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Chapter 10: Stop and Stare

“She got hit,” Robert said and made as if to tear a strip off his shirt.

“Wait,” Amber eased Daniel into a seat and ran to the front of the bus. She came back with a first aid kit and handed some gauze to Robert. Accepting it, he held it at Calida’s forearm, where her other hand was wrapped around a metal spike.

Robert counted to three and she yanked the projectile out and tossed it away, before clenching the part of her arm above the wound till her tan flesh turned white. Fire seemed to roil and burn just below her skin, lighting her arm up from the inside like a lava lamp. Calida gritted her teeth visibly and made a pushing motion and black liquid oozed out of the wound, which Robert wiped clean and bandaged. The mocha-skinned girl sat back, looking exhausted.

“There.” He sat back onto the seat next to Daniel and began to wrap gauze around his own thigh, hissing in pain. It seemed that the Demon’s talon had gone almost straight through his leg. Daniel had Amber to help with the mummification of his torso – not that that made the pain any lesser.

This was just supposed to be a simple pick-up and drop-off, not a mad scramble around Amber’s neighbourhood with an army of Demons chasing us. They hadn’t even brought medical supplies along, relying on Calida’s healing fire to help Amber. They weren’t supposed to have been injured. He sighed.

None of them moved. After a while Calida nodded off, curled up against one of the only unbroken windows in the bus, scrapes and scratches littering her paler-than-usual skin. There wouldn’t be any quick healings in a while, he figured. Robert seemed to go into meditation mode, eyes closed and hands clasped in his lap – he’d need the energy once dawn came.

Amber, the only one out of the four with only minor injuries, apart from her arm, leaned her head back against the headrest. “What was that giant eagle, or something?” she asked quietly.

“A roc. ‘All feathered things yet ever knowne to men / From the huge Rucke, unto the little Wren.’ Michael Drayton, 1604. Marco Polo said it was an enormous eagle that would take elephants and drop them in midair to kill them so it could eat.” Amber didn’t reply, but he saw her raise an eyebrow. “Sorry,” he said. “Demons are kind of my thing. I do research on them. I think I know way more about them than I should.” He caught the miniscule smile that flitted past her lips. “You were flying,” he said.

“Yeah, I was. It was… awesome.” She whispered it like she was admitting to a crime, but the smile returned.

“I told you so.” He held out a fist and he could’ve sworn she laughed almost silently, then she fist-bumped him.

“And the thing with the spikes?”

Is she testing me? “A manticore would be my best guess. A Demon with a human head, a lion’s body, the wings of a bat, and a tail that shoots poisonous spikes. Derived from a Persian myth. Back then, its name meant ‘man-eater’ in early Middle Persian.”

She hummed, then yawned. “Daniel…”

“Hm?”