The Call (The Magnificent 12 1)

“Fair enough,” Jarrah admitted. “I don’t suppose you could—”

“No. Whatever you’re going to say, the answer is no,” Mack said.

“How about—”

“No.”

“But if we—”

“No.”

“What are those?” Stefan asked.

“What are what?” Mack asked. But even as he asked, he saw what Stefan meant. Which did not mean he could answer the question.

Because what he saw, he had never seen before.

They were outlined against the setting sun, perhaps two dozen of them in all. They seemed small, maybe no taller than Mack himself. You might almost think they were children, but their shape was wrong.

And the way they moved was wrong.

Karri pulled a flashlight from one of her many pockets. She aimed the beam. It illuminated a triangular face dominated by the oversized eyes of a night creature. The nose was a slit. The ears were pointed—Vulcan ears, but swept forward at the points.

The mouth grinned in a sort of tight V shape. The V grin was lined with teeth that stuck out beyond the lips. Not like buck teeth, but curved, like overgrown fingernails—like talons, but talons that were teeth.

There would be time later (Mack hoped) to figure out just how to describe those teeth.

The flashlight beam shook as Karri played it down the creature’s body to highlight a strangely quaint little outfit: red leather shorts held up with green suspenders over a sort of spangled vest.

They had overly long arms that dragged their long, delicate fingers on the ground as they walked.

The legs were bare, and that was unfortunate because they looked a great deal like goat legs, with curly tan-colored hair similar to that which spilled from under the creatures’ jaunty green caps.

“Who are you? And what are you doing here?” Karri asked.

“You don’t speak; we speak.”

They had surprisingly deep voices, for child-sized freaks of nature.

“Get off this rock,” Karri said bravely. “You’re not allowed up here.”

Mack guessed that “you’re not allowed” wasn’t going to quite do it.

Sure enough.

“Shut your vile, filthy, fruit-chewing mouth, you low, slow, soggy bag of water; you sweat-oozing, cheese-scented wad of pulp mounted on toothpicks; you barely animated mistake of nature.” One of them delivered this peroration (a word Mack had gotten wrong in a spelling bee). The creature stabbed the air with his long, thin fingers and almost spit as he spoke.

“I am here by right,” Karri said. “Now shove off.”

“Yeah, shove off,” Jarrah echoed her mother.

Mack was impressed by their courage. The creatures were not.

“We are elves of the Gum Tree Tong,” the spokesman said, with pride and arrogance that really should have been matched to someone bigger. “We will have what we came for, you pus-filled, slobber-stained blood balloon!”

And with that, all of the elves of the Gum Tree Tong—whatever that was—rushed forward.

Twenty-two