“Aww, fuck,” the dog whimpered.
“Kill that fucking dog!” I yelled.
“Huh?” Fridu said.
“The dog! Kill it!” Gerik had ostrich necks wrapped around both his arms, holding him helpless, and another around his neck, choking the thief’s life away. Molly was on her back with three ostriches raking at her with their clawed feet, leaving lines of blood and what amounted to trenches in her flesh. Another ostrich kicked at me, sending me flying and knocking my head against the side of the stairs.
“Kill that dog!” I tried to yell, but it came out muffled. The wall had stunned me. My legs felt like water. Two ostrich heads appeared in my vision, their fanged mouths grinning and their eyes full of death. One latched onto me, biting and clawing. Molly couldn’t make it back to her feet. There was no room. Her struggles were fading. Gerik’s face was purple.
And then the ostriches were gone.
“Oh,” Fridu said. “That worked?” The dog’s body fell down the stairs, bumping and bouncing, with a burning hole in the side of its head. A wicked, unfriendly smell. As the dog’s body bounced down the stairs, it changed. By the time it hit the bottom and slumped against the iron door it was a young woman. Maybe my age. Early twenties. She had long black hair melted to the destroyed side of her face. Her features had been elven, with pointed ears poking through her hair. Dark brown eyes open in death. She’d been a frail thing, spindle-stick limbs, wearing what amounted to a one-piece bathing suit made of fur.
“How’d you know she was a sorceress?” Fridu asked from the top of the stairs.
“I didn’t. I just thought she was an asshole dog. Molly’s hurt.” I hurried down the steps as I spoke. Molly was on her back, frowning, cursing, trying to hold her stomach in place. She’d been ripped wide open. Every time she moved, things tried to slide out. Blood welled up from her wounds. Her face was ashen.
“Fucking birds?” she said. Her voice was weak. I kept slipping on the stairs. Too much blood. I passed Gerik, giving him an accidental shoulder in the tight confines. He was leaned against the wall, gasping for breath, with a line of purple around his throat where the ostrich’s neck had nearly strangled him. His aura of darkness fluctuated, as if he was lit by flickering light.
“Those fucking birds?” Molly said, her voice dwindling, looking at her stomach in disbelief. It was like freshly tilled soil. But bloodier. I stumbled to a stop at the bottom of the stairs, slamming into the iron door in my haste, with one foot stepping momentarily on the leg of the dead elf. Her body shifted, sliding in the puddle of blood.
“Heal!” I shouted, pressing my hand to Molly’s stomach. I felt power surging in me, along with my fear welling up. Molly’s wounds began knitting together, but too slow. The color kept draining from her face. She was shivering, complaining about being cold. Her limbs were going slack. The clawed feet of the murderous ostriches had dug deep, ripping wide gouges and terrible valleys. The barbarian was a mess. I had one hand pressed to her stomach, focusing all the healing I could give her, and another on the side of her face, whispering and shouting encouragement, telling her to hold on, to stay with us, to fight.
“Fight!” I told her. “Stay conscious! Look at me! Stay with me! Fight! Don’t you want to avenge your mother?” And all the time I could feel the power surging through my chest, racing into my arm, blasting out from my palm and into Molly.
There was movement at my shoulder and then Fridu was there, leaning over Molly, pressed up against me. Water spilled from a canteen in her hands. It just kept spilling and spilling, more water than possible, so that we were both soon kneeling in rising water, two or three inches at the bottom of the stairs, mixed with alarming amounts of blood as the waters poured over Molly’s wounds, cleansing them so that we could see the progress of her healing.
“C’mon, Molly!” I yelled. “Fight!” The wounds were still knitting together, but there were so many of them. Molly’s breaths were low. Out of sync. I wanted to scream. Maybe I was already screaming. I didn’t know.
I’m not sure how long it all lasted. It felt like forever. But after some time I became aware that Fridu was shaking my shoulder. Trying to pull me back.
“Stop it!” I barked at her. “I need to save Molly!”
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“She’s fine, Josh!” Fridu said. “Molly’s fine.”
“What?” I said, but with realization already dawning on me. I looked up from Molly’s stomach and gazed straight into her eyes. She looked strong. Amused. Mocking. She looked like Molly, in other words.
“Why were you so scared?” she said. “There’s no way any dumb birds were going to kill Molly the Barbarian.”
“They kinda did, though,” Fridu noted. “You were basically a pile of bloody confetti.”
“Yeah I suppose,” Molly agreed, in a dismissive tone that made it clear the topic was boring.
“Honestly,” Fridu said, “I’m not sure you would’ve made it if Josh hadn’t immediately jumped right on you.”
“That’s the kind of guy I am,” I said. “Willing to jump on Molly at any time.”
“I’ve noticed,” Molly said. “And I’m also noticing that your hand is disappointed I wasn’t grievously wounded on my ass.” She raised an eyebrow and looked down to where my hand was resting on her stomach, fingers splayed out, slightly rubbing.
“No worries about that,” I told Molly. “Your ass is invulnerable. It looks hard as steel.” Molly started to say something, but then we were all just laughing, letting go of the tension in the stairway, because despite all the joking we knew that we’d almost lost Molly. Hell, we’d almost lost everyone. I took my hand from Molly’s stomach and started to stand, but Molly reached out and pulled me closer. Her lips met my cheek. She gave me a kiss and whispered, “Thanks” in my ear. I stood up wobbly, but there might have been other reasons.
“How you feeling, Gerik?” I asked. He was leaned against the side of the stairs, rubbing his throat.
“Like I was one step away from a death that would be giggled about in taverns,” he rasped out. “But otherwise fine. Does anybody recognize the woman?”
“Not me,” I said. I didn’t look very close. I didn’t want to see her. She’d been beautiful. She was dead. I didn’t want to think about it.
“Never seen her,” Molly said.
“Me either,” Fridu said, but then, “Wait. Hold on.” She knelt in the shallow water and rolled the woman’s head back and forth, holding her chin, squinting. I watched from the corner of my eyes.
“Yeah,” Fridu said, releasing the corpse’s chin. “This is Gaile. She used to come to a series of informal coven meetings I had going on, a couple decades back. She specialized in shape-changing. A total bitch. We kicked her out.”
“Why?” I asked.
“She stole a spellbook. You just… don’t do that. And the book was my friend’s. A woman named Tonba. She had the book in her library, somewhat guarded by a trio of parrots she’d had for something like thirty years. Gaile killed them. They were witnesses to her crime.”
“She does sound like a bitch.” Gerik said. “All you did was kick her out of your meetings? I’d have done more.”
Fridu shrugged and said, “Ah, coven life.” I didn’t really understand what she meant, but the others just nodded like it made perfect sense.
“Coven life?” I said. “How does—?”
“Iron door,” Gerik said.
“Huh?” I said.
“We’re getting distracted by something that’s frankly pretty secondary to who or whatever’s behind this door we’re standing next to, and which could burst open at moment to unleash a horde of people to stab us while we’re standing here like toddlers with our wee-wees in our hands.”
“Point taken,” Molly said. “But I don’t have a wee-wee; I have a medusa. One sight of her and men turn to stone. Parts of them, anyway.” She had her hand on the latch to the iron door. Gerik had managed to pick the lock before the long-necked cobra-ostriches appeared. Molly began opening the door, inch by inch, grinning, enjoying the squeak of the door and the tension of the moment. If I’d been her, I’d still be reliving the moments I’d almost died, and would likely be doing so for several months or even years. Molly had moved past such trifles in a manner of minutes.
I looked to the door as it opened. I looked to the dead woman on the floor. I thought of the Fox Geas on my flesh and the cult of assassins who wanted me dead. I wondered what was behind the door and I hoped it wouldn’t make my life even more complicated. I could use a doorway that opened to some solutions, not problems.
There was good light in the room behind the iron door, which looked like a richly appointed medieval bedroom. The bed was an acreage and looked as soft as clouds. There were twin dressers and an open washing room and a writing desk and a large open window that looked out, impossibly, on a meadow.
Another window looked out, more impossibly, on the street in front of the Leaky Centaur bar in Whitewater, with the festival and market in full swing. There was a cat perched in that window, regarding us with the disdain of a cat that’s had its nap interrupted. My gaze swept past the cat to the multitude of paintings on the wall, and to the plants that were so numerous that they reminded me of the jungle of Salena’s apartment, back when I was a kid.
There were a good many things to look at in the room, but only one of them truly caught my attention.
In the middle of the room was a woman, facing the door as we stepped through. She was dressed in loose-fitting robes, like the ones from old time martial arts movies, which seemed fitting because she was in a martial arts stance, one fist glowing with unearthly power. Her eyes were fierce.
Her robes were colorful, with a fox emblem embroidered on the fabric of her chest, depicted as caught in the middle of a leap.
The colorful clothes acted in contrast to the woman, whose skin was incredibly dark. Her hair was short. Her eyes flickered to Gerik and his sword. They swept to Molly and her axe, and to Fridu holding a wand amidst swirls of power. And then the woman’s eyes slid to mine, briefly, before glancing down to the small tide of water and blood that seeped in at our feet, but then the woman’s eyes widened and returned sharply to mine. Her fists wavered. The glow dimmed.
“Josh?” she stammered out, confused.
“Binsa?” I said to my sister. “What are you doing here?”
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