When I open my car door, the first thing I notice is the smell.

  It’s bad. Like blood and stale urine and farm animals and manure and skunk. “This is going to be great,” I mutter to myself, closing the door behind me and taking stock of my weapons. A quick mental check reassures me that I’ve got blades and bats in my weapons stash, and I take a few steps away and pull out a large table from my regular inventory, one of the ones I took from a grocery store days ago. I start to drag it forward, thinking having it as a place for Nancy to hide behind is a good idea.

  I’d really like to get crafting with Beaker, to see if we can build something better than a table for this purpose, and see if he can give it a shield label so I can keep it in my weapons stash. But for now, I guess I need him to survive this first fight.

  A second later, the heft of the table is lessened, and I look over. Ryder’s got one of the legs, helping me heave it forward. “Good idea, Jane, to have a barricade,” he says.

  “Thank you.”

  “Too bad it won’t help with how stinky it is out here.”

  I almost laugh.

  A few of the monsters have taken note of us, and they slink to the outskirts of the fight to eye us making our way forward. There’s one creature that, for the first time, I really can’t tell what it used to be before its mutations. It might have been a chipmunk or squirrel, with its little limbs and big tail, but the shape of the ears make me think maybe it was a rabbit. Or maybe some weird combination of both?

  Oh shit, can these monsters even reproduce in the normal, natural way? What would second-generation magical monsters even look like!?

  Not the time or place, Jane.

  The edge of the purple haze comes into view on my map. “Oh thank god,” I say.

  Ryder’s head whips to me.

  “The haze. It’s shrinking.”

  “Good,” Ryder says. “Though it spread weird, so we have to assume it’ll shrink weird, too. Let’s put this down as close to the mob as we—auughh!” His thought—which is actually a good thought!—is interrupted as a fist-sized critter launches itself at his head. Apparently we’re close enough to pose a threat.

  And apparently the monsters are still trying to attack us by flying at our faces.

  Ryder ducks out of the way and turns a second later, chucking a fireball at the retreating critter. It still doesn’t go very far, only a couple feet, but the critter makes a shrieking sound as it tries to zag out of the way.

  And then something flies at me, and I stop paying attention to my party member.

  Having a blade is like magic.

  I don’t have fancy techniques, so I mostly just hold the thing in my fist like I held my baseball bat, tight in a fist. And like how I used to bash with my bat, I strike with the dagger, hacking at the monsters. Eventually I realize I can stab, too, and add some of that into my arsenal.

  Like usual, I stop thinking as I fight. There’s no time to worry about stance or hand positions, to think about where you want to land your next hit, who your next target is. There’s just the two feet in front of you, the weapon in your hand, the instinct to hit and whack and stab and flail until the danger is passed.

  I come across a skunk, and in my concern about its spray—whether that would be the concrete-like spray from the Tim Horton’s battle or a traditional skunk spray—I bring my blade straight down and cut the thing’s tail off. There’s still some sort of spray, mostly getting coated on itself and the ground around it, and I can smell skunk and burning. The skunk itself screeches, the coating on its own fur starting to sizzle.

  Acid skunks. I love my life.

  I bring down the other blade into the skunk’s neck, and move on to the next monster.

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  I try to pay attention to where I’m going, to what’s happening around me. I haven’t forgotten my plan to take out the horses first. I don’t think I’ve ever been this terrified in my life, and yet I keep looking up and trying to find the large beasts so I can keep hacking my way in their direction. I think about Ryder. About Nancy. About Beaker and Savannah. About the fact that I’ve promised people I’d keep them safe.

  That means facing my fears. That means throwing myself into dangerous situations.

  In a moment of respite in the middle of the fray, I wonder if Beaker thinks this is reckless.

  And then I hear a bawk and try to duck but a chicken lands on my shoulder, its talons the size of kitchen scissors and digging into the flesh there. It flaps its wings, feathers in my ears and eyes and whacking me against the side of my head, its feet still embedded in my shoulder.

  I think I’m screaming.

  Thrusting a hand up, I stab my blade into the chicken’s chest, spurts of blood coating the side of my face and getting into my eyes and mouth. I pull the blade out, stab again, and a third time, and still it clucks right back at me, its beak pecking at my temple, its wings keeping me from seeing anything beyond the bird on my shoulder.

  I’m going to be thwarted by a fucking chicken.

  The blade in my hand drops as I try to reach for the monster, but before I can make contact with its neck, the flapping of its wings changes, for lack of a better word. And then it’s not just flapping against my head, but controlling the air around us, and I suddenly can’t breathe. The chicken is cutting off my air. It’s choking me.

  My knees hit the ground, one hand pressing against the warm dirt as the hay tickles my face. Blood courses down my cheek, mine and the bird’s, and I think about how nice it would be to just lie down in the warmth of the blood and the hay and they feathers. Black creeps in to the edge of my vision. Silence echoes heavy in my ears. Pressure builds in my chest.

  WHAM.

  The world around me comes back to life. I gasp, heaving, desperate to get air back into my lungs as the world comes back into focus. The sounds of the fight surge up around me, screeches and chitters and squawks of the animals.

  I search for the chicken who nearly got me. It’s a few feet away, getting stomped to death by Beaker. He looks up at me, blood splatters on his clothes and a few scratches on his arms but otherwise unhurt.

  “You okay?” he says, shouting to be heard over the cacophony.

  I nod. “Thank you.”

  “That’s what teammates are for,” he says, and then a long, skinny thing leaps between us. Maybe a ferret, or a weasel!? I don’t know, but either way, Beaker and I are separated again and I pull two more blades from my weapons stash.

  The fact that he saved my life kind of surprises me. I’ll have to think about it later.

  In my moment of clarity, I scope out the horses again. They’re on the far end of the mass. I’m strong enough to admit I’m coward enough to be glad that it’ll take me the rest of the battle to get to them.

  I check my map. The edges of the purple continue to seep back, the haze turning opaque. There’s still a while to go but we’re getting there. I scope out the barricade-table, hoping that Nancy is still there, because now that I’m no longer being suffocated to death by a chicken, my shoulder throbs where its talons skewered me.

  There. I start to head back in that direction. I yell out Nancy’s name, but I guess she doesn’t hear me. It all reminds me of another battle, another shoulder injury, another time that it got hard to use the arm to swing my weapon.

  A fireball arcs in front of me. I jump, my head whipping around to find what monster has fire power. But it’s Ryder, shouting a “Sorry!” as he runs past me and tackles a duck.

  I take a few steps backward, toward the edge of the battlefield, and take the long way back to the barricade-table. Nancy’s behind it, thank goodness, as I slump to my knees at her side. I’ve pulled my knives back into my weapons storage, so I can use a free hand to press against the stab wounds in my shoulder.

  “Oh my god, Jane!” Nancy says, her hands pressing down on top of mine. There’s a flash of pain as she pushes against the broken skin, but then the warmth of her healing rushes past me. It’s less of that warm-spring-day feeling and more like the blast of heat you get from opening a pre-heated oven.

  But my hand goes back to my shoulder after, and the holes in my skin have been patched. “Thank you,” I breathe, taking the moment behind the table, sitting on its side. I look her over. She’s got some gore on her, but nothing that looks like any damage to her directly.

  “It’s really intense out there,” Nancy says, ducking further as something bangs into the table.

  “Yeah.” I slump against the back of the table, taking the chance to catch my breath. “But the wide sprawl of the purple is shrinking, so we’re on our way.”

  “Oh good.” Nancy peeks over the top of the table, just her eyes, before ducking back down. A small chipmunk jumps into the space between us, and before I can do anything, Nancy brings her knife down and stabs the thing straight through its middle. She pulls the corpse from her blade and throws it over the table back into the main fight.

  I laugh, which feels a little crazy considering our situation. Still, “You’ve come a long way, girl.”

  Her smile is a little sheepish. “And yet it’s still not enough,” she says. She reaches out, booping my nose just long enough to give me another refreshing jolt of her healing magic. It’s such a moment of ease, of peace, of comfort, in the middle of the crazy fight, that I laugh again.

  And in response, I hear a snort, and a neigh, and I look up into the face of a horse, leaning down from the other side of the table and right to where we’re sitting.