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Jazz then noticed its open mouth and thought, Oh no! That can’t be a mouth. The dark opening held her horribly fascinated; it was full of spiked hairs, and those hairs had living, biting snakeheads at their tips. Lots and lots of mouths to feed, she told herself, thinking she was in an awful place and that she really needed to leave.
Her confidence vanished. Sheer and complete terror took over. “TREVOR!” she screamed.
Trevor cursed softly. “I know this beast!” he called out to her. “It has its origins in Danu.”
“Where can we go?” she wailed. “It is coming fast!”
“Don’t worry, I have a plan. This thing was created without benefit of the Wheel of Being, a derivative of the Krill.”
“You’re giving me a history of this thing’s family tree?” she asked incredulously. “Just tell me how we kill it!”
It stopped suddenly and looked directly at Trevor as though puzzling out just how to get past him to its food.
It obviously had decided she was just what it needed to eat, immediately. However, the creature appeared to be leery of Trevor, and it clawed the ground angrily.
Jazz wondered, did it recognize Trevor as Fae? She looked into the beast’s soulless eyes and did, in fact, think she saw intelligence seated there. She felt a pang of sympathy for the beast. What was this Dark King that he had created so much havoc and pain, leaving all these creatures to fend for themselves?
Trevor had his Death Sword in hand and yelled over the beast’s roar at her, “Stay out of its way—STAY PUT. Its saliva is poisonous—to you, poisonous. Do you understand?”
She nodded vigorously. She had every intention of staying out of its way.
Trevor shifted onto the creature’s back, stood, and got ready to plunge his Death Sword. Then the unthinkable happened.
The beast stood and swiped the air with its huge claws, and Trevor lost his balance and fell.
The beast went back on all four and looked as though it was about to devour Trevor whole.
Jazz reacted; she ran forward, getting in its face to distract it. “Hey—you! Come on. You don’t want him—you want me …!”
It growled ferociously at her and forgot Trevor for the moment as it shook its enormous tawny mane and lowered its head while stalking towards her.
Trevor was already up and shouting at her to run, and she did, wondering how Trevor had recovered so quickly.
The beast was nearly on her, and she said a silent prayer as she looked over her shoulder to see Trevor once again on its back.
He plunged the Death Sword deep inside the beast. As it toppled to the ground, he shifted in front of it, saying ancient Danu words as he raised his sword again, this time with a slashing expertise that left it decapitated. What he apparently didn’t see as he got busy calling on a fire to burn the head was that, as the beast fell and rolled, it disgorged its last meal, one that was still alive.
Jazz’s eyebrows rose with her horror as a creature no taller than she but with many more legs, spidery legs, jumped onto the dry, dead earth and paused.
It looked like an overgrown tarantula until its protruding eyes discovered her standing there. She swore to herself that it somehow smiled … an evil, I’m coming for you smile.
Something grotesque popped out of the top of its hairy body, and Jazz saw that it was another head—this one the size of a melon. In addition to the many eyes that this head sported was a row of gnashing, chomping, razor-like teeth.
She ran. There was nowhere to go but towards the oddly shaped glass building ahead. Maybe someone there, assuming that someone was there, might take pity on her situation and let her in.
She switched into Fios and used her Fios speed. She knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t help herself—she looked over shoulder to see if the beast was gaining on her. It was. She was so dead.
She was almost at the glass house … almost, when she looked back once more and discovered that the monstrous spidery thing had stopped. It raised up onto four of its eight legs and gave what appeared to be a victory cry
Magic! Because of her fear she had forgotten what she could do. With her back to the wall, so to speak, she turned and centered all her thoughts into one. She took whatever Dark Magic the creature had inside it and slammed that Dark Magic right back at it. YES, she told herself, Fios slamming.
It took the hit like a cannonball to its center, a center that had produced a suction-cup mouth with canines, and the beast went flying backwards.
All this had happened in less than a minute.
Trevor hadn’t yet noticed any of this as he made certain the krill was burned and unable to rise up.
Jazz turned back to the glass building and began pounding on its walls but got nothing. After what was only a moment though seemed an age to her, she turned to see the thing had righted itself and was coming at her once more as though it were driven by steam engines.
