Page 7

CHAPTER 7

The sounds of cracking wood reached me before I reached the shack, but I expected to find Victor and Zee neck deep in some kind of fight. What I did not expect was Zee, arm out, blocking Victor from going inside.

“What is it?!” I panted, skidding onto the deck. “What’s going on?” The crashing noises still sounded from inside. We had to get in there to help Hooper and his friends.

“Kitten, we cannot go in there... There’s a frog.”

Oh dear. “A frog?” Why would there be frogs here?

“I know!” Zee’s tail whipped back and forth. “I’m tryin’ to tell Victor McKnow-It-All it’s too dangerous, but he says frogs aren’t dangerous, like he’s some kind of frog expert?—”

Victor growled again. “There is clearly a ruckus happening?—”

“We gotta let it happen. Frogs are bad news. If we go in there, it will eat our faces.” Zee spread his other hand—the one not holding Victor back—over his own face, then Victor’s face. “All our faces. Gone. You like your face? I like your face. I want us all to keep our faces.”

“It appears there’s been some misunderstanding regarding frogs, and while now is not the time to go over it in any depth, you seem to have mistaken them for some kind of deadly creatures,” Victor explained, eyebrows pinched in an impatient frown. “I’ve let it go in the past, as I wasn’t entirely sure if you were deliberately trying to make me believe frogs are dangerous, or whether?—”

“Frogs are dangerous!” Zee snapped. “They killed the fuckin’ dinosaurs.” His wings began to shimmer, lighting up the deck. Another crash sounded from inside. “If we go in there, we’ll fuckin’ die like the dinosaurs died. You wanna be extinct too?”

Victor seemed puzzled by this. Puzzled enough to take a step back. “Zodiac, how big do you believe frogs are?”

Zee looked to me, as though I were the frog expert. I did know a little bit... from the hotel books. “The size of dogs?” I suggested.

“Some are bigger.” Zee nodded. “Like ... scary big. Like the size of a bus.”

We all winced as something else smashed against the inside of the shack walls.

Bemusement softened Victor’s frown. “I don’t know whether I’m alarmed you believe this, or ashamed I did not clarify the misunderstanding sooner. Frogs are small amphibians. Most are no larger than your palm.”

Zee snorted. “What kinda fake frog news have you been reading, Fancy Fangs?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “That can’t be right. The books said?—”

“Frogs are responsible for most of the murders in Ohio,” Zee added.

Victor sighed. “Perhaps we should discuss this later, after we’ve helped?—”

Zee thrust out a hand again, pushing Victor in the chest, jolting him back. “You’re not going in there. You looked out for me, an’ now it’s my turn.”

“There are no dangerous frogs in there, Zodiac. Sometimes...” Victor wet his lips and tried again. “Sometimes... and I know this will be difficult to hear... but sometimes you are wrong.”

Zee glared back. “I’m not wrong . You wanna know how big frogs are? That one in there is the same height as Adam. It’s fuckin’ weird-ass eyes are as big as your skull, and it’s tongue is probably the length of both of you combined, but I didn’t stick around to find out. I ain’t never letting you go in there to face that monster alone. You’re gonna have to fight me, Victor .”

Victor glared back too. “This is absurd.”

Zee folded his arms, his wings spread out, deliberately blocking the door behind him. Nobody was getting by him.

Victor faced me. “Adam, if we wish to help these people, we must act now.”

What was I supposed to do? Frogs were terrifying, and Zee was warning us not to go inside. But Victor had warned us about the alligator, and he was old. So he did know a lot of things too. Who did I believe?

But looking at Zee blocking the doorway, he wasn’t joking. He really did mean to protect Victor, and if Zee said he saw a frog as big as me, I believed him. “Look at Zee,” I told Victor. Victor nodded and did as I asked. He tilted his head back a bit, since Zee was so tall. “Whatever is in there, Zee is protecting you,” I said. “You trust that, right?”

The defiance in Victor’s glare fizzled out, and his expression softened. “I do.”

“Thank you, Kitten. At least someone believes in me. You’ll thank me when you realize it’s a massacre?—”

The side of the shack blew apart. Bits of timber flew across the swamp, and a man tumbled onto the deck beside Victor and Zee. He groaned, then blinked, shaking the shock from his head, and when he saw us his eyes widened. “Help me!”

He reached a hand toward us.

A thick pink ropelike tendril flew out of the shack, looped around the man’s reaching arm, and snatched him off the deck.

I’d never seen anything like it. Like a giant pink scaleless snake thing.

“ Yoink ,” Zee said.

I moved the few steps across the deck to where the side of the shack had been smashed open, and saw a humanoid creature as tall as me use its long, flashy pink tongue to haul the man into the air. The man screamed, and I would have too if I were peering down into the open mouth and throat of a frog... And it was definitely a frog.

The frog—huge, and wrapped in clothes that looked a lot like the bib overalls Hooper had been wearing—threw its large head back and used its tongue to dangle the man over its open mouth. Then that muscular tongue shoved the man straight into the frog’s gullet ... whole. Stuffed him right in there. Arms and legs poked at the stretching membrane around the frog’s mouth. The frog opened up again, and using its weird, fleshy, toelike fingers, maneuvered the man around in its mouth. Then, with the help of its protruding eyes, it blinked one then the other, and forced the man-snack down its throat.

“Well...” Victor said beside me. “That is indeed a large frog.”

The shack was in disarray, but the big frog wasn’t the only frog here. As the dust settled, more frogs emerged from the back room. Not as big as the man-eating one, but big enough to make me feel small. And outnumbered.

The man-eater slapped its thin lips together, its mouth fixed in a smug frog smile.

We’d made a mistake coming back.

These frogs did not need our help.

They’d been just fine without us. As was made clear by the unconscious—or maybe dead—guys strewn around us, their guns kicked out of reach. They were definitely the guys from the truck.

“Uhm... hi again? So... we thought you maybe needed help, but it looks like you have everything under control.”

“ Ribbit ,” the man-eater said.

Zee gulped loud enough for me to hear. “Kitten, you speak frog, right?” he whispered. Although in the quiet of the shack, everyone heard him.

“Uh, no, I don’t think so.”

“You speak fuckin’ alligator. It’s the same.”

“Frogs are amphibians, not reptiles,” Victor clarified.

“I don’t wanna hear any frog facts outtah your face when you were wrong this whole time, Fancy Fangs, an’ I was right.”

Victor blinked slowly, and with a stiff nod, said, “Understood.”

The man-eater stepped forward. His huge belly jiggled, full of... person. It rolled its broad shoulders, and the exposed green flesh of its arms and legs began to change color, gradually shifting to a more typical human skin tone, baked by endless hours under the sun. The big frog eyes shrank back into human eye sockets, and the enormous mouth reduced down to just human lips. Hooper adjusted his belt and coughed the croak from his throat. “Sorry you had to see that.”

“Are you gonna murder us too?” Zee asked, a twitch away from launching himself through the roof.

“Only if you mean us harm.” Hooper’s deep voice bubbled, as though wet. “Like these guys.”

The others gradually shifted back to human forms too, but still squat and round, with big eyes and no necks, which made more sense now I knew they were actually frog people and not human people. They collected the dead guys and dragged them out through the new hole in the side of the shack.

“Gators will take care of the cleanup,” Hooper said.

Zee shared a quick glance with me and Victor without Hooper seeing, and gestured for us to run.

“They keep comin’ round, an’ we keep dealing with ’em, but it’s gettin’ worse. Ever since we refused to sell...” Hooper was saying as he began to set right the broken make-do furniture.

Zee gestured wildly for us to leave .

I picked up a fallen barrel and rolled it back to where it had roughly been before. “Who are they?”

In the corner of my eye, I saw Zee rapidly shake his head and tap his wrist where he’d have been wearing a watch if he owned one. Then he mimed flapping motions.

“Bad people,” Hooper said. “They want our land. Want to put a resort of fancy houses here. We won’t sell, so they think they can scare us out.”

“Bad people, huh...” I’d known a few of those. Eaten a few too. We had that in common. “They wouldn’t be related to Mr. Skrinde by any chance?”

Hooper turned his big bulk to face me and loomed, as though he might use his tongue to whip me into the air and shove me down his throat. “What do you know about Skrinde?”

“He tried to kidnap us. Used his son to trick us. I don’t know why. We uh... we sort of accidentally uhm... might have upset him with something we did.” Probably best not to mention we’d made the bad people angrier. I didn’t think this attack on Hooper’s shack was related to what we’d left behind in Toby’s house, but I wanted to speak with Victor and Zee before getting us more involved.

“Seems like we have the same enemy,” Hooper said, righting the last table.

“That’s nice... Time to go, Kitten,” Zee urged. “Sunlight makes Vic crispy, an’ we gotta make a call, remember?” He rapidly blinked wide eyes at me.

Zee was right. We had our own problems. But had we just made Hooper’s worse by accidentally murdering Mr. Skrinde’s son and a whole bunch of his employees? Could we really walk away from this? I glanced at Victor, and caught that little knot in the middle of his eyebrows, above his nose. The knot he got when his furniture making wasn’t going so well. The knot that said he didn’t like this and he wanted to fix it.

Zee caught the look on my face and rolled his eyes all the way to Victor, who also had the look on his face. A different look to mine but it meant the same. We were staying. Zee poofed his wings away and dropped onto one of the rickety chairs. “We all gonna die.”

“We can help,” I suggested. “If you want us to.”

Hooper studied me, then Victor as he approached, and Zee, flopped in the chair, head back, massaging his temples. “We saw the news report. You’re wanted for murder.”

“It was self-defense.” Hands in pockets, I shrugged. “A chef came at me with a cleaver.”

“A chef who tried to poison lots of folks,” Zee said, leaning forward to get involved in the conversation. “Adam didn’t kill him, I did.”

“I would have.” I shrugged. “Some people need to die.”

“Put it this way,” Zee said, apparently coming around to the idea of working with the frogs, perhaps so we could leave as quickly as possible. “We got a drug lord after us, and he’s also after you guys. If we go it alone, we might fix it. But together, we got a better chance of getting it done the first time.”

Hooper looked around at the rest of his people. They’d all stopped cleaning up the dead bodies to listen.

“You saw... we’re pretty good in a fight,” Hooper said. “Maybe we don’t need outsiders... You don’t look like much, and this one fainted.” Hooper nodded at Zee.

“Okay so, to be clear, I temporarily checked out, alright? I have a high metabolism. It’s a thing. Look it up. Nothing to do with fainting. I’m fine with leeches. Some of my best friends are suckers. And frogs. No issues with frogs, whatsoever. I have always said frogs are fine.”

“Also, if I may explain something that could swing the argument here,” Victor interrupted. “Adam is a dragon.”

All eyes swiveled to me.

“Oh yeah... I forgot that part.” I smiled sheepishly.

“Trust us, it’s always better to have a dragon on your side,” Zee said.

Hooper studied us for a few seconds longer, then nodded, which, as he didn’t have much of a neck, meant he sort of bobbed his head and shoulders together. “Alright, then... Sounds like we could use each other’s help.”

“Okay, then. Heroes of the City back in action.” Zee stood and strode over. “So, no time to waste, let’s point Adam in the right direction an’ he can barbeque Skrinde. Problem solved. Where does this drug lord hang out? He got a favorite country club we can crash? Golf course Adam can land on an’ deep fry him? If we can avoid nosy witnesses, that’d be great, as we’re kinda on the run right now. Our fees are a lifetime’s supply of mac and cheese, and any cat ornaments, if you have ’em.”

“Your fee is... mac and cheese?” Hooper asked.

“Yup. So where’s this Skrinde guy live?”

Hooper nodded at the TV, which showed—behind the static—a glistening collection of high-rises and miles of white sandy beaches. “Miami.”

Oh dear.

“That makes things a little more difficult,” Victor said grimly.