Wesley

  He did not get much time to agonize over what to do before a section of the wall on his right began sliding outward, forming a barrier to separate him from Sam. By the time he was on his feet, the new wall had already slid shut, leaving no seam behind to suggest that the hallway had once continued past it.

  Wesley heard the muffled sounds of a struggle from the other side, the beast's howling and the woman's grunting, until that too faded. Did that mean the fighting was over? Or had the house just shifted, as it seemed to do frequently and with intent, to separate them from each other?

  Noticing that he had regenerated a single AP over the course of the day's journey, Wesley thought he might as well give his new skill another try. He cast a Detect [Life] with all the confidence he could muster, which was not much, to find out whether Sam Darling was still on the other side. He did not see anything. Not wolf, nor woman.

  He was beginning to think that he must be using it wrong somehow, since he never seemed to sense anything with the damn thing, when he turned and caught a faint glimmer of something alive through the wall. Its source had to be at least a few rooms over, but it looked at least vaguely human based on the blurry outline he was seeing, and at that point he'd take anything that wasn't trying to kill him.

  He went for the pistol Magpie had given him, only to look around and realize it had been on the other side of the wall when he'd been separated from Sam. Just his luck. Then again, the damn thing hadn't worked anyway, so he figured it wasn't such a big loss.

  Instead he drew his sword in shaky hands, its weight strange and unwieldy to him, and carefully made his way toward the little smudge of light. He rounded the corner of the hallway, and it led him into a larger room that appeared to be some sort of lounge, with a cold fireplace on the right-hand wall and fine furniture still folding out of the floor.

  He was hearing distinctly human cries coming from the room adjoining this one, and fear slowed him to a crawl. He inched along, and finally pulled open a gilded door that did not just have an empty wall behind it for a change. Entering a short, narrow hallway, he immediately fell short.

  The far end of the hallway was plugged up with a great blubbery mass of flesh, five eyes floating around a malformed face and a wide, toothless maw yawning wide and stupid. Many pale, mucus-slick tentacles extended from the central mass, some snaking along the walls and ceiling while several others ensnared the legs of a woman who lay snarling and yelling on her back, being slowly pulled closer to the creature's waiting mouth.

  It was Price, the mercenary.

  The woman heard Wesley enter, and she tipped her head back to stare wide-eyed at him, teeth bared with the effort of clinging to the floorboards by her bloodied nails. "You!" she said. "Get me my sword! Now!"

  The weapon in question lay discarded less than an arm's length from her, the longsword bared from its scabbard with a line of black monster blood already tracing one edge.

  Wesley did not move. Could not move. It was all too much.

  "Hey, fuckface!" Price shouted. "Help me! Quick!"

  She had almost wriggled one leg free of a slimy tentacle when another hooked the inside of her belt and yanked her firmly toward the creature, undoing any progress she had made. The mercenary was doing a fair job at staying clear of those chomping jaws, but Wesley could tell that she was beginning to fatigue. She wouldn't last much longer now.

  But for some reason, his legs still would not move.

  "Uh…" dribbled from his mouth, not one thought behind it.

  "Please!" Price screamed, an edge of panic to her voice now. When it became obvious to her that Wesley was not about to assist anytime soon, she took a hand off the floor to reach for her weapon. This proved to be her undoing, as her tenuous grip with her remaining hand slid, and the blubbery thing swept her the rest of the way into its mouth, everything up to her waist going inside the furnace-sized maw.

  Wesley watched as the thing clamped down, the hard bony ridges of its toothless gape pinching her in half. It pulled her torso away as it chewed happily on her lower half, entrails hanging from her severed waist like melted cheese off a pizza slice.

  He watched as Price's face went all pale, and her mouth went in a wide O as though about to scream, but only a strange sort of squawk came out, and she blinked stupidly up at him as the creature worked at her bottom half. Then it finished, and it wrapped a whole heap of tentacles around her top half, and one slid over her face so Wesley couldn't see it anymore, which in truth was a blessing as Wesley did not wish to see the accusation in her eyes.

  Then in she went, disappearing behind a pair of stiff white lips, and the blubbery thing bobbed up and down against the cramped confines of the hallway in utter delight of its tasty snack.

  Wesley watched. He watched, frozen with horror, and his legs went all warm. He did not know why until a sour odor reached his nostrils, and he realized that he had pissed himself.

  Only when the blubbery thing had finished with its first victim and spat out tough leather bits and metal buckles and such that did not appeal, and had turned its five jaundiced eyes on him, did Wesley's feet miraculously regain the ability to move. But when he turned to flee, he found that the door he had come through no longer existed, just a blank wall where it had stood.

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  The blubbery thing was slowly working its way up the hall, squeezing its great bulk along by straining its countless limbs. It reached greedily for him with several free tentacles that tapped along the floor like blind men's canes, only a few precious feet shy of him.

  Wesley looked around desperately for a way out. But of course, he could not find one. The house had trapped him here, in this room, and there was no way to escape.

  He was just about to fall to his knees and begin praying when he caught a brief flicker of something in his periphery. A spark of life captured by his still-active cast of Detect [Life]. It went away, then returned moments later a little stronger.

  There was something on the other side of the wall. And since he never seemed to sense any of the monsters, it meant that something had to be a person.

  His body seemed to find some hidden store of vigor, and before he knew it he was hacking away at the wall with his sword, throwing off little chips of dark wood. Each swing sent a hard jolt up his arms, and his progress was pathetically slow. Too slow by far. He didn't even dare glance in the direction of the monster, but at this pace, he knew it would catch him before he got halfway to breaking through.

  Instead, he sheathed his weapon and did the only other thing he could think of.

  "Dash!" He cried, willing himself to move, and he went flying into the wall shoulder-first at great speed. He bounced off it reeling and with a thumping shoulder, having left a barely appreciable dent in the woodwork, but he could not afford to give up.

  There was no time to worry about skill fatigue, either. He Dashed again, and again, and again. He felt something cold and sticky wrap around his ankle, and with an undignified squeal he Dashed one last time, and went flying through the weakened wall with a crashing of splintered planks, went sprawling ass-over-head as he landed on the other side.

  It appeared that he had come free of the monster's grip. He could not feel anything grabbing his ankle anymore.

  "Grinner bait!" called a voice that at any other time would have grated Wesley to hear, but was like sweet music to him now. "Where the hell did you come from?"

  Mongrel yanked Wesley roughly upright by his shirt-front, and the pot-bellied old man wrinkled his nose at the state of Wesley's trousers. "You've been having a fun time of it, looks like."

  "Uh-huh," Wesley grunted, throwing worried glances at the hole he had left in the wall. It was just about big enough for him to squeeze through headlong, meaning it could not possibly accommodate the blubbery thing's entire bulk, but if it got some arms around the edges and pulled it wider…

  Before his worry could turn to panic, a chimp—the one called Number One, he thought, going by the gray in his fur—had waddled over to the wall and signed a skill that set the ragged hole closing up on itself, little bits of wood floating up and finding their places in a sort of sluggish reversal of hoe they had scattered in the first place. After a few seconds, only a few hairline cracks remained, and it was all silent on the other side. Maybe the blubbery thing had given up.

  Now that he had a moment to breathe, Wesley felt all the energy drain out of him in one big go. His left shoulder suddenly hurt so bad it had him hissing through his teeth with every breath. He couldn't move his left arm, and when he tried to touch the shoulder he immediately thought better of it with a sharp wince.

  "Dislocated, I'm guessing," Mongrel noted matter-of-factly. "You'll need to put up with it until we're out of here."

  "Do you… Do you really think we're getting out of here?" Wesley asked.

  Mongrel snorted, and let the flat of his sword fall against his shoulder. "It's better than thinking we're all going to die in here, isn't it?"

  "I suppose." Wesley focused on getting his breathing under control. He felt like a bundle of soggy spaghetti, his body wanting to go sideways more strongly with every second. "That lady—Price. She's dead." He couldn't look the old man in the eye while he said the words.

  "And I weep over her loss, truly. But we're still alive, and right now, we've got to focus on us."

  "Okay."

  "Attaboy." Mongrel clapped Wesley on the cheek, a little too hard to be affectionate. "You a rightie or a leftie?"

  Wesley frowned. "What?"

  "You jerk off with your right hand or your left, stupid?"

  "Right."

  "Good. That means you can still swing a sword, so look alive. This place is crawling with beasties, and I reckon we'll be seeing more of 'em sooner than we'd like."

  "Okay."

  Wesley had a look around the new room he found himself in. It had the look of an office or a study—a large desk, a few chairs scattered around the place, an empty bookcase, a plush rug draped over the floor at an odd slant. Two of the walls had glass windows set into them, though they only showed a perfect blackness, just like the one he had seen before.

  "I saw Sam before," Wesley said. "We, uh, got separated though. She was fighting a big… werewolf, or something. I'm not sure if she made it."

  Mongrel laughed as he moved to peer through the windows one by one. "Oh, I'd worry more about us than her. You put that girl in front of a freight train, I reckon it's the train that'll need its pieces scraped up after."

  "I guess so." Wesley tried to shrug, which made him yelp at a sharp twinge in his bad left shoulder. "I saw Magpie, too. She got out. Left me in here."

  "That mangy shit-eating cunt of a whore," Mongrel growled. "Not surprised she'd fuck us like that. She's no good, Oatmeal—mark my words. No good at all."

  Wesley saw no cause to disagree.

  "Where are the other chimps?" he asked, noting a severe lack of little furry fellows aside from Number One.

  "They were up in the trees, so they didn't get caught in the semblance," Mongrel said. "Zero came with us, though. She died pretty quick."

  "I see."

  The old man turned to face Wesley, levering the sword on his shoulder up and down. "What about the boy genius? Bump into him at all?"

  Wesley shook his head. "No. You?"

  "Nope."

  "I've still got Detect active, but I…" Wesley shut his eyes and tried to rub a few of his tired brain cells together, but there was no spark. "Yeah. I don't feel anyone nearby."

  Mongrel gave a grunt that sounded almost a tad appreciative. "How long can you keep your cast running?"

  "I don't know. I think it's fading a bit, and I don't have enough AP to cast it again."

  "Damn. Well, you lean back or something and try to hang onto that Detect for as long as you can. Let me know if you get any tingles."

  Wesley nodded. "Yessir."