Damián came back choking.
He jackknifed up off cold ground with both hands clamped to his throat so hard his fingers hurt. He dragged in air.
Air came.
Real air.
No blood.
No hole.
No wet bubbling death-rattle shit.
He froze there on his knees, breathing like somebody had just hauled him out of deep water by the hair. One hand still locked on his neck. The other flew to his face.
Eye.
He touched skin.
Eyebrow. Eyelid. Cheek. Socket.
No knife.
No ruin.
No hot blindness.
His breathing got worse before it got better.
"What," he croaked.
His voice worked.
Rough. Thin. Shaking. But there.
"What the fuck."
He looked down at himself.
Dark shirt. Dirt. No blood. No open chest. No stab in his side. No shaking red mess soaking into pavement. Just mud. Leaves. Damp earth. Roots.
Roots.
Damián stared.
This was not a street.
He turned too fast and nearly threw up.
Trees.
Tall ones. Close ones. Bent black trunks, slick bark, low mist hanging between them like smoke that hadn't decided where to go. Branches laced overhead. The ground was rough and damp and wrong under his hands.
"No," he said immediately.
He stood too fast, staggered, caught himself on a tree, and whipped around again like the city might still be behind him if he just found the right angle.
Nothing.
No fences. No cars. No corner store. No dead streetlight.
No body.
No men.
Just forest.
A weird, wide, pale light filtered through the branches overhead. Not moonlight. Not streetlight. Too soft. Too wrong.
Damián looked up.
The sky was wrong.
It wasn't one thing. That was the problem. It looked normal enough at first that his brain almost accepted it, then didn't. The color was off. Too pale in some places, too deep in others. A weird silver-blue wash that made everything feel cleaner and stranger than it had any right to.
He took one slow step back.
Then another.
Then his heel caught on a root and he almost ate shit immediately.
"Okay. Okay. Cool. Great." He pointed at nothing. "I died, and now I'm in some— no. Mm-mm. No."
His throat tightened hard enough to hurt.
He touched it again.
Still whole.
He pressed harder, like maybe if he found the right spot the memory would split it open again.
Nothing.
He dragged both hands down his face and nearly laughed.
It came out ugly.
"Yo, if this is hell, y'all got trees for no reason."
No answer.
Of course not.
The forest was too quiet in some places and too loud in others. A little hiss of leaves. Something clicking in the distance. Water maybe, somewhere far off. A bird-call he didn't know, sharp and ugly and short.
His stomach twisted.
He was alive.
He had definitely died.
Both of those things were true.
That was not supposed to happen at the same time.
He backed into another tree and stayed there, one palm pressed flat against the bark while he tried to think. Old world. New world. Dream. Brain damage. Dying hallucination. None of it sounded less stupid than the others.
His chest was still pounding too hard.
He forced himself to breathe slower.
In.
Out.
In—
His hand jumped from his throat to his face again.
He rubbed his right eye. Then his left.
Both there.
He squeezed them shut.
Opened them.
Still forest.
"Man, fuck this."
He looked down at the ground around him.
Flattened leaves. Damp soil. A patch of crushed brush where he'd apparently been lying. No sign of how he got here. No drag marks. No road. No anything helpful.
He turned in a slow circle.
Every direction looked equally bad.
Then he heard it.
A shout.
Faint. Human.
Damián snapped toward it so fast his neck popped.
Another shout.
Then something metallic. Then a heavy thud. Then something like an animal screaming through a broken pipe.
People.
"Oh, thank God."
He did not think about it too hard. Didn't ask why there were people in nightmare woods making combat sounds. Didn't ask why the scream sounded wrong. People meant answers. Answers meant maybe he wasn't insane.
So he moved.
Fast at first. Then less fast when he almost slipped on wet leaves again.
"Okay. Cool. We're jogging now. Beautiful. Love that."
Brush scraped at his legs. Branches tugged at his sleeves. The ground dipped where he didn't want it to. He kept angling toward the noise, ducking around trunks, stepping over roots, breathing harder now for a reason that wasn't murder.
The voices got clearer.
Two men.
Maybe three.
One woman? Hard to tell.
He heard somebody yell, "Left!"
Then a low burst of sound that didn't make sense to him at all—like air snapping open.
Then another creature-scream.
Damián slowed and crouched automatically behind a thick trunk.
There. Through the brush.
A small clearing.
Four people.
Armor.
Or not full armor. Gear. Real gear. Leather, cloth, dark pieces strapped down. One with a spear. One with some kind of hooked blade. One crouched over a dead thing on the ground pulling something out of it with practiced hands like this was just business.
Damián blinked.
"What."
The dead thing was not helping.
It looked sort of like a dog if a dog had gone to hell and come back swollen and hairless and mean. Too many teeth. Wrong legs. Gray skin pulled too tight over the body.
One of the fighters kicked it once.
"Still twitching?"
"No."
"Good. Take the sac."
Take the what.
Damián stared harder.
The woman with the spear turned slightly and the light hit her profile. Dark braid. Lean build. Focused face. Zero confusion. These people looked like they had done this before.
Not once.
A lot.
He opened his mouth.
Closed it.
He had no idea what sentence even came first here.
Hi, I got murdered and woke up in your monster forest?
Before he could embarrass himself, something moved to his right.
Fast.
Close.
The sound was small. Wet. Scratchy. Like claws on bark and something breathing through a stuffed nose.
Damián turned his head.
And saw it.
The thing was knee-high.
Ugly enough to insult God.
Hairless gray skin. Humped back. Shovel face. Mouth too wide. Little jutting teeth sticking out wrong. Front legs too hand-like. It stood half behind a root, staring at him like it had found lunch and personally resented the wait.
Damián just stared back.
"…what the fuck is that."
The thing hissed.
Its mouth opened wider.
Damián's eyes went huge.
"Holy fuck what the fuck is that shit—"
It lunged.
He ran.
Actually ran. No dignity. No hero pose. He nearly slipped on the first step, pinwheeled once, recovered by pure accident, and tore through the brush like the forest owed him money.
Behind him, the thing came fast in short disgusting bursts, hissing and clicking.
"Nope. Nope. Absolutely the fuck not."
A branch slapped him in the face. He shoved through it. His heart kicked into panic again. Too close. Too much rustling behind him. He looked back once and instantly regretted it.
Still there.
Still coming.
Its little legs moved so wrong.
Damián yelped, tripped over a root, and went down hard on one knee. Mud splashed. Pain shot up his leg.
The thing launched.
He turned on instinct more than thought, throwing up both arms.
The creature spat something.
A little ball of dim blue-white light, sticky-looking, crackling ugly, straight at his face.
Damián flinched—
And his left eye burned cold.
Not hot.
Cold.
Sharp and deep, like somebody had slid a splinter of winter behind the eye and snapped it.
The little light vanished.
Just—
Gone.
No impact. No explosion. No splash.
Gone.
Damián froze.
The creature froze too.
For one confused second, both of them looked equally offended.
"What."
The thing screamed and came anyway.
"OH, FUCK YOU TOO—"
Damián threw the first thing his body had.
A right hook. Wild. Awful. Too wide. Too angry. Bad feet. Bad shoulder. No technique at all.
It landed.
And the creature's head caved in sideways so hard the rest of its body spun and slammed into a root with a crack that made Damián's whole arm ring.
Silence.
Damián remained half-crouched there, fist out, breathing hard.
The creature twitched once.
Then not again.
He slowly looked at his own hand.
Then at the thing.
Then back at his hand.
"…I did not mean to hit it like that."
"Neither would I."
The voice came from behind him.
Female. Dry. Close enough that Damián flinched so hard he almost swung again.
He spun.
The spear-woman from the clearing stood there with two others fanned behind her. Not careless. Not panicked. Just ready.
Up close, she looked even less confused than before.
Her eyes moved over:
his face
the dead creature
his fist
his clothes
then back to his face
"What," Damián said, breathing hard, "the fuck is going on."
Nobody answered immediately.
One of the men—a broad one with a hooked blade and a scar through one brow—looked from the dead thing to Damián and frowned.
"You with a crew?"
"A what?"
"Clan?" the other man said.
Damián stared at him.
"No. I'm with me. Unfortunately."
That got him another long look.
The spear-woman stepped closer.
Not enough to be friendly.
Enough to see him properly.
"You're not from around here."
Damián laughed once because there was nothing else to do.
"Lady, I don't think I'm from around here at all."
The broad man muttered, "He's concussed."
"I'm not concussed," Damián snapped. "I got murdered."
Silence.
Real silence.
The three of them exchanged a look.
Damián pointed at himself with both hands like maybe that would help.
"I was on a street. There were men. Knives. Car. Whole bad evening. Then I woke up in this horror movie forest and that ugly little bastard just spit blue shit at me and I think my eye ate it or something, which I feel like should not be possible—"
"Your eye what," said the scar-brow man.
Damián touched his left eye immediately.
"It— I don't know. It just—" He made a useless hand motion. "The thing spat that little glowing whatever and then it was gone."
The spear-woman's face changed a little.
Not shock.
Attention.
She looked at his eyes properly now. Really looked.
Damián did not like that.
"What," he said.
She didn't answer that either.
Instead she crouched by the dead creature and touched the broken skull, then looked at his fist again.
"You hit it once?"
"Yes?" Damián said. "I don't know why you're saying it like that."
The broad man muttered, "Mudgnaw bone shouldn't fold that far from a panic swing."
"Maybe he's just stupid strong," said the other.
"I heard that."
"Good."
The woman stood again.
What little patience had been left in Damián finally started cracking.
"Okay, no, hold on. I need one of y'all to stop acting mysterious and explain why there are dead gargoyle dogs in the woods and why you just called that thing a mud-whatever like that's a normal sentence."
Something moved in the clearing behind them.
All three fighters changed instantly.
It was sharp enough that Damián felt it in his teeth.
The woman's spear lowered.
The broad man took one step left.
The third man stopped breathing loud.
Damián turned.
The woods had gone wrong again.
Not noisy. Wrong.
The air felt held.
A shape stood between the trunks deeper in, half-hidden in gray mist and branch-shadow.
Too tall.
At first he thought deer.
Then it lifted its head.
The antlers were wrong.
Its mouth opened wrong.
And the pale throat under the jaw swelled like something inside it was taking a breath it shouldn't have.
Damián stared.
Then pointed, because apparently his body had decided that was useful now.
"Nope," he said immediately. "That is not a deer."