Since there's going to be roughly a hundred of these, I'm trying to crunch down on how long each Kishin-hunting mission takes. Hence, this zippy little one-chapter arc.
February 14th, 2023
3rd Person POV:
The last of the herd of goats bleated at him as they moved off the path and into the dense scrub. Hector pushed his foot down on the gas pedal, but groaned when his truck suddenly refused to move. It had been bad enough when the herd had swerved out in front of the road and he'd had to brake to let them dawdle by, but now this.
"Jue puta…" he muttered, shifting to press his foot on the brake and turn the truck off with a twist of the keys. He cranked them savagely again, but the truck continued to idle, and he swore aloud and smacked the steering wheel. Just his luck, for the truck to die while he was still stuck out in the bluffs around town. He wondered if it was worth getting a blanket out of the back and just dozing in the seats until sunrise, when someone was sure to find him… but no.
No, he was getting home to his own damn bed tonight, and his own kitchen and his own comforts. The thought of them was like a physical ache of longing in his body, a reminder that he was here, sweaty and miserable after a long day of work, in the humid, steaming woods in the backhills of town. The moon hadn't risen yet, and it was dark and warm as bubbling tar on the road, save for the bright yellow beams of his headlights.
Hector reached into the glove compartment and grabbed a flashlight, switching it on to look at the dash. He groaned even louder than before as he saw the radiator needle hovering in the red heat zone, his head falling back against the driver's seat.
Grumbling under his breath in a blistering stream of invective, he turned the key again to shut off the engine, before Hector unbuckled himself and kicked open the door. Climbing down out of his truck, he circled back around to the bed as the distant rustling and bleating of the goats began to dwindle into the distance. Good riddance, he thought with a scowl, while he unhooked the stretch cables that held the emergency water. When he grabbed the handle to drag it closer to him, however, he paused.
The jug was suspiciously light.
Hector gripped his flashlight between his leg and yanked the jug closer, but from the hollow sloshing he felt inside and the way it slid so easily across the slats, he knew what he would find even before he unscrewed the cap and aimed the beam inside.
The water jug was almost empty.
"Fuck!" he snarled, slamming his fist down on the bed of the truck with a hollow bang of metal. It hurt his hand, but the hurt was good, grounding him somewhat as the pain pulsed like a physical outlet of his frustration. First the radiator overheated, and now he was out of water to cool it. Tonight truly was just his fucking night.
He groaned long and soulfully, next, rubbing his face with his other hand. Right, fine. Okay. So the water was out, but he could find some more easily enough. He'd been traveling this backcountry for years, he knew where all the landmarks on this road were –and one of those landmarks was a low river, probably not more than five hundred yards away right now.
Yes, he'd have to trudge through the hot, muddy jungle in the dark, but between that and waiting for the radiator to cool down on its own… Hector would much rather feel like he was making some forward progress to getting home tonight, even if the warm glow of his kitchen seemed like a distant dream of paradise right now.
Grumbling and muttering the whole time, he grabbed the useless water jug and swept his flashlight around the road, marking where the herd of goats had emerged from the thick underbrush. That was probably a path down to the water, and with all due and proper caution, considering how dark it was and how thick the jungle, he began making his way down it. Even dirty river water would be good enough to cool the radiator long enough to get home, at least, and he could worry about properly fixing his truck in the damn morning. Too much had gone wrong tonight for him to care about doing anything but getting home and unwinding with all the finesse of a loom with cut strings.
The thoughts of peeling off all his clothes and collapsing into bed sustained him as he made his slow and careful way down the slope of the hill, almost falling once or twice as his boots slipped in the thick, soft earth. The murmur of flowing water began to slowly thread through the hoots and insect-chitters of the night around him, and Hector raised his arm to wipe the sheen of sweat from his face. Soon enough, this would all be over, and he could relax at home with an ice-cold drink.
Thankfully, there was a narrow strip of beach at the end of the path –hardly a beach at all, really, but enough for a small herd of animals to stand on without pushing leaves aside, and more than enough for him to breathe a sigh of temporary relief. His boots sank deep into the soft, wet mud as he wrenched himself along towards the river, and he winced as it crept up to his ankles… but then, thankfully, it seemed like he was close enough to bend and dip his jug in the water.
Hector sighed as the soft glubs of water rushing into the plastic vessel replaced the swish and murmur of the flowing stream, resting one elbow on his bent knees as he craned forward to fill it as quickly as possible.
"¿Disculpe?"
"¡Come mierda!" he cried, his body trying to do too many things at once as he reared back but tried to keep ahold of the jug but also shifted to balance his footing in the ankle-deep mud. The end result, of course, was that he wobbled, arms wheeling, and slammed his ass back into the mud. Luckily, he kept hold of the mostly-filled jug as he slammed the base into the mud beside him, because if it had been wrenched from his hands and floated off down the current, Hector thought he would have sincerely started crying.
"Oh, sorry." came that same soft voice as he ripped his head around, staring at a figure that was barely more than a pale silhouette under the trees about a meter away. "I thought you heard me coming…"
He scrabbled in the mud for his flashlight and swung it around, revealing a young woman who half-raised her arms, squinting, against the sudden glare. Her dark hair tumbled in long curls down to her waist, and she wore a white skirt and blouse that seemed to have seen far better days, splashed in places with river water and stained with many tints of mud. There were several rips in the cloth, as well, although it was torn nowhere immodest.
"I saw your flashlight, and I…" Her voice shook as one glistening eye peered at him from between those arms, and he slowly lowered his flashlight in courtesy. She, too, lowered her arms, but then wrapped them around herself, her full lips trembling as she continued to speak. "I-I've been lost for so long, when I saw the light I just…"
Those huge, dark eyes peered up at him again from under long lashes, and she gave the tiniest hint of a smile.
"I truly thought you would have heard me coming, stumbling along as fast as I did." she said wryly.
"Sorry." Hector said, and she gave a soft, rippling little laugh.
"Why should you be sorry! I'm not lost anymore, am I?" she asked, extending one hand to help him up. "If anything, I should be thanking you."
He chuckled sheepishly in agreement, letting her pull him to his feet. Maybe this night wasn't so bad, after all.
"I have a truck back on the road." Hector told her, gesturing slightly with the water jug. "If you give me a little to fix it up, I can drive us both into town."
"Thank you." she said, her eyes warming. "You're too kind."
"I'm just doing what anyone would do." Hector said honestly, flashing his light at the head of the trail and gesturing for her to follow as they began to head back up. She gave another of those tinkling little laughs behind him.
"Most people would worry about me being a monster. Perhaps even a Witch."
Hector snorted.
"What Witch wanders around the woods like this?" he asked derisively, not looking back. "And if you were a monster, you could have eaten me before I knew you were here."
"True." she said, and then seemed to save her breath for climbing. Well, that made sense. Hector remembered that she was very thin, almost delicate. Climbing up a jungle path in the dark like this might be a difficult thing for her. He wished he could give her a hand, but both of his hands were occupied with holding the jug and the flashlight, respectively. While it might be polite to help her up, it was hardly effective to go stumbling around in the dark because he'd pocketed his flashlight, and they couldn't go anywhere without the water.
They made it up the path without incident, even though she walked so quietly he had to glance back several times to make sure she was still there. Hector could see why she had joked about people thinking she was a monster first and a person second –her eyes were big and dark, and her hair tumbled about her face in a way that hid it almost completely at times, making the flashes of dark eyes set in pale skin look almost like a skull in the dark gloom beneath the trees.
Hector probably didn't look much better himself, though, given the way every plane and angle on his face was highlighted by the flashlight's reflected beam when he turned back to look at her. She had jumped, the first time, and only relaxed when he gave her a sheepish smile and an apology for moving so suddenly. To be fair to her, it was probably even more nerve-wracking to trust her safety to a strange man she had met after being lost alone in the wilderness for who knew how long.
She sighed with bone-deep relief when they got to the road and saw the twin headlights of his truck, and he waved her to it absently as he approached the hood with grim determination.
"Make yourself comfortable." he said, and received her quiet acknowledgment as she went around the side of the truck. Hector pulled the hood up and wedged the fold-out pole into place, holding it there as he swung his flashlight at the radiator cap. He busied himself with unscrewing everything and carefully pouring the water in as it steamed and hissed against hot metal, hearing the truck door open and slam shut again as the vehicle rocked gently.
He didn't think it was possible to move more quickly than he had already intended to, but Hector's movements were certainly brisker than he would have thought as he strove to finish this fast and get this poor young woman into town. This was rough country to get lost in. He didn't recognize her, so she wasn't a local like him, and she could just as easily never been found –or found only in decayed bits and pieces– if he hadn't come along.
Sure enough, when he lowered the hood back down again with a satisfied slam, he saw her face peering out at him from the passenger seat, looking anxious and eager to go. Hector gave her a thumbs-up, before walking around the truck to open the door and tossing the empty jug at their feet. He climbed in and turned the ignition, and lo and behold, the truck rumbled back to life as he gave a quiet sigh of relief and moved his foot to the gas. She sighed, too, and slumped against her seat like all her troubles were over.
Hector didn't say anything for a while as he sent the truck roaring along the road that he knew, enjoying the quiet company and the unexpected direction his evening had taken. They were still a good twenty minutes away from the town, over more rough and hilly terrain, but the water he'd put in the radiator should last them all the way there and with water to spare.
"So," he said after a while as the truck rumbled forward through the darkness, feeling as though the long silence might be getting to be a bit much for her. "Where should I drop you off? Do you have any family here?"
"No." she said. "Not anymore, I don't think."
He hummed in sympathy.
"Passing through, then?"
"You could say that." she said, and giggled. He laughed too, without really knowing why. He wasn't exactly sharing his misery to half it, but it was a lot harder to feel frustrated and sorry for yourself when you had rescued a pretty lady from the backwoods and your truck wasn't broken anymore. This would make for a fun story to tell his friends.
"Well, I'm sure Jessica can spare you a room in her house for a while." he said. "She loves gossip."
"That sounds nice."
"What's your name, anyway?" he asked, suddenly realizing that he didn't know yet.
She said something, but it was drowned out by the rough bang of suspension as they crested another hill. Hector shook his head and glanced at her.
"Sorry? I didn't hear."
She said something again, but the sound rushed past his ears like water, fluid and indistinct. He could see her lips moving as she said it, catch the glint of meaning in those deep, dark eyes, but the noise that escaped her mouth rustled and clicked in ways that didn't match how her mouth formed the words.
"I don't…"
"Well, thank you for letting me come along, anyway." she said, and gave him another of her bewitching little smiles –except this one stretched back and back and back, the skin of her face parting to reveal a gleaming skull with sharp white teeth. His fingers froze on the steering wheel as taloned fingers pushed back a loop of that long, glorious hair.
"Not many people offer a ride to a lady alone, you see."
Arya's POV:
I took back everything I complained about the truck ride into the camp in Washington.
This ride sucked ass.
"I thought- you said- you could drive!" I yelped as we seemed to clear another pothole with a massive bang and lurch.
"Drive, yeah!" Tessa barked as we continued chugging along doggedly, her grip firm on the steering wheel. "Control road maintenance, no!"
"Death, please stop arguing." Rex groaned from beside me in the backseat, head in his hands and a certain green tinge lingering about his face. "It's been two and a half hours already."
"Two and a half hours, and if anyone says anything against Lukas's navigation, I'm pitching them out the window." Tessa snapped. "We're on route."
There was a moment of silence.
"If it makes anyone feel any better, we are starting to get close to the town marked on the map." Lukas offered at last, the huge fold-out spread rustling as he shifted to lay it on the dashboard from his sacred place in shotgun. One finger traced our path. "Maybe another half-hour or so."
"Oh, goodie." I sighed grumpily, clutching onto the overhead handle as our suspension did its best imitation of a trampoline. "I'd hate to have busted my ass in a three-hour drive for nothing."
"Who's busting whose ass?" Tessa asked, glaring at me through the rearview mirror. "I'm driving."
"And I'm the one who's suffering for it. Ass to seat for three hours, Tess, and it's a real hard fucking seat."
"Please, please stop arguing." Rex moaned.
"We're not arguing." Tessa and I said as one.
To explain the reason for our currently high-tension close quarters, I needed to go back a bit, to after we had returned to town in triumph, nicely rubbed our gobsmacked partner team's faces into the fact that we had gotten the Kishin Egg, and headed back to the DWMA. The other two had been seething the whole way, but Rex had already eaten the Kishin Egg's soul fair and square, so, they'd just had to suck it up.
Since it was a Friday, we'd at least managed to sneak in for afternoon classes, and Tessa and Lukas had taken in our whole story with incredulous grins. They had some news for us, however, as we all worked on our world history project for Oceania.
"You know, you're not gonna be able to partner with those guys again, and if they start spreading rumors about you stealing their kill, nobody's gonna wanna partner with you at all for a bit." Tessa had said, being well aware of our/my goal to get as many Kishin Eggs as I could as fast as humanly possible. "Why don't you come with me and Lukas this weekend? We're doing a mission down south, it'll be fun."
"South where?" I asked, exchanging a glance with Rex.
"Guatemala." she'd said. "Something's happening in this little remote town in the middle of nowhere, apparently, and they want the DWMA to come help. Sounds like it'll almost certainly be a Kishin Egg, unlike your last mission."
I will admit –despite my/our very urgent need to make Rex a Death Scythe– that I hesitated to agree. Not because of anything to do with Tessa, but rather because we had skipped out of class on Wednesday, missed all of Thursday, barely showed up on Friday, and now, with me and Rex hardly having set our feet back down in Death City, we were going to have to reverse momentum again and head off to what sounded like the backcountry of Guatemala for at least the whole weekend.
And, you know, we had yet to even catch up on our schoolwork in a single EAT class.
But the temptation of bagging another Kishin Egg soul (and helping save people's lives) won out in the end. It was just one weekend, right? Rex and I could totally start making it up by next week. One Kishin Egg a week ended with 52 in a year, and we were already some seven souls in, not even a month after coming to EAT. I couldn't help but find this kind of progress very encouraging. One week of fudged classwork was fine, probably.
So I'd said sure, and sealed our fates. Some twelve hours later, most of which was sleeping on the plane, the four of us had landed in the capital city of Guatemala, the rest of us watching Tessa wrangle in Spanish with some dude for a brisk five minutes about renting out a truck before we were summarily handed one of the most beat-up automobiles I had ever seen in my life. According to Tessa, you needed something tough to climb all the terrain we would be driving through on our way there, and the rust and the grease were what held it all together, actually.
Rex and I had exchanged another glance, this one full of misgiving.
But we'd bitten the bullet and climbed in, since neither of us could actually drive at all. Rex was a city baby who took public transport or walked everywhere he needed to go, and while I had gotten a learner's permit back in the days of yore, it had been very shortly before I was wormhole-isekai'd into an anime world, and my last practice with an actual car had been almost over a year ago. I could, probably, if it was a matter of life and death, get behind the wheel of a motorized vehicle and drive it, but I was not at all confident in my skill otherwise.
I basically didn't know how to drive at all, and that, I reflected grimly, was something I would have to change in my near-far future.
Tessa's driving wasn't actually that bad, to be fair, except for the aforementioned potholes and ruts in the dirt road that weren't really her fault anyway. It was just, we were two and a half hours into a three-hour car ride, in a cramped and claustrophobic space that smelled of gasoline, sweat, and road dirt, the sun was blazing down at us in the way only a tropical sun could, and Rex and I were both still dealing with at least two layers of jet lag.
Suffice to say, we were predisposed to be grumpy.
I couldn't even try to nap to at least deprive myself of being conscious for this trip, because the truck was rattling along the road in a very loud and very bouncy manner, and if I leaned my head against the window to snooze, my skull would be beating against it repeatedly like a metronome. Not to mention, everything was hot and humid and miserable, since my biggest concession to the heat was to tie my hair up and wear a canvas pair of shorts and a dark grey T-shirt –and the AC in the truck, of course, was totally busted.
I was not stupid enough to wear a white shirt in a world ruled by pervy fanservice tropes.
Rex, meanwhile, had stripped down to his dorky little vest and shirtsleeves, and Tessa had taken things even further with a sturdy black crop-top and cargo shorts. (Lukas was more sedately dressed in a stunningly average white T-shirt and jeans.)
But we were all of us cramped, sweaty, and miserable, and the others were probably also dealing with headaches despite the bottles of water in the cooler under the back with me and Rex. None of us wanted to drink too much and extend this hell-trip any longer with a bathroom break.
I closed my eyes and leaned against the headrest of the seat –which was marginally more comfortable than the window– as the truck continued to rattle and chug down the dirt road, trying to find my Zen. Or my happy place. Whichever worked to get me out of this place, where carsickness and cabin fever were creeping in at the edges –Rex was already looking green about the gills, and I could only pray that he'd manage to roll the window down before he puked, if indeed his stomach got too much for him.
"Anyone wanna play I Spy or somethin'?" I asked aloud without opening my eyes or moving my head. None of us knew the local radio stations, and the loud buzzing Tessa had gotten when she fiddled with the radio to try and find one had nearly primed all of us to murder.
"Well, it's not like we can play Slug Bug." Lukas said as I cracked open an eye, watching him gesture to the conspicuously empty road stretching off into the distance before and behind us. For those who might wonder, Slug Bug –also occasionally known as Punch Buggy– was the delightful American car game wherein you slugged someone in the arm whenever you saw a Volkswagen Beetle and shouted the game's name. Whoever saw the car and punched first won.
Tessa sighed.
"I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with D." she chanted, sounding resigned to her fate.
"Dirt?" Lukas guessed sardonically.
"Dust?" I asked without opening my eyes.
"Driver's seat?" Rex tried.
"Dirt." Tessa said, lifting one hand from the wheel to fistbump her partner. "Lukas's turn."
"I spy, with my little eye, something… beginning with S."
***Time Skip***
Whether it was through the intervention of I Spy or not, we all actually managed to make it to the small town without murdering each other, and Tessa parked our busted-up truck at the corner of the plaza.
"Okay." she said as she switched it off. Sensing something important in her tone, Rex and I peeled our limp bodies away from the dampened seats and leaned forward in as much attentiveness as we could muster. "We've got ghost stories and garbled witness statements from a few people in town, but we've also got disappearances, so we know something's here. The four of us'll work together to take down whatever needs taking down, and we'll figure out who gets whatever souls there are after, okay?"
"Sounds fair." I said when she paused to let us comment. Tessa gave a sharp nod.
"Right. Since we don't know what's going on, some of us will have to stay with the truck to make sure we have a getaway, in case this town is swarming with enemies or something. Arya and Rex, that'll have to be you guys, since you don't understand Spanish."
I winced. It wasn't my fault my schooling had gotten interrupted… okay, well, it was, but that wasn't the point!
"Me 'n Lukas will go over and ask the priest what's been going on." Tessa continued, pointing to the white adobe building with a belltower that took up one entire side of the market square we were in. "He'll know everything there is to know about the local events. We'll meet you guys back at the fountain here in, say… an hour?"
"Do we have to stay in the truck?" I asked, and Tessa flashed me a sympathetic look in the driver's mirror.
"You'll have to stay right next to it, yeah." she said. "You guys should probably get out and stretch your legs a little bit, though, otherwise you won't even be able to run if something bad happens."
She flashed us a toothy grin, as if laughing at the thought, before she and Lukas unbuckled themselves and climbed down out of the truck. Rex and I watched them walk with confidence across the square, Tessa's piercings glinting and jiggling in the light of the sun as its faint, roaring laughter drifted down out of the sky. We watched them climb up the slight incline of steps, and then Tessa pulled open the heavy, dark wood of the door and they stepped inside.
"Yeah, I'm getting out of here before my legs freeze up." I said when the church door slowly swung shut and nothing untoward happened, unbuckling my own seat belt and kicking open the side door. There was a chorus of groaning and popping ligaments as I unfolded my legs to stand straight on the cobblestone pavement, and I groaned with them, rubbing my aching knees.
A few moments later, there was a crunch and a similar set of crickles and crunches on the other side of the rusty truck as it rocked subtly, indicating that Rex had gotten out too. Now that we were out of the moving vehicle, the heat and humidity lay sticky on our skin, and I fanned myself with one hand, looking longingly towards the fountain in the center of the plaza. It was strongly tempting to abandon restraint and fling myself inside, wallowing in the cooling basin, but I didn't know if this fountain also served its historical use for watering livestock and wasn't willing to take the chance.
Following Tessa's not-quite-joking advice, I began to circle the van in a hobbling sort of way, which slowly smoothed out as my legs stretched back into their proper configuration. This seemed like a fairly average small Latino town in South America, with square, almost flat-roofed adobe buildings lining the streets, painted in a variety of shades in blue, yellow, green, and red. They rose and fell with the landscape, with the trees arching above us on the horizon as the bluffs around town rose to cup us in their valley.
There was no one about except me and Rex, but I didn't know enough about tropical climates to know if that was because this was the middle of the day and nobody wanted to be outside moving around when it was hot as fuck, or if there was some other reason. Back in Italy, at least, a lot of businesses tended to peter off or even go to a standstill as the hottest part of the afternoon crept on, although that was in the very-stereotypical world of Hetalia.
When Rex and I finished a few creaky circuits of the truck, we ended up leaning against its shady side, watching the empty plaza square.
I fidgeted and glanced at my watch. Waiting for Tessa and Lukas to finish interrogating the priest was not the most investing activity, and I fanned myself again, panting a little. Before now, the most southern I'd ever been was… probably Nevada, actually, since I was pretty sure China was on a higher latitude. Or longitude. Fuck, whichever. China was the most south I'd ever gone in Eurasia, and I hadn't left Eurasia ever since the isekai incident.
Since we were once again in the midst of civilization and therefore had access to bathrooms, I turned to crack open the truck door again, pulling over the cooler and grabbing a water.
"You want one?" I asked, glancing to Rex, and he shook his head. To my surprise, despite wearing two layers (vest and shirt), plus the hat, he seemed to be dealing with the heat much better than me. Then again… he had been raised in Death City. A desert climate was his home, and while tropical humidity was its own kind of misery, he was still bearing the heat with a lot more grace than me.
I tried not to feel bitter about that as I drank some of the water and dumped a little more on the crown of my head.
"Ugh."
A riveting ten minutes of nothing followed, and by that point it was a conscious effort not to run laps around the truck or something to burn off my antsy energy. I'd been sitting still for three hours! Actually, it was even more than that, since we'd had to take a plane in to Guatemala City, so an additional seven hours on top of the car trip –even if we were asleep for most of them.
I scratched my head and sighed.
"You still got a pack of cards somewhere?" I asked. "We can play poker to pass the time."
"I think Lukas left some in the glove compartment." Rex said, and it was a sign of his own boredom in how he didn't even argue with me about how we were supposed to be nominally keeping watch. If we played in the truck, that'd still count as guarding it, and by now, that was more than enough for me. I wouldn't quite go so far as to say it was obvious that nothing was going to happen, but I certainly didn't feel any bad vibes or remember any alarming tropes about this situation. It all seemed pretty straightforward: monster causing trouble, locals call in monster-hunters, rinse, repeat.
We climbed back into the truck, and Rex pulled out the worn deck of cards and began to shuffle. We weren't really betting anything, since we didn't even have matchsticks or loose change to use as tokens, so it was mostly just pride on the line as Rex dealt between us and we each took up our hands.
My first hand was a six of spades, seven of spades, ten of hearts, king of spades, and ace of spades. It was almost a great many things –almost a suit if not for that pesky ten of hearts, almost a straight flush if not for the gap between ten and seven, and almost a royal flush if not for the six and seven. In other words, it was a highly-ranked junk hand.
I looked at Rex under my eyelashes. He looked neither confident nor distressed, a slight twist to the corner of his mouth as he shifted two cards to lay beside each other. If he was moving stuff around, though, that argued that there was something worth looking at, something worth matching, and I wavered for a moment, glancing again at my hand. With a king and an ace, my hand would beat any other junk… but it would also lose to anything that wasn't a junk hand.
"Fold." I said at last, flopping my cards down.
"Pair." Rex answered, showing that my guess had been correct as he set the fan of his cards face-up on the seat between us, showing a pair of queens along with the rest of his cards.
He swept the discarded hands back into the deck, shuffling and dealing again. Once again, my hand was almost something fantastic –this time I had the pair, with a jack of hearts and a jack of spades, along with a king of clubs, a queen of hearts, and an incongruous nine of diamonds. Even though the rest of my hand counted as junk, it was still pretty good junk, and I hummed thoughtfully.
"Bet." I said, and Rex didn't even bother concealing his wince.
"Fold." he said, tossing his cards down to show that it was a junk hand with a four, a five, a seven, an ace, and a jack. He swept the cards in and shuffled again as I cast a glance out the windows –still nothing untoward, still no people.
This time I had another pair, but it was two nines, along with a ten of spades, a queen of spades, and a seven of diamonds.
"Bet." I said, recognizing that neither of us had ever gotten anything higher than a pair so far, and my pair was pretty high. Rex looked thoughtful, glancing at his cards for a long time.
"Call." he said after a measured moment, and I raised an eyebrow. We both flipped our hands to lay face-up on the seat, and it turned out he had been right to match me –Rex had a pair too, except his pair was of eights. I grinned smugly, and he gave a good-natured grumble as he collected the cards, shuffling them back into the deck.
My next hand was yet another pair, but this one was of aces, and I didn't even hesitate before I said "Bet." Rex gave me a wary look, and tossed his hand down.
"Fold."
Three of spades, ten of spades, ace of clubs, jack of hearts, queen of clubs. Almost something to worry about, but in the end, just a junk hand.
After he shuffled and dealt, I hummed as I got my next hand –one of us, at least, had finally gotten something higher than a pair. I had three eights –the eight of diamonds, eight of hearts, and eight of spades– along with the nine of spades and the jack of spades. Almost a suit, which would have been nice, but I would take the three of a kind over a pair any day.
This time, though, I remembered that the actual purpose of poker was to bet and win money –even if it was just the two of us playing for the better hand, right now– and did my best to conceal my victorious grin. In a real gambling parlor, seeing someone whoop after they got their hand would definitely keep anyone from betting any big amounts on the current pot. Now I got why keeping a poker face on was always said to be important, even when you were winning.
"Bet." Rex said, and I nodded.
"Call."
We both flipped our cards down, and I grinned as I saw that he only had a pair of nines.
My next hand was junk, and I folded –wisely enough, as it turned out, since Rex had three sixes. We continued playing like this for a while, occasionally glancing out the window but otherwise fully invested in our game. The plaza stayed quiet, although we did see one or two people drifting out of the stores trailing off down the four main streets that led here –so we knew, at least, that they town hadn't been overrun or abandoned or something. The sun continued to laugh distantly overhead, the spikes on its round body flaring with roaring flames, and I heard the occasional faint clucks of chickens or the bleat of livestock. A dog even barked, once or twice.
All in all, this was a fairly quiet place, and while on literally any other occasion I might have called that ominous, this seemed like a natural quiet. This was a sleepy backwater town in which nothing ever happened and no one really went anywhere, and the people here were content with that, comfortable in their well-worn rhythms of home and hearth. It was very peaceful, and I had to wonder what had happened to invoke a Kishin Egg here. Maybe it was from out of town.
Or maybe it was some dickhead who wanted to break away from the rural patterns of their life a bit more explosively than normal. I was still a bit fuzzy on how known the process of becoming a Kishin Egg was to ordinary civilians –they clearly knew what Kishin Eggs were, and that eating human souls was bad, but I wasn't sure if the dots were publicly connected.
Eh. Not my problem. I had enough stuff to do on my plate already.
Movement from the church made me glance up and Rex turn around, seeing Tessa and Lukas pushing open the heavy wooden doors and making their way down the steps. Neither of them looked annoyed –and more importantly, weren't running for their lives– so I had to assume they'd gotten something useful out of the priest.
I handed my cards to Rex as he swiped them all up and tucked the pack inside its deck, stowing that back in the glove compartment as we both turned to shove open the doors and drop down onto the hot pavement. Tessa waved us over to the fountain –where she, apparently not having my reservations, bent her head over and ducked her hair in the water. She flung it back with a splash and a gasp, water streaming down her face and back, before sitting down on the stone edge as we all joined her.
"According to the priest, five people have disappeared in the last month." Lukas began crisply, unfolding what looked like a surveyor's map that he must have gotten from inside the church, since it depicted the local terrain. He spread it out on the stone as we all leaned over him. There were five red dots spread in a fairly nonsensical scatter around the town, which was marked with a black X. Lukas tapped each dot in turn as he named the victims. "Carlos Sala, Esther Ruiz, Fernando Porras, Gabriela Prieto, and Hector Mata."
"They all didn't come back home after going out on various errands after dark." Tessa continued, raking her dripping hair over the shoulder opposite our map. "Carlos after driving out to find a lost goat about a month ago, Esther a week later, Fernando and Gabriela while driving home from a romantic dinner at sunset on a bluff, and finally, Hector Mata while driving back from an errand in the next town over. His neighbors called the guys he was working with when he didn't come home to feed his dog: apparently, he left that town just before sunset."
"So everybody got taken at night." I said, following the clear pattern. "That mean something?"
"It could." Rex shrugged, lifting up his hat to scratch at his hair underneath. "Might be an evil spirit who has to do things in such-and-so a way, or it might just be a human Kishin Egg trying to be sneaky."
"Yeah, well, it's probably an evil spirit." Tessa said. "Because apparently, it didn't get everybody it came after. One kid, Javi, came to the priest a few weeks ago, said that he'd seen a woman standing by the side of the road when he was out biking with his friends. She asked for a ride."
"Just to clarify, we're talking ring-a-ding-ding, newspaper-route, playing-card-in-spokes-of-wheel bike, not Harley Davidson?" I asked, miming the position of handlebars with both fists and swiping my thumb like I was ringing a bell.
"Yup. Apparently, there's a couple of hills around here that the local kids like to take daredevil rides on with their bicycles. The teenagers sometimes do it after dark, y'know, in the moonlight, and this kid says a creepy woman in a long white dress asked him if she could hitch a ride."
"On a bike." I said again, still dumbfounded.
"Yeah, well, he said he thought the phrasing was a bit weird, too, but he figured she was some neighbor's relative or something who wanted to hang with the locals, and he handed his bike over, told her to give it a try. She rode it down the hill and into the jungle, but she didn't come back. They couldn't find the bike, either."
I snorted.
"I know it sounds ridiculous, but this kid and his friends were all spooked." Lukas said. "I mean, that's a creepy thing to happen to you late at night, especially with the local disappearances."
"Mmm. Fair enough."
"So anyway, that happened, and this other woman, Teresita, told the priest that she was approached by a strange young woman while out on her evening walk." Tessa said, using air quotes as she mimed the witness's apparent manner of speech. "The way she tells it, she was wandering along, saw a pale figure staring at her from between the trees, but when she got closer, the woman was gone."
"I think I need some notes to sort this out." I said, shifting restlessly. My hands drifted over my pockets as I looked for a paper and pencil, only to see that Lukas already had me covered, pulling out a notepad that already had a hefty amount of scribbles on its topmost page. "Uh, never mind then."
Lukas shot me a sympathetic smile.
"We've got a young woman, pale, wearing white." he announced as his gaze fell back to the page, tapping off the points as he'd written them. "She comes up to people who are alone, at night, but she doesn't actually speak to those who don't have some kind of ride. She doesn't seem to discriminate between gender, since she approached men and women, or age, since she approached both teenagers and the elderly."
"She asked to hitchhike with a kid who didn't have something you could hitchhike with." I pointed out, and he nodded, his pencil moving down the page.
"But he did have something you can ride on. And when he gave it to her, she just rode off without doing anything."
"Process of elimination." I hummed under my breath, eyeing his notes as Lukas laid them out on the stone rim beside the map. We knew what happened when this Kishin Egg approached people who didn't have a ride –she looked at them, and then left. We knew what happened when she approached people who did have a ride –she asked to share it with them. When they just gave her their ride, she took it and rode off. But…
"What happens if you do have a vehicle she can hitchhike in and you do say yes to letting her ride home with you?" I asked with deep misgiving.
One of Tessa's fingers tapped the surveyor's map near the ominous red dots.
"I think we already know." she said grimly. "Evil spirits usually have rules, ways they can work, and that's this bitch's limit. She can't do anything to people unless they offer to give her a ride."
"And it almost certainly has to happen at night –probably when she and her prospective victims are alone." Lukas said as he thoughtfully leaned over the map a little, tugging at the front of his shirt to flap the limp fabric and give himself some air. "All the people that disappeared, the teenagers with their bikes, the old woman –at the time, they were the only people around for a good mile or more."
We all looked at each other over our map and notes.
"Well," Rex said at last. "At least this time we don't have to search for it."
What seemed like every insect in creation was humming, buzzing, and chirping for all it was worth as the old, rusted truck made its slow way along the winding hills and roads around the town. Neither the driver nor the navigator were local, and there was many a pause to consult the map and the terrain around them.
The truck creaked its way over one hill and trundled down the next, moving with the same speed and verve as an ambling cow as it meandered its way through the thick backwoods. The lights of the town, although they were not too distant, were completely swallowed up by the hills and the bush, and it was easy to imagine these people bumbling around and around in the dark and the uneven terrain until their gas tank ran dry.
"I'm telling you, we're lost."
"We are not lost! It's not like they make roads that go to nowhere: we'll find something if we just keep driving straight!"
"They don't- ugh, even a kid would know that just driving around randomly is stupid! We don't know how the roads curve or where they're supposed to go to. There's no way that just driving straight will get us un-lost!"
"We're not lost!"
"Oh yeah? Then tell me where we are!"
"We're- fucking, that's bullshit, you couldn't tell me where we were even when we were in the city!"
"Well, we're not in the city now, are we? And we'll still lost!"
"Ugh!" the driver snarled, a young woman with snapping eyes and a fiery head of red curls. Her explosive temper seemed to dim, somewhat, as she saw a lone figure standing at the edge of the road up ahead, waving with a slender arm. "Look, see, we're not lost. There's some chick up ahead, she probably lives around here. She'll know where to go."
The creaking, rusty truck lurched its way forward, rolling to a slow stop beside the standing figure of a woman. Her long, glorious cascade of dark hair almost seemed to hide her face, an odd counterpoint to her somewhat ragged and mud-stained white clothes.
The driver's window to the truck slowly rolled down, and the redhead stuck her head out, propping one elbow on the side.
"Hey." she said, flashing a quick smile at the silent woman. "So, uh, my boyfriend and I are just a tiny little bit turned around –you live around here?"
The woman shifted slightly, turning her head coquettishly to the side as a glistening strand of dark hair slithered off her shoulder.
"I've been around for some time." she answered, a smile on her full lips.
"Cool. Uh, so yeah, we've been backpacking around the back country for a little bit, and someone-" Here she briefly turned to favor her driving partner with a sharp glare. "-got us turned around. Think you can help us out?"
"I'd be pleased to. May I hitch a ride back to town with you? It's a bit far to walk."
"No problem." The driver waved towards the back. "Make yourself comfortable."
The door opened with a click, and the young woman slipped inside. The truck gurgled slightly as it began to make its way forward again, and the redhead hummed, tapping her fingers against the wheel.
There was an odd silence that hung heavy in the air as they drove: the arguing tourists were silent, as though they didn't want to reignite hostilities, but the young woman sitting calmly in the backseat didn't seem to feel the silence awkward, despite having been popped into the middle of it. She simply sat in the back and smiled, as though she was waiting for something.
"So." the driver said at last, after the silence had stretched on to be uncomfortable and then for a good bit more. "Directions?"
"Oh yes." The woman smiled charmingly and waved her hand in a vague gesture to the right. "Take the next turn. It should be coming up in a mile or so."
"Cool. Thanks."
Silence fell again, closing in around them with the sudden and swift completeness of water enveloping a diver. The truck rumbled, the birds and beasts of the jungle chirped their nightly noises, but no one inside the truck said a word. A subtle tension seemed to be running through them, an anticipation shared by all but only felt by some. The woman seemed pleased to wait, but it was a cruel and patient sort of pleasure, like a spider calmly waiting for the innards of its silk-wrapped prey to liquefy. The two in the front seat seemed to feel a keener and yet more unfocused anticipation, like they were waiting for something that they didn't know about.
In all fairness, judging when and how to hide in the bed of a moving truck was a difficult exercise, never mind the fact that Rex and I needed to find a way to do so that also left us able to attack later. None of us thought that the Kishin Egg could spontaneously vanish, but if she did, finding her later was going to be a chore and a half. It wasn't like she'd fall for the same trick twice, although we probably could still try to find her by using vehicles somehow.
Easiest solution was to lure her in and then skewer her.
We both shimmied out from under the crackling plastic tarp that had been bundled over us, doing our best to keep it from crunching too loudly. The rattle-bangs of the chugging truck and the sound of its tires digging into the dirt helped a lot, but neither of us wanted to lose our prey by being too loud.
Shifting carefully, muscle by muscle –which was a lot harder to do when the truck was swaying and bouncing all over the road despite its lazy pace– we both shifted upright, crouching in the corrugated bed side by side. Rex carefully moved his hand over to mine, and we clasped them together. I made eye contact with Lukas, who was slumped as though leaning dolefully against his door window, his gaze fixed on the side mirror.
Several things happened in very quick succession. Lukas's left arm shifted to a long machete-like blade very similar to Rex's, and he swung it back full-force at the woman's head. Tessa stomped on the gas. Rex transformed as I caught his handle, and the woman… well, she didn't look much like a woman anymore as she screeched, lunging aside in the backseat as the hooked tip of Lukas's blade caught in the stuffing.
It was fine. The car was insured.
I grabbed the side of the truck and braced my legs as the swaying and bouncing intensified to an alarming degree, feeling a little like one of those tilt-a-whirl dishes at a fair –you know, the giant saucer-shaped rides that swirl around and around and bounce up and down to try and knock down anyone foolish (or reckless) enough to stand in the middle.
A window broke inside the cabin of the truck as the Kishin Egg screeched again, a flurry of light and dark as her long hair whirled about her pale body while she and Lukas tussled in the backseat. Her hand flailed out, slamming into the back of the driver's seat and knocking Tessa forward as taloned nails drew several long gouges down the upholstery. She automatically hit the breaks, sending all of us lurching forward –me actually stumbling a few steps and barely catching myself before slamming face-first into the cabin– as the woman suddenly disappeared.
"What?!" Lukas reared back with one arm still in Weapon form, looking a little disheveled. He looked back towards us as I finished catching my feet, and I shrugged helplessly. "Tessa?"
"Ugh…" She twisted back and forth in the driver's seat as she straightened back up, looking around in all directions. "Fuck. She's gone."
There was a chorus of groans from all four of us.
"That's just great." Rex grumbled from my hand. "Now what?"
Tessa sighed, her forehead briefly landing on the rim of the steering wheel.
"Now we haul this truck back into town and figure out what to do next." she said miserably without hauling her head back up. "Dibs on first shower."
"Dibs on first in bed." I said, massaging the place where I'd slammed my stomach into the edge of the truck with one hand. Lukas sighed, giving me a commiserating look, before turning to plant his ass in the backseat.
"She didn't get you, did she?" I asked, watching him rub his wrist as he transformed back to human, and he shook his head.
"Nah. Just annoyed that we didn't get anything out of this."
I tsked in agreement as Tessa shifted to start us forward again, rumbling on into the darkness. This had been a tense and stressful five minutes that ended in nothing much at all, especially considering all the legwork we had to do to stuff me and Rex into a hiding place and then drive around the town in ever-widening circles after dark. I sighed and got ready to sit down, which would at least lower my gravity for the bumpy trip back into town.
We had barely started to move again, though, before my eyes widened and I paused mid-flex of my legs.
The woman was back.
Icy fear slammed down my spine as she flickered back into existence in the backseat with Lukas, sitting as calmly as though the past five minutes hadn't happened. I couldn't help but notice, though, how her long black hair now fell in tangled snakes down her back, and her pretty pale face was looking decidedly bony –and sharp.
"Jesus H. fucking Christ!" I screamed as Lukas saw her and threw himself against the side of the door with a cry of his own, arm already coming up as a blade. Rex and I were faster, though, and I shoved the uneven tip of his blade right through the back window in a panic, shattering the glass explosively. The truck bounced and bucked beneath my feet as we shot along the road, glass clattering to a halt inside the cabin, and I felt a brief tug of resistance before I was suddenly plunging Rex through the open air, barely catching myself before I stabbed my arms with the broken remains of the window.
The woman's decapitated head rolled over the width of Rex's blade, plopping down into the backseat in a wild swirl of black hair that soon dissipated into writhing black bands, which condensed into a glowing coal-red soul.
The truck slowly rolled to a stop again, and this time Tessa turned off the engine and twisted to look at us all in the backseat.
"Everyone okay?"
"Barely." Lukas observed, running his thumb along the thin cut on one cheek to swipe away a trickle of blood. "Not that I'm not happy for the assist, Arya, but maybe watch out for flying glass next time."
"Sorry." I felt a bit sheepish about that, but then, I wasn't used to working in teams.
"I'm good." Rex buzzed placidly in my hands. "But, uh… who gets this soul this time?"
We all looked at each other, none of us feeling particularly comfortable in calling dibs over the others.
"Uh…"
"I mean…"
"Well…"
"You two killed it." Lukas said at length, slumping against the truck door with a reluctant sigh. "Finders keepers."
"Oh, no." I felt compelled to politely protest despite my best interests. "We couldn't-"
"Nah. We had our chance, and you guys were the ones who brought home the bacon." Tessa said, shaking her head. "Damn it. How the hell did she do that?"
"I think it was part of her rules." Rex said, writhing out of my hands in a flash of light and manifesting in human form in the backseat of the truck, reaching out to hold the Kishin Egg soul in one hand. "She was a phantom hitchhiker –maybe she needed the vehicle to be moving in order to take her prey or manifest?"
"Whatever it was, it was spooky as shit." I said with authority, turning to vault my way over the side of the truck's bed and make my way around to the door. Lukas politely kicked it open for me as several shards of glass slipped out onto the dirt of the road.
"Agreed." he said as I climbed in, shivering. "Nearly scared me to death when she popped up again like that."
"Well, that's one more successful mission in the works, anyway." Tessa sighed in satisfaction, turning the keys in the ignition again as the now much-battered truck rumbled to life beneath us. "What does that bring your tally to, anyway?"
"Eight." Rex mumbled around his mouthful, before swallowing audibly.
2.38 PM, USA Central Time
Happy Valentine's/Death of James Cook day!
8-Siguanaba:
(see-who-an-nee-ba) This here is an urban legend from Central America, about a female spirit that goes in the similar modus operandi of Women in White, i.e. "seduce lone and typically unfaithful men away from their route and then eating their fucking faces." Allegedly, the Siguanaba is found as a beautiful woman near a water source, naked or in a thin white dress, and proceeds to do her work from there. There's a lot of regional variants, but the one I took for this was from Guatemala, wherein she typically appears to horse riders on lonely roads asking to hitch a ride, and after a while, appears in her true form –clawed and having a horse head, skull, or horse skull as a head (variations disagree)– which causes the rider to die from terror, or if they manage to get away, get lost in the wilderness. I forget some of the exacts, but I also seem to recollect she works in the typical locomotive monster "you gave me a ride now you're literally stuck with me" fashion and is impossible to remove from your mount until you're dead. But that's as maybe –someone's welcome to give me more information/correct my errors on that.