To her surprise, the hit landed. James had been distracted by the other two just enough to make her untrained flailing effective. This is why friends weren’t worth the effort, pal. The timing was lucky, as spots of color and the signs of oxygen deprivation were beginning to make her vision distort. It had nothing to do with how heavily her current body hung, gorilla-sized as it was.
Her luck had a short fuse, heralded by the lost light and the growth of the nastiest set of teeth she’d ever seen just inches from her face. The Knight’s jaw popped audibly. “Oh Goddess that’s gross. That’s SO GROSS,” she whined in a voice so deep she startled herself. Right, man double. It wasn’t her favorite. Marlowe gagged, trying to turn her head away before she upchucked the gin she’d imbibed during her shift.
A solid wall of air pushed them apart before he could cheese grate her face with the advertisement for braces he called a mouth. Gasping for air, Jaime2 fell to the dirt, draping an elbow over a bent knee while the redness calmed in his face. “Thanks,” Marlowe directed at the blonde, not caring if she’d acted in an attempt to help her or not. She liked her neck unsnapped, either way.
Petty as hell and seeing an opportunity for comeuppance, she rose to her feet and rushed the Knight when he stumbled to the earth, twisted in a pain she didn’t understand. “En garde, Dickhead!” She wound up a kick aimed at the man’s ribs, but hopped to a stop mid-charge when the curve of his back began to look like a bloody crest of a Venus Flytrap breaking through his shirt, only bony, and about 250 percent more foul. The claw hand carving the earth by her feet made her screech, big hands clutched beneath the stubble on her chin in dainty horror. She had no idea what kind of creature he was, but she couldn’t remember seeing anything so skeevy before. One leg rose, bent before the other as though keeping only one foot on the ground would protect her from the potentially scary effects of her nearness.
“Nope Nope Nope!” Flailing both hands in the air, Marlowe turned and sprinted from the scene as fast as her legs could carry her...which was pretty damned fast. This dude had some inseam, holy shit. “You tasted great!” She hollered over her retreating shoulder, in a barky baritone matching the one he’d foolishly used to converse with his friends. “But eat a mint now, that’s...not sexy.” She caught herself mid fall, unfamiliar legs snared on one another at the knees, then scrambled for the mouth of an alley between the Pool of Tears and the Puppetshow.