The Two Fangs

Chapter 11

He dreamt about Mr. Walter's home. The bay window that overlooked the garden, the hall between the old man's bedroom and the pups'. He dreamt of Crucis being kind to the old man, though Valle knew that even at that age he had already begun to distrust and maybe fear his brother. Perhaps it was for the best that they'd been taken, and Mr. Walter hadn't had the chance to see what Crucis would become. Or perhaps, without Osah's intervention, unfeeling and unkind may have been the worst Crucis would have been.

When he woke, it was with a gun pressed to his chest.

"Do you think we don't know about the Fang of Osah?"

It was the human with the pitted cheeks. There was just enough light to see the muzzle of their gun buried two inches deep in the fur of his sunken chest, and the dark shapes behind it. Valle kept his hands still, palms up in case they were visible.

One of the shapes broke off from the one with the gun, and threw a bag over his head. Valle clutched the edges of his borrowed cot, resisted the impulse to thrash.

Not here. They couldn't. Crucis might come.

"Are there Vampires on the way already?" the human forced Valle to his feet, gun still in place. "Which way will they come from?"

"I'm not -" Valle managed, before being punched in the gut.

"When they get here they'll wipe us out, and the whole deeptown too, and you'll be here for the photo-op. Right? With your cool sunglasses and big wings?"

Valle stayed doubled over for several seconds after the blow. It had come with a crunch: one or more of his organs hadn't taken it well. When one of them tried to grab his wrists, though, he'd had enough. He shoved that fighter aside with his shoulder, and pushed the gun away. It went off, the muzzle flash a fire that singed away a swathe of hair from his chest and neck. The gun was built for low velocity fire, to minimize the risk of stray bullets damaging a dome, but that explosion would still have burnt a hole in his chest the size of a fist, and driven a bullet through him and into the floor. While the human struggled to bring the rifle's butt around to strike Valle, the bat pinned them to the wall by the neck.

He may be weak, but his hands were big, and his claws were sharp. He made sure the human felt the big thumb claw against their jugular vein.

He pulled the bag off his head, though doing so revealed little in the dark.

"You don't know anything about the Fang of Osah," he growled, his teeth inches from the acne-scarred face.

Something struck him on the head then. The world exploded in bright white shapes, wheeling kaleidoscopically across his vision, and he fell to the side. The human shoved him to the floor, and both intruders laid into him with boots and claws. There were voices, several of them, but Valle only heard the impacts against his back and shoulders and arms.

"Get up," the human snarled again, when the blows stopped. They had the gun again, and they swatted at Valle with it to unfold him on the floor.

Valle didn't want to get up.

Wet footsteps sounded outside, and accelerated.

"God damn it."

In seconds, Grid was in the old squamate woman's hut, had the second intruder's arm twisted behind their back and a knife to the human's neck. Her tablet, in its mount on her forearm, illuminated their faces. Her hooked beak looked extremely dangerous next to naked human flesh.

"He's not who you think he is," she hissed.

"That doesn't make him a friend," the human muttered, head turned as far away from the knife as possible. "That doesn't make you a friend."