The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [120]
“Bitch?” said Awa, licking her lips. “Is that a dog joke? Funny.”
It rose back up on all fours, a low growl giving way to her voice again, and a single word with a much deeper inflection. “ I have come here to eat the dead, not to be barked at by Awa. I mean you harm. I have come here to eat Awa.”
“Well shit,” said Awa, and it lunged forward.
Her dagger punched through its cheek and glanced off its jawbone, the creature emitting the scream of a young girl as it wrenched itself away and dashed past her, skittering around the gravestones and disappearing in the thicket of stone markers. Her knife hand was dripping with its blood, and Awa almost laughed, the battle won before it had started, when she noticed her fingernails were digging into her slick palm. She did not have to look down to realize her knife was gone, that the monster had bit down on the blade and yanked it out of her hand and run off with it, and Awa was dashing toward the crypt even as it called out from the shadow of the wall behind her with the child’s voice, “Looking at Awa, looking at Awa!”
It had been years since Awa was genuinely terrified, but she fell back into it easily enough. She was not breathing, which was a good start, and her vision was blurring, and she could not make herself turn and fight even though she knew it could outrun her, knew it was right behind her, knew she was doomed. Her bonebird was dipping through the air in front of her and she followed the course it charted through the cemetery, the avian construct leading her toward the high crypt. Like a hounded stag bounding over a stream, she saw a stone slab jutting out of the snow and leaped for it. Instead of propelling her up to the safety of the crypt’s roof, her right foot slid on top of the snowy gravestone and she fell forward into the side of the mausoleum.
Unlike her childhood escape attempt from the necromancer’s hut, when she had jumped across a chasm only to have a dead tree knock the wind from her, Awa had not taken a breath in nearly a minute and so had no breath to lose, and the sensation of three ribs cracking like kindling no longer brought the debilitating pain it once had—almost, but not quite. Her callused fingers closed on the edge of the mausoleum’s roof, ignoring the agony her elbows shot into them as they too struck the crypt, and Awa hauled herself up over the top of the structure. Her palms slapped the icy stone, dragging her stomach over the sharp lip of the crypt roof, her legs curling up behind her instead of trying to find purchase on the side of the mausoleum as her bird frantically fluttered above her.
Then it rose like a fish breaking the surface of a pond, the furry ridge of its back tickling her thigh, and iron-hard teeth bit into her hoof. She had no breath to scream with and so she gasped, her fingers stretching out toward the opposite end of the roof, to cling to the edge so it could not pull her off, and then she was falling. Awa tried to scream, so that the villagers in the town would hear and help, so that anyone would hear, even Omorose or her tutor, anyone, but then that precious scream was knocked out of her lungs on the frozen ground as it brought her to earth, the pain in her chest every bit as monstrous and powerful as her attacker.
Awa lay contorted on the ground, the beast towering over her. It had her hoof in its mouth, the ensorcelled string that normally disguised it having come loose or been bitten clean through, and those shining pink gums strained as it bit down harder, its delighted yellow eyes squinting from the strain. Then her hoof cracked, blood running off its hot tongue and dribbling down her leg. It dropped her, its purple tongue running over its wide teeth, and Awa saw that in addition to her mangled hoof, the leg was twisted, broken, and blackening.
The bloody