all had one, and most of them held their elbows cocked and the blades in line with their forearms, just like my DI had taught me. They knew what they were doing.
I realized I wasn’t just juiced with Red’s superhealth. I’d let it make me overconfident. But it was too late for second thoughts.
As I backpedaled toward one of the bridge supports-to keep anybody from getting behind me-I spotted one of the Tiki torches out of the corner of my eye. I reached and jerked it out of the ground. It was just bamboo, and bent and bounced in my hands. But it was better than no weapon at all.
A finhead came at me. I shoved the flaming end of the torch at his face, and he stopped short. At the same moment, I glimpsed or heard or felt motion right beside me. I jumped away from it, and a knife thrust fell short by an inch.
Ezequiel snarled and scrambled after me. As his arm pulled back for another stab, I booted him in the face. That was one nice thing about fighting short creatures. It was actually practical to go all Bruce Lee on them and kick them in the head.
Ezequiel reeled backward. I turned to find the next threat. Unfortunately, it found me first.
Something shoved the back of my right knee, or at least that was how it felt. No pain, not yet, just pressure. As I pitched forward, I realized that one nice thing about being a short creature fighting a human being was that you’re in a good position to hamstring him.
Other finheads swarmed on me. Each stab or slash was a paralyzing shock. But then energy roared up from the center of me and burned the weakness away.
I had maybe half a second before the next thrust or cut would come. I screamed and flailed with the torch. It was clumsy to use such a long weapon at close quarters, but it either knocked the finheads away or made them scramble back. Maybe because they hadn’t thought I had any fight left in me.
I hadn’t thought so, either, until Red healed my wounds. But I was pretty sure he couldn’t keep doing it over and over again. I needed to put an end to this.
I’d at least changed the dream. Was that worth anything? As I scrambled back onto my feet, I risked a glance in Rufino’s direction. He was watching the fight, but he was still a dissected, bloody mess, and still staked to the sandy ground. There was no reason to think that the other finheads wouldn’t go right back to torturing him after they finished with me.
It occurred to me to try to run back to my physical body. I could take another crack at helping Rufino later on. But no, to hell with that. There had to be a way to turn this thing around.
Ezequiel’s little brother stalked toward me. His knife swept through horizontal figure eights. I jabbed with the torch and caught him in the chest. He yelped, and one of the grown-up finheads, a female with little rimless glasses on her face and skinny gold bracelets on her arms, rushed at my flank. I didn’t have time to swing the burning end of the torch around, so I thrust with the other one.
It thumped on her collarbone, stopped her cold, and skipped upward. It snagged on a fold of scaly skin and tugged it up and outward before whipping free.
Except that I realized it wasn’t really a fold of skin. It was the bottom of a head mask more lifelike than anything you can buy at Halloween.
I yelled and threw the torch like a spear. Startled, the finheads flinched, and I launched myself into the middle of them. That’s where Mrs. Rufino was.
At that moment, any of them could have cut me, except that I’d surprised them. I drove a punch into Mrs. Rufino’s face. It jabbed pain through my knuckles, but it knocked her off balance, too. I grabbed her and hauled her toward her husband, with everybody else and everybody else’s knife just a step or two behind me. When I was close enough for him to get a good look, I gripped her fin and pulled.
The mask made a sucking sound as it came off. The head underneath was nothing but dozens of eyes glaring in all directions from a round black skull. It shouldn’t have filled out the mask to give it the right shape, but apparently magic had taken care of that.
“Look!” I yelled, still scrambling away from the other finheads and their shivs. “It’s not your wife! They’re not your kids and friends! This isn’t real!”
The thing that had been passing for Mrs. Rufino wrenched herself out of my grip and jammed her knife into my guts. The breath whooshed out of me, and I didn’t seem to be able to suck in any more.
But then a shock jolted everything. I’d never been in an earthquake, but I imagined it was probably like that, except that the jolt was inside my head as well as outside. It was like the world was a mirror, and suddenly, it cracked.
The hostile finheads froze like statues, some of them with their blades just inches from my body. Rufino thrashed, snapped the ropes tying his wrists and ankles to the stocks, and shakily drew himself to his feet. “Lies,” he said. That first one was a whisper, but he got louder with every repetition, until he was screaming at the end: “Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies!”
I felt another shock, and another. Sections of what was in front of me disappeared, leaving white emptiness behind. If this place had been a cracked mirror before, now it was shattering completely, and pieces were falling out of the frame.
After another second, I fell out of it, too. I was back in my physical body with my hands on Rufino’s chest. I brought up another surge of Red’s energy, and this time I used some of it to wash away the scary feeling of wrongness in my stomach. After that, I could tell that Mr. Ka didn’t have any more to give. So I let him go, to sink back down inside me or mix himself back in with the rest of me.
Then, panting like I’d run ten miles, I looked down at Rufino to see if I’d actually accomplished anything.
His fin was still ragged and tilted off center, and scars still covered his skin. But he’d stopped struggling, and there wasn’t any terror, hatred, or craziness in his eyes, just a plea to be let out of the gag and restraints.
So that was what his family did. Then there was a lot of babbling and hugging. Rufino told them he was sorry for making their lives hell, and they told him it wasn’t his fault.
A’marie and I stood back and left them to it. Then she gasped, stepped right in front of me, and stooped to get a better look at the front of my shirt.
I looked down at it, too. It had blotches of wet blood all over it, with the biggest one on the stomach. I figured I had one on the back of my right pant leg, too.
“It’s okay,” I said. I pulled up the shirt to show there weren’t any wounds underneath.
Not anymore. Still, if I needed more proof that what happened while I was outside my body could kill me, well, now I was wearing it. And seeing, feeling, and smelling it made me feel lightheaded and queasy.
“Mr. Billy,” Rufino said.
I turned and saw him and the family looking at me.
“Thank you,” he continued. “It’s so…
I wished I did, too, but the best I could do was: “You’re welcome. And now I think it’s probably time for the whole family to bug out to Cuba, don’t you? You don’t owe Timon anything anymore, not after what he did to you, and you don’t want him finding out you got better. He might decide to hex you all over again.”
“But if Timon isn’t the lord here anymore,” said A’marie, “then he won’t be able to hurt Rufino. He won’t dare to deprive another lord of the use of one of his servants.”
I sighed. I’d known this was coming. Still, it would have been nice to have another minute or two as everybody’s hero.
“You can’t count on Timon losing the fief,” I said. “Because I’m still not going in the tank.”
A’marie stared at me. “I don’t understand. You saw what Timon did to Rufino. It must have moved you, or you wouldn’t have healed him. Are
“That isn’t it,” I said.
“Then what?
I wasn’t sure I could put it into words that would make any sense. Or that wouldn’t make me sound like a selfish scumbag. So I went a different way.
“Look,” I said, “I get it: Timon’s the devil. But I watched Wotan eat some poor person he murdered. Gimble beat the shit out of Clarence just to make it look like he didn’t stick me on purpose. Leticia messed with my brain just like Timon messed with Rufino’s, and the Pharaoh tried to mangle my soul. Maybe there isn’t any
