“I see them. Are they moving?” Tyler said.
“They’re not moving, as far as I can tell,” I said. The goats all stood, but none were animated. “That’s strange. Maybe goats sleep standing up? Are they nocturnal? They still smell like they’re alive. If they were dead they wouldn’t be upright, correct?”
“Just our luck. Bloody possessed goats,” Danny groused. “Killer bats, spiders as big as cats, and sea wraiths weren’t enough of a sampling of the animal kingdom? She had to add goats?”
“Wait a second.” I paused. “Eamon said the entrance appeared as something else. Selene wouldn’t want to announce it to the world, so what better way than to disguise the actual entrance with a bunch of goats? A natural piece of the landscape. The smell of power is very faint, so she’s obviously trying to mask her magic though the goats. As beings, they can absorb some of her power. It’s not like the Scorpers, which she created with a spell. The goats aren’t coming after us; they are our ticket inside.”
“We have to go through a goat to get to her?” Tyler asked. “You’re kidding me.”
I chuckled. “It’s petty ingenious. I bet there’s a gatekeeper goat. There have to be at least twenty of them up there.” Tyler started his ascent.
I shrugged and followed my brother toward the tricked-out goats.
“When we reach them, they’ll attack; make no mistake,” Danny muttered as he came from behind. “I hope they’re not weregoats. Does such a thing even exist?”
“I’ve never heard of one,” Tyler called. “But that doesn’t mean much. I had no idea wereweasels existed before one attacked you.”
“That was a wicked little thing,” Danny replied. “I hope the Goddess doesn’t have a cache of them at her beck and call. Their teeth are like shards of broken glass.”
“Werewolves are so damn egocentric,” I complained as I climbed. “If you guys had paid attention to the world around you once in a while, you’d be better versed and better prepared to battle what might come your way.”
“Nobody is stronger than us,” Tyler yelled from his point twenty feet above me. “Not even your cat. There is no need for us to worry about what’s on the bottom of the food chain. It’s like a shark worrying about the small fish. Why bother?”
I snorted. “Yeah, that works until that guppy grows fur, a pair of wicked incisors, and comes after the shark with a million of his little pals. One wolf is no match for an army of anything.”
“You have a point, of course,” Danny added. “But guppies don’t ever come around, so it’s easy to forget they exist altogether. I haven’t encountered anything to give me pause in more than a century. A hundred years is a long time to get comfortable with your life. No wars, no enemies, no issues. It’s been grand.”
“Then I’m christening this the ‘Dawn of the Guppy’ because I have a feeling the small things are going to throw the biggest punches.” We all pulled ourselves steadily closer to the statuesque goats. None of them had moved during our entire climb. Danny had edged farther right and had positioned himself directly under them, while Tyler and I had stayed more left.
“I’m pushing ahead of you both,” Danny called. “One of us has to investigate the bloody beasts and I pick myself to be the lucky winner.”
Tyler and I stopped climbing and watched Danny steadily close the gap between himself and the goats. We were all waiting to see what was going to happen. When he was within ten feet, he placed a single foot on the ledge directly below them and a decisive power shift flowed over me in a hot, prickly wave. “Danny!” I yelled. “Be careful. Something just happened. You must have triggered a boundary line.”
A single bleat echoed in the air.
“Bloody hell, did you see that?” Danny yelled back. A snowy white male with long ragged hair and two sharp-looking horns moved its head.
Then it took a single step forward.
“I see it,” I answered.
As we watched, it angled its head toward Danny, blinking once as a slow fire ignited in the center of its eyes.
It bleated again.
Then, one by one, they all turned their heads slowly, like possessed animatronic fiends.
All of their eyes blazed a fiery red.
21
“This doesn’t look good,” Tyler said. “We can’t fight off twenty, two-hundred-pound possessed mountain goats in our human form and there’s no place to change safely. There’s barely a foot clearance in any direction.”
“Wait. Maybe we don’t need to fight all twenty,” I said. “They’re all starting to move except one. Look.”
The red-eyed monsters started to pace agitatedly as fierce angry sounds erupted out of their snouts. They milled back and forth like army sentinels, except for one who was pushed up tightly against the rocks.