A Beautiful Friendship-ARC (13 page)

“No,” she heard herself whisper to her tiny protector. “No, it’s too big! Run away. Oh,
please
—please!
Run away!
”

But the treecat ignored her, his green eyes locked on the hexapuma, and despair mixed with her terror. The hexapuma was going to get them both, because she couldn’t run away . . . and the treecat
wouldn’t
. Somehow she knew, beyond any possibility of question, that the only way the hexapuma would reach her would be through him.

* * *

There was very little to sense in the death fang’s brain, but Climbs Quickly understood its hesitation. This was an old death fang, and it had not lived this long without learning some hard lessons. Among those lessons must have been what a roused clan could do to its kind, for it had the wit to look for the others who should have been there to support him.

But Climbs Quickly knew what the death fang couldn’t. There
were
no other People—not yet. They were coming, tearing through the treetops with frantic, redoubled speed, but they would never arrive in time.

He glared down at the death fang, sounding his challenge, and knew he couldn’t win. No single scout or hunter could encounter a death fang and live, yet he could no more abandon his two-leg youngling than he could have abandoned a kitten of the People. He felt her desperate emotions urging him to flee and save himself despite her own terror, even as he felt his sister’s mind-voice screaming the same. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter that the death fang would kill the two-leg the moment he himself was dead. What mattered was that his two-leg—his
person
—must not die alone and abandoned. He would buy her every moment of life he could, and perhaps, just perhaps, it would be long enough for Sings Truly to arrive. He told himself that firmly, fiercely, trying to pretend he didn’t know it was a lie.

And then the death fang charged.

* * *

Stephanie watched the motionless confrontation as treecat and hexapuma glared and snarled at one another, and the tension tore at her like knives. She couldn’t stand it, yet neither could she escape it, and the treecat’s utter, hopeless gallantry ripped at her heart. He could have run away. He could have escaped the hexapuma
easily
. But he’d refused, and deep inside, under the panic of an exhausted, hurt, terrified child face-to-face with a murderous menace she should never have encountered, his fierce defiance touched something in
her
. She didn’t know what it was. She didn’t even realize what was happening. Yet even as the treecat was determined to protect her, she felt an equally fierce, equally unyielding determination to protect
him
.

Her right hand fell to her belt and closed on the hilt of her vibro blade survival knife. It was only a short blade—barely eighteen centimeters long, which was nothing compared to the sixty-centimeter bush knives Forestry Service Rangers carried. But that short blade had a cutting “edge” less than a molecule wide, sharp enough to whittle old-fashioned steel as if it were wood, and it whined to life in her hand as she somehow shoved herself to her feet. She leaned back against the trunk, left arm dangling while terror rose like bile in her throat, and knew her knife was too puny. It would slice through the hexapuma effortlessly, cutting bone as easily as tissue, yet it was too short. The huge predator would tear her apart before she could cut it at all. And even if she somehow did manage to cut it as it charged—even inflict a mortal wound—it was so big and powerful it would kill her before it died. She knew that. But the knife was all she had, and she stared at the hexapuma, hardly daring to breathe, waiting.

And then it charged.

* * *

Climbs Quickly saw the death fang move at last. He had time to send out one more urgent message to Sings Truly. A moment to feel her raging despair and fury at the knowledge she would come too late. And then there was no more time to think. There was no time for anything but speed and violence and ferocity.

* * *

Stephanie couldn’t believe it. The hexapuma was terrifyingly quick for so huge a creature, yet the treecat sprang from his perch, catapulting through the air in a cream-and-gray streak that somehow evaded the hexapuma’s slashing forepaws. He landed on the back of its neck, and it screamed as centimeter-long claws ripped at thick fur and tough skin. It whirled, both rear pairs of limbs planted firmly, forequarters rising as it twisted to snap and claw at the treecat, but its furious blow missed. The treecat had executed his flashing attack only to race further down his enemy’s spine and fling himself back up onto the trunk of a near-pine. Then he turned, clinging head-down to the rough bark, snarling his war cry into the teeth of the hexapuma’s rage.

The hexapuma forgot about Stephanie. It wheeled, charging the tree in which the treecat waited, rising up on its rear legs and spreading its front and mid-limbs wide to claw at the thick trunk. It dragged itself as high as it could, slashing and snarling, and Stephanie suddenly understood what the treecat was trying to do.

He was
distracting
the hexapuma.

He knew he couldn’t kill it or even truly fight it. His attack had been intended to hurt it, to make it angry and direct that anger at
him
and away from her, and it was working. But it was a desperate, ultimately losing game, for he must keep up the attack, keep stinging the hexapuma, and he couldn’t be lucky forever.

* * *

Climbs Quickly felt a fierce exultation, unlike anything he’d ever imagined.

This was a fight he couldn’t win, yet he was eager for it. He
wanted
it, and the blood-red taste of his own fury filled him with fire. He watched the death fang lunge up the green-needle tree and timed his response perfectly. Just as the death fang reached the very top of its leap, he dropped to meet it, claws slashing, and the death fang howled as he shredded its muzzle and tore an ear to pieces. But again its counter-striking forepaws missed him as he sprang away once more.

It charged after him, and he came to meet it yet again. He danced in and out of the trees, pitting blinding speed, skill, and intelligence against the death fang’s brute power and cunning. It was a dance which could have only one ending, yet he spun it out far longer than even he would have believed possible before it began.

* * *

“
No!
”

Stephanie screamed in useless denial as the treecat finally made a mistake. Perhaps he slipped, or perhaps he’d simply begun to tire at last. She didn’t know. She only knew she’d felt a wild, impossible hope as the fight raged on and on. Not that he could win, but that he might not
lose
. Even as she’d let herself hope, she’d known it was in vain, but the suddenness of the end hit her with the cruelty of a hammer.

The treecat was a fraction of a second too slow, lingered to slash at the hexapuma’s shoulders for just an instant too long, and a mid-limb paw flashed up savagely. Ten-centimeter claws flashed like scimitars, and she heard—and
felt—
the treecat’s scream of agony as that brutal blow landed.

It didn’t hit squarely, but it came close enough. It stripped him away from the hexapuma’s neck, flicking him aside like a toy, and he screamed again as he slammed into the trunk of a tree. He tumbled down it in a broken, bloody ball of fur, and the hexapuma rose on its rearmost limbs. It hovered there, howling its rage and triumph, and then it lowered all six feet to the ground and crouched to spring and rend and tear and crush its tiny enemy.

Stephanie saw it. She understood it, knew what it intended . . . and that she couldn’t possibly stop it. But the treecat—
her
treecat—had known he couldn’t stop it from killing
her
, either, and that hadn’t kept him from trying. A part of her knew it was only a pathetic gesture, no more than the hiss and spit of a kitten in the instant before hungry jaws closed on it forever, but it was a gesture she simply could not
not
make.

She lunged, ignoring her snapped rib, the agony in her wounded knee and broken arm. In that moment, she wasn’t just a twelve-T-year-old girl. There was no time for her to fully grasp all that was happening, but something inside her had changed forever when the treecat offered his life to save hers, and her scream was a war cry as she brought the vibro blade slashing forward and offered
her
life for his.

The hexapuma shrieked as the high-tech blade sliced into it.

It had forgotten about Stephanie, narrowed all its attention to Climbs Quickly, and it was totally unprepared for the unadulterated agony of that blow. The blade of immaterial force caught it on its right flank, so “sharp” that even a twelve-T-year-old’s arm could drive it hilt-deep. The creature’s own frantic lunge to escape the pain did the rest, and blood sprayed across the fallen leaves of winters past as its movement dragged the unstoppable blade through muscles, tendons, arteries, and bone.

Stephanie staggered and almost fell as the huge predator squirmed frantically away. Her hand and arm were soaked in its blood, more steaming blood had gouted across her face and eyes, and if she’d had the time for it, she would have been nauseated. But she didn’t have time, and she staggered further forward, putting herself between the treecat and the hexapuma.

It was all she could do to stay on her feet. She shook like a leaf, her blood-coated face streaked with tears, while terror yammered within her. Yet somehow she stayed upright and raised the humming blade between them as the hexapuma stared at her in animal disbelief. Its right leg trailed helplessly while blood pulsed from the huge, gaping wound in its flank. But the very sharpness of the vibro blade worked against Stephanie in at least one respect: that wound was fatal, but the hexapuma didn’t know it. It would take time to bleed out, and the knife was so sharp, the wound inflicted so quickly, that the creature had no idea of the catastrophic damage it had just received. It only knew it was hurt. Knew that the injured prey it had expected to take so easily had inflicted more agony than any enemy it had ever faced, and it howled its fury.

It paused for just a moment, hissing and spitting. The ears Climbs Quickly had shredded were flat to its skull, and Stephanie knew it was going to charge. She had no more idea than the hexapuma that she’d already inflicted a mortal wound, and she tried to hold her knife steady. It was going to come right over her, but if she could get the knife up, stick it into its chest or belly and let its charge do there what its lunge away had done to its hind quarters, then maybe at least the treecat would—

The hexapuma howled again, and Stephanie wanted desperately to close her eyes. But she couldn’t, and she saw it lunge—saw it spring forward in the first of the two leaps it would take to reach her, dragging its crippled leg, fang-studded maw agape.

Only it never completed that lunge.

Stephanie’s head jerked up as a dreadful noise filled the forest. She’d heard a single echo of that sound from the treecat who’d fought to protect her, but this wasn’t the defiant cry of one hopelessly gallant defender. This was the rippling snarl of dozens—scores—of treecats, filled with hate and vengeance, and its challenge pierced even the hexapuma’s rage. Its head snapped up, as Stephanie’s had done, and its yowl was filled with as much panic as fury as the trees exploded above it.

A cream-and-gray avalanche thundered down with a massed, high-pitched scream that seemed to shake the forest. It engulfed the hexapuma in an unstoppable flood of slashing ivory claws and needle-sharp fangs, and Stephanie Harrington collapsed beside a dreadfully wounded Climbs Quickly as the scouts and hunters of his clan literally ripped their foe to pieces.

11

“I’m home!” Richard Harrington called out as he walked into the living room.

“About time,” Marjorie replied from her office. She was at the end of the section anyway, so she hit save and closed the report, then rose and stretched.

“Hey, don’t give me a hard time,” her husband told her severely as he walked down the short hallway and poked his head in her door. “
You
may be able to do a full day’s work without going anywhere, but some of us have patients who require our direct, personal attendance. Not to mention a superb bedside manner.”

“ ‘Bedside manner,’ right!” Marjorie snorted, and Richard grinned as he leaned close to kiss her cheek. She put an arm around him and hugged him briefly.

“Did Steph have a good day with Mayor Sapristos?” she went on.

“What?” Richard pulled back with a strange expression, and she cocked an eyebrow.

“I asked if Stephanie had a good day with Mayor Sapristos,” she said, and Richard frowned.

“I didn’t drop her off in Twin Forks,” he said. “I didn’t have time, so I left her home. Didn’t I tell you I was going to?”

“Left her home?” Margie repeated in surprise. “Here? On the freehold?”

“Of course! Where else would I—” Richard broke off as he recognized his wife’s incomprehension. “Are you saying you haven’t seen her all day?”

“I certainly haven’t! Would I have asked you about Mr. Sapristos if I
had
?”

“But—”

Richard broke off again, and his frown deepened. He stood for a moment, thinking hard, then turned and half-ran down the hall. Marjorie heard the front door open and close—then it opened and closed again, seconds later, and Richard was back.

“Her glider’s gone,” he told Marjorie grimly.

“But you said you didn’t take her to town,” Marjorie protested.

“I didn’t,” he said even more grimly. “So if her glider’s gone, she must’ve gone off on a flight of her own . . . without telling either of us.”

Marjorie stared at him, her own mind filled with a cascade of chaotic thoughts and sudden, half-formed fears. Then she took a firm mental grip on herself and cleared her throat.

“If she went out on her own, she should be back by now,” she said as calmly as she could. “It’s getting dark, and she would’ve wanted to be home before that happened.”

“Absolutely,” Richard agreed, and the tension in their locked gazes was just short of panic. An inextricable brew of fear for their daughter, guilt for not having watched her more closely, and—hard though they tried to suppress it—
anger
at her for evading their watchfulness flowed through them. But there was no time for that. Richard shook himself, then raised his uni-link and tapped the key that brought up the communicator interface. It blinked, and he cleared his throat.