Summoned A Hundred Years Too Late

Three versus one. Those odds were not what Alexandra had been hoping for when she set out to hunt. Still, there was no backing out now. The goblins wouldn’t let her.

Sickle in hand, she took a fighting stance. Her best impression of a fighting stance was to stand sideways, knees slightly crouched, her sickle holding hand raised behind her.

The goblins didn’t seem to care much about her. They grouped up slowly, their gazes never leaving her. Their smiles ran all the way up to their ears, leaving just enough space between their lips to peek at their sharp teeth.

None of them were even holding weapons.

Alexandra told herself that was a good thing. Fewer things to dodge. Simple math. She was good at math. Well, decent.

She was not, it was becoming clear, particularly good at fighting.

The goblins spread out around her in a lazy half-circle, in no apparent hurry, their long arms hanging loose at their sides. Their fingernails—claws, really, she should start calling them claws—caught the morning light in a way that highlighted their sharpness.

She tightened her grip on the sickle and tried to look threatening.

The first one came low and fast. She swung. The blade sang through empty air while the goblin ducked under it and shoved her leg on the way past. Not a real strike. More like a greeting. She stumbled backward anyway, got her feet back under her.

Okay. Okay. So they were fast.

She reset, sickle up, and made herself breathe. Slow. In through the nose, out through the mouth, like she was doing yoga.

Fuck, this wasn’t yoga.

The second goblin feinted left and she didn’t take it. Then the third came in from the right and she turned, swung and actually connected. The blade dragged across its forearm with a sound like tearing cloth. The goblin hissed, reeled back.

Her heart thumped.

A goblin raked a hand across her calf and danced away before she could turn. Three thin lines of heat bloomed on her leg. Not deep. Definitely on purpose.

They circled again, unhurried, easy, one of them licking the cut on its forearm like it was something interesting rather than something that should hurt.

That was when she understood.

They weren’t trying to win. They were playing. Testing the shape of her, seeing what she’d do, having a lovely time at her expense. And the worst part was that she couldn’t do anything about it yet, and they knew that too.

She exhaled slowly and adjusted her grip.

Fine. Let them play. She just had to last long enough to get good.

She took the initiative, swinging in a wide arc at the closest goblin. It stepped back, dodging without a sweat.

She repositioned.

One goblin came in low and she caught it across the ribs on the backswing. A solid hit, she felt it connect. The goblin hissed and skipped back. Good. She turned to track another, swiped at it, missed, caught the last one instead with a glancing blow across the shoulder. She was moving faster now, or she was reading them better, she couldn’t tell which. Maybe both.

She landed another hit, then another, the long edge of the sickle opening small cuts across green skin, arms and sides and once cleanly across a thigh. She was finding the patterns she’d been looking for.

Yet they were laughing. A low bestial cackle echoed through the field.

A goblin was already inside her next swing, closer than it had any right to be, and its claws dragged across her forearm before she could pull back. Blood flowed. She spun, swiped, connected with nothing.

She shook her arm, trying to dispel the pain, but another strike caught her across the shoulder on her blind side, tearing through her shirt. She stumbled forward, turned it into a step, swung wide to buy herself space. The goblins scattered and regrouped, easy as breathing.

She pressed in again. Caught one with a decent slash across the chest, another with a kick to the side. They hissed and moved as they bled. Not enough. She took a cut across her thigh in exchange, then one across the back of her hand that made her fingers go briefly numb. She lost the count of her own wounds. She didn’t need to know.

She reset. Breathing hard.

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Her slashes felt wrong. Weak. Every hit that landed seemed to slide off, pulling away before it could go deep.

She looked at the sickle. Really looked.

The curve.

The tip.

The first attempt was clumsy. She snagged a goblin’s wrist with the tip of her sickle more by accident than skill, and it twisted free before she could do anything useful with it. But she felt the principle of it, the way the blade wanted to pull rather than cut, and she chased that feeling.

The second attempt caught the same goblin by the ankle mid-lunge. She pulled. It went down face-first into the dirt and she was already moving to the next one. Her growing smile was pulling on her wounds, but she didn’t care.

She hooked the goblin’s arm, felt it stumble, and lost it before she could do anything useful. Messy. But the sickle was doing something now.

She kicked.

The goblin staggered, found no ground to recover on, and she was already pivoting, hook finding the shoulder, catching deep under the joint, and she pulled. It screamed. A real sound, high and sharp and nothing like the wet laughter from before. Nothing like the call to its brethren. The goblin dropped to one knee, its arm hanging wrong.

Her lips pulled back. It hurt. She let them.

The other two goblins stopped moving.

Their playfulness was snuffed out like a candle in the wind. Just gone. They looked at their companion, then at her, and something shifted behind their yellow eyes, something colder, violent, and not remotely entertained.

They moved together this time.

She got her sickle up but they weren’t coming for the blade. One went low, the other high, and she made the mistake of tracking the one she could see better. The low goblin hit her like a tackle, and when she went down the second one was already on her, one hand pinning her sickle arm, the other drawing back with those long curved claws extended.

She turned her face. Reflex. Stupid reflex.

The claws caught her across the lower cheeks on both sides in two quick passes, once on the way in and once on the way back. She got her thumb up and drove it into the goblin’s eye. The goblin screamed and reared back. She wrenched her sickle arm free and swung blind. The blade connected with something.

Then her legs went out and she hit the ground anyway.

She lay there for a moment.

The sky was the wrong color for this. Too blue, too soft, too easy, a few thin clouds dotting the canvas. The flowers around her were still standing where she hadn’t crushed them, yellows and whites and blues. There was even a red — ah, that was her blood. Somewhere nearby a bird was making a small, unconcerned sound.

Her hand found her face on its own. She already knew what she’d find. Warm, wet, deep. Too deep. She pressed her fingers against her cheek and felt her flesh move in a way it shouldn’t. She took her hand away and looked at the sky instead.

Okay.

Okay.

She’d been cut before. Today, many times. This was just another cut. It was on her face, which was new, and it was deep, which was also new, and there were two of them, which—

The goblin with the ruined shoulder was making a sound somewhere to her left. Not a threatening sound. Something lower, more animal, the sound of a thing in genuine pain. She’d done that. Hell, she was doing that right now, she realized. She’d done that and then they’d done this and that was how fighting worked, she supposed. You hurt something and sometimes it hurts you back worse.

The bird was still going.

She put her hand flat on the ground, felt the crushed stems and the soft earth beneath them, and pushed herself up.

They stepped back.

She did, slowly, one hand returning to her face before she could stop herself. Warm. Wet. Deep enough to be dangerous, she thought, though she wasn’t sure she was in the best position to be making that assessment right now.

The injured goblin was back on its feet, shoulder still hanging awkwardly, but standing. The three of them watched her with new eyes. Evaluating.

She spat blood. She’d bitten her cheek when she fell. The last of her concerns, really.

Then she ran.

The flowers whipped past her legs, stems and thorns catching at her shins. She didn’t stop for any of it. She didn’t look back, couldn’t look back, the only thing in her head was distance and more of it. Her face was on fire. Her legs, too.

A goblin caught her across the back of the thigh. She stumbled, nearly went down, kept going. Another jumped at her. She ducked without thinking, the claws catching air just above her ear. She was faster than them. Taller. Her legs were longer. The field was open and she just had to keep moving, keep moving, keep —

Another hit, low on her back. Not deep. She barely felt it over everything else.

She crested a small rise in the field and the ground evened. She chanced a look back. They’d stopped at the bottom. All three of them, watching her go.

She could do it. She was going to make it. She—

She was running away.

She fought. Nobody could say she didn’t. She was bleeding and still on her feet and that was already more than most people would manage. She could go home. Clean the wounds. Come back later, better prepared.

It would be fine. It would be the smart thing.

Therion was right. All along.

She slowed from a sprint to a run, then a jog.

It would be fine. She turned the words over.

It would be fine today. After all, she was only wasting a streak of one. That was nothing.

And then what? What about the next time it gets hard? And the time after that? She knew how that worked. She’d watched it work on people she’d gone to school with.

She’d watched it work on her.

She stopped.

Her breathing was ragged. Her face was still bleeding, a slow drip she could feel reaching her jaw, painting the earth below her. She stood in the middle of the flower field and listened.

Silence.

Just silence. The goblins were gone, and the field was just a field again, painted with a beautiful pastel indifference.

She raised her hand, summoned her journal, and opened it on the third page. A single drop of blood fell on the paper.

“I hope I don’t regret this.”