Chương 31: Chapter 30 - Emerra: 0, Crazy Townspeople: 1

It was past eight by the time I finished loading up Jay's car with all the groceries I'd bought. The sun had set long before, and the last of the light was gone. Fortunately, Olene Durand had thought to include lights on the four-wheeler. I'd discovered them on the first day while I was flipping every switch and pressing every button to figure out what they did. I could make it back to the motel, no problem, and I was looking forward to crashing on the couch to watch a few episodes of anime.

It had been a very long day. I threw my leg over the wide seat and was about to flip on the lights when I heard a noise that made my heart stop. A second later, it thudded back to life, and I whipped my head around, searching for the source of the noise while assuring myself that I must have imagined it. It wasn't that late, and Conrad knew that I was doing research. He wasn't expecting me home at a particular time.

Besides, I knew my packmate, and even if I was in some kind of trouble, he would've made it his priority to protect Kappa. I was a human among humans—I could expect some help from them. If Kappa was in Fort Rive, he'd need help because of them. Conrad would never bring him here, and he'd never allow Kappa to come out here by himself. But I could've sworn that was one of the noises that Kappa made. A repeat of the faint wailing floated along the breeze. That's Kappa's noise of distress.

I jumped off the four-wheeler and ran along the edge of town in the direction of the sound. Every step I took felt like it was on the border between one world and another. I was caught between Fort Rive and the overgrown woodland beside it. How far out were the buildings and yards allowed to impose? How far in were the roots and branches allowed to grow? To my right were the unkempt backyards and terminal sidewalk slabs—each one cracked and dislocated by tree roots. To my left, only wildness.

As I ran, the sound grew louder, and both the town and the wildness seemed to lean over me. Thirty yards from the four-wheeler, I found a large hole. Despite its size, it was hard to see. The faint light coming from the houses and the distant street lamps had to filter through the tree branches to get to me. I almost fell in, but I'd stumbled enough in the darkness, I'd learned to pause when I saw a shadow at my feet, and the lip of the hole created a sharp line of shadow across the opposite wall.

I stopped and crept forward. The sound of distress echoed oddly from the hole. I pulled out Conrad's phone, turned on the light, and shined it down on whatever was making the noise. The little guy in the hole winced and threw his mottled green and brown hands up to cover his eyes. There was no blue. It wasn't Kappa. But it was a lurker. It's weird when you feel simultaneously relieved and horrified. Your body doesn't know what to do. You can't sigh because you're trying to gasp at the same time.

I stood there, frozen, as my brain struggled to understand what I was seeing. The walls of the hole were straight up and down, and each one was covered by a slick five-foot-by-eight-foot sheet of metal, creating a box that was five feet across on all sides and eight feet deep. Under the lurker was a net and what looked like some leaves and small branches. I'd seen the cartoons. I knew what that meant. A pit trap. Someone had dug a pit trap. How was that even possible? This was Louisiana!

That pit should've been full of water! But it had to be possible. It wasn't like I could argue with the evidence offered by my own eyes, and the forest outside of town was higher than most of the surrounding area. I shut off Conrad's phone, crammed it in my pocket, and jumped into the pit, next to the startled lurker. He crouched away from me, all his fins pulled back. I squatted down, wrapped one arm over my knees, and put the other hand between us on the ground. I don't know.

Maybe I thought it was a non-threatening gesture to show that I was there for him. He stared at me, his already large black eyes as wide as they would go.

"I know, right?" I kept my voice low and friendly.

"Who expects a pit trap? This is straight-up Wile E. Coyote shenanigans. I'll bet that you didn't even know these existed." He blinked when he heard me. Understanding would be limited—I doubted that "Wile E. Coyote" would translate—but at least he would recognize who I was.

"We have to get you out of here," I said.

"If someone built this on purpose, they'll be coming to find you." His fins rose and he nodded. Thank god, he understood that.

"If I get you out of here," I said, "do you promise that you'll go back home?" His head tilted as he gazed at me.

"Go home!" I repeated.

"Be safe!" He nodded more enthusiastically.

"Good. Now, I'm not going to hurt you." His fins retracted again when I reached out, but he let me pick him up. I walked over to the nearest wall, hoisted him high above my head, and stood on my tip-toes. I felt him kick and struggle, then his weight disappeared. I stepped back as he pulled himself out of the pit and scuttled around to look down at me.

"Go on!" I said as loud as I dared.

"Go home!" He hesitated.

"I'll be fine!" I assured him. His head rose, and he stared hard at something I couldn't see, all his fins quivering. He whipped around and disappeared. A second later I heard voices.

"I'm telling you, it was right there!"

"You couldn't have seen anything if it's in the trap."

"Shut up! It just ran away. I told you to hurry!"

"If it just ran away, then it couldn't have been what you heard."

"There might've been two of them," a new voice suggested.

"Look! I know what I saw! And I know what I heard!" There were at least three of them. They were all men, and one of them sounded like he was already angry about something. I grimaced. He probably wouldn't be too excited about catching me in his trap. Beams of light swept over the mouth of the hole.

"Shit. I think he's right," a voice said.

"Look. The ground's churned up."

"Why would it be churned up if it fell in?"

"Maybe it tried to catch itself as it fell."

"Look for the tracks! Do you see any?" My heart started pounding. If the lurkers had been leaving tracks around, that would have shown them where to put the trap.

"It's not a good day for tracks." I resumed breathing. I may have been stuck in an eight-foot hole with three soon-to-be very disappointed men gathering above me, but at least they'd have a hard time proving that a lurker had been there. A beam of light came over the edge of the hole to glare down on me. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. I raised a hand to shield my eyes and tried to keep the quaking in my mock-cheerful voice to a minimum: "Hey."

"Shit," the man behind the light said. A silhouette appeared beside him.

"Who the hell are you?" Ah. The angry one.

"My name's Emerra Cole. I'm a visitor."

"I've heard of her," the third voice said.

"What the fuck are you doing in my backyard?" Oh. Wow. Forget angry, he was enraged.

"I'm sorry," I called.

"I didn't know this was your backyard. There was no fence or anything." His whole body jerked when he clenched his fists.

"The fuck you didn't know! What the hell are you doing here?"

"C-could you, maybe, shine the light somewhere else?" The beam of light dropped to my feet. Above me, I heard a whispered conference. The enraged guy whispered the loudest, and there was a hard edge to his tone, but I couldn't make out any words. There was a pause, then one of the other two called down to me, "Are you hurt?" My stomach lurched. Any normal person would be hurt if they'd tumbled into a pit trap on accident.

Given how small it was from side to side, they probably would've hit their head, but I didn't think I could fake an injury well enough to convince the three men—and heaven help me if they decided to take me to a doctor.

"I hit my knees pretty hard," I said, "but I'm okay." The whispering resumed.

"I don't suppose you'd be willing to help me out of here?" I asked. A dead silence followed my question. Then:"It's not like we can leave her in there."

"Pull her out. We can get her for trespassing."

"They can get you for digging the damn pit. I doubt you checked to see if it was legal."

"Shut up." The enraged guy got on his belly and reached down into the hole. I hesitated, but I didn't have much of a choice. It was take his arms or stay there. Two hard, calloused, wiry hands grabbed my wrists hard enough to make them ache. One of his friends leaned down to help. My muddy sneakers scrabbled uselessly against the metal sheet on the wall as they hefted me out of the pit. Me and the enraged guy ended up on our knees.

The friend that had helped him was sitting back on his butt with his hands braced against the ground behind him. The last man was standing on the other side of the enraged guy, holding up his phone as a flashlight. When he squatted down to get closer to our level, it lowered the light. I could finally see them without being blinded. No surprise, every last one of them was bigger than me. The skinniest one was the enraged guy, and it looked like he did heavy manual labor to earn his paycheck.

The other two had more weight on them, but it was mere padding that added mass to their muscles. If they'd been wearing black leather, I would've assumed they were in a biker gang. And each of them was glaring at me in a way that made my blood go cold.

"Now," Enraged-guy said between gasps, "what the hell…were you doing…in my pit?" I had to swallow before I could answer.

"I fell in—""Bullshit!" My eyes went from Enraged-guy, to the man who held the light, to his other friend. There wasn't a speck of kindness or friendliness in any of their faces, and none of them thought this was funny. I tried to laugh anyway. It died a millimeter out of my mouth.

"Look, guys, I'm sorry—I really am—" Enraged-guy said, "You trying to tell me that was you making those noises?" Ohhhhh, crap. He'd heard them. Of course he'd heard them. I'd heard them, hadn't I? Half the town had probably heard them!

"What noises?" I bluffed. He used his head to motion to the pit.

"You trying to tell me that was you I saw in there?" But if he had seen the lurker in that pit, he wouldn't be wasting time with questions; he would've gone straight to accusations. When he heard the noises, he'd probably come out, in the dark, saw something in the pit, and gone back to get a light and his friends. There was a chance—a ridiculous, ludicrous, spider-web-thin strand of a chance—that I could play this off.

"I mean, it'd have to be," I said.

"I was the one who set off the trap. It was covered when I fell in." I pointed to him with a shaking finger and tried, like my life depended on it, to sound casual.

"Was that you I heard above me?" Light-holder and Other-friend glanced at Enraged-guy. His grimace, which was already deep enough to see in the bad light, cranked further down. His face looked like a wooden mask you'd use in some terrible ceremony that involved demons. He called me an extremely not-nice name and spat in the dirt at my feet. Then he ran his tongue over the top row of his teeth and sneered.

"I know that wasn't you," he said.

"It was too small to be you."

"I was crouched down."

"And the noises? That cooing, whiny noise?"

"I was scared."

"Bullshit!" He lunged toward me on his hands and knees, like a mad dog, landing only inches away. I jerked back. My wrist slid into the pit, scraping along the edge of the metal. I caught myself before I fell, but pulling myself onto solid ground brought me even closer to his sneering face.

"You're trying to make out that I'm crazy," he yelled, "but I am not crazy!" He sure looked crazy—ragged breathing, spittle flying, his eyes wide and bloodshot around the rims. I glanced at the other two men to see if they were going to take him by the shoulders and say something pacifying, like, "Easy there, Jimbo. We know you're not crazy," but they were still watching me. I could see the suspicion hardening behind their eyes. When I stood up, all three of them got to their feet.

I tried to step to the side, but Other-friend moved to block me. That was a… bad sign. I was standing in front of three hostile men who didn't want to let me leave, and the only place I could go to avoid them was back in the pit. My icy stomach dropped several inches, my brain dumped an ocean of adrenaline into my system, my heart rate picked up, quadruple time, and my breathing suddenly felt crystal clear. I held up both my hands in a placating manner.

"Look, I'm really sorry. I was lost—""You're with them," Light-holder said. His eyes were narrow, and he was frowning at me. The fact that he was the one who'd spoken—not Enraged-guy—was another bad sign.

"I heard you worked in the swamp," he added. My hands trembled, but my thoughts flowed like a breeze through a silent Zen temple. I wasn't fooled. This wasn't peace. Some part of my brain assumed that I was about to take part in a war where my prospects were abysmal, and it had dumped everything else to focus on survival.

"Yes," I said.

"I'm helping Ayla Davids—" Light-holder interrupted: "Everyone knows that those… things are coming out of the swamp. You're with them. You're trying to protect them." There was only one hope left. I turned to Other-friend. His face was as grim as Light-holder's.

"What are you hiding?" he demanded. So much for that hope. Snuffed out like the proverbial candle. I could almost hear the tiny sizzle as it died. I kept my hands at my sides, but I curled them into fists. I looked Enraged-guy right in his goggling, blood-shot eyes.

"Please let me go." He stepped forward, fists already raised, as he said, "Not until you tell us what you're hiding!" I wasn't as scared as I should've been. Maybe it was the adrenaline. Or maybe it was because Conrad had trained me to fight. It'd take more than three large men to impress a girl who went toe-to-toe with a six-foot-nine wolfman three times a week.

And if I'd been any smarter, I might have remembered that Conrad went out of his way to avoid hurting me, whereas these guys would be doing the exact opposite. Enraged-guy threw his fist in a slow arc toward my head. I dodged it and went with a straight punch to his face, just like Conrad had taught me. From the shoulder. Keep it tight. Move like a whip. Aim behind your target. I had a nano-second's pleasure of feeling his nose splatter under my knuckles. Then the pain hit.

My mouth opened to shape an involuntary augh! and I cradled my hand to my chest. Indignation flared. When I hit other people, it was supposed to hurt them, not me! My eyes flew up to Enraged-guy. He sputtered as blood spewed from his nose. His eyes were watering, but he managed to glare at me with a hatred so profound that I knew, to the bottom of my frosty white stomach, that he wanted to kill me. I raised my aching fist and stepped into a decent fighting stance. All three rushed me at once.

I like to think that I did a pretty good job of holding my own. Considering it was three-on-one (and much worse odds if you took weight into account), the fact that I stayed standing for almost a whole minute was impressive. By the time I went down, I'd given all of them some bruises and, hopefully, a kidney shot or two to remember me by. They beat me as I laid on the ground, curled up in a ball, trying to protect my neck and face.

My only break was when, in their eagerness to hurt me, they ruined their rhythm and got in each other's way. With every blow, the agony and despair built until I thought I'd be crushed by it. Then something went click in my brain, and I couldn't feel anything anymore. My world was filled with a cool, dull numbness. That's right. This is what it was like. I could turn myself off like a switch. I could stop all the pain. I haven't done this since I was a child. Not even with the cancer.

Your father didn't beat you, another part of my brain said. Good for him, a much more bitter part said. We can give him that one scrap of credit. He earned it. It hardly matters now, another said. It was like they were all sitting around a table, watching my pummeling from a safe distance. The last voice—a tiny, sorry little thing—whispered, Do you think they really will kill me? A voice outside of me roared, "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

Light-holder had dropped his phone at the beginning of the fight. It shone up in the air, only allowing me to see heavily shadowed forms, but I could make out the shape of the large hand that reached through the light and grabbed Other-friend's arm, jerking him back with enough force to send him staggering away.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" the voice roared again. For a delirious moment, I wondered if it was Conrad. That was stupid. Conrad should've been miles away, and the shape of the silhouette was all wrong. Whoever this new protector was, he kicked out Light-holder's foot and shoved him hard. There was an abrupt oof as the air was slammed out of Light-holder's lungs and a sharp thunk when his head hit the ground.

The new guy grabbed Enraged-guy by the collar with both hands, dragged his face to within an inch of his own, and yelled, full volume, "Get out of here! All of you! You have five seconds! If you don't, I swear to god, I will make sure that every last one of you rots and dies in prison!" That must have been my problem. I tried to be nice and logical. I should've tried to out crazy them. He let go of Enraged-guy and gave him a hard kick for good measure.

"Git!" Enraged-guy and Other-friend staggered off. Light-holder had to scramble over the ground until he could grab his phone, make it to his feet, and limp after his friends. I was left alone with the man who'd saved me. He stood there, staring after them, his hands trembling. When they had "git" enough, he sat back on his heels and drawled, "Miss Cole, are you all right?" Definitely not Conrad. Conrad didn't have a southern accent. I should've known that voice too.

Now that he wasn't yelling like a lunatic, it sounded familiar. Unfortunately, I was having trouble thinking—what with all the blinding pain. I tried to sit up. The man took my arm, put his other hand on my back, and helped me. Between the two of us, I made it to a sitting position.

"How bad did they hurt you?" he asked. I couldn't answer. My jaw felt stiff.

"Hold on." He took out his phone and turned on the flashlight function to get a good look at my injuries. When he angled the phone, I finally got to see the face of my hero. It was Benjamin Gladwyn.