Page 30 of Sons of Sorrow
“My hero,” Evander croaked, already delirious from this thing’s toxins.
“Skink!” Bruna shouted. “Shut the hell up.”
She slapped him across the face, knocking him out of his stupor long enough for him to react as Evander Skink was meant to react: with a scandalized, wide-open mouth. An expression that said both “How dare you,” and “I can’t believe you’ve just done that.”
It also happened to be the perfect size and shape for shoving a curative potion into. Bruna dribbled a phial of something into his mouth, a concoction that looked red and potent and vital. Evander gagged, smacked his lips, and moaned something about deserving a chaser.
“There. That should stave off some of the pain, slow the effects of the venom. Sylvain, can you keep watch over him for now?”
Sylvain nodded. “Say no more.”
He pressed his hand against the ground, erecting a dome of leaves to separate him and Evander from the thing with all the teeth. The lizard thing, I meant, not me. Yes, my lips were drawn back in annoyance, my teeth bared because my mortal enemy had gotten himself into enough trouble that my best friend and my boyfriend had to go and waste resources on him.
But we had more problems to deal with. Problems like one Luna Hernandez going full apeshit on the lizard thing that just envenomated her new gay best friend.
“I shall punish you,” Luna announced. Cheesy, but sure, whatever she needed to get through the day. These Iron College kids were weird, man.
Luna touched a thumb and forefinger to each ear and flung her hand forward. Silver flashed, crescent moons as big as saucers launching from her fingertips. They sang as they sliced through the air, each one a razor-sharp boomerang, cutting through the creature’s neck with a wet, meaty squelch.
The lizard’s head issued a rasping death rattle as it fell, dead before it even hit the ground. Luna pumped her fist in the air, her crescent weapons already dismissed. Nicely done. No muss, no fuss, and no need to deal with the grossness of catching bloodied boomerangs. Just one problem.
“It’s not dead yet,” I said, pointing at the creature’s still-wobbling trunk. “Look.”
Slender tendrils grew out of the stump that Luna had left behind, wavering like tentacles as they stretched up high. Each bore a bud on its tip, almost like a plant with rapidly growing stems — kind of like that trick Sylvain had pulled with the potted plant in his bedchambers.
But these weren’t plants, and I had a terrible feeling that the buds wouldn’t burst open to reveal flowers. Within moments the new tendrils had developed hardened scales to match the trunk. The buds split open, exposing jagged rows of teeth, spitting and snarling.
“Oh, great,” I shouted. “Just great. Thanks a lot, Evander. You too, Luna.”
“Hey,” Evander’s disoriented voice said, muffled inside of Sylvain’s cocoon. “You’re welcome, buddy.”
Luna’s cheeks puffed up with indignation, but she said nothing. Bruna rushed to my side, nudging me with her elbow.
“Okay, monster master. Tell us what this thing is and how we’re supposed to defeat it.”
“Hydraling,” I said, scanning my vague mental recollection of the many, many bestiaries I’d perused for my studies. “Ermengarde Frost wrote about these things. You know how you can keep lopping off a hydra’s heads and they’ll just keep growing back? Nine out of ten that get chopped off will shrivel up and die. This guy over here is the one in ten that survived.”
It was the strangest phenomenon. A hydraling was nowhere near as much of a threat as a full, proper hydra, and few were expected to even survive past living short, miserable lives as mangled half-snakes. This one had somehow evolved, growing its own stumpy little legs and a pair of short, stubby T-rex arms. It would be almost cute if it wasn’t so sad.
And deadly. Also deadly. They could still inject venom and spit acid, after all, and grow heads out of their wounded stumps, just like the parents they’d split off from. But something was especially off about this creature. Even hydras could only grow so many heads, a few from each stump, if the legends were true. Luna had only decapitated it once. How did it now have seven heads already?
The air filled with tinkling and jingling. Ember came zooming toward us, back just in time from his scouting. “I leave you people alone for ten minutes and already you’ve found yourself in more trouble. Why do I bother?”
“We thought it was a guardian,” Luna said. She pointed an accusing finger at me. “At least his familiar said so.”
I glared at her. “Don’t blame Satchel for this. You’re the one who went and chopped off the first head.”
Satchel wrung his fingers together. “I’m sorry, Locke. I really am. I don’t know how I got so confused. I can still sense a guardian here.”
“Later,” I told him. “We’ll figure that out later. And I mean it. I don’t blame you for this. Okay? Let’s work through this together.”
He put on a brave smile and nodded, reaching for something invisible at his side. It flashed, long and gleaming in his hand, one of his sewing needles.
“Right,” Ember said. “We’ll need to work together to take this thing down. You’re just lucky it’s not a true hydra.”
“Uh, guys? A little help?” Bruna squished her hat to the top of her head as she dodged a gob of the hydraling’s spit. It landed on the ground, sizzling as it ate through dirt and rock.
“Okay, okay,” I stammered. “I’ll summon my doves to distract and confuse the hydraling. Satchel, you see if you can help with that, too. Luna, cut the heads off the way you did before, but lop them off all at once. And Ember, can you cauterize the stumps once they’re gone?”
