Page 42 of Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay

Nose the dog came bursting through the trees, sprinting past them at full speed, and Bridget turned to see an enormous bristle-haired pig following him, its yellowed tusks black with gore, its hoofs carving dark scars in the earth as it prepared to charge.

She didn’t think. There wasn’t time. She stepped toward the pig, looked to Gwen, and shouted, “Run!”

Gwen’s horse, unfailingly sensible, didn’t need telling twice—but the boar was already charging, resolute and unstoppable, and the horse had no place to go that didn’t contain tree or monster.

The pig wasscreaming, such a hoarse, human shout that it struck unbridled terror into Bridget’s heart; she leaped between that scream and Gwen, her sword raised, waiting for the noise to stop and the pain to begin.

She was hit hard, the impact throwing her against hot legs and hoofs; her vision went black and her head clattered with agony, her arms buckling, boiling to the elbows. There was something on top of her, smothering her,crushingher.

The ragged scream went on and on.

“Bridget,” someone was saying. “Bridget.”

Bridget realized she’d closed her eyes. When she opened them, she found that the boar had come to a sudden stop at the end of her sword, its weight pinning her legs, the blade buried in the roof of its open mouth up to the hilt.

Shewas the one still screaming.

She stopped at once, her throat sore with effort. Gwen’s horse had jumped free and, miracle of miracles, hadn’t staved in Bridget’s skull in the process.

The boar grunted, shifted, and Bridget took one scarlet hand off the slippery pommel of her sword and reached toward John, who was holding his large, ugly knife just slightly out of range. He tossed it to her, she caught it by the handle, and then with the kind of steady-handed precision she never could have manufactured outside of a life-or-death situation, she killed the boar with one true strike between the ears.

“God!” Gwen said, dismounting clumsily from her horse and rushing to Bridget’s side. “Are you hurt? Bridget? Are you all right?”

“Yep,” Bridget said, pushing backward away from the boar until her legs were free and her back was supported by a tree, dropping both knife and sword and busying herself cleaning her hands on her cloak, so that she might conceal how hard they were now shaking. She couldn’t stop looking at the boar.

This was good, wasn’t it? Proof that she was better at being a sword in the order of the round table than a tourney knight riding in the lists. She’d killed the boar. No forfeiting, no withdrawing. Of course, in this case, to forfeit would have meant certain death.

So why didn’t itfeelgood?

John came over, retrieved his knife, then offered Bridgeta hand. “Neatly done,” he said before he hauled her up, as casual as if she’d just scored a double at darts.

Nose the dog threw himself at the boar and bravely proceeded to worry its leg, apparently determined to take some credit for its felling.

“Get away, Nose,” John said crossly, and Nose gave the leg one last nip before backing off.

Bridget inspected herself and found that, vast quantities of hog blood notwithstanding, she was mostly unblemished. A few minor cuts and scrapes to her face, and her legs would be sorely bruised, but that was all.

The scream would take longer to recover from. She’d never heard herself make a sound like it. Frankly, she’d never heardanyonemake a sound like it. She was ashamed, instantly and utterly. She shrugged off Gwen’s comforting hand, unthinking, as the feeling spiked in her chest—and saw the way Gwen stepped back sharply from her, and felt even worse.

“I’ll dispose of this,” John said, going to Gwen’s horse to retrieve the sack containing the kitten, which squeaked as if it had heard and understood its fate.

“No,” Gwen said quickly. “Um, thank you, John, but the king will want to see this. For… posterity, you know? And research. If it’s spawn of the Beast.”

“Right you are,” said John, throwing the bag over the back of Gwen’s saddle with a carelessness that made the princess wince, and securing it to the billet, where it immediately began to bother the horse. Bridget wrapped her cloak around her hands, took hold of her sword, and pulled it from the boar with a long, slick heave.

The dog was beseeching them to follow him again, his tail wagging, urgency in his eyes. “I reckon Nose can hear your knights,” John said. Bridget wasn’t sure if she was imaginingthe newfound respect in the word “knights,” which might before have been said with a healthy measure of disdain.

They remounted, and followed Nose into the wood. The canopy above them opened up, bright harlequin patches of daylight creeping in through the gaps in the branches, and eventually they came to a stream, where they found Nose, tail wagging, with his face buried in the crotch of the King of England.

Gabriel, who was scratching behind the dog’s ears, didn’t look up at first, so it was Arthur who said, “Christ! What the hell, Leclair?”

“Boar,” said Bridget.

“Boar! Bloody boar, we had a run-in with it too. Did it get you?”

“Nope.”

“She killed it,” Gwen said, carefully alighting from her horse and untying the sack. “We think we found the Beast. She was already dead: I imagine the boar killed her. And this is her… um… baby?”