Outsiders 16.2

A Hellborn and a Hard Place, Part 2

List felt the ground fall out from beneath her even as the shockwave from Agnizzar's blow tossed her off her feet. She heard Valerie scream her name as the world turned sideways. For a blink, she felt completely weightless. And then she was falling, and her stomach jumped into her throat.

She tumbled completely out of control in a shower of dirt and rocks, the sky becoming the ground becoming the sky as she fell end over end. In pure desperation, she flicked out her whip, hoping to catch it on something, anything.

It cracked against nothing but empty air, and List's heart constricted to a pinprick. At once far below and terrifyingly close, the rocks and river waited for her as a churning ribbon that would break her into pieces. She was screaming. Cursing. Flailing.

And then something yanked on her whip—she'd kept her grip on it out of instinct and training drilled too deep for the panic to reach. A rush of bliss surged through her, cut off as soon as it came when the whip didn't stay taut. But then something hard slammed into her, and it wasn't the rocks below. A crushing force wrapped around her so tight it cut off her screams, and the trajectory of her fall changed.

Her spinning tumble stabilized, and she had just enough time to process the thing wrapped around her as the contours of a person's body—Kaleb's body—before there was a hard impact and a loud crack. Two more collisions followed in rapid succession, and then the world became water.

Instinct had her fighting to swim up, but she could barely tell which way up was, and even though whatever had her before had released her, now the currents had her. Her face broke the surface, and she drew in half a lungful of air before she was thrown headfirst into a rock.

List woke up in a cough fit, unable to breath as water spattered out of her mouth. Frenzied, instinctive movement seized her body, and she rolled onto her stomach to retch and heave in a desperate rush to clear them of water. It took a few sputters, but eventually, it was only air passing between her lips in ragged breaths.

Her whole body shook as she struggled to steady herself. Her head spun with the relief of being able to breathe. Her hair clung to her face and neck, her clothes hung heavy on her body, and everything hurt. She'd been scraped raw all over, was battered and bruised, and chilled to the bone. 

She was on the bank of the river, a thicket of short trees surrounding the embankment she was on, and the cliffside towering over her on the opposite side of the river, which continued on at a much gentler pace than the rapids she'd fallen into.

And a few feet away from her, lying face down in the dirt with his legs still in the water, was Kaleb. 

Kaleb. The memory of the fall, of his arms wrapping around her and his body taking the impact, came rushing back to List, and sudden panic gripped her chest. That had been a long drop. And he wasn't moving.

"Kaleb?" She crawled to him, and tried to turn him over, but he was even heavier than he looked, and strength had abandoned her body. As she struggled, the moments before the fall replayed in her mind. Kaleb had been standing near her, but the ground had fallen out from underneath her, not him.

"Kaleb, I swear to the gods, if you died jumping off a cliff for me—"

She finally turned him over, and a groan of pain escaped his lips. List breathed a shuddering sigh of relief, but it was short-lived. Her hands came away from him stained red.

"Shit."

With his clothes thoroughly soaked, it took a second to spot where the blood had seeped through, on his shoulder and down his back. Having only just rolled him onto his back, she cursed herself, and him, and the river, and the elite that had attacked them, and the Chosen and Digax and this entire fucking country and what the fuck was she supposed to do now?

"Shit, shit, shit." She was panicking, knew she shouldn't, and tried and failed to focus. She tried to get his shirt and jacket off, but with him unconscious and heavy as a sack of rocks, and wet clothes clinging tight to him, she got nowhere.

Only then, through the haze of pain and frustration, did she remember she had magic. With a burst of power that ran first across her own body and then down his, she dried them both off, so thoroughly it was as if they'd never been in the water. His clothes lifted up easier once he was dry, and with considerable effort, she managed to get his shirt and jacket off and roll him onto his side to inspect the damage.

Kaleb's body was cracked like a stone slab someone had taken a hammer to. The cracks centered just to the right of his shoulder blade, and spread across his back and down his arm. Blood oozed from the cracks, and it was hard to tell at a glance how deep they ran.

"Nots . . . bads look…" Kaleb's voice came out as a hoarse whisper, and List nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard it.

"What?"

Kaleb grimaced, drew in a shaky breath, and tried again, even putting on what might have been intended to be a smile. "It's not as bad as it looks."

"It looks like you're about to break into little pieces."

Kaleb nodded, failing to suppress the twinge of pain this produced. "My body…acts more like stone when it tenses up. Cracked when we hit the cliff. They're…not deep."

List stared at the wounds, still certain from their appearance that Kaleb's arms was about to crumble off of him. Gingerly as she could, she prodded his back with two fingers. Immediately, his whole body seized, and indeed she felt his whole body go hard as stone for a split second, a sensation accompanied by the most unpleasant grinding noise List had ever heard. Kaleb hissed.

"Ow," he rasped.

"I think your shoulder is broken," List said. She examined the rest of him with her eyes only. Beyond the fresh, bleeding cracks, Kaleb's body had been discolored in multiple places, and his back sported a cross-hatched mess of raised, straight scars. Those raised questions, but they weren't the immediate problem. "And your arm. And your ribs."

"Probably a leg too," he admitted weakly. "Couldn't put any weight on it getting us out."

List blinked, sure she misunderstood him. "Getting us out?"

"I lost you when we hit the water," Kaleb said, and he sounded like he was apologizing, even as he tried to keep his breaths shallow to avoid aggravating his ribs. "Managed to catch you… closer to the bank. Dragged us out."

"With a broken arm. And a broken leg."

"Teeth."

Now, truly, List could do nothing but stare at Kaleb. He'd dragged her out of the water. With his teeth. She was caught somewhere between grateful, touched, and dumbfounded. She had a high opinion of herself, and not even she was sure she was worth that kind of effort.

She was still staring, trying to think of how to respond, when a chittering noise echoed through the gorge. Every aching muscle in List's body went rigid as her head snapped up. That had come from somewhere close. 

Instinctively, she tried to summon her whip out of her tattoos, but nothing happened. She'd lost it in the river. In fact, as she scanned the composite images along her arm, she spotted only a single dagger incorporated into the design of the dragon.

"List?" Kaleb croaked. He tried to sit up, but pain brought him back down. Whatever adrenaline or determination had fueled him rescuing her from the waters, it was gone now. He couldn't move.

List summoned her lone dagger, and it crackled with chaotic red lightning that bathed their embankment in blood red light. She was unsteady on her feet, and her head felt lighter than it should. Kaleb may have taken the worst of their landing, but she hadn't come out anywhere close to unscathed.

Kaleb, damn him, noticed. "One of us should get out of here. Just go. You can't fight like this. "

List's grip tightened around her knife, and she risked looking back to shoot him a haughty grin. "Watch me."

Their eyes met, and Kaleb swallowed hard. 

The brush rustled, and in the glow of List's knife, a shadow crept forward.

List shouted as she lunged, and the brush burst apart as a monster pounced to meet her. It was only a little taller than a man, and looked like a six-limbed spider with a chitinous head and hairy abdomen. Each of its legs shone like steel in the light, and were tipped with dagger-sharp points. It walked on four legs, and its front limbs were held out wide like scything blades.

List's deflected one blade and dodged the other, taking a shallow slash across her shoulder. Too slow. The monster's legs became a blur as it skittered to the side, every step a stab. It whirled and chased, slashed and lunged, and List's blade painted a trail of red light through the air as she fought desperately to keep up. 

It was a frenetic dance of razor sharp edges, but List was fighting one blade versus six, with shaky legs and a rattled skull. For every pair of strikes she turned, one slipped through. In only a few seconds, stripes of blood covered her head to toe.

List performed a clumsy lunge that earned her a swipe down her back, and she let out a scream. For a heartstopping second, Kaleb watched her stumble, and the beast jabbed out its other foreleg to skewer her. 

"Rude!" List snarled.

She lashed out like the wounded animal she was, and this time, her parry did more than just deflect the attack. Black blood splashed across her arm as her dagger sliced the tip of the monster's leg clean off, and it let out a shrill sound as it skittered back. 

List gave the monster a sadistic grin, even as she herself staggered back. She was favoring her right leg, and bleeding from a dozen different cuts up and down her body. Her breathing was ragged, and her whole body shook. But she still held her dagger at the ready, and her tail flicked angrily out behind her.

A spike of new alarm speared Kaleb through the chest. After the last exchange, List and the monster had staggered into a line with Kaleb. If the monster charged, List wouldn't be able to dodge without letting it run straight into Kaleb with its bladed legs. To her credit, List realized the predicament only a second later as she glanced behind her and swore.

The monster attacked, leaping to come at List with three legs at once while opening its mouth wide to bare rows of fangs. In the split instant of the attack, Kaleb could see from the arc of its lunge that it would land either of List or him, depending on whether or not she moved.

Or at least, that was what he'd thought, expecting that List's only option would be to either get out of the way or be impaled. What he hadn't accounted for was List dashing straight into the creature's bladed embrace. She held up one arm to shield her head from one strike, though it cost her a mean gash across her forearm. Instead of running her through and and yanking her into the monster's waiting jaws, the remaining two legs only sliced her on either side of the ribs.

She was still pushed toward the monster's mouth, but it was a clumsier manuever than the attempted feeding, and List was still in enough control of her movements to bring her dagger straight down through the top of the monster's skull.

It collapsed at once, though its momentum and bulk still had it bowling List over. She and the carcass landed in a crumpled heap on the ground, inches from Kaleb's face. List lay motionless, pinned beneath the corpse, black blood running in rivulets down the creature's head and staining her shirt. With a grunt, she managed to extract herself out from underneath it, and she stomped on the monster's head to make sure it was dead.

"There," she said, immediately collapsing back into the dirt next to him. "We're even."

Too exhausted to use her arm, she jerk her chin towards Kaleb's bottomless bag, blessedly still hanging from his belt.

"Tell me you have bandages in here."