“Can you fix?” The way her big eyes looked at him, a mix of awe and sadness in her expression, yanked his feet out from under him.
“I… can’t. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. David saved us.” She hugged him again and rubbed her forehead and horns against his shoulder.
He fucking melted.
“The rider isn’t dead. I buried him, but he’ll probably get out, and–” Stars danced in David’s vision, his head grew a thousand times heavier, and blackness drowned him. He fell, and all four Las fell with him, squashing him and squeaking as his back hit the dirt.
“David!?” Caera yelled, coming up behind him. Frowning down at him with her single eye, she pushed him back up to sitting. “What’s wrong?”
Acelina swept a wing out, nudging the Las aside, and they got off him and knelt around him, all with enormous eyes locked.
“I… I… I’m…” Fire surged through his chest. Energy drained out of him. Everything grew heavier, and he fell back again into Caera’s hand. “Holy shit.” He grabbed his half breastplate and held it as more pain pumped through his insides. His inner fingers screamed at him in protest, and his stomach shrieked with hunger.
Dao unleashed a flurry of clicks and squatted beside him, gently nudging the Las out of the way. Frowning, she undid the straps of his breastplate, tossed it aside, and pressed a palm to his chest.
He grabbed her hand and shook his head.
“It’s… fine. It’s just the… the strings. I played… too hard, I guess.” Not very convincing. Every breath was a labored mess, and new beads of sweat dripped down his forehead. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get enough air, and he squeezed Dao’s hand as tremors worked through his limbs.
“You’re not fine,” Jes said. “But if the rider’s still coming after us, we have to go. Now.”
“I’ll take him,” Caera said.
“We help!” the Las said, and too many hands helped him to his feet. He lasted a whole second before falling.
“Fools,” Acelina said. Hissing at the little ladies, she flapped her wings at them once, enough to nudge them back, and she picked David up by his wrists. For a moment, he thought she might treat him as gently as she had minutes before when she’d saved his ass, but nope. She dropped him onto Caera’s back, nearly crushing his balls, but at least she’d placed him so he didn’t get one of Caera’s spikes up his ass.
He leaned forward, grabbed Caera’s spikes as best he could, and held on.
They got ten feet before he fell off.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He woke up. It was a strange sensation, waking up during the day, when his ghost body told him sleeping was only meant for night. Instead of pulling up out of the depths of stasis like usual, a robotic but seamless and easy feeling, this felt like dragging himself up out of a swamp. He had to fight to wake up, eyelids refusing to listen, and limbs insisting they were anchored to the ground.
Where was he? The sensation was familiar. Oh, right, when Acelina had picked him and run away with him, away from the rider, his fire wings bursting up from the ground. That’s where he was, in Acelina’s arms, his chin over her shoulder, his body pressed to her breastplate.
Forest. Black trees that looked almost like glass. He’d destroyed the forest before, for kilometers, so the group must have covered a lot of ground while he was out. Groaning, he forced his head up off Acelina’s shoulder and looked behind him at the group. The trees were more spread out here, with some giant tombstones dotting the land and fog, and the group followed Vicus between them. No path.
“How long was I out?” he asked.
The Las all spun, cheered with squeals, and dashed back toward him, only for Acelina to brush them back with a wing. But the little critters would not be deterred, and they ran circles around the spire mother as she marched forward.
“A few hours,” she said. “I am guessing your use of your special strings proved too taxing?”
“I… guess, yeah. My fingers are killing me.” As if someone had grown new limbs inside him, he was too acutely aware of invisible fingertips he could still flex and move, and that they were throbbing, sore, and if they’d been physical, bleeding. “Fuck… I am starving.” And of course, his guts had become a black hole, content to eat him alive from the inside out.
Daoka joined them, clicking, chirping, and gesturing around and behind them. Jes joined her, and she smiled up at David as she motioned for the Las to take her place by Caera at the head of the group. They did, whining and sharing some pleading clicks with Dao, but the satyr ushered them toward Caera, probably so the tiger had some backup if Vicus betrayed them.
“We’ll get you some food,” Jes said. “Vicus knows a church around here. We can sleep, and maybe hunt if we’re lucky. He says there’s no food around here, but you never know.”
“Sounds… like a dangerous place to sleep.”
“Yeah, could be. But he insists no one comes down this way.”
Acelina hissed quietly and whispered. “I do not trust Vicus. He will betray us.”
“Maybe,” Jes said, “but he needs us more than we need him.”
David wasn’t sure about that. Vicus knew the area, they didn’t, and he could just run if the rider showed up again while they were sleeping. The rider wasn’t dead. He’d get out sooner or later, and if they didn’t have any clue of how to get to Timaeus, they were going to have problems. The rider had tracked them down, just like he’d done Mia, which meant he had some way to follow David. Maybe not to his exact position, but to his general area, maybe.
But they were all exhausted and didn’t have a choice.
He tried to keep his head up and scan the fog for more threats, but everything felt heavy, especially his skull. It wasn’t long before his cheek was on Acelina’s shoulder, arms limp, and he relaxed as he listened to the movement of her body, ear against her neck. Clop. Clop. Hooves against the dirt. Eyes half closed, he kept them open, but the weight pulling on his limbs and the ache in his guts didn’t make it easy.
A few hours later, they arrived at a church.
“Here,” Acelina said, and she put him on Caera’s back again. “Hold on this time.”
“Thanks,” he said, body teetering a little, but he stayed upright, hands on Caera’s back spikes.
Acelina hissed and gestured forward. She might have saved his life and carried his ass, but she wasn’t willing to face-check a building for them.
Jes was. She and Daoka followed Vicus toward the church, and after a few clicks from Daoka, the little ladies ran off and flanked the building, checking for traps or ambushes.
“I wasn’t lying,” Vicus said. “And after seeing what the unmarked did, I’m glad I didn’t.”
David managed a weak smile for the vrat, almost slipped off Caera’s back, and almost squeaked as he grabbed her spikes.
“I… yeah.” Admitting he still wasn’t entirely sure how to control his powers to a stranger was not a smart idea, but suppressing his reflex to say more than he should was a pain.
The church was something straight out of medieval fantasy, an old abandoned building made of gray stone, surrounded by a shallow metal fence. The windows were empty square holes, and the roof was made of slabs of black… wood?
“I have seen churches in scrying pools,” Acelina said. “This hardly qualifies. This is what humans call a… a…”
“Shack,” David said. “A large stone shack in the woods. Why are we calling it a church? I’m fully expecting an evil book with a cover made of human skin awaiting us in the basement.”
The demons raised their brows. Apparently, they hadn’t seen that one.