Tristan pushed the gate open. “This footpath runs along the headland to the ruined chapel. I think if we follow it—”

  “Follow the trail. Safe here?” She pointed to the headscarf wrapped around her head.

  Tristan looked around. No one was in sight. Not that his track record of keeping her hidden was going well. So far the two people they’d spoken to had both seen her, and if looks could kill she’d have left a trail of bodies through the village.

  “I think so—”

  “Good.”

  She tore the headscarf off and flung it at him as if it were suddenly too much to bear, then launched herself forward, accelerating before her feet seemed to touch the ground.

  “Hey! Wait!” Tristan called.

  She skidded to a halt, energy shuddering through her like a coiled spring.

  “What about… y’know, Sanguivores?”

  “I will remain close.”

  “Uh huh. How—”

  She burst away again, faster than before, as if she’d been holding herself back. He’d seen her move fast before, but now she tore across the landscape in bounding strides.

  “—close is close…” he finished.

  For a heartbeat she vanished behind a rise, then surged into view again as she sprang over a hedge and disappeared from view. He stared after her for a moment and then began ambling along the path, scanning the horizon nervously.

  Every so often he caught sight of her in the distance, on top of a hedge or a rock. As soon as he spotted her, she vanished again. She was letting him know she was out there, watching the way ahead. That made him feel slightly better.

  Fifteen minutes later he reached the edge of a field near the top of the valley. The wind had picked up, howling across the exposed headland. He was just thinking it’d been a while since he’d seen Yesa when she vaulted over the tall hedge ahead of him, landing without a sound beside him.

  He flinched. “God damn it—stop doing that.”

  “I have found it. This way.” She gestured toward the hedge.

  Tristan looked at the dense, spiky hedge and the barbed wire at its base. Climbing that would probably kill him.

  “Yeah, I don’t think I can climb that.”

  “Then find a way.” She was over it before he could blink.

  “Then find a way,” Tristan muttered in a mocking singsong, hoping she wouldn’t hear.

  When he finally caught up, his trousers were caked in mud, and a length of bramble had wrapped around his arm like it had a personal vendetta.

  “You have arrived.”

  Yesa looked as though she’d been standing perfectly still the entire time.

  “Yes, well…” He sighed as he yanked at the bramble. It held firm. “Had to find another way around, didn’t I?”

  He finally ripped it free with a triumphant grunt.

  It immediately caught on his trouser leg.

  Yesa watched him hop on one foot, trying to shake it loose. “Humans are very uncoordinated.”

  He brushed himself down. “Depends on the human. You just got lumbered with one of the bad ones.”

  He shot one last venomous glare at the bramble. “Well. Where is it?”

  Turning, she pointed across the field. Sure enough, a stone circle almost identical to the first sat there in the open. Tristan was certain he’d have walked straight past it if she hadn’t pointed. “I found something else. This way.”

  She stalked over to an outcropping of gorse and brambles nearby and waved him over.

  A man in black lay sprawled deep in the overgrowth. Very dead. So dead, in fact, that other things had already started living on him.

  “Dead human,” she said, in the same tone someone might use to note a strangely shaped cloud.

  Tristan winced. “Jesus… That’s the second dead body I’ve seen today, and it's not even twelve o'clock."

  He trailed off, frowning as he noticed something tucked into the man’s pocket.

  Careful not to snag himself on the brambles, he edged closer and tugged it free.

  He held it up between thumb and forefinger.

  A balaclava.

  “Right. Well. That’s just great,” he muttered.

  Yesa looked up at him.

  “I think this was our burglar,” he said. “He’s dressed in black, wearing gloves, and only two kinds of people wear balaclavas. Thieves and skiers.”

  “He is not a skier?”

  “Not unless he’s very lost or his travel agent was an idiot. What killed him? One of your monsters?”

  “No. Nothing from my world kills without eating.” She pointed at his throat, which had more hole in it than throats tended to do. “One cut.”

  Tristan rubbed the back of his neck and glanced across the empty fields. “Oh good. So someone with a sharp weapon.”

  Someone who might still be nearby.

  “Based on what Jess said—assuming he came here after breaking into the museum—he’s been dead a while.”

  It certainly looked like it. The exposed skin had turned a dark purple-green, and the smell was overpowering, putrid and sweet at the same time. It reminded him a bit of mango, he’d never be able to eat one again.

  He dropped the balaclava back into the undergrowth, stepped out of the bush and wiped his hands on his coat.

  No one knew he was here. Maybe it was better to keep it that way. Could they get fingerprints from the cloth? Would they think he murdered this guy? He glanced at Yesa and her very sharp sword.

  Fuck.

  What if they thought she’d done it?

  His heart started pounding. His breaths came fast and shallow.

  “What are you doing?” Yesa asked.

  “I think… I think I’m having a panic attack.”

  “What is that?”

  “Kind of makes you feel like you’re dying,” he panted.

  “Then stop.”

  “I can’t! It’s involuntary!” he croaked, bending double with his hands on his knees.

  Yesa watched him for a moment. Then she stepped forward and punched him.

  He reeled back more in shock than pain, clutching his face.

  “Ow! What the hell was that?”

  “I was concerned,” she said, stepping back.

  “You don’t punch people you’re worried about!”

  “But now you are not panicking.”

  She had a point. He was more annoyed than terrified. Which annoyed him even more.

  He let out a shaky breath and closed his eyes. “Right. Fine. I think we just leave it here. No one’s found it. No one knows it’s here.”

  “Whoever killed him will know it is here.”

  Tristan grimaced. “Right. Apart from whoever that was.”

  Yesa cocked her head. “I can punch you again if it will help.”

  “No! No, thank you. I feel much better,” he lied.

  Monsters from another dimension were one thing. At least they weren't plotting. A burglary and a murder meant someone was. Tristan didn't like that at all. “Let’s concentrate on the stone circle.”

  His legs still felt weak. He shoved his hands into his pockets to stop them shaking as they walked toward the stones.

  He was sure he could still taste the decay in his mouth.

  One stone was completely missing. Another lay on its side a little way off.

  “Well, we can pick that one up,” Tristan said, motioning to the fallen stone. “Not sure what we’re going to do about the other one.” He clenched his hands in his pockets.

  Yesa stalked around the edge of the circle. She stopped where the missing stone should have been and crouched, sniffing at the grass.

  She stood, then stepped cautiously into the circle.

  It was stupid, but for a second Tristan thought she might vanish.

  She didn’t.

  She stood there a moment, one hand raised, then strode back out.

  “It is broken,” she said, folding her arms.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Tristan suddenly felt the need to work out why—on his own. For humanity. For the species. To prove they weren’t completely useless.

  He clicked his tongue and nodded, then stepped past her, crossing the edge of the circle as if there were a low wall there.

  Nothing.

  He turned slowly. “Okay. Why do you think it’s broken?”

  She didn’t sigh or look disappointed. She simply bent down, picked a long blade of grass, and held it up.

  It jerked in the wind.

  Tristan stared. He was going to look like an idiot in about three seconds. He could feel it coming.

  “No, I still don’t understand,” he admitted.

  “Try.”

  Her voice was patient, like she was teaching a child.

  Tristan hesitated, then bent down and plucked a blade of grass, copying her.

  The sensation hit him immediately.

  Wooziness. Wrongness. His stomach lurched. The air felt thick somehow—resistant, like moving through invisible syrup.

  His grass didn’t move.

  There was no wind.

  Outside the circle, her hair and ears whipped in the gale.

  Inside—nothing.

  The wind howled around them. He could hear it, see it bending the grass and rattling the hedges beyond the stones.

  But here, inside the circle, it didn’t exist.

  It was like standing in a bubble.

  A dead bubble.

  “Fucking hell!”

  Pain slammed into his skull, and he doubled over, almost collapsing from the agony. He staggered out of the circle, back into the wind, suddenly grateful for the gale.

  “Ugh—God—that feels horrible!”

  He dropped to one knee, his brain still feeling like it was trying to tear itself apart.

  “Does that feel wrong to you?” he asked. “When you’re in there?”

  “Wrong, how?”

  He struggled for words.

  “Once I noticed it, I just—hated it. Like my brain didn’t want to deal with it.”

  Yesa looked at the circle, then back at him.

  “You cannot see what is there. You forget when you do.”

  “Like at the museum?” he said, suddenly desperate. “What does that mean?”

  She didn’t answer immediately. Her eyes swept across the landscape—the fields, the walls, the village below—calculating.

  “The stone,” she said finally. “It would not move itself.”

  She walked to the low wall and studied it for a moment, then began pushing stones from the top, sending them tumbling.

  “I don’t think the landowner is going to be very happy about this.”

  “They can have Carrion or a wall.” She shoved another stone free.

  Tristan glanced around nervously. “Right, but they don’t know about the Carrion, do they?” He frowned. “What are Carrion, anyway?”

  “The creatures. Sanguivore and the other one.”

  “Oh. A catch-all term? Are there others?”

  “Yes.”

  “So all creatures from your world are called Carrion?”

  “They are not from my world.”

  She braced her shoulder against the wall and heaved. Stone ground against stone. She stepped back. “Help me.”

  “Only if you tell me about the Carrion.”

  She glowered at him, eyes flicking to the wall and back again.

  “They came,” she said. “The gods fled.”

  She plucked a loose stone from the top of the wall, weighed it, and tossed it aside.

  “Then we died.”

  The wind rippled through the long grass.

  “Right…” Tristan almost stopped there, but pushed on; the worst she could do was kill him. “So they came through… what? Doorways?”

  “I do not know. Only what I was told. I did not see it.”

  “What about the—what did you call it—the god stone?”

  She shrugged. “I saw it once. In the ruins.”

  “Like ruins of a city?”

  She set her shoulder against the wall again and heaved. “Yes. City of the gods. Ruins now. It crashed.”

  “It… crashed? From the sky?”

  “I do not know. I did not see it. That is what my mother told me.”

  She glanced back at him. “Are you finished?”

  The wind whipped across the headland.

  Tristan cleared his throat. “Right. I’ll—”

  He joined her at the wall, and together they toppled it easily.

  “Well, that’s a lovely pile of rocks. I know what you’re thinking—they took the stone and built it into a wall somewhere. But how would we ever find it? It’s a needle in a haystack.”

  “I do not know what that means,” she said, still pulling stones from the wall.

  “It means trying to find a small sharp thing inside a bunch of other stuff,” he explained, watching her work.

  “Push someone in. They scream. A needle is found.”

  Tristan stared at her. “That’s… horrifyingly efficient, actually.”

  “Yes.”

  She reached over and pushed him.

  He would have been fine if his foot hadn’t caught on the broken wall.

  He pitched forward and landed in a heap of loose stones on the other side.

  “Very mature,” he groaned.

  “Needle,” she said, looking down at him.

  “What?” He tried to untangle himself from the rocks.

  She patted the stone he’d tripped over, still embedded in the wall.

  It did look roughly the right size and shape.

  Tristan stared up at her. “Did you know it was there?”

  She shrugged. That infuriating non-answer that could mean anything.

  “You pushed me on purpose.”

  “You found the needle,” she said, as if that settled the matter.

  “How?” He brushed himself off.

  She pointed to her ears.

  “Right. Of course. It’s cheating if you can hear the needle,” he muttered.

  Tristan left her digging the stone out while he went to fix the other.

  Much like the stone at the first circle, this one had simply tipped over—whether someone knocked it or the ground slipped. It didn’t take much effort to push it upright again, though he was careful not to step inside the circle and tried to ignore the absence of wind.

  He stepped back to admire his work, then turned to find Yesa.

  She’d freed the stone from the wall but was struggling to move it, pushing with her whole body as it scraped slowly toward the circle.

  He walked over. “Need a hand?”

  “Yes.”

  He bent to help.

  His hands had just touched the cold stone when—

  Pressure.

  Sudden and wrong, crushing down on him like a physical weight.

  His stomach dropped.

  Yesa noticed immediately. Her head tilted slowly to one side, ears twitching. “What?”

  “I—I don’t know. I just felt… weird.”

  Yesa looked toward the stones. “Weird how?”

  A low rumble reverberated through him. Not sound—deeper than that. It vibrated in his bones, tickled something primal in his brainstem.

  Every fibre in his body screamed at him to run.

  “What was—” he started, shaking.

  “Danger.” Her voice was tight.

  “You too?”

  “I heard it.”

  She was crouched now, facing the stones, ears flattened against her skull.

  Tristan noticed something that concerned him more than anything he’d ever seen. Yesa was breathing heavily, her hands trembling slightly. Her eyes were almost wild, pupils dilated.

  She looked scared. In all the fights, all the creatures, all the chaos—he'd never seen fear on her face. Until now.

  "Run…" she said softly.

  "Run?"

  "RUN!" she screamed and bounded away past him, faster than he’d ever seen her move.

  Tristan stood frozen in place. He'd never heard her sound like that.

  Something moved within the circle.

  Tristan couldn't make it out at first—translucent in the air, with reality bending around it like heat shimmer. A vast reptilian maw materialised from nothing. Massive. Scales the colour of blood, wet-looking, sheening. Obsidian eyes that reflected nothing absorbed everything.

  It lazily turned from side to side.

  A monstrous clawed fist appeared beside the impossible head—talons as long as Tristan was tall, razor sharp—and pushed against thin air. Testing. It seemed to be held back. Unable to leave the stone circle.

  "What. The. Fuck," he whispered.

  A hand grabbed his arm. "RUN, stupid!" Yesa had returned. She did not look happy about it.

  "Wh—what is it?" he stammered, still transfixed.

  "Death! We need to run!" She tried to drag him, but he wouldn't budge.

  The claw pushed. Reality bent around it, a shimmering rainbow effect at the edges as it strained to hold.

  Curiosity washed through him—not his. He was terrified; he knew that, but the terror felt distant, like shouting through cotton wool. The thing's emotions were simply larger than his. Too large to think past.

  He desperately tried to drag his fear back to the fore and tore his gaze away towards the fallen stone.

  "No." Yesa's grip tightened.

  "We can fix it," he said. "It's trapped in there. If that thing gets through—" He looked down at the village in the valley below.

  She followed his gaze. Back to the stone. A heartbeat of consideration, then she released him and raced toward it, already pushing before he could help. "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!" she muttered. Tristan ran to join her; the stone was twenty feet from the stone ring. Theoretically not far, but an insurmountable distance when it meant closing on that monster.

  Was it a dragon? It looked like one, huge and reptilian—hadn't noticed them yet. Too busy testing its prison. Another enormous fist appeared beside the first. Both pushed against the barrier. Claws pressed against empty space and the air warped outward, the barrier stretching from the ring of stones like rubber under strain.

  How long would the barrier hold?

  They were so close Tristan could make out individual scales, the spines running down its neck, and the huge armoured plates covering its body.

  He grabbed the stone and heaved with everything he had, rolling it toward the circle. His back screamed. His hands were bleeding. His muscles burnt. Yesa strained beside him, heaving with her entire body.

  It noticed them.

  A vast head snaked toward them. Tristan had the sense of something watching through a window—hands cupped beside its face to see better.

  "Push. I will distract!" Yesa darted away, pulling her blade with one hand. The head followed her movement, swinging away.

  Yesa launched herself directly at it, and Tristan almost laughed—it was like watching a mouse attack an elephant, and he found it decidedly funny for absolutely no reason he could think of.

  It lifted a claw out of her way as if to give her space, but Yesa was not to be dissuaded. She leapt at it, bringing her blade down on its foot. When the weapon bounced off with no effect, she changed tactic, springing away momentarily and then bounding back, bringing her sword around with a two-handed swing into its armoured leg which glanced away.

  She couldn't hurt it, but she could annoy it.

  Its head tilted to one side as it watched her attack again and again, and then quicker than something so large should be able to move, it swept her away effortlessly, hurling her back into the grass.

  She landed in a heap.

  Unmoving.

  Tristan couldn't stop to check on her, no matter how much he wanted to.

  The stone. Had to finish. Just needed to seat it.

  It had managed to extend its prison to the point that he was almost beneath the thing's head now; it lingered on where Yesa had landed momentarily, then its neck coiled down toward him.

  Curiosity, concern – whose? He wasn't sure anymore. And something else…

  The creature moved forward, unrushed; it opened its maw wide enough to swallow him whole. Tristan screamed and shoved the stone upright with everything he had left.

  Stupidly, he looked up.

  He let out a horrified moan as hot breath washed over him—sulphurous, ancient, wrong. Teeth the size of swords filled his vision.

  The fanged maw dissipated around him like a cloud hitting a wall, reality snapping back into place with an almost audible click.

  Tristan collapsed to his knees, gasping. His hands were still bleeding. His back was screaming agony.

  He couldn't believe he was still alive.

  Yesa.

  He staggered to her prone form.

  “A… are you… okay…?” he gasped.

  “No,” she said, not moving.

  “Oh. Oh good.” He collapsed beside her.

  They lay there for what felt like ages. The wind howled. The clouds raced overhead. Tristan had gone through abject terror to numbness; everything felt slightly unreal, fuzzy.

  “So, that thing is another Carrion? They come that big?”

  “It is… unique. The first. The Carrion came after. With it. I do not know.”

  "Well, thank you for coming back. I guess you had to or you’d need to find yourself another human. A more coordinated one."

  She grunted,”No time to find a new one. I will make do. Uncoordinated or not. Stupid, or not."

  After a few minutes, he pulled himself up, staring at the stone circle—now complete. Wind ruffled the grass between the stones. If it weren't for the six-foot furrows gouged into the earth nearby, he'd have thought the entire thing a horrible nightmare.

  Still, he felt like he was being watched.

  That feeling of unreality lingered at the edge of his perception.

  What was worse than everything else, though, was that before it had vanished, he’d got the distinct impression it had been worried.