“Monster Slayer: You can’t handle this much awesome! Wednesday nights on the Adventure Channel!”
—Monster Slayer advertisement
ROOTED TO THE GROUND between the monster and Tracy, Leif prayed for a miracle, for a distraction, for anything! A heartbeat later, a falcon appeared between him and the advancing creature. The bird flapped wildly in the monster’s face in a way that Leif, had he been more in control of his wits, would have deemed unnaturally altruistic.
The beast assessed this new element for a fraction of a second. The brief distraction allowed Leif the exact bit of time he needed to waste the opportunity entirely.
Then the falcon was forgotten. The arm-deprived creature reared back to strike with a soul-piercing scream.
The claws rending Leif’s tender flesh sounded a great deal more like a shotgun blast from behind than he would have expected. Much less painful too. A second blast followed the first. The beast’s scream turned into a horrible, mangled gurgle as a third blast took the beast in the face.
Leif blinked in realization and looked over his shoulder as the monster staggered backward. There stood the doctor. He held a wicked- looking sawed-off shotgun, apparently pulled from within the collapsible cot that now lay on the ground beside him.
“Aha!” Leif spun around completely, arm flung wide and pointing at the weapon in triumph. “I knew it!”
“Karlson, get out of the bloody way!”
“Wha?” Leif turned back as the doctor scrambled around for another shot. The beast loomed, its eyes blazing in an eviscerated face, far more enraged than wounded by the blasts. Leif had no time to even think of defending himself before the monster knocked him aside and rushed for the doctor.
That could have been the end of the doctor, of Leif, of Dave, and of Tracy, who were perhaps saved by only the considerable number of pages remaining after this one—though if you really wanted to, you could give credit to Jason.
Recovered from a brief tango with unconsciousness, Jason lunged to his feet, scooped up his fallen sword, and drove it hilt-deep into the beast’s gaping shoulder wound. He gave no battle cry or clever one-liner to punctuate the strike. Perhaps were Jason not of the “strike first, quip later” school of combat, the beast might have had a chance to avoid the three-foot lance of steel now embedded crosswise through its vital bits.
Lungs punctured and hearts pulverized, the monster gave barely a gurgle of pain before it collapsed to its knees, pitched face-first into the dirt, and moved no more.
“There now,” Jason declared. “All dead-like.”
The major reason Jason preferred the “strike first, quip later” method was because he so seldom could come up with something clever to say in the moment. As it was, his triumphant comments were often written by someone else after the fact and added to the footage via post-production camera tricks.
Everyone else stood, either stunned or checking themselves for injury.
“Nice timing,” Dave managed.
“Thanks.” Jason yanked his blade free of the creature’s body and, with a nod to Leif’s frantic gestures, severed its head in a single cleave.
Tracy turned to Dave. “Tell me you got all that.”
Leif was too wired from fear and adrenaline to catch Dave’s response. Flush with the dual triumph of being right about the gun and seeing the creature slain just after he’d thrown himself in its path like a selfless idiot, he could barely catch his breath! He was alive! Tracy was alive! . . . He was alive!
And the gun hardly even hurt it?
“Guy killed it, Trace,” Leif whispered. “Killed it with a sword.” He went to sit down and realized he hadn’t gotten up yet.
Jason sank down to lie on his back with a groan. “After I get at least an aspirin, Doc, you’re going to tell me how long you’ve been toting that gun around.”
The doctor hurried over to examine his leg. “It was rather her idea,” he answered.
“Tracy!”
She blinked calmly back at Jason. “What? It’s for our safety, not yours. We’ll edit it out later. I don’t know if you noticed but the gun didn’t do much to it anyway. That was all you.”
“Still. It’s just not right. Dishonest.”
“Okay, so we blame it on the new kid,” Dave offered.
Tracy nodded. “Workable.”
Leif blinked. “Wait, what?”
Jason laughed and then winced at the doctor’s needle. “That’s probably worse. Just . . . I don’t know. We’ve got time to figure it out, I guess.”
The doctor forced them to wait before exploring the canyon lair any further. The hero needed rest, he declared, and his wounds needed patching, all of which was fine with Leif. The hike, the fear, the smack in the head by a giant turtle-frog—likely in ascending order—they’d all sucked the energy right out of him.
Jason complained at the delay but did so on his back with his eyes closed and a smile on his face. Dave happily reviewed the footage. Time drifted on for a while as they rested. Tracy gradually began to pace.
“What’s wrong?” Leif finally asked.
“Nothing. Why?”
Jason opened his eyes. “Getting antsy, Trace?”
“Not antsy. Just . . . a feeling. There’s something else in that canyon, I think.”
“Another of . . . those?” The doctor gestured to the dead creature.
“No, just . . . Look, I don't what it'll be, or how I know. Call it gut instinct. Producer's sense. We’ll find something interesting in there.”
Leif grinned. “That’s what I said!”
“I don’t mean treasure, Mr. Karlson.”
Leif scowled. He’d hoped living through the monster attack would bond them a bit, but she continued to use his last name. There’d be progress when she used his first name, he’d decided. It’d be all symbolic. That’s just how it worked. “So what, then?”
“I don’t really know. Just a feeling.” She turned to the doctor. “We’ve been resting for a while now. Satisfied?”
“I suppose. Careful on that leg, though.”
Jason stood. “Feels fine. Hey, let’s get a shot of me saying all that stuff about something else in the canyon. Sounds dramatic.”
“Good point,” she said. “Dave?”
They did a few takes of Jason mimicking Tracy’s intuition as his own—one solemn and weary, the other dashing and complete with broad grins to the camera.
“Cheesy,” said Leif, turning to Tracy. “You ask me, you should host. He’s a great fighter, don’t get me wrong, but you’re the brains here.”
Tracy actually appeared to smile for a moment—almost. “Thanks, but no one asked you,” she said finally.
“Plus, you’re a lot sexier than he is.”
The almost-smile vanished. “Jason? Lead on. Karlson, in the back. And shut it.”
“Better do what she says or she’ll bring out her producer’s whip,” said Jason with a grin.
“Ooh, you have a whip?”
“Figure of speech, Karlson. Now quiet.”
“Yeah,” Dave added. “Down, boy.”
Tracy didn’t realize she was walking shoulder to shoulder with Jason until Dave complained that she was getting in his shot. She slowed and forced herself to let the star take the lead. He just had to get himself a leg injury, didn’t he? It was a good thing she didn’t have an actual “producer’s whip,” she realized, or she might have used it; she wanted to be in that canyon. It further vexed her that she couldn’t put her finger on just why.
Vexed? she thought. Who talks like that? She swore to not say it aloud.
The hike up the canyon was a short one, punctuated with quick stops to search within each alcove. There were those who like to say that a sought object is always in the last place you look. There were still others who, upon hearing this uttered, flashed their smug little grins and pointed out that few people continue to look once they have found something. Tracy hated the second lot so much that she once continued to look for her keys after finding them, just out of spite. As they found little until reaching the very end of the canyon, she’d have been out of luck if anyone had made that comment today. There was simply nowhere else to search. Fortunately, no one said such a thing. They were all too mesmerized by the sight of an amulet on a golden chain hanging from a small natural peg of rock at the end of the alcove.
A smallish shaft in the alcove’s ceiling directly above the peg spilled daylight directly onto the amulet. Purplish glints of light scattered from the gemstone embedded in its center, which shone with the illusion of its own soft glow. Reflected light sparkled off the gold and danced upon the natural rock.
“You didn’t notice that before?” Leif asked.
“Might have,” answered Jason. “I was looking for a creature, not a necklace. This isn’t Jewelry Slayer, here.”
“You didn’t notice it.” Leif said.
Aside from the basics, Tracy had never been big on jewelry. Nonetheless . . .
“It’s beautiful. . . ” she whispered. Ignoring Dave’s protests, she stepped into Jason’s shot to reach for it.
“Looks like a trap to me,” Leif said.
She barely heard him. (This was not due to any preoccupation with the amulet. Tracy had spent most of the day trying to avoid listening to Leif and was just managing to get the knack of it.)
Even so, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the amulet called to her, like a cranberry-orange nut muffin. Or six-hundred-thread-count sheets. This, she knew, was for her.
She snatched it from its hanging place and slipped it over her neck before the others realized what she was doing. When the purple stone flashed a second later, they at least reacted quickly enough to catch her before her lovely unconscious skull hit the ground.