Page 58 of Nexus

Catching her, I held her away from my body so she wouldn’t get stuck to the jizz. “I need to wash this off, asap.” The bird pointed off to the side with her wing, so I held her out to Ruen. “You’re going to have to carry her. Her feathers will get stuck all over me if I carry her and she’ll looked like a plucked chicken.”

My assistant wasn’t happy about it, but he gingerly took her back from me. She fluttered her long eyelashes at him and snuggled against his side when he tucked her beneath his arm again. “We should keep moving,” he said, looking back over his shoulder to search for signs of the ogres. “How dangerous were they?”

“About festering boil level,” I told him as I grabbed my sack again. “They were too strong for me to take on in a pack.”

“At least we know where your strength and resilience come from now,” he said as he trotted to keep up with my long strides. “Lord Gilden will be happy to have the mystery of your ancestry solved.”

“I guess so,” I said glumly.

“You’re disappointed to find out what sort of monster you are?”

“I just wasn’t expecting to be so huge and hideous.”

“The ogres seemed to find you attractive enough,” he said teasingly. “I bet you’re beautiful, for their kind.”

“Yeah, that’s a real comfort,” I said with a grimace.

The bird directed us to a pond, somehow sensing or smelling it from a mile away. We came to a stop and stared at the placid water. “It’s yellow,” I said, making a face at the bright yellow liquid. “I bet there’s a giant around here somewhere and this is where it pees.”

Ruen snickered, then took a deep sniff. “It doesn’t smell like urine.”

“Maybe it’s acid. It’ll probably melt my flesh off,” I predicted. The bird shook her head impatiently, then leaped from Ruen’s arms. Landing lightly on the ground, she delicately picked her way through the grass to the pond. She drank from it, then turned to look at me pointedly. “Okay, fine, I’ll bathe in the pond,” I said in capitulation. If anything bad happens to me, it’ll be on your head.”

Dropping my sacks to the ground, I didn’t bother to disrobe, since my clothes were just as sticky as my skin. I waded into the water to find it was only waist deep.

“What does it feel like?” Ruen asked curiously.

“Wet,” I replied, then scooped up a handful of liquid to cautiously taste it. “It tastes stale and a bit salty.”

“That’s probably from all the semen clinging to you,” he joked.

Giving him an annoyed glare, I began washing the gunk off. I lay back in the water and made sure to wash myself as thoroughly as possible. When I sat up, something long, fat and yellow was dangling in front of my eyes. “What the hell?” I asked and grabbed hold of it to pull it off my forehead. About a foot long, it looked a bit like a worm, but had a huge, gaping hole for a mouth, with razor-sharp teeth.

I glanced at Ruen and the bird to see them both gaping at me in horror. I looked down to see I was covered in the disgusting things. While their teeth couldn’t penetrate my flesh, they were doing their best to chew through it.

“They’re leeches!” the vampire screeched in hilarity, then he began laughing at me again.

“This realm sucks,” I muttered, standing up and wading over to the grass. I dislodged the bloodsuckers with sweeps of my hands. They fell to the ground with wet plops, then began squirming their way back to the pond.

“There’s one hanging off the back of your head!” Ruen said, eyes streaming with bloody tears he was laughing so hard.

I ran my hand over my bald pate to get rid of the final creature, then kicked it to send it flying back to its watery lair. While the bird wasn’t capable of actual laughter, she was definitely looking amused. Ruen was bent over with his hands planted on his knees as he tried to catch his nonexistent breath.

“Did I get them all?” I asked the bird and turned in a slow circle for her to inspect me. Her head bobbed up and down, so I grabbed my gear. “Let’s keep going. We’ve got a long way to go before we’ll reach the city.”

“Why did you leave the road?” the vampire asked, catching his sack when I tossed it to him. He was still giggling quietly, but had regained his poise.

I told him about the barracks I’d discovered and my theory that three guards had gone in search of reinforcements. “They brought back dozens of soldiers, so I thought it would be best to avoid them,” I finished up.

“Then you walked directly into a pack of ogres and almost ended up as their mate,” he said with a smirk.

“Laugh it up,” I complained. “That could have happened to anyone.”

“We’re lucky you turned out to be an ogress,” he mused as we continued our journey. “They probably would have killed us on sight if you’d been in your human form.”

“What do you mean ‘us’?” I scoffed. “You were stuffed in my sack, dead to the world.”

“It’s inconvenient that my kind can’t seem to stay awake during the day here,” he said, all amusement vanishing.