Page 43 of Kill the Beast
“Do I have to do anything special while I fill it?”
“Yeah, you have to howl at the moon in order to activate the spells.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Really?”
“No.” She laughed at the look on his face. “You would have done it though, wouldn’t you?”
Alderic rolled his eyes and uncorked the canteen. “You’re not half as amusing as you think you are.”
“But Iamsomewhat amusing?”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
As he crouched to collect the water, the surface of the lake rippled violently. The loose boards of the dock bucked beneath Lyssa’s feet, water surging up through the gaps between them. The lantern skittered over the edge with a splash, plummeting them into semi-darkness, and she lunged forward to grab the back of Alderic’s coat before he fell in, too.
“What was that?” Lyssa said, peering at the black water. Brandy was barking wildly, but she couldn’t see a damned thing without the lantern. “Brandy, hush! It was just a gust of wind, or something.” When he didn’t stop, she whirled around to glare at him—and was horrified to find him tensing the way he did every time he was about to jump into the river in the Witch’s Wood, eager and nervous all at once. “No! Stay there!”
He looked over at her and whined, obviously torn between obeying her and going after whatever it was he wanted in the lake.
Lyssa’s scalp prickled at the look in the bullmastiff’s eyes. She had trained Brandy to flush out faeries in the wild, so that shecould kill them, and he always had that same look when he had scented something with magic in its blood.
“Al! Get away from the water!”
“What? Why?” He was reaching out with the canteen, trying to collect the lake water without falling in.
Before she could shout at him to please,pleasejust listen to her foroncewithout arguing or asking questions, Brandy screeched, and Lyssa whirled around in time to see a pair of pale, webbed hands drag him into the water.
Alderic tossed the canteen aside and dove into the lake before Lyssa’s brain had even registered what had happened. A split second later she moved to dive in after him, but her feet jerked out from under her and she slammed down painfully onto her stomach. At first she thought she had gone through one of the rotten boards, but then she started to slide backward.
“What the fuck?” She scrabbled at the dock with her fingers, trying to keep from being dragged into the water. Something had her foot in an iron grip, and it hissed as she struggled.
Lyssa shouted obscenities and lashed out wildly with her other foot until she finally managed to kick whatever was holding her; it shrieked, relaxing its grip just enough for her to wrench free. She flipped over onto her back, unsheathed her pistol, and fired somewhere between the luminous eyes and glistening teeth looming over her legs. The head snapped back, and the creature let out a gurgle before it slid off the side of the dock and splashed back into the water.
Another one was already climbing up one of the pylons with slick gray arms, its eel-like tail whipping back and forth as it struggled to heft its weight out of the water.
Mermaids.
Lyssa shot the slimy bitch in the head. It plummeted from the pylon and sank like a stone.
Something else burst from the surface on the other side of the dock and Lyssa almost fired at it, too, until she realized that it was Alderic. He had Brandy draped over his shoulder like a sack ofgrain, but she couldn’t see much else. She holstered her pistol and grabbed the bullmastiff’s collar, dragging him up onto the dock.
Brandy whimpered as she quickly looked him over, trying to assess whether it was safe to move him back to camp. There were gashes all along his flank, three of them deep enough to need stitches.
Lyssa gritted her teeth against the sob that threatened to rip from her throat. “You’re going to be okay,” she told him, stroking his ear.
Alderic grunted with the effort of hauling himself out of the water, and rolled onto his back on the dock. He was breathing hard, and he had lost his cravat—his long hair was wrapped around his throat like a sodden scarf instead—but otherwise he looked unharmed.
“We have to get out of here,” Lyssa said, her voice tight with the effort of holding back her emotions. “Get the canteen.” Beyond the dock, more mermaids had poked their heads up from the water. They watched Lyssa and Alderic with eyes that seemed to glow in the moonlight, their tangled hair pooling around them on the surface. It wouldn’t be long until they swarmed, and Lyssa only had so many bullets on her.
“Come here, baby,” she said to Brandy, lifting him into her arms. He yelped in pain, and the sound was like a knife in Lyssa’s heart. “Shhh, it’s okay,” she told him, cradling the back of his head and adjusting her hold on him as gently as she could. “It’s going to be all right. We just have to get you back to camp and then I’ll patch you up.”
She staggered to her feet, and together she and Alderic climbed the stone steps carved into the cliffside, Alderic keeping one hand at Lyssa’s back so that she didn’t topple over beneath Brandy’s awkward weight. The moon had silvered the lake enough for her to see the mermaids, but the stairs were shrouded in darkness. She had to feel for each step with the toe of her boot before committing her weight to it, and their progress was so slow that she feared her arms would give out long before they reached the top.
When they finally made it back to camp after what felt like an eternity, Alderic spread a blanket out beside the fire and Lyssa laid Brandy down gently on top of it. The bullmastiff whimpered, and she pressed a kiss to the salt-and-pepper fur of his muzzle, letting him lick feebly at her cheek in return before she got to work.
“It’ll be easier if you hold him while I do this,” she told Alderic after she had fetched her med kit from her pack in the tent.
“Whatever you need. Just tell me what to do.”
