Freyja fluttered her groggy eyes open. They felt incredibly heavy, and her head was pounding with a dull ache. Chills crawled up and down her body one moment, then hot flashes scalded her the next. She wiggled her digits and focused her vision, feeling the golden rings of her eyes contract as they locked onto the white ceiling above her head. The back of her head, matted with sweat-soaked hair bunching up uncomfortably into her neck, was laying on a cushy pillow that took some of the strain off of her prone posture. Her back, which was as sensitive to pressure when sleeping as the princess and the proverbial pea, felt well-cushioned and supported, so that was good. If it weren’t for the aches and the bipolar temperature shifts of her body, she’d almost call it a good night’s rest. Where was she the night before? It was all so blurry.
She threw back the heavy blanket that felt like it was stifling her all of a sudden, and she felt the quivering lacerated flesh beneath layers of white bandages stained a ruddy brown with dried blood protest as raw nerves were brushed and agitated. The medical garments crisscrossed her chest, stomach, and lower torso. Additionally, there was a cold press towel over her forehead, she could now feel. She moved to lift her arm and felt a brief flare of grinding pain. She instantly remembered her dislocated shoulder joint, and expected the afflicted ligament to scream pain at her again, but only that one flare came up, and then as quickly passed. She was able to rotate her shoulder cuff when she sat up, and realized that at some point her shoulder had been cracked back into its socket. She took the towel from her head, clenching it in one paw, and looked over to the corner of the apartment.
Beyond the carpeted threshold of a wide open frame, marked by a shiny strip of tacked-down brass banding, was an expanse of tiled room with a round table, and the shapes of a countertop and cabinets beyond. Swaying shakily on her feet at first, her tired legs remembered their lupine strength and steadied themselves, instantly dispersing the vestigial sensation of pins and needles numbing them. She crossed the border and found herself staring into a kitchen, with a sink, a few stove top burners, and a quaint old-fashioned oven set into the recess of the back wall. At first she thought that the lights had been restored to the apartment while she was unconscious, but she quickly realized that the morning sun was merely cascading in through the blinders half-drawn across the sliding glass door to the enclosed front porch.
It took her a few minutes to piece together all of the missing information. She recognized this place piecemeal, but couldn’t put all of the contexts and associations together right away. Though her headache had begun to fade, her mind still felt sluggish; swimming.
Then she saw Cuppy’s puppet replica - or ‘Cuppet’ as she was beginning to think of it - propped up against a corner of the kitchen counter, and everything came rushing back - the dream encounters with Richie in the Backyards, her rescue of Cuppy from a watery grave and her reversion to human form, her adoption into Cuppy’s domain, their shared battle with the bunyip occupying their water supply, and -
The jester. Freyja realized.
They were attacked right outside their own home by that freak with the long claws. She jumped back a bit as a momentary flashback vision of the killer springing for her passed over her eyes, and then she thought about Cuppy and what could have happened to him after she conked out.
“Cuppy?” she called timidly, not sure if she was afraid of attracting the attention of the killer, or afraid of finding the boy dead.
She received no verbal answer, but Cuppet slumped over on the counter, one arm dangling over the side as if pointing. Freyja crept around the counter corner and saw that, under the puppet’s guiding finger, Cuppy himself was slumped against the cabinet, head down.
“Cup-” Freyja prodded at him gently.
“Hi, Freyja.” Cuppy looked up, smiling dopily.
“What are you doing crashed like this in the kitchen?” Freyja asked, familiarity with their own cohabited home returning to her.
“Oh, nothing in particular. I just can’t move an inch of my body whatsoever. I’m in excruciating, mindblowing pain right now. I overdid it with the surgical strings on myself, not gonna sit right for a week. The pain comes and goes now though, I think the worst of it is over.” he said.
Cuppy paused, mulling it over. He blinked.
“Nope, totally wrong. There it is again. Owwwwww.” he smiled, a single tear leaking out of the corner of his eye.
Freyja looked over her own body, bandaged and tended to as it was. “You patched me up and overexerted yourself into a paralysis, didn’t you?” she asked him, rubbing the underside of her arm guiltily.
“Don’t sweat it, it was the least I owed you.” Cuppy forced a reassuring smile.
“What do you mean? What happened with that freak in black and white last night? I’m drawing blanks.” Freyja said.
“I was hoping you could tell me. I kind of blacked out at the parts before we got here and I could start working on your injuries. I kind of thought I was a goner there, right in the middle of all of my own -”
“Bombs.” Freyja remembered.
And then, she remembered.
-
Freyja had been viciously swatted out of the tree top, even the glancing blow from the killer’s claws, restrained as they were by Cuppy’s interference, was enough to scatter her blood like raindrops. She might have been able to dodge better if she had been more awake and alert, and if she hadn’t been slowed by some inopportune cramps striking at the worst of times. As it was, she ate the half-slash and was thrown from the top of the tree. Her consciousness was already fluttering before she hit the ground. The soft patch she had landed in saved her from cracking her skull open, but it wasn’t enough to prevent a dizzying concussion. Somewhere in the gray area between being knocked out and being ever so slightly awake and aware, her animal instincts and senses took over, reaching out and enveloping her being to act as an extension of her awareness where her own eyes and ears failed her. The wolf in her perked its ears to the sounds of Cuppy’s continuing scuffle with their homicidal assailant. They registered the cathartic crack of the lunatic’s head slamming into something. Hard.
She wasn’t sure how many seconds or minutes passed between that recognition of the killer taking a heavy blow and when she came fully awake to witness a miracle, but that same part of her deep, primal unconsciousness that had shielded her breached the surface again to exert its will. Freyja saw, as one sees themselves doing in a dream, her own actions. Burning hands of solidified fire broke clear through the clods of dirt and blades of grass, like an escaped prisoner of Hell, and clutched the jester’s ankles. Cuppy’s flail struck the masked man full-on in the face, and then the mysterious killer was masked no more.
Cuppy’s explosive pellets spilled from his wondrous magician’s bag of tricks, and rolled into the fiery aura of Freyja’s projected devil’s hands. Somehow, her connection to their strange, alien tactile sense translated into something countable, and she could know for certain that there had been exactly twelve potent fireworks laying at the madman’s feet. Her ears - her true, physical human ears now, as well as the mental ears of her inner hellhound, detected the hiss as the fireworks were ignited from the inside out.
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Then she was on her hands and knees, looking up, reaching out with her remaining good arm in a futile gesture as both Cuppy and his foe were engulfed in a blinding flash, and a tremendous booming crackle of thunder.
Except, it wasn’t the both of them after all. The twelve volatile spheres all blew at the jester’s feet at once, ballooning into a bubble of kinetic energy, pressure, and disorienting flashes. But the dozen explosions were blocked at the line between the jester and Cuppy straight down the line between them, like an invisible wall. Freyja could see the outer edges of the energy ripples push into and be deflected by that invisible wall, warding off even the smallest shrapnel or wayward debris from the downed puppeteer.
Realizing how slowly time was passing like this, Freyja had time to manually count each distinct sphere of expanding, fiery light she saw, to confirm the number of them that her fire hands had already felt. Then she saw that the wall blocking off the collective explosion was not invisible - not entirely. It had merely seemed transparent in comparison to the flash of the fireworks. There was a light blue film screening off Cuppy, as though someone had taken a sheet of cyan plastic wrap and stretched it from forest floor to forest canopy. It soundly and completely repelled the shockwave, leaving Cuppy blissfully ignorant and resembling a sleeping baby on the other side. Then, narrowing the golden banded circles of her demonic eyes to bring the view more clearly yet into focus, Freyja saw that at the center of that ephemeral wall was a trinket - a policeman’s badge.
Dean’s badge, she would learn from Cuppy later.
Somehow, the badge had conjured enough talismanic power under its own apparent will to fly up between Cuppy and his enemy to protect the boy. And when that power was expended, the badge crumbled to dust, gone into the wind before it even hit the floor.
But its job was done. Cuppy was unharmed.
The same could not be said for the jester. During the flash itself, Freyja could only see that the costumed man’s ruffled shirt was blown to shreds within the light, and it was too bright to tell how many strips were actually fabric, and how many were flesh. She heard a subliminal cracking noise that sounded to her absurdly like the popping of roasted chestnuts, and saw scattered wood chips of what had been the man’s fancy clogs.
Around the same instant the flash subsided and the remnants of Cuppy’s explosive pellets burnt to glowing smolders, the jester’s body was thrown by the explosive force a dozen feet off and away, over and into some darkened shrubs. A trail of fire was left burning in a small trench following his wake, and noxious smoke smelling of melted plastic buttons and grease burns rose from the half-buried form lodged in the leaves. The claws, retracted though they were, were the last thing to cool off, a few straggling tendrils of gunsmoke rising off of them like a griddle charring flecks of hamburger residue.
Freyja couldn’t see the freak’s face. She wasn’t about to go over there in their condition to check for a pulse, but she hoped that psychotic smirk was blown off the bastard’s pretty face for good.
Standing tall again, Freyja felt her dangling shoulder and clutched at her bruised forearm stubbornly. Regarding a tall, solid tree trunk at her side, she lined her shoulder up with it and rammed. With a grunt and a sickening - but satisfying - crunch, she popped her shoulder back into place. Shaking off the waves of dizziness from such superficial cuts to her torso, she trudged to Cuppy, marveling a few moments both at the shallow smoking crater his conjoined explosion had left at ground zero, and at the tenacity of the goof.
She propped him up, her hair tickling his nose and rousing him briefly so that he could protest this, but she only shushed him in a calming, motherly way. She propped him against the tree trunk, then scanned the trees for a few seconds before locating and fetching Cuppet, now sporting a trendy window in his chest where the clawed freak had expanded his swords. Cuppet’s painted eyes tracked Freyja curiously, but allowed this handling. The marionette only looked over Cuppy’s meager, bruised body, with what Freyja guessed was concern emanating from its otherwise static facial expression. Shifting to her wolf form, Freyja draped both of them over her groaning back, grit her teeth, and pawed her way back to the apartment.
A few dozen yards never felt so long.
She locked the door behind them and wondered if it would really do them any good. It was only glass. But, she was too exhausted to make much of a fuss about it, and decided to have faith in Cuppy’s wards, if only out of convenience. At some point, both of them lost track of events, and their grips on waking reality.
But, before that long night was over, Cuppy puppetted his already depleted form to bandage Freyja, and tuck her into a more appropriate place for bed rest and recovery.
…
Freyja’s ordeal was not over.
“Ow! Owowow! Take it easier on me!” Freyja whined as Cuppy stitched her cuts closed. “Can’t you use your strings like you always do?”
“Quit yer bellyaching. I used up all my strings for a while, my muscle fibers feel like they’re all twisted in pretzels. Stop squirming!” he sat on her, trying to still the thrashing body that couldn’t bear to hold still for the dreaded needle.
Cuppet was holding Freyja’s hands over her head for her own good, and even though she could just as easily incinerate the puppet, the part of her that recognized she should get the treatment over with didn’t resist - the other part of her, the one that had only lost by a hair, wanted to knock the two of them together by the heads.
“I don’t get it, you’re covered in tattoos and piercings, why so much fuss over a few stitches?” Cuppy scratched his head.
“That’s different!” Freyja mewled, eyes watering. “Can’t we just be done already? This hurts!”
“I watched you burn your own flesh back together, just endure it a little bit, sheesh.” Cuppy rolled his eyes.
“You’re a callous nurse!” Freyja accused him.
“Richie would agree with that. If you would take better care of yourselves, it wouldn’t be an issue.” Cuppy said.
“Well excuse me for trying to help you with the maniac in our backyard!” Freyja growled.
Cuppy pierced her frayed flesh again, and began drawing more ridges of cleaved skin together. Freyja kicked her legs around rapidly, thumping the ground.
And eventually,
“There, good as new.” Cuppy smiled.
Freyja was still sniffling, looking over her sewn flesh. “You’re mean.”
“Want a lollipop?” Cuppy suggested.
“I hate you. Yes.” Freyja nodded.
Cuppy presented Freyja with a bright red lollipop he pulled from the inner depths of his cloak sleeve, and pat her comfortingly on the head.
“It’s cinnamon.” Cuppy said cheerfully.
Most of that day was just resting and doing a whole lot of nothing. The two kids had endured a lot of bodily abuse over the week, and the breaking point was already in the rearview mirror. This became a problem when their stomachs started growling.
“Guess we need to make some food.” Cuppy said.
“Do you want to go catch it?” Freyja eyed the backdoor to the forest.
“No.” Cuppy agreed. “You know what we should do next, when we can move again?”
“Get a pizza?” Freyja asked hopefully.
“Oh, no, I didn’t think of that. I’ll keep that in mind.” Cuppy held his chin, wishing he had come up with the pizza idea first. “I was thinking it’s about time we bring electricity back to this place. Cooking stock supplies when we’re too beat up to hunt and gather seems a lot more important now than it did before I tore every muscle in my body.”
“Don’t we have to wait for your friend, Richie? Isn’t he the mechanic?” Freyja asked.
“Who says? I helped build the water tank too, I can try my hand with the power. I’ll just throw science at a wall and see what sticks.” Cuppy smiled.
Freyja tried to keep her stoic, moody composure, but snorted, then cracked up entirely. “Ok, you do that, hehehe!”
Cuppy joined her in laughter, then they both hissed and clutched at their ribs. Laughing with wrecked bodies hurt like a son of a bitch.