SAFE . . . reyna ramirez-arellano

72 - whole load of nothin

FOUR DAYS LATER, Briar was at the helm with Coach Hedge when the dwarves attacked.

She didn't even know what happened; she was arguing with the coach about the very practical use of a gun when a gag was stuffed in her mouth.

She didn't even have time to react as her knives were taken from her, and when she finally saw what had just gagged her and taken away her knives, she'd been wrapped in duct tape and hound to the control console. Maybe she should've just kept her gun.

It was a demon monkey dwarf, with crooked yellow teeth, a scraggly red beard, a warty nose, and two mismatched eyes — one much larger and higher than the other. It danced around the deck, picking up whatever wasn't tied down and sticking it in his bag. He was maybe four feet tall, even shorter than Coach Hedge, with bowed legs and chimp-like feet, his clothes so loud they gave Briar vertigo. His green-plaid pants were pinned at the cuffs, and held up with bright-red suspenders over a striped pink-and-black woman's blouse. He wore half a dozen gold watches on each arm, and a zebra-patterned cowboy hat with a price tag dangling from the brim. His skin was covered with patches of scraggly red fur, though ninety percent of his body hair seemed to be concentrated in his magnificent eyebrows.

There was another one at the mainmast where Coach Hedge was similarly bound and gagged. It danced around him, doing the coach's hair in tiny pigtails with pink rubber bands. It was dressed even worse than his friend, in a green bowler hat like a leprechaun's, dangly diamond earrings, and a white-and-black referee's shirt.

Briar struggled with her bonds until she heard the sound of footsteps, looking over her shoulder to see Reyna, Leo, Jason, and Frank coming up the stairs, a click sounding behind them just as they made it.

"Duck!" Leo yelled, and Briar instinctively turned away and shut her eyes tightly.

When Briar's vision cleared and her brain made sense of things, she saw Brown Dwarf frolicked over to the nearest ballista, which his red-furred friend was priming to launch.

The brown-furred dwarf jumped onto the projectile like it was a skateboard, and his friend shot him into the sky.

Red Dwarf pranced over to Coach Hedge. He gave the satyr a big smack on the cheek, then skipped to the rail. He bowed to Leo, doffing his zebra cowboy hat, and did a backflip over the side.

Leo, who was lying on the ground, shakily stood up. Jason was already on his feet, stumbling and running into things. Frank had turned into a silverback gorilla ( why, Briar wasn't sure; maybe to commune with the monkey dwarfs? ) but the flash grenade had hit him hard. He was sprawled on the deck with his tongue hanging out and his gorilla eyes rolled up in his head.

And Reyna was getting up next to Briar, leaning heavily on the control console before taking off her gag.

"Go after them!" Briar ordered. "Teach them to have a better fashion sense! Oh, and also, they stole my knives. I liked those. Get me my knives back."

At the mast, Coach Hedge mumbled, "HHHmmmmm-hmmm!"

Briar figured that meant: "KILL THEM!" Easy translation, since most of the coach's sentences involved the word kill.

Leo turned to Jason. "You feeling good enough to control the winds? I need a lift."

Jason frowned. "Sure, but—"

"Good," Leo said. "We've got some monkey dudes to catch."

* * *

After that whole ordeal, Briar had had nightmares about dwarves with such bright colors that it woke her up, and she still saw them behind her eyelids.