Page 56 of Horns & Heart
Chapter21
The wayhouse had an outhouse and a river nearby as well as some essentials like the blankets.I cleaned up in the river as best as I could, then pulled my clothes back on.Vergis had hung them over a branch to dry in the sun alongside his own.The brooch Nokim had given me was still there, but the scarf was filthy with orange spider brains.Its blood was blue, like monster blood usually was.
My boots hadn’t quite dried.The soles were still soggy, and I hoped the cat socks would be enough to keep me from getting blisters.
I kept casting wide-eyed stares at everything around me.The trees weren’t as alien as the ones in the other place—much more recognizable as trees, although smaller.Only a few reached up high toward the sky above.
What perfumed the air around here was an ocean of flowers that grew close to the ground, five-petaled and creamy white but fading to blue closer to the center.I bent low to sniff one, my hair still wet from washing in the river.I’d never had to wash in a river before, and I hoped I wouldn’t ever have to do it again.
“You can chew them.Makes you high.”Vergis had walked up to me silently, and his sudden presence right in front of me made me fall backward onto my ass.
“Ouch!I’m not here to get high!”
He shrugged.“Suit yourself.”He bent down and picked one of the pretty flowers, put it in his mouth, and started chewing.
“For real?”
He shrugged.“No coffee.I get cranky if I don’t get my caffeine hit.I put the wayhouse back in order.If you’re finally done splashing around in the river, we should go.”
“Oh, just the lack of caffeine that makes you cranky, huh?”I scrambled back to my feet.I wasn’t at all looking forward to doing any kind of walking, but I wanted to make sure Inkiri was okay.“We can go.”
Vergis grunted, turned around, and started walking.I grabbed my jacket off the branch nearby, pushed the soiled scarf into its pocket, and hurried along.
As it turned out, this forest wasn’t completely wild.From the wayhouse, we followed a path that was at least somewhat maintained, and that in turn led to a road that was even paved.
“What’s this place like?”I teased one of the neatly fitted stones that made up the road that cut through the forest with the tip of my boot.“I mean, is the civilization here like the Middle Ages?”
I left the stone alone since it didn’t look like it was going to budge and caught up to Vergis so we were walking side by side.He turned to me, and I saw his massive horns shimmer in the sunlight.For once, he didn’t look as if my very presence was offensive to him.
“Some steam and water power.Magic doing stuff here and there still.”He smirked.“By the way, you have a blood worm stuck to your throat, human.”
My hand flew up to the side of my neck and landed on something soft and squishy.I screamed.
“What the heck!Get it off me!”
Vergis laughed and crossed his arms to watch me.
I pulled on the thing, and that was when I felt it.It was sticking to the side of my neck, pulling the skin with it.That fucking hurt.
“Get it off!Please?”I looked up at Vergis.
He was still chuckling when he grabbed my hand and pulled out his knife with his other.
“No!Oh, no no no.You’re not cutting into me with that thing!”I tried pulling back, but he had fierce grip strength.
“Hmm.I hadn’t thought about that.Might work.Stop being such a wuss and wish for nice weather.”
My heart hammered in my chest.Vergis had told me to wash in the fucking river without warning me about bloodworms.I wasn’t sure he hadn’t planned all of this, but that mattered less than getting that thing off me right then.He was a game of roulette in the trust department, at best.
I briefly considered wishing for him to get hemorrhoids, and I’d have done that too if I didn’t think he’d manage to turn that around and make it my problem somehow.Instead, I said, “I wish that we have nice weather for our trip.”
The blade in Vergis’s hand glowed.A second later, I saw black ash scatter in front of my face as the hand Vergis held heated.
When he released me and put the knife back into its sheath, I felt along my neck, but the blood worm was gone.There was just a small wound where it had been.My fingers came away smeared with a few drops of blood.
I rubbed the little stain between my fingers.“Magic takes a sacrifice.A life.You said it couldn’t do that.You said the Koa Esher can’t use magic to hurt our guys.”
“They can’t, at least not like this.It requires preparation, just like those sacrifice jars they use are prepared before use.You’re a conduit though, and conduits can pull anything into the sacrifice.Makes it fast.Normally, you have to mark a sacrifice or set up a ko-circle—a magic circle.But you can pull magical energy through a conduit, like back in the lake.When you wished for Nokim’s arrows to hit, you pulled the sacrificial force from whatever fish or eels it took to let us pass through the veils.”
