Our attacker seemed less affected by the smell than it was by the fluid spraying directly in its eyes.. It recoiled from the presumably unpleasant sensation, releasing its grip on the furry stink-bomb and beating its wings in an attempt to distance itself from her.
Ris’kin was having none of it. Our rage at the owl’s intrusion, and our determination to keep my denizens safe no matter what it took, came to the fore. Her fingers gripped the owl’s stick-like ankle tightly, her claws digging in and making the creature screech. It shook itself, spiraling through the air as it tried to dislodge her, but she’d already hauled herself up its legs and was using fistfuls of feathers to climb its chest.
Holding tightly with one hand, Ris’kin reached over her shoulder and pulled one of her half-spears from the holster on her back. As though it knew what was coming, the owl rotated its head as far as it would go, twisting in a way that was creepy and unnatural.
That stopped it from taking a spear to the eye. But it was also essentially flying blind, which it turned out was not the brightest thing it could have done.
The branch came seemingly out of nowhere. The owl slammed into it with twig-snapping force; similar snapping sounds, of hollow and brittle bones, crackled out from one of its wings, and it plummeted helplessly toward the ground.
Ris’kin hadn’t seen the branch either; she was totally focused on her target, and her peripheral vision on one side was totally gone, but once more her feline reflexes kicked in. Her sight might have been damaged, but she sensed our relative position to the ground with accuracy despite the owl’s kamikaze journey toward it, and was able to maneuver herself atop her feathered nemesis just before it hit the ground with a sickening crunchy thud.
The impact jolted my avatar’s wounds. She growled as her cracked ribs screamed and her mauled face throbbed, but the owl’s huge body had broken her fall as she intended.
As she climbed down, stretching each limb experimentally, I tried to come to terms with what I’d just seen.
She’d used something called Defensive Spray—an ability, just like those Binky had access to. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to me that my avatar would have them too; so many of the god-borns’ other rules did not apply to my avatar, after all.
You pee-farted on it. I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of you, I told her.
I could feel her giving me the side-eye, aimed directly at the space in the back of her mind I currently occupied. I was about to examine her Augmentary profile to see what other named skills she had. Then I realized she really was looking at me with just one eye.
Our nose was filled with the stench of blood—our own this time. Hot fluid dripped down the right side of Ris’kin’s face; parallel lines of pain throbbed from her ear to her jaw, and her vision on that side had gone dark. The partial blindness was disorientating, and my avatar stumbled a little as she turned on the spot, trying to compensate for the loss.
A rustle of feathers had her whirling around.
Her mutilator was somehow still alive.
Pain and rage surged through her as she glared down at the wounded owl. I felt more than a little uncomfortable at the idea of killing an injured creature in cold blood—much as I’d felt upon seeing Longshank viciously stab the incapacitated mole-rat back in the tunnels—but now I understood.
It’s it or us.
She raised her half-spear.
Triggered by the movement, the owl attempted one last lunge at its vanquisher. We dodged the clumsy attack with ease, following the movement with a practiced thrust of her arm. One quick stab and it was over.
“Is everything okay, Corey? Did you find her?”
Ket’s voice wavered nervously. I sensed her hesitance in communicating, probably after I’d given her such a dressing down last time for distracting me at a crucial moment.
“We found her,” I said. “She’s alive.”
Ket’s joyous relief flooded through our bond. She started babbling about how Shanky and the scouts had returned. Meanwhile, Ris’kin and I squinted one-eyed up toward the tangled boughs we’d just fallen from.
We need to get the child down. Think you can manage it?
A flash of indignation. Ris’kin was offended at the notion that she was too weak to handle such a task.
The instant her hand touched the tree trunk, something hard smacked against her head. The squirrel was back. It hopped from foot to foot, chittering and spitting as it lined up another shot, which my avatar dodged.
She bared her teeth at the mad little critter. It reciprocated.
Then its tufted ear—a tiny gray version of Ris’kin’s own—twitched at a noise from further up the tree. We heard it too: a tiny chorus of peeping, high-pitched and slightly pathetic. It was coming from the nest.
Two adult tiger owls had attacked our camp. We’d dealt with this one. Hoppit’s deadshot had felled the other. Most likely they’d been a mating pair, the parents of the fluffy nestlings.
As though aware of our scrutiny, one of the owlets hopped out of the nest and onto the branch. It peered down at us.
They can look after themselves… right?
Another of the owlets flung itself from the nest, landing on the branch beside the first owl with a flurry of feathers. Startled, the first owl jumped, then tipped forward.
We watched as though in slow motion as the baby owl teetered on the edge of the branch, flapping its wings uselessly before finally losing its fight with gravity and plummeting toward the earth.
It bulleted down toward us, emitting a constant skreeing sound that somehow conveyed the dual sentiments of “Help!” and “Wheeeeeee!” Our instincts overruled our better judgment, and we leapt back from the trunk, arms outstretched, just in time to catch the wind-ruffled bundle and spare it from its accidental near-suicide.
The owl—surprisingly light, considering it was almost the size of a
