ Finn said grimly, ‘there’s only one of it, and nearly forty swampies.’
‘Think we can take it?’ I asked, dropping my backpack and kicking it out of the way.
The cat gave a guttural growl.
Finn made a similar low sound. ‘Is the sky blue?’
I looked up. Blue sky wasn’t always a given in Between. It was now, if you ignored the smoky yellow haze from the sulphur.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘How about I try to scare it, and if it doesn’t run, you do your horny bit.’ Then we were high-tailing it to the nearest hotel in the humans’ world. ‘On three, two, one—’ I jumped up, yelling and waving my arms, and ran at the cat.
It sat back on it haunches, a ‘you’ve got to be kidding me’ look on its face.
I skidded to a stop, Finn’s arms going round my waist as he dragged me back. ‘Guess that answers the question whether it’s an animal or not,’ I said, glaring at the cat.
‘Oh, he is an animal, Ms Taylor,’ a familiar smarmy voice said. ‘But not just an animal.’ A squat figure appeared out of the charred foliage at the base of the twin-stemmed oak tree: Mr Lampy, the wrinkles in his round face deepening as he gave us a wide smile, his ultra-white human dentures blinding. The mustard-coloured lichen mapping his bald pate ruffled in the hot wind. His bare feet crunched on the cinder path as he strained forward, pulling what looked like the bastard child of a wheelbarrow and a chariot behind him. He stopped once he was fully through the entrance, produced a dirty hanky from his tweed jacket and mopped his face.
‘What’s going on?’ I demanded.
‘I’m guessing an ambush of some sort,’ Finn breathed against my ear. ‘You run for it while I hold the cat off. Keep to the left of the cinder path and look for a copse of goat willow by a small stream; the entrance there will bring you out on Wimbledon Common near the windmill. Speak to Dimitris’ – Finn’s closest brother – ‘and he’ll bring help.’
It was a sensible plan. Running the swampies’ foot-stomping gauntlet wasn’t that hard. I knew how to run, even if the recent chaos had meant I’d missed my usual morning exercise the last few days. But I wasn’t going to leave Finn to deal with the big cat and the gnome on his own, however sensible-sounding his plan. It didn’t feel right, not when there were two of us, and two of them. But as I was about to object, another grey and black striped big cat slunk through the entrance behind the gnome as if it were embarrassed to be here. Then as if to seal the deal, a third big cat bounded through, skidding to a clumsy halt next to the others. Fuck. No way could we outrun all three of them.
The gnome gave a satisfied sniff and tucked his hanky away. ‘Glad you decided to take my suggestion and look into the path here, Ms Taylor.’ Crap, I’d forgotten he’d asked me to do that. ‘It really does make things easier for me.’