The fire was almost gone when the scream ripped through the trees. Bill's knife lifted, catching the last red light. Julian's grin stretched wider, like he'd been waiting for this moment.
Then they came.
Three shadows peeled from the black and slid into the bowl of our camp. They didn't know they were walking into a bowl, and that the steep edges of roots and damp earth wanted them to trip, to offer us their throats by accident. They came like hunger with legs. One was big through the shoulders, a bull that learned to stand upright and never fully forgave the idea. One was wiry, hands looped with cord like a noose that wasn't satisfied with one job. The third was a boy, hard to tell his age in this light, gaunt with the kind of emptiness that devours thought before it takes flesh. His fists were clenched like knives he didn't have to bring.
They didn't speak. Neither did we.
Chaos began.
The bull hit first because bulls always do. He slammed into Bill. Bill met him, but late. The impact emptied his lungs in a sharp bark and drove both of them through the edge of the fire. Embers coughed up, clinging like red insects to shirts, to hair. The smell of burnt thread arrived and tried to claim the scene.
The wiry one lunged for me, cord yawning for my throat. I dropped flat. The loop skimmed my cheek and bit dirt instead. He yanked. Roots tore, but not me. I kicked sideways, hard, and his knees folded. He toppled into the coals. The embers spat at his shins. His curse was ragged, furious. He tugged harder, wood creaking, the loop biting deeper into bark. I kicked at the shaft once, twice. On the third strike it splintered with a sharp crack, the broken half whipping loose in his hands.
For a moment he wasn't an attacker, just a man, trying to beat flame off his legs while the broken stick thrashed in his grip like it was punishing him for the miss.
Julian laughed. With a savage twist, he spun the man sideways into his own teammate. He staggered, losing grip on Bill. For a heartbeat they were a clumsy knot of arms and curses. Bill used that heartbeat. He drove his forehead into the tree's nose. Bone crunched. Blood sprayed black in the firelight.
"Don't die," Julian chirped at me, already moving. "I like you as a person."
The boy reached me silently, but I could see him. His hands were claws, his breath a furnace with nothing inside. I didn't have a knife but I had what the ground offered. My right hand found a branch, wrist thick, half rotten, soft where fungus did its patient work. I swung. It cracked across his shoulder. The stick broke, the top half spinning off into the dark like a thrown sentence cut in half. He staggered and didn't stop. Nails raked my forearm. The pain was clean and insulting. I jammed the stump of the branch into his chest. Air left him like it tripped. He folded around the hole where breath was.
Behind me, the loop man staggered out of the coals, ash streaking his face, eyes streaming tears that tried to wash cinders away and only made gray rivers. He grabbed for Julian, blinded, hands more wolf than hand. Julian turned with him, let the grasp slide, hip checked him into the edge of the pit again, then drove a knee up into the hinge of ribs. The noise the man made was smaller, internal, a bird dying in a box.
Bill bellowed, all lungs and will, and walked the bull backward into a tree. The trunk shivered, leaves let go of their commitment and fell like tired hands. The bull reached for Bill's throat with hands the size of plates; Bill slammed an elbow into a rib once, twice, three. Meat sounds. Breath sounds. The tree took a scuff of bark and pretended it was none of its business.
The boy hurled himself at me again, but closer this time, inside swing distance. His mouth opened and closed in a grin that was more wound than expression. He bit my shoulder. It wasn't metaphor, his teeth were in me. Pain lit, pure and white and mean. I screamed, grabbed his hair and twisted, hauled him off. He spat blood, mine, and laughed with it on his teeth like paint.
Julian arrived sideways by accident, shoulder smashing into the boy's chest. Both of them pinwheeled, hit a mat of roots. The boy's shoulders wedged in and he writhed, clawing dirt, making the animal noise that comes before language. Julian planted a hand on his sternum, leaned, then got distracted and had to roll away as the loop man flailed past again, ash blind, arms open like a sleepwalker's.
The wiry man's fingers found a rock by luck. He swung it wide at Julian's head, overbalanced, sloppy. Julian ducked too late and the rock licked his ear. He laughed anyway, a breathless wheeze. With a shove, he sent the wiry man back into the pit. The man's scream tore the night in two and the forest refused to stitch it.
I stomped the boy's wrist until his fingers decided to separate from the root he'd married. He howled back into my face. I stomped his chest for variety, and because he refused to stay down. He bucked, tried to throw me. I leaned close and rammed my forehead into his. It was like headbutting a jar, never as clever as I think, always as effective as I want. He went slack for a beat. I shoved off him, breath sharp and shaking.
Bill and the bull were still married to each other's ruin. They rolled, striking whatever was there when the fist finished its sentence: ribs, dirt, air. Bill's palms found the bull's throat. The bull's thumbs jammed toward Bill's eyes. Both men roared the same wordless language of ownership and refusal. They crashed into a fallen trunk. Bark exploded in chips and the wood underneath was pale and shocked.
Julian swarmed the wiry man in the ash. He threw ash into the man's face from a white fist and the man coughed, eyes rivers of gray. Julian wrapped his arms around the man's chest and dragged him down. They rolled. Kicks found shins. Heels found kidneys. Fingers found ears.
I lunged in to help and caught a blind backhand that snapped my head sideways. Bark bit my cheek. I tasted dirt, bit it back, and went low, hands to the wiry man's ankle, yank. His leg skidded, hip turned, balance left him like a friend who'd heard enough. Julian rode the motion, knee up. The wiry man's breath burst in a wet cough. He wheezed, trying to crawl out of his own ribs.
Behind us, Bill and the bull slammed the fallen trunk again. The bull's forearm ground across Bill's throat; Bill's forearm ground across the bull's. They looked like mirrors arguing. I scooped a double handful of dirt and dead leaves and flung it over my shoulder at the bull's face. It hit. He snorted, blinked, clawed at his eyes. Bill used the blink, bucking him sideways, rolling on top, pinning the bull's arm with a knee. His other hand found the ground, found a root, used it like a lever, not a weapon, a wedge to hold the man down.
"Breathe," I rasped, to myself or to all of us. It didn't matter who heard.
The wiry man clawed for something. He flipped it toward Julian's throat by instinct. I caught the cord in both hands before it closed, wrapped it around a branch jutting from the pit's rim, and yanked backward. The loop tightened on wood instead of flesh; the man yanked and only dragged the branch toward him. Julian answered with a sharp, ugly knee to the temple. The wiry man sagged. His fingers loosened. The cord slithered free and hung limp like a bad idea that had lost its job.
The boy moved.
He was up out of the roots, eyes too wide, face streaked with mud and someone's blood. He looked smaller now, like the night had wrung him. His chest shuddered. He clocked all three of us in a single, animal sweep: Bill pinning the bull, me on the branch, Julian swaying, ash gray and smiling because he didn't know what else to be.
I lifted a palm. It shook. "Run."
He froze. The forest held its breath with him.
He screamed instead and charged, hands clawed. I braced for impact that never landed. Julian staggered, slipped on ash, bumped the boy at a strange angle, turned his sprint into a stumble. The boy skidded on his knees, palms carving furrows. He jacked back to his feet, pivoted hard, and bolted the other direction, away from us, away from the dead fire, into trees that seemed to open just for him. Branches whipped back and closed. The black ate him.
Silence dropped like wet cloth.
The wiry man rolled once, tried to get a knee under himself, failed. His body gave up in sections. He lay on his side and coughed until the coughs turned into nothing. The bull heaved beneath Bill, once, twice, and then stopped trying to choose.
For a long time we were only chests moving. The forest stayed performatively empty. Just our noise and the quiet that wanted to replace it.
Julian wiped his mouth with the heel of his palm. The grin flickered and dimmed. "Well," he said, voice like raw silk, "we're terrible fighters."
Bill didn't answer. He eased his weight off the bull, pushed upright, staggered a step, planted a hand on the trunk to steady the world. His breath scraped. His eyes scanned the trees where the boy vanished and found nothing but the shape of absence.
My forearms were crosshatched with root bites and cord burn. I was shaking, small at first, then the bigger tremors that come when the body realizes it's still got a job.
"No one follows," I said, because saying it was the only way I could make the sentence true.
Julian tipped his head, listening. Only the hush of the made river far off, the buried hum deeper still. "Not yet," he agreed. "Maybe later."
We scattered the coals with heels and dead branches until the red gave up. Ash bloomed and floated, a gray galaxy collapsing. I grabbed the dented pot because leaving it now would feel like breaking a pact with a stupid god. The cord hung from the branch like a snare that grew tired of work. I yanked it free, coiled it, then dropped it.
"Move," Bill said.
"Where?" Julian asked lightly, as if there were choices.
"Away," Bill said.