ANGIE. NO TIME FOR PANIC.

They searched the house.

Once they’d confirmed Evan wasn't anywhere in the building, Ryan pulled out his phone.

“What are you doing?” Angie asked.

“Well, first I’m texting Evan,” Ryan replied, texting as he spoke. “Then, since I don’t expect that to accomplish anything, I’m calling Chris,” he continued, and put the phone up to his ear. Angie followed him, closing the door behind her.

Faintly, Angie could hear the ring. Then a muffled voice after the second ring. “Hi,” Ryan said in response. “Glad you picked up. What’re you up to?”

A response which she couldn’t make out. “Okay,” Ryan said, “Can you, ah, go out, by chance?”

A one word response. Probably ‘Why?’ Ryan suppressed a sigh. “This is going to sound crazy, because it absolutely is. It is possible that Evan has decided to go out and try and hunt a Beast by himself. At the very least, he’s out after curfew for some reason.”

A brief response, then Ryan said, “With just a hunting revolver, we think. Specifically the most lightweight revolver that qualifies as such—it’s just an 11.9mm. But that’s better than just his ten-eight.”

Chris voiced a question, and in response Ryan said, “Yeah, I wouldn’t have put it past him. He feels like he’s better with it and not good enough with the eleven-nine.” Pause. “Of course not, no one is licensed for a ten-eight, that’s a sidearm-weight handgun. With the eleven-nine he’s licensed for a team of at least four gunners, or to go out as fire support for a properly licensed Light Bearer or magician. No one is licensed to solo hunt with any gun. How do you not know that?”

This one sided conversation was driving Angie crazy. Ryan responded to Chris again, “Well, fair enough. Anyway, I wouldn’t be bothering you if there wasn’t something you could do about it. I’m going to text you a link. It’s safe for your phone, I promise. It should connect you to the GPS on Evan’s phone and show you where he is on Googol Maps.” He paused, not long enough for Chris to actually respond, then said, “Please tell me you have Googol Maps on your phone and that you don’t just use Pear’s garbage map app.”

Chris’s response came with audible laughter. Ryan shook his head while he said, “It would take me an hour just to give you a satisfactory answer to that, and I’ve known you for the length of one lunch period, so I’m maybe going to hold off on that conversation. Let’s just focus on Evan doing this damn fool thing right now and make sure he doesn’t get himself killed doing it, and that I’ll owe you big time for your help. For all he probably won’t run into a Beast by himself without any way to draw one beyond his simple presence…” Ryan paused for a moment, then finished the thought. “If he does, he’s probably dead.”

Chris responded one more time. “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Thank you. For serious. Keep us updated, if you can.” With that, he ended the call.

Cali had watched Ryan, expressionless, for the length of the conversation. Now she went back into the living room and flopped back onto the couch.

Angie gave Ryan a look. He raised an eyebrow back at her. She sighed, and went into the living room. “Hey,” she said to Cali, sitting down next to her on the couch and putting a hand on her knee. “You okay, kiddo?”

“Don’t call me kiddo,” Cali said, her voice as flat as her expression.

“He’s going to be alright. Chris will talk some sense into him. He’s very compelling,” Angie said, giving the younger girl a small smile.

Cali looked at her without moving her head, gave a miniscule shrug, and, still flat voiced, “Who cares. If he wants to get his fool ass killed, let him.” She focused back on the TV.

Angie sighed. “You don’t mean that.”

“Can we not do this?” Cali said, her voice still flat, but a little softer.

Angie gave her a sad smile. “Yeah. Okay. You want us to keep you posted?”

Cali seemed to think for a minute. “Well…” she said. “If he’s dead, I suppose you better tell me. Other than that, fuck it.”

This time Ryan sighed, out in the hallway. Angie gave Cali a small nod, and left her alone. Then she went to figure out if there was anything she could do.

MEGAN. NIGHTTIME.

Megan spent the evening alternately fretting and raging in her room, the latter mostly while she sent Lauren and Katie Kay long messages through Social laying out her understanding of the situation surrounding the Exiles and demanding explanations.

Eventually, no replies or parents in evidence, she went to bed exhausted, barely getting her hair up in its buns. She forgot to shower entirely.

EVAN. TIME TO DO OR DIE.

Evan took a step out onto the walk, his hand on the seven-chamber eleven-nine[1] he’d replaced his day gun on his hip with. The ten-eight sat in a holster at the back of his belt instead, angled so he could draw it quickly with his right hand if necessary. The pale shape ceased all movement. Already bringing up his iron, he took it in as it turned and started skittering toward him.

[1] Hopefully not a mistake—he just wasn’t as good with it as the six chamber ten-eight. Of course, shooting ten-eight rounds and no eleven-nine rounds would land him in serious hot water, and the ten-eight might not be able to do the job.

The Beast was fast. As tall and wide as one of the medium breeds of Beast-hunting dog, but far longer—it was probably some sort of Stalker. One that had fed. Slick-looking, pale skin gleamed in the gaslight—not like an amphibian’s, but like that of a hairless albino mammal covered with something thick and oily, like petroleum jelly. Clawed legs, too many—twelve, sixteen, more? Too many joints on each leg, and different numbers on different legs, giving it a wildly undulating gait as it sped toward him. The limbs on its underside were like four-jointed dog legs. Longer legs, with far more joints than four, oscillated out from its flanks, vaguely resembling a spider’s or a centipede’s. Its face was vaguely birdlike—one bulbous orange eye sat in the middle of the head, and below it, three long, sharp, beak-like juts of bone formed a needlesque pyramid over a vast maw. When the beak spikes opened, something glowed inside that maw, a sick green light. Viscous liquid trickled off the tip of the bottommost beak spike.

It looked like some sort of higher-class centihorror—Menace-class, or maybe even Terror—but “centihorror” was a pretty broad classification, so knowing that didn’t help a ton. He had little idea what to expect, beyond the certainty that it would trample him to death if it could. It could easily be unique—a bare majority were, in the modern era.

Evan felt his guts clench up, his mouth go dry, his knees go weak. Somehow, the real thing, a true Beast, was different—even worse—than the horribly realistic phantasmal replicas in the Gauntlet. Or maybe it was something about this particular Beast, the way it moved, its too many joints, its glowing maw. Regardless, it was more horrible than he’d been prepared for.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

But his revolver was up and he was peering down the barrel through the sight at the Beast. While his conscious mind gibbered, his body reacted, his training doing its job. Evan Cadell met his first Beast with lead, sound, and fury.

It was much too fast, having covered a quarter of the distance between them in the time between its first turn and when he finished aiming. So he shot the legs: long, slender, and likely fragile. His first shot, the best placed, blasted apart not one, but two, of the long spider-like legs on its left side, striking just as they lined up—fistfuls of thick, pus-like fluid sprayed from the severed ends of the stumps and the ends of the severed legs alike.

The second bullet blew up the front underleg on its left side, sending shattered bone-like black fragments spraying across the concrete of the walk behind it, but it didn’t seem to hit the leg behind.[1] The Beast’s gait undulated even more wildly. The third shot smashed the first underleg on its right side, but the second leg on that side seemed unharmed, too. Its head started drooping toward the ground.

[1] Evan thought he would have gotten it with his lighter gun, the timing and recoil of the heavier pistol just different enough, even after all his practice, to throw him off—but maybe the hollow points were just not capable of piercing the thicker dog legs and going on to do more damage.

It wasn’t enough.

The fourth shot cleanly pierced its massive eye, bursting it, which released a torrent of the pus-ichor out in front of it, drenching the walk in milky pale slime. The fifth short shattered one of its three beakspikes—the wound seemed to stretch out the maw across the lower left of its head, gaping gore.[1] At this point its head, no longer supported by the two severed front legs underneath its body, started dragging on the ground. As a result, he missed another headshot[2], and the sixth bullet blasted where the back of the neck met the top of the back, near where a sensible vertebrate would keep its spine. Dark fluid jetted out of the wound. And on his seventh shot, the recoil of the gun had built up more than he could handle, as always, and he did not appear to hit at all. Shit.

[1] He’d aimed at the middle of the forehead, above the eye, hoping to hit some brains in there (you never knew), but the recoil was just a little too much and he overcompensated.

[2] He’d have gotten it with the ten eight, he was sure.

It wasn’t enough.

The gun’s roar echoed up and down the street, off the windows and security gates of the closed and shuttered businesses on either side. Evan shot fast enough that the result was nearly machine-gun-esque, even with the heavier weapon. Still, as he shot, the creature covered the second quarter of the distance between them, despite its shattered gait, despite dragging its ruined face on the ground. And it kept coming when he was done.

Evan didn’t want to look at it up close, so, tucking the spent gun against his chest with one arm, he twisted and dived, using the other arm to direct his motion half forward and half sideways and rolling across his shoulder, like he’d practiced a thousand times. He rolled across the deactivated moving-walk onto the concrete of the lane. This sucked, but not as much as it could have—the bargain-basement wards in his jacket kept the roll across the concrete from being too unpleasant.

Just in time. The Beast careened past him, through the spot he’d been standing, as he hit the top of the arc of his dive. One of its spider legs flicked out in his direction, impossibly long, and came away with a dark gleam at the tips of its three claws. Evan registered the image and the jolt of an impact against his hip at the same time—though the blow was not even strong enough to knock him off course, a shock still shot through his body, and his handgun slipped out of his hand and clattered several meters away.

Too far to retrieve. Shit.

Before he was even done coming to his feet, his right hand darted back and released the ten eight from its holster, and it was out and he was aiming down the sights in a moment, focused again on the Beast. He hadn’t slowed it down that much, but losing those legs appeared to make it more difficult for it to stop. Of course, he supposed it was possible that when it wanted to stop running, it always clawed at the ground frantically, trying to find purchase with its remaining legs as it tried to turn, before losing its footing and tumbling at least half a dozen meters, its long body flopping and twisting and leaving a long smear of ichor behind it.

But as fast as he’d drawn, the Beast was up on its feet and gathering momentum toward him within a couple of seconds, so he took a step back, intending to backpedal while he unloaded on it. Only, his left leg wouldn’t quite support his full weight, and he stumbled, nearly falling. His first shot went wide.

He thought: Bleeding balls. I’m going to die.

Then he thought: Fuck it. He steadied himself, unleashing a second volley.

As he focused, everything seemed to move in slow motion around him. He saw that, distressingly, the eye cavity appeared to be full of gnashing jagged teeth and a dozen tiny tendrils with tiny eyes on the ends.

He put two bullets into the former eye socket. They smashed some of the teeth but the tendrils dodged out of the way. His fourth and fifth shots half-severed four more of its spider legs, two on its left, then two on its right—his old friend the ten eight not letting him down, still easier to shoot than the eleven nine. The Beast slowed, but not enough. Then it somehow reared up, its unsupported upper body popping and clicking into a new configuration, the noise of the bones rearranging sounding like return fire. His sixth shot cratered the lower torso instead of being another headshot, and it staggered, but it staggered forward.

His accessible speedloaders were all for the other gun, and he didn’t have time to go for it with his hip hurt. So Evan raised his iron to club the Beast with it as it ate him. To toss the thing into one of its maws and hope it choked. His other hand scrabbled at his wallet, hoping he had a silver bit to shove down its throat as it ate him. This whole affair was poorly planned. He stared at the Beast, and could see it so clearly. It was like a bright light approached from behind him.

Evan slammed into the Dens-i-glass front of the shopping tower, blown by a massive, impossible gust of wind that came out of absolutely nowhere. The gust sounded like the world had exploded. Then his head thwapped against the glass and his vision whited out for a moment. He was distantly aware of the Beast doing a sort of flip past him, bending in the wrong direction, its chin sliding across the gravel as its body folded completely up and over itself in a manner that would have been hilarious and satisfying if he hadn’t been having an up-close-and-personal visit with the ringing bells of a cathedral at the time.

After far too long a moment he staggered away from the window, trying to shake it off, and turned to see a blazing white light. After a second shake of his head, his vision focused enough that it became evident that he was seeing a humanoid figure, its back turned to him, wielding a bloody FLAMING SWORD, the flames white like the stars, like the moon—like Bearer’s flame. It was, somehow, between him and the Beast, which was feebly trying to scritter away from the figure with its remaining legs.

As his eyes adjusted to the light, Evan could see the Beast was scraped up something fierce, with huge holes along its hindquarters where the hollow-point rounds he’d put through its maws had hit its interior.

The figure wore a solid-looking warding mantle of an indeterminate dark color. Their hood wasn’t up, and they had shortish, probably dark hair, though it was hard to tell what with the FLAMING SWORD backlighting them. The figure approached the Beast cautiously. They paused, then took a quick step forward, and the Beast lashed out with some of its remaining spidery legs. The figure nimbled back and swept the sword through the legs, the flames flaring up silver like the moon, and the legs burst in clouds of silver steam and foul dark smoke, clear in the sword’s bright light.

Then the figure lunged forward, driving their blade into the Beast’s face, through the shattered lower maw, then tilting the blade upward until it ripped up through the upper maw and the top of the Beast’s head. The Beast thrashed wildly, and the remaining spider leg flailed at the figure. The figure whipped out their right arm, brushing aside the limp claw, the many-layered wards of the mantle more than up to the challenge of preventing any harm from the Beast’s dying spasms and tremors.

Of course, as the blade was buried in the maw, the flames were just as buried. The silhouetting effect of that FLAMING SWORD disappeared, of course. Of course, in the bright yellow of the surrounding gaslights, some color emerged, and Evan could perceive new details about the figure. Their hair was indeed dark, of course, as dark as the enveloping night. Its length was, of course, the exact length necessary to be rakishly shaggy.

Because it was, of fucking course, Chris fucking Gramyre.

Gramyre drove his left arm forward and down, plunging the sword into the thrashing Beast’s dying torso. Wracking one final time, the loathsome thing fell still. In one elegant motion, he pushed his hair back from his face and looked over his shoulder.

Surely his eyes didn’t sparkle in the gaslight. Surely.