Parasite Soul (16 page)

Spitting mud, Simon fought desperately for purchase in the mire as
the wendigo rounded on him. This creature, then, had been stalking them
all along, no doubt waiting until they separated to attack. Simon
regretted dismissing Niu’s concerns, that night in the barn, but there was
nothing for it now: he was alone, unarmed, and entirely unprepared for
the attack.

“I…” he sputtered, grasping at a flimsy and protesting sapling to
anchor himself, “I’m not your enemy, I wanted to free you, remember?”

The wendigo bared its teeth, hunching in a predatory crouch,
preparing to spring. Simon scrambled clumsily to his feet and backed
away, arms outthrust.

“Look,” he managed as the creature, hissing softly, glared balefully
at him from behind a curtain of greasy, tangled locks. “I never meant
for… it wasn’t
my
idea to… Why would you come after
me
…?”

Because he thinks he’s protecting his family, such as it was.
Every muscle in the creature’s body strained taught.
The hunger in its eyes was terrible. Simon fervently wished he’d brought
Sasha along, after all.

“I’m a fugitive, like you! I wouldn’t tell anyone about what
went on in your…”

He cried out as the wendigo sprang, shielding himself with crossed
arms as the weight of the monster bore him down into the muck. His world
was reduced to a blur of snapping teeth and rotten breath as he grappled
desperately with his assailant to prevent it closing its reeking jaws on his
face. Predator and prey churned the spongy soil with thrashing feet,
struggling for control. Stained incisors raked Simon’s forearm, tearing
flesh, spattering them both with blood. The metallic scent seemed to
drive the wendigo wild; it began to batter Simon relentlessly with fists while
Simon howled and kicked beneath it.

This is it, then
, Simon thought in
panic.
I’m going to die. This is the inglorious end of the great
Dragonslayer. And maybe I deserve it; if I’m dead, I can’t ruin any more
lives
.

“What in the name of Lesquann’s shriveled tits?” someone gasped from
nearby. The wendigo’s head snapped up. Simon heard the scrape of
multiple swords leaving their sheaths, and his blossoming relief abruptly
withered and died.
Out of the frying pan, into the fire
.

With all of his strength, he gave his distracted tormentor a violent
shove. The wendigo reeled, off-balance, and Simon wriggled out from
beneath it. Panting, he gained his feet, only to be faced with four burly
members of the King’s armed guard.

Drawn to the very man they were waiting for,
Simon thought bitterly
, by his own cries
.

A bald soldier pointed his blade at the wendigo. “What in
blazes is that?”

“Cap’n,” interjected a tall, voluminously bearded guard as he
examined Simon. “Ain’t that…?”

“Kill the beast,” the unit’s cold-eyed blond captain said
calmly. “Take the lad. Alive if possible, but gut him if he puts up
a fuss.”

Simon moaned. He exchanged a glance with the wendigo, whose
lip curled sourly as they came to an unspoken understanding. They would
put their antagonism on hold for as long as it took to deal with these
interlopers.

“
Kill the beast
,” the bearded man repeated dryly under his
breath. “Su-ure.” He and his fellows fanned out cautiously on the
quivering ground, circling their prey. The wendigo snarled and grunted,
executing darting dashes then wheeling back, just out of range of the
blades. Simon wasn’t sure where to put his back. Belatedly he
remembered the swortsword Niu had purchased for him and fumbled for it.
Producing the lightweight weapon elicited a humorless snigger from the bald
man. His confidence in tatters, Simon waved the blade at the men and
prayed to Vanyon for a miracle.

“Get this nonsense over with,” the captain ordered lazily,
scratching at a disfiguring facial scar. His palm rested on the pommel of
a blade he hadn’t bothered to draw. Apparently he didn’t view either
Simon or the wendigo as any kind of real threat. His men, while clearly
sharing his views of Simon’s competence, took a different view of the pallid
creature in the loincloth and hesitated. This proved to be a mistake as
the wendigo, initially cautious, sensed their fear. Its elongated face
split into a nightmare grin as it hurled itself at the nearest man.

Yelling, the soldier went down beneath the clawing fury of the
cannibal. The two combatants struggled for supremacy, rolling over and
over, flattening swathes of reeds. The guardsman’s fellows joined the
fray, hacking at the wendigo whenever an opportunity presented itself, while
the captain, unsheathing his sword, thrust it toward Simon, daring him to make
a move with a chilly half-smile. Paralyzed, Simon clung to his own
inadequate blade as though it were a lifeboat, edging left then right as the
captain calmly kept him pinned against the swamp.

“You aren’t going anywhere, son,” he was told, which seemed an
unfortunate truth. Sweat trickled down his forehead and he blinked it
from his eyes. Behind him, the guards yelled with increasing
confidence. The sick thud of blades in flesh were punctuated by the
crunching of bones. The wendigo whined sharply like a kicked dog, then
fell silent. The skirmish had clearly gone poorly for the creature; chancing a
glance over his shoulder, Simon saw the bald man plant a booted foot on its
neck and roll it off his comrade into a stagnant pool. The creature
disappeared beneath the oily surface, trailing thick streamers of blood as it
sank into the murk.

The bearded man crouched by the fallen guard and put two fingers to
his neck. Looking up, he shook his head.

“You’ll pay for that,” the captain told Simon gruffly, as though
he’d had anything to do with the man’s demise. “It’s the end of the line
for you.”

Simon had come to the same conclusion. If he struggled, he
would be killed. If he surrendered, he would be executed. He’d left
his allies behind. This was not a scenario he had much hope of surviving.

At least I’ll be able to beg my father’s forgiveness in person,
he thought.

“Drop the blade,” the bald man snarled behind him.

Simon’s mind worked furiously.
If you surrender,
he
thought,
maybe Niu and Sasha will figure out some way of rescuing you.
Fighting these men would be suicide. Surrender is the best option.

He’d very nearly come to the decision to do just that when a sudden
truth struck him: these were, no doubt, the very men who’d strung his
father up. The butchers who’d hauled him out of his home, in front of his
friends and neighbors, and murdered him for an offence which was not his
own. A crimson bubble of rage began to swell in Simon’s heart; a fury
unlike anything he’d ever experienced before. His hands shook so
violently that he could barely maintain his grip on his blade. A powerful
sphere of hatred encompassed him, distorting his vision and his
judgement. In that moment, he didn’t care whether he lived or died, but
he needed these men - who had wronged him so grievously on nothing more than a
monarch’s petty whim - to suffer.

“You killed him,” he snarled, spitting into the reeds at the
captain’s feet. Was that his own voice, or that of some wrathful
stranger? “You killed my father!”

“I’ve killed a lot of people’s fathers, son,” the man returned, that
infuriating smile broadening. “And I’ll drop you here, in the mire and
filth, if you refuse to…”

The bubble burst. Pounding red waves washed consciousness
clean from Simon’s mind. When the world came unsteadily back into focus,
the captain’s face was ashen; his threats terminating in a strangled squawk as
he dropped his sword, clutching at his chest. Bewildered, Simon gaped as
the man tottered three steps, fell to his knees, croaked like a frog and
collapsed face-first into a shallow pool. Whirling, he was astonished to
find the other two soldiers suffering from a similar affliction. Their
faces grey, they crumpled, gasping like landed fishes, eyes bugging with
astonishment and terror. Within moments the swamp had fallen silent;
Simon was alone with the twitching dead.

Disbelief cloaked Simon like a shroud. Had these men suffered
from
heart attacks
? Had they fallen victim to some poisonous vapor
from the swamp? If so, why hadn’t he? Could it be that Vanyon
himself
had struck them down, answering Simon’s silent cry for vengeance?

Whatever had occurred, he knew it wasn’t wise to wait around.
He didn’t know how many soldiers had been deployed to Brand, but he couldn’t
count on these men being the only ones. Further, he couldn’t be sure the
villagers themselves would take his part. Vanyon had blessed him a second
shot at life; ignoring the god’s boon fell somewhere between sacrilegious and
stupid.

You can’t leave your father without so much as a burial marker,
he told himself.
A stone or a branch. He deserves
that at least. He died for you
.

Casting about for a suitable monument, Simon nearly failed to notice
the disturbance in the water of the nearest pool; the faintest ripple across
the oily surface like the tremor in a spider’s web. Heart in mouth he
stood rooted to the spot, eyes fixed on the murky darkness. Was he about to
witness a second miracle; his father returning from the depths? From the
dead
?

Simon cursed himself for an idiot as a long white hand broke
surface, groping for solid ground. The head and shoulders of the wendigo
followed in short order, matted with mud and crawling, slippery things:
white worms and blind bottom-feeders, skating bugs and larvae. The
creature blinked muck from its eyes as it hauled itself out of the sludge and
onto the spongy ground, trailing strings of pondweed. Tilting its chin, lips
curling, it stared death at Simon.

Simon didn’t wait for another instance of divine intervention.
He waved his sword unsteadily at the beast only for the briefest moment before
common sense kicked in and he turned and fled. A low growl from behind
him chilled his blood, while the sound of wet slapping - bare feet in mud - set
fire to his heels.

Claws raked his back, rending cloth. Simon yelped and ducked
behind a straggly
tree, stumbling forward as a second swipe sent leaves
shivering into the air. He kept to cover as he zig-zagged, the creature
close on his tail. Wet warmth blossomed between his shoulder blades and
trickled down his spine. Paying scant attention to direction – his
concentration consumed by avoiding his pursuers slashing talons – he blundered
out of the swamp and into the outskirts of Brand.

Few folk
were out and about this late in the evening, but those who were froze,
startled, as the wild-eyed Simon sprinted through an untended yard, vaulted a
low wall with more agility than he would have possessed in cold blood, leapt a
ditch, and stumbled flailing into the road. Had the wendigo not been
wounded he could not have outrun it. Every so often, it was forced to stop
and marshal its ebbing strength, clutching at injuries which would have felled
a human. The rage which had lent it temporary strength was ebbing.
Fumbling its way over the wall, it blundered into the ditch, landing awkwardly.
A bloodcurdling scream of rage reverberated throughout the village as it
yanked its twisted ankle free of clutching weeds and scrambled up onto the
street, hobbling after Simon.

Simon, who
could now only regret the blind flight which had led the monstrous cannibal
into the heart of his childhood home, waved his arms and screamed for the
villagers to retreat into their homes as the wendigo stalked him down the main
thoroughfare. Some locals complied immediately, while others stood gaping
blankly. Grent, the miller, disappeared into his cottage to return,
grim-faced with an axe with which he guarded his rickety porch. Widow
Oakland, pulling weeds in her yard, hurled verbal abuse at both Simon and his
pursuer.

Turning a
bend in the road, Simon sprinted past the modest hut he’d once shared with his
father. The sight of the thatched straw roof, crooked chimney, and
ramshackle fence enclosing the property stole his breath. He longed to
eat at his own table and sleep in his own bed, such as it was, or at least to
stop long enough to collect some memento of his father. Who would lay
claim to the property now? Neither Simon nor Veter would ever till the
fields which stretched out behind it ever again. And where was
Adelaide? Had some kind or opportunistic soul rehomed her, or had she filled
the soldiers’ stew pots?

Heart aching
as his feet steered him away from the shell of his home, Simon’s blood began to
boil as he realized guardsmen were spilling out over the threshold. The
remaining soldiers stationed in Brand had commandeered
his
home after
murdering
his
father! The thought of these butchers desecrating
his sanctuary made him murderous, but what could he do? With a wendigo
snapping at his heels and no chance of defeating nearly a half-dozen armed men,
his only option was flight. That, and perhaps to hope for another miracle
from Vanyon.

Oaths and
exclamations burst from the soldier’s lips when they caught sight of Simon’s
ashen shadow.

“A demon!”
roared one, tossing his blade from hand to hand.

“Vampire?”
gasped another.