Present Tense (Out of the Fire #3) - Candace Blevins Page 0,130
in case he did, I wanted to keep as much feedback from him as I could.
We were about a half mile from the staging area Aaron had found, and I started walking to it, knowing Aaron would map out a plan with Nathan and they’d both be in position long before me.
Walking away from them, through the woods, towards danger without my gun was terrifying, but I breathed through my fear and tried to keep my physiological reactions to a minimum. Both for my own pride, to keep Aaron and Nathan from smelling my fear, but also because it wouldn’t do for the goat-people to know I was terrified before I saw them. A lost human can be expected to smell a little scared, but not out-of-her-mind frightened.
I was pretty sure the creature I’d killed had the snout of a goat, which would likely mean he couldn’t speak as a human, but I heard guttural speech when I was around sixty yards from the cave. I purposefully walked loud, and as I rounded a boulder and headed towards a gully, I saw movement.
They stopped talking, and only one of them was waiting for me as I neared. He looked almost like a man, though a grotesque one, but I could see hints of the goatman’s features in his mostly human face.
I deliberately let a little shock show in my expression before I reined it in to be polite. “I seem to have gotten lost. Can you tell me how to get back to the main parking lot in Prentice Cooper? I thought I was following a trail but I must’ve gone off the blazed pathways and…” I tried to look as vulnerable and incompetent as I could manage. “I feel like an idiot, but I wouldn’t know which direction to go even if I could figure out where north is.”
I wasn’t all the way back to the staging area, but both Aaron and Nathan have excellent hearing. However, if they’d heard the creatures talking then I’d have expected them to have apprehended them before I arrived, so I wasn’t sure what was up. I couldn’t come up with a reason to scream, but I needed to do something loud so they’d know where I was. Sound doesn’t always carry as you’d expect when making your way in and out of gullies as you climb and descend mountains.
The second creature stepped out, and he looked almost exactly like the one I’d killed, though his horns seemed thicker and heavier. This was my excuse to scream, and I did. Long and loud. These guys not only looked terrifying, but I’d seen how well the other fought and the fear reflected in my screams wasn’t an act.
I heard Nathan running towards us this time, but only because he intended for us to hear. The shock value of watching an eight-hundred-pound lion running towards you is enough to make anyone freeze, and I stepped out of the way as Nathan pounced on the more goat-like of the creatures. The other one ran, and I saw Aaron take him to the ground just before they rounded a corner.
Nathan had a paw on the goatman’s chest, and his scary lion teeth pressed into the goatman’s throat enough for a small trickle of blood.
“He wants to know where the women are,” I told the goatman under Nathan. “I’d advise you to start talking. He’s tasted blood and he can’t always pull himself back.”
This was a lie. Nathan has perfect control, but I wanted to be sure the goatman was sufficiently terrorized.
“He should just go ahead and kill me, then,” the goatman said from the ground, his voice strained.
“Oh, no. He likes to play with his food before he kills it. Sometimes creatures are more than half eaten before they finally die. He knows which parts of the body he can eat without getting into an artery, and he bites around the spots that would let you bleed out. When they’re gone, he opens the stomach and eats the liver while his victim watches. I’ve never managed to stick around for much of it — the screams are horrid.”
He’d actually only done this around me once, but I wasn’t lying about having to leave because of the screams.
The goat creature laughed. “He won’t eat me. I taste awful and will make him sick.” His English was good, but he had a chopped, guttural accent, and I had the feeling it was his second language.