Page 81 of The Hunting Moon
The changeling lunges at Winnie, skull stretched long as if it wants to scream but lacks the mouth. All it has are the two slits at the center of its head where that choking breath punches out.
It smells like dead things.
And it looks likeChrysomya megacephalamaggots in their third stage.
The changeling slams into Winnie and she drops her backpack, no vial retrieved. Then she thrusts up her hunting knife in a pointless attack born from instinct, not logic. The knife enters the monster’s abdomen, where the white flesh simply absorbs it. The changeling’s full weight is atop Winnie now, and the nostril slits—coughing and gagging and coughing—widen to reveal teeth.
It is going to bite her in the face.
Winnie digs the knife in deeper and hikes up her left hip. It is a move she has practiced with Jay in recent weeks, and the instinct is a good one. She tips the changeling sideways. Its nose-mouth and fangs careen past her to land on the dirt.
The choking noise tangles louder. So close to Winnie’s ear. It is the sound a person makes before they vomit.
Winnie flips the changeling, reorienting herself atop it—which is somehow worse than being below it. The visceral horror ofstraddlingthis nightmare is like a thousand fingernails dragged down her spine.
Gorge rises in her esophagus. She coughs out the same sound as the monster.
The unnatural, unformed shape of a changeling has been known to elicit nausea in some hunters.
Winnie shoves the knife deeper. It most definitely causes no pain to the nightmare—because it has nofreaking organsand because its Maslow pyramid is basically just one need: taste human flesh and become human.
But Winnie is able to thrust so hard and so thoroughly that she stabs through to the other side and digs the knife into the cold earth. It won’t hold the changeling long, but it is momentarily trapped.
Winnie dives off the nightmare, grappling for her backpack.
She manages only a single step before the changeling’s wormlike arm slings around her ankle. It yanks. Winnie falls, thudding onto her stomach. Her glasses fly off her face. The front of her helmet hits the ground; her nose crunches.
And that is when she feels the changeling bite her—though “bite” doesn’t evenbeginto describe the sensation of its teeth on her calf. It is like a hundred syringes poking her all at once, except the sensation of the syringes almost immediately vanishes.Changeling saliva possesses a numbing agent that keeps prey alive during feeding though unable to move or feel pain.
In approximately one minute, if the changeling doesn’t release Winnie, that numbing agent will reach her brain. She kicks at the creature’s head with her free foot, but the changeling’s teeth are stuck in. All she does is drag the creature along with her while briefly collapsing its skull inward with her boot.
The head instantly re-forms. More of Winnie’s blood flows into its nose-mouth. And already, Winnie can see the monster starting to change.
It is growing auburn hair.
She kicks again, harder and more frantically, rolling and writhing as numbness creeps up her leg. She just needs her backpack, she just needs her backpack.
Then she spots something glittering nearby: a vial of nightmare contraband. Her vision is obscured, the darkness near complete within the trees, but it looks vaguely square-shaped. It’s not the vial she wants, but it is better than having her blood slurped out by a changeling.
Changeling saliva also possesses an anticoagulant to thin the blood for easier consumption. Once bitten, a human victim can be drained entirely within minutes.
Winnie snatches up the vial, rips off the cork, and slings the contents at the changeling.
Green liquid arcs out.
It hits the nightmare, a splash of spidrin venom in a long spray down its back—a back that is quickly becoming as pink as Winnie’s human flesh. The acid hisses, some sinking into the changeling, some rising as fog into the night.
A splatter hits Winnie’s calf too. She can’t feel it, though, because of thenumbing agent. She kicks again at the changeling, and this time she loosens the nightmare’s hold on her calf. Its teeth release. It chokes and flails. And Winnie scrabbles away from it on hands and knees. She can’t breathe this air, she can’t breathe this air, she needs to get away before the evaporating acid hits her lungs.
Winnie tears her glasses off the earth, then her backpack, then she half drags, half sprints into the trees.
She glances back only once to find a body, naked and identical to her own, stretched prone across the forest floor. There’s a hole all the way through its back from which green fog spews.
Winnie runs.
CHAPTER42
Winnie is limping now. Not from pain, but from numbness. There will be pain eventually, when the effects of the changeling saliva fade. And while she could try a drop of melusine blood to nullify and heal her right away, she’s afraid that will render her foolish. That she will heal… and then skip around the forest, trying to befriend every hunter or nightmare—or worse, every Diana.
