CHAPTER 4

The Finger and the Stinger

Ez nocked an arrow and crouched low to get a better angle.

“Aim for the eyes!” Gramma hollered. “That’s their weak—” a deafening crash obliterated the rest of the sentence. Sighting up the shaft of the arrow, Ez watched as fissures spiderwebbed the ceiling. Icy sweat trickled down her spine. If the entire roof collapsed, the battle would be brief indeed; she, Gramma and Thoralf would be crushed before they could inflict a single casualty. Down in the cellar, Wilburn would survive only for as long as it took the vexpids to clear the debris and penetrate the titanium. However, quite the opposite occurred. With a terrible groaning riiiiiiip, the roof peeled back from the rafters like the rind of a grapefruit, leaving the skeletal frame open to the night and to the swarm of hornets thrumming in the darkness.

A wave of fruitily rotten, rancid meat stench smashed into Ez's lungs. She gagged, and might have vomited under less dire circumstances—but there simply wasn’t time. The moment she spotted a glint of lamplight in a compound eye, she drew and released and was already reaching to her quiver when the arrow found its mark. Twenty arrows, twenty shots. She took them in rapid succession, knowing the bow would be worthless when the distance closed. Nock—draw—loose—nock—draw—loose—She entered a state of mind where time seemed to slow down, and yet jerk past in disjointed fragments of hyper-clarity.

—nock—

A buzzing mass of hornets clogged the rafters; she picked one at random.

—draw—

She could see every glittering bead in its eye.

—loose—

The arrow buried itself to the fletching as she nocked another, heedless of the lightning streaking past her from the tip of Gramma’s cane and of the the hornets falling smoking to the floor. Green ichor sprayed as Thoralf kicked vexpids to pieces, drenching Ez, though she paid it no mind. The slaughtered insects began to pile up in heaps, shrinking the diminutive room further. Such tight quarters meant the hornets couldn’t fly, but their overwhelming numbers more than made up for this minor inconvenience. They poured on and on into the cottage like a volcanic eruption in reverse. For each one killed, two more came scuttling after it with twitchy, too-fast movements.

Nock—draw—loose—nock—draw—loose—Ez reached for another arrow—and her fingers closed on air.

Tossing the bow aside, she seized her axe and sprang out of her crouch with an upward slash, carving a deep gouge in a hornet’s underbelly. She pivoted, yanking the axe free, and swung it sidelong, chopping another’s leg off as it dropped down from the rafters. She might have been screaming. Her emotions were a paradox of abject terror and something akin to euphoria. An ancient animal had risen up within her and was fully in control, while the part of her mind that normally made decisions sat back quietly in awe.

The vexpids ceased to be individuals to her. Ez fought a single, multi-headed monster that seemed to heal instantaneously, sprouting new limbs faster than she could hack them off. All was a spinning dance of chaos. The vexpids demolished sections of the walls and flooded in from all directions. Flames leapt where the oil lamps had spilled, throwing hot light and writhing shadows everywhere. Ez stumbled. She was buffeted and bludgeoned. She was hurled to the ground. She managed to roll just in time. A stinger, gleaming crimson in the firelight, plunged deep into the floor next to her cheek. The wood at the injection site melted like wax, and even through the miasma, Ez caught a dizzying whiff of something toxic—an acrid, sulfuric stink. Somehow, she regained her feet. Somehow, she kept fighting.

A hemisphere of glittering black eyes and snapping yellow pincers pressed in upon the three defenders, who fought desperately with their backs to the common center of the trapdoor. The perimeter around it rapidly constricted so that only a small circle of hornet-free space remained. They were in trouble. Gramma’s lightning flashed less frequently, each strike feebler than the last. Ez’s arms grew leaden. Only Thoralf fought with real vigor, his hooves flying like cannonballs. He bucked and kicked and reared up on hind legs to clobber hornets from the air, striking left and right, forward and backward in a whirlwind, wreaking tremendous carnage, yet not once did he so much as graze Gramma or Ez. The two of them would have been killed a hundred times apiece without him, for their fatigue rendered them increasingly ineffective.

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Ez struggled to maintain her footing in the quagmire of gore, vaguely aware that her left leg was not cooperating. She might have been injured, but she felt no pain or strain, only a dull, irrefutable force dragging her down, slowing her movements ever more. The battle seemed to have been going on for hours, though it couldn’t really have been more than a few minutes. The onslaught of hornets was relentless. It was all Ez could do to dodge and parry as they forced her backward step by step by—

She backed into something.

Whirling, she almost disemboweled Gramma. The two women were pinned, elbow to elbow against Thoralf’s flank. One look at the older woman’s face and Ez knew it was over. They were beaten. There was no room to maneuver. There was nowhere to retreat. The only thing left to do was die. The buzzing of the swarm had reached a fever pitch; it was in Ez’s head, behind her eyes, drowning out her thoughts—erasing her.

Gramma howled right by Ez’s ear. The words were meaningless to Ez, but the sound cut her to the quick. It was a cry of fury and frustration, a raw, savage refusal to comply with destiny—the sync.

There was a great whoosh of emerald fire. Ez blinked through the afterimage and found herself standing in the center of a charred circle. Every vexpid in a twelve-foot radius was gone. A haze of ash hung in the air. She turned in time to see Gramma sway, then keel over like a felled tree. Her cane landed next to her. She didn’t pick it up. Thoralf took a protective stance over her prone form as fresh vexpids rushed to fill the space Gramma had cleared. The spell had taken every drop of her remaining strength, and it had only postponed the inevitable for a few seconds.

Ez’s hands were slick on the handle of the axe. I'm sorry, Wilburn, she thought. Maybe Jack would be waiting on the other side. Her left leg spasmed uncontrollably. But her resolve was firmer than her feet as she planted them upon the trapdoor, vowing to slay at least one more vexpid before exiting the stage of life. And here they came. The distance closed. Ez yelled, raising her weapon high—

Then she went flying. A sudden jolt of a force had thrown the trapdoor upward, shearing off the latch and flinging her like a projectile from a trebuchet. She cartwheeled over ranks of vexpids and crashed down right in the thick of them. She tumbled to a halt, battered and dazed, amidst a forest of bristly yellow legs. Her axe was nowhere to be found. She fumbled at her belt for the small knife—then froze. The room had gone silent. The vexpids stood still as statues. They were all focused on the same thing, and it wasn’t her.

Ez got to her feet carefully, so as not to brush any of them, and followed their gaze to the center room, where Thoralf’s head protruded from the crowd. A short distance from him—Ez had to crane her neck to see it—the trapdoor lay open to a square of darkness, and this seemed to be the subject of the hornets’ rapt attention. To her dismay, Wilburn’s head floated up through it, followed by the rest of him, clad in his red pajamas. The boy wasn’t shaking anymore. The fit had passed, and he now looked remarkably at ease—in fact, uncannily so. He wore a placid, dreamy smile, and his eyes were closed, as if he were savoring some exquisite treat.

Ez didn’t know what to do. A score of hornets stood between her and her son. Her only weapon was her hunting knife, which wasn’t made for killing, but for dressing game after she’d shot it with her bow. Did she dare make a move? What if by doing so she prompted the hornets to resume their attack? They would have Wilburn in their clutches long before she reached him... Ez hesitated.

One hornet at the front of the group crept forward from the rest. It approached Wilburn, who—“NO!” Ez cried—drifted complacently to meet it. The insect levered itself upright to balance on its rearmost legs, thrumming its folded wings for stability as its abdomen curled under and its stinger began to extend. The black lance tapered to an impossibly sharp needle tip, where a drop of violet venom clung, quivering. Ez made her move. But it was futile. One hornet smacked the knife out of her hand; another walloped her between the shoulder blades with a leg like a small tree. There was a strangely absentminded quality to their actions. She fell hard, and they could easily have killed her… but they didn’t. Their heads swiveled back to face the center of the room, as if they were captivated by the spectacle before them. They ignored Ez as she staggered to her feet.

Wilburn was floating on a level with the hornet’s stinger. Still smiling, his eyes still closed, he reached out with his index finger. Ez screamed for him not to do it. But he did. Slowly and deliberately—and remarkably precisely given that he couldn’t see what he was doing—Wilburn pricked the very tip of his finger on the hornet’s stinger. His face went blank. His eyes blinked open. He looked at his hand. A shudder ran through his entire body. Then he crumpled to the floor.