The monster sped onto the shore, sand and water flying in spurts as it dug into the beach with parallel lines of paddle-like flippers. It came on like a greyhound, sleek and agile for all of its length.

The creature was gorgeous; laser-bright reds, gold, deep black, viridian greens, and pulsing blues dazzled on its hide, luminous in Capella’s light. Kalico had an image of sun-red shading into bright splotches of yellow and remarkable violet patterns that shifted and pulsed on its water-sleek sides.

Shinwua’s spell broke, and the man wheeled around. Maybe, if he’d been fit instead of half-starved after all the years in Ashanti, he might have made it. He was reaching for the door when the slashing scimitars flashed closed. The lower ones swept in from either side. Caught Shinwua in the hips. The third cut cleanly down the side of his head, peeling the man’s scalp and ear off his skull and sheering through the collar bone. As it did the lower two pinched together, slicing up, stopping just under the ribs.

The sample jar dropped from Shinwua’s nerveless fingers to thump and roll on the sand.

Kalico glimpsed the man’s horrified face, watched blood well and spurt on bared skull where his scalp and ear were sliced away. The skin from his head was hanging limply, mindful of a soggy red rag that flopped on his shoulder.

“No!” Kalico bellowed, sliding to a stop. She clawed her pistol from its holster as the shimmering beast lifted Shinwua and spun. Clutched in the deadly blades, Shinwua’s body was flung around and flopped like a limp doll’s. The predator was maybe thirty meters in length with a long, tubular body that narrowed into a pencil-thin tail. Water streaked out of vents just behind the line of flipper feet. As the beast turned, the flippers cupped the sand like scoops. One of the stalk-topped eyes was staring at Kalico, keeping track of her as the thing headed for the sea.

Kalico dropped to a knee, sighted. She shot to center of mass. Saw no effect, shot again, and again, and again as the terrible beast raced for the surf.

She continued to fire as the creature charged into the waves with its grisly prize.

When her pistol clicked on empty, all that remained were the endless breakers, curling, crashing, and rushing up to erase the monster’s tracks as if it had never been.

18

The dreams had been weird. Images of the bush, slipping through dappled shadows beneath aquajade, creeping over tangles of roots, and hunting. Odors and tastes he knew but had no words for. Flashes of strange but curiously familiar quetzals. Like Dek recognized these beasts he’d never laid eyes on. He kept seeing landscapes, forest images, vistas where he’d never been, but that reeked of the familiar. In some, he was hunting, camouflaged in wait as chamois or crest approached unaware.