Black Goat Blues_Book Two of the Mythos War by Levi Black

Author:Levi Black [Black, Levi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765382504
Amazon: 0765382504
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2017-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

35

THE TRAIL HAS been narrow and twisty, a rocky foot trail between brambles and thickets and sticky-sharp vines that snag and tug on the coat. It is all worked up and chattering in the back of my mind. The collar of it has ruffled across my neck like an avant-garde fashion accessory that fans around the back of my head from jaw to jaw. It clings tightly to me and I don’t feel the prick of thorns, but something warm trickles onto the back of my left hand stuck in the coat’s pocket and I know whatever the coat has for blood is leaking out and running down where a nasty snag has opened it up.

Of course the vegetation parts as Mylendor leads us down the trail, flowing in behind her like water, a Moses of the weeds.

I don’t know where we are. If this is Earth or some other realm. I’m no botanist, don’t spend a lot of time out of the city, I like walls and doors and locks and houses with places to get away if there is danger. Being out in the open like this, especially an open that is so pressed and choked with vegetation, where anything could hide close enough to touch and I wouldn’t be able to see it coming, makes the panic bell ring in the back of my head where my spine meets my skull.

I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.

And I don’t like not knowing where I am. I have learned that even on Earth other places can exist, just steps away; one wrong turn, one pass through a door left ajar, and you can find yourself in a place people should never be. I once walked down some stairs under a sushi joint in a city I think was New York and wound up in a cave somewhere else with a massive elder god named Cthulhu in a jar.

But there’s nothing to do but follow Mylendor wherever she’s taking us.

The trail is so narrow that we walk in single file. I follow Mylendor, the skinhound a step behind followed by Javier and then Ashtoreth. The skinhound refused to be farther away and I trust Ashtoreth to defend herself far better than Javier could, so she brings up the rear. I don’t like being so closed in, so I concentrate on the soft blue and green glow of the skin on the back of Mylendor’s neck and put one foot in front of the other when all I want to do is pull out Oathbreaker and use it to hack our way free.

The air has gone cloying, thick with the stifling perfume of vegetation, not rot as much as decay, cellulose breaking down, the nose-ruffling odor of chlorophyll exposed to humid air. It’s fetid. Dank. Musty.

Familiar.

In my fourth-grade Earth Science class, Miss Kimbrough brought in a botanist who lived and studied in the Okefenokee Swamp. She showed us pictures of alligators as long as cars and flowers with such colour they made my young eyes hurt with their beauty.

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