Page 44 of Kill the Beast
She sterilized her needle, knife, and scissors in the fire before wiping them down with her tiny bottle of clear liquor and a clean rag. Alderic sat on the blanket and held Brandy the way Lyssa instructed him to, while she dabbed at the bullmastiff’s flank with a gauze pad soaked in the alcohol. He snarled and snapped at the sting, but Lyssa kept her eyes on her work, wiping the wounds carefully to lessen the chance of infection.
“He didn’t seem to like that,” Alderic commented.
“He never does, the big baby.”
Brandy’s wounds weren’t fatal, and he had definitely suffered worse during his unnatural lifespan, but he wasn’t a puppy anymore. The mortal world was hard enough on his body as it was, these days, and injuries like this…
Lyssa cursed herself for bringing him, for risking his life because she was too weak to leave him home. He should be safe at the cottage with Ragnhild, chewing his bone, not lying here bloodied and in pain between a mermaid-infested lake and whatever the fuck was in that forest.
No. You have to focus.She shoved the guilt aside for now. Tried not to let it cloud her head.
Brandy remained still throughout the ordeal—he had been patched up before and knew what was expected of him—but he couldn’t help his whimpers of pain. Lyssa made soothing sounds while she worked, a murmured mantra ofit’s fine you’re fine it’s going to be okay,and all the while Alderic held the dog’s head, stroking his ears gently and muttering his own words of comfort.
When she was finished, she mixed a paste from a few of theherbs she kept in her med kit, then slathered the mixture on Brandy’s wounds.
“Don’t lick it,” she commanded him when he raised his head to sniff at the stuff. He gave a heavy sigh and laid his head back down.
Alderic sat back, drawing his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. He was still completely drenched from diving into the lake, and his teeth chattered as she cleaned her tools and put them back in her med kit. When she ducked into the tent to grab her pack, she brought a blanket back out with her, too, and dropped it in Alderic’s lap. “Here. Before you freeze to death.”
His eyes widened as though she had given him a gift of immeasurable value. “Thank you,” he said as he wrapped the blanket around himself. “I don’t know where those things came from,” he added, his tone defensive, as if he thought she might blame him for the foul infestation that had taken hold here. “I swam in that lake all the time as a child.”
“I told you, something must have moved in since the last time you were here.”
“But how would they havegottenhere?”
“The veil between our world and theirs is thinner, in some places. This might be one of those places.” She unbuckled her belt and her pistol in its holster, stowing them in her pack. Checked her knives and slipped a few extras into her boots. Fury was rising swiftly within her, now that her fear for Brandy had ebbed. When she was filled to bursting with it, she would need to release it the only way she knew how. “Did they attack you, when you entered the water?”
Alderic shook his head. “They didn’t touch me. Kept their distance, in fact. Like they were afraid of me.” A strange expression flitted over his face—guilt, maybe, that Brandy had gotten hurt and he hadn’t. She didn’t have time to think about it, though. Nor did she have time to wonder why the mermaids would have been afraid of Alderic and not of her. Her anger was reaching its peak, and she needed to be down at the dock when it did.
“Stay here with Brandy,” she told him. “Make sure he doesn’t try to get up and follow me. Tie his paws together if you have to. And under no circumstances are you to go down to the lake while I’m gone. Do you understand me?”
“Why? What are you going to do?” Alderic said, half rising, but the expression on Lyssa’s face must have made him reconsider, because he sank back down.
“I’m going to do what I do best.”
CHAPTER
TWELVE
THE MERMAIDS WEREwaiting for her, teeming around the dock like goldfish clamoring to be fed. The water roiled and splashed with the thrashing of their tails. One of them had Ragnhild’s canteen in its webbed hands, and Lyssa’s anger ratcheted up at the sight of it.
Damn you, Alderic. I told you to grab the fucking thing.
Well, she would just have to pry it from the slippery bitch’s cold, dead fingers.
“My companion suspects that you’re afraid of him,” she called to the creatures as she walked down the stone steps, a knife in each hand. “But I’m the one you should be afraid of.”
The mermaids hissed and bared their sharp teeth. Reached up to grip the sides of the dock when she stepped onto it, the wood groaning beneath her boots.
“When I’m done with you, this lake is going to be more blood than water,” she told them.
They might not have been able to understand her, but they must have recognized the challenge in her tone, the threat, because they hissed again, collectively, and then they swarmed. Up the pylons, over the boards, hefting their bulky weight up onto the wood in such droves that it began to splinter and crack. Lyssa waited for them to come, tightening her grip on her knives. The pistol would have been faster, less messy and less work, but she wanted to get her hands dirty this time. Wanted to feel their lifeblood spilling out onto her skin. Besides, pistols didn’t work so well when they got wet, and she had a feeling she might be going in the water tonight.
When the first of the mermaids reached her, she began towork her own kind of magic, becoming what Ragnhild had made her—a living weapon. She stabbed and sliced and sawed with fatal precision, channeling Ungharad’s divine rage, Her holy justice. She became so focused on the death she was dealing that she barely felt the claws and teeth that found their way into her flesh. Her own body didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was victory. And when the dock finally fell apart around her, dumping her into the mermaids’ domain, she recovered quickly from the shock of the icy lake and the leaden resistance of the water, adjusting her movements to compensate for the sluggishness of her limbs.
It wasn’t the first time she had battled faeries underwater, and, Lady willing, it wouldn’t be her last.
She fought until the lake was clouded with blood—not all of it belonging to the mermaids. Ignoring the pain in her body, the tightness in her chest as her lungs struggled not to breathe, she let her fury fuel her until her vision began to blacken at the edges, her limbs slowing.
