Jazz: Monster Collector In: Ultimatums By The Bagful (Season 1 Episode 8) Read online

familiar, but I couldn’t place it. My shadow sight saw no magical energies around it, but those things could be masked. I held it up and sniffed. It smelled charred but something else too. I sniffed again, struggling to name the scent.

  “Jazz! Jazz!”

  The bauble in my hand was probably nothing, a splinter or a scrap of a claw left from some old fight. But it felt important. I tucked it into the zippered pocket on my left shoulder. “Over here.”

  “Jazz, I found—,” DJ said as she came around the rocks. Just as she did her eyes and mouth burst open. “Jazz!”

  I heard her warning and saw the shadow a microsecond too late. I dropped into a forward roll, but the beast’s paw caught me square in the side and sent me flying. But I didn’t go far. I slammed into a rock. I felt some ribs give way, heard my helmet crack, and then I crumpled into a helpless heap.

  I was dizzy and damaged, but I had to get moving. I tried to get to my feet, but pain shot up my right leg and I collapsed, nailing the back of my head against another rock on the way down.

  Despite the blood running into my eyes, I saw the bear leap for me.

  Thunder cracked loud, three times. The paleo stumbled as if it had lost control of its rear half, spun a turn, and hit the rock beside me; the bony plate that covered its right shoulder fractured with a disturbing crunch. We were now laying, broken and bleeding, side by side on the rocks, staring eyes to eyes.

  With a loud boom the gun, my gun, fired again. The beast’s face winced with the pain. When they reopened they were running with blood, but, instead of hate and anger and evil, I saw only relent and surrender.

  Two more shots and, with a soft release of air, its eyes rolled up and its bony head rolled against the rock with a dull thump.

  “Jazz!” DJ ran to my side, looking me up and down. “You’re hurt—of course you’re hurt, you’re always hurt, you’re too reckless. Oh no, you opened that cut that Uncle just patched. Can you get up? We should get moving, it will be dark soon, and something may have heard the shots…oh gods, you’re bleeding worse—”

  “Help me up,” I said as soon as she took a breath, and raised my less pain-stricken arm.

  She set my MacDaddy revolver on the beast’s dead body and, taking my arm in both of hers, got me up on my feet.

  I flinched with a flare of pain and sucked air in through my teeth.

  “Take it easy, you should lay down. I’ll call Ship to pick us up.”

  I guess I smirked, I hadn’t meant to.

  Her fine, porcelain-white skin creased with a dozen fine lines. “What?”

  I used the back of a sleeve to wipe the blood from my forehead. “I just don’t know where you get all the energy from.”

  “What—”

  I held up a hand to stop her before she’d built too much verbal momentum and wiped fresh blood from my face. “I’m fine. I’m always fine. Get my rucksack off; we need to plug the leeks.”

  DJ came behind me, stepped up on a small rock so she could better reach, and started to ease the pack off.

  “Ouch!” I snapped. “Take it easy.”

  “Sorry.”

  I wasn’t tall for a woman, pretty average, but DJ was outright tiny—a little china doll with the claws of a tiger and the heart of a dragon. Sometimes though, she was a right pain in the ass. A ‘deferred species bond collector groupie’ who’d followed me around so much she’d just morphed into a member of the team.

  Truth be told though, she was in a fan club of exactly one. The few that actually knew me, or knew of me, didn’t like me. Hell, I didn’t even like myself.

  As carefully as she could, DJ wrangled me out of the shoulder straps and, with a grunt, set my heavy backpack on the ground. “OK, now sit down, I’ll make the call and get you patched up. Here, drink this,” she said passing me the old, army-navy canteen.

  I took a long drink, letting some of the water spill into my hand, and then splashed it over my face. It stung the cut on my forehead, but I managed to not let DJ see.

  She, in turn, held up the radio’s microphone; worry had filled her eyes. “The radio’s broken.”

  “I know.” I held a hand to my forehead to slow the flow.

  DJ dug into the rucksack and pulled out a small, metal box. She opened it and began pulling out first aid supplies. “We’ll have to get you out of your jacket.”

  “No problem,” I said despite the complaints from my ribs, arm, chest, and shoulder.

  “Jazz?”

  DJ’s voice went soft, like she was moving away. I tried to call to her but I couldn’t find my breath.

  “Jazz? What’s wrong? What is it?”

  Her voice grew fainter and further. My head spun, my vision blurred, and I couldn’t seem to get any air in. I was burning up, sweat poured down my face. I tried to focus my eyes, forcing myself to stay calm, but all at once I was overcome with nausea. The ground must have opened up beneath me because the next thing I knew everything went black and I was falling.

  “Jazz?”

  DJ’s voice—closer now. I took a slow, careful breath in. Gloriously, my lungs filled with fresh, oxygen rich air. My ribs ached, but I pushed past the pain and continued taking deeper and deeper breathes. I wiggled my toes and fingers, then circled my hands and feet, trying to get some feeling back into my body. Then I opened my eyes.

  Immense trees shot up for what appeared to be miles into the sky. Sunlight filtered through the green high above and twinkled between the swaying branches. I was in my padded undershirt, laying on something soft and wonderful. That’s when I knew that something was wrong.

  “What the hell?” I went to sit up, but a wave of pain arched my spine and I cried out. “Ahhh!”

  “Jazz, relax, you’re safe. Lay down. Try to stay still.”

  I closed my eyes and breathed through the pain. When it had subsided enough I looked at the little, round face at my side and struggled to keep my voice even. “DJ, where the heck are we?”

  Her china-white face brightened with a smile that seemed too wide for her skull.

  Then another face appeared above hers. This one had cedar colored skin, long, ash colored hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, and pointed ears that folded down at the tips like little airplane wings.

  “Truvinn, great. DJ, would you pass me my gun?”

  The warrior elf sneered. “Get up, monster collector. The chief wants to se you,” he said in a thick, cockney accent.

  Worry flooded DJ’s brown eyes. “She’s still hurt, she needs more time to rest.”

  The muscular elf eyed me, resting a hand on the hilt of his long, serrated sword. He seemed to be gauging my injuries. Then he turned and marched toward chief Manamana’s house. “Rest time’s over. Get her up or we’ll drag her there by her cockles.”

  DJ’s thick, black eye brows jumped from a sharp downward slant up to a smooth line at her hairline. “What are cockles?”

  “Something I don’t have. Still, you’d better help me up.” Growling through the pain, and with DJ’s assistance, I moved to sitting, then, even slower and more painfully and leaning heavily on my little sidekick, got up on my feet. “And I wasn’t kidding about wanting my gun.”

  We followed Truvinn, for lack of a better word he was the forest elves general, along a stone path that was so overgrown with a bright green fern that it was hardly noticeable. The path led into a thick forest of immense trees and heavy underbrush.

  “Welcome to Forestdeep, the great elfin city,” I announced over my shoulder.

  “Where’s the city?” she asked as I knew she would.

  As we entered the underbrush I said, “You’re in it.”

  We pushed through wide-bladed grasses that, despite their rough, serrated edges, were as soft as silk. Butterflies the size of robins flittered from gigantic flowers. Meter-long salamanders perched on sturdy leaves and basked in streams of sunlight. Fairies beat quadra-wings faster than a hummingbird and tried to keep out of sight. A Galapagos-sized tortoise looked up at
us, still chewing on a palm leaf. Magics swirled within and without everything around us, at least as I saw it.

  A childhood accident had rendered me color blind, but had granted me shadow sight, the ability to see into the magical spectrum. So many times this ability had saved my skinny butt, but here, in the elfin realm, everything was awash with magical energy. It was too much, like you staring into very bright lights. I was partially blinded by the level of magic present.

  Elves are for, by, and of magic. I had been unconscious and therefore vulnerable to their mystical probings, so I had to assume that the dammed forest dwellers now knew about my little eye issue. The question was, how hard had they looked? I still had a few secrets and I planned to keep them.

  I was virtually weaponless, hurt, feeling a little post-probed loopy, and walking into a trap. On the up side, I wasn’t tired, hungry, bleeding, or dead—apparently the elves had also done some kind of healing on me.

  “So when do we get to this city?” DJ asked.

  Truvinn took three long strides toward a dense pack of ferns and cattails. He reached up, took a branch in hand, and, like a curtain, appeared to swing the forest itself aside.

  “Holy crap.”

  I felt my eyes widen sarcastically. “Yes DJ, an entire city grown from the forest itself is best described as, holy crap.”

  “That’s what I said,” she snapped as she strode past me and entered Manamana’s House.

  I’m not normally one for overreaction, but I think my eyebrows rose at the snide-ness of her retort. Good for her.

  I followed her in and strode straight toward