How to Ride a Tikbalang Ch. 06

A/N

I know this chapter took way too long. But, here it is. :D I do hope you enjoy reading it. Please do share your comments with me. :)

*****

"Let's consider how to approach this seemingly 'simple' find, shall we?" Kidlat's voice was even, reasonable and calm as he rearranged their packs into a neat little line on the clearing floor, the movements betraying his own agitation. "Because I sure as hell am not going in there unprepared." Deep, authoritative, just right, Kidlat thinks as he looks at his two adventure partners. Someone has to be in charge, right? Right.

Jinx nodded her assent, her eyes a turbulent roil of night flecked with molten gold in the waning light. "As disturbing as the ease of this find may be, Cocoy, you can't deny that the setting of this dilemma is beautiful." She spread out a hand and swept it across the horizon to her right, where the sun was dipping into a far-off sliver of sea in a blaze of deep purple, vibrant pink and fiery orange flecked with the purest gold.

The colors of the sunset were stunning—par for the course anywhere in the Philippines, yes. But this evening there was a wildness and violence to the setting sun's descent, or at least that's how it seemed to Cocoy, who watched it over steepled fingers held tight to the tip of his well-shaped nose.

Never had the sunset felt more like an omen than it did now.

"Well, we can have dinner and a show first, I suppose," Cocoy said nodding pensively at the horizon as the last half of sun dipped further beneath the sea. "I suppose the vacuum-packed food is warm enough."

He reached into the camper's pot where Kidlat had boiled water and immersed the viand and rice packs to heat. The three sat close together while they ate with sporks, as if they needed the reassurance of each other's company but did not want to say it out loud. They disposed of the remains of their meal in silence, stuffing the wrappings in a garbage bag they would bring down from the mountain once this quest of theirs was done. If it got done.

There is something about being out in the wilderness, Jinx mused, that encourages silence. Perhaps it is reverence. She moved out from between her men and reached for her backpack and withdrew her notebook and a small flashlight to read by.

Cocoy rose and took his own notes and a flashlight out of his pack and perused them, standing like a shadow against the dying daylight.

Kidlat watched both his lovers with a slow smile, wondering if they'd ever know just how sublime they looked backlit by a darkening sky before he allowed his thoughts to go back to the puzzle of what to do. He was getting tempted to just drag his man and his woman down to the leaf-strewn floor of the clearing and ravish them both until none of them could move.

***

"Okay, what was it Gandalf said in 'Return of the King' again? 'Speak, friend' or summat like that?" Cocoy was sitting coiled on a convenient boulder, trying to lighten the dark and dreary mood his two companions had fallen into.

Kidlat leaned against the white stone of the cave's "entrance" and cast a faint smile that hailed Cocoy's attempt at humor at his man and his woman. Jinx, on the other hand, was flipping through the small tickler notebook she had in hand, slowly, at first, then with more impatience, tsking as she went. Both men still had re-slung their backpacks, preparatory to the spelunking they were about to do.

"Actually, what we may have to do is see the stone for what it is: An illusion." Her brow was knotted as she read her notes by flashlight now that night swathed the mountainside fully. She also had her pack on, but was thinking it just might go up in flames. "It says you need 'the fire of a Diwata's steps' to lead you inside and, once inside, you need to 'find the meandering path through the rocks,' or whatever."

"Does that mean we don't get any action until we're in?" Cocoy asked flippantly, blowing a stray curl off his forehead as he looked at Jinx.

"Well, that would be one way to get her fire up," Kidlat answered, his voice cautiously hopeful. "But does that mean we get to feel her up? Because if she isn't coming, it would be kind of rude if we did."

"Just you wait until we have to do the ritual to make you boys immortal," Jinx said with just the hint of menace in her voice as she took her hiking boots and socks off and stuck them into Cocoy's pack. "I'll get mine then. So, let's do this. Get your hands on me."

"I'm beginning to like this adventure," Cocoy said as he rose from the boulder and approached Jinx with both hands out at breast-level. "I'll have a grand time playing with these."

Kidlat was behind Jinx in a trice, his hands smoothing her boot-cut blue jeans and over her slim hips with slow, skimming motions up just beneath the curve of her breasts, then down almost to her groin, while his lips feathered kisses down her nape and Cocoy made light tracery with his fingertips over the vee of her button-down shirt.

"You do need to be alert enough to spot the guardians on the other side of the illusion. I probably won't if I'm horny," Jinx said as her heartbeat and breathing sped up and her eyes began to go molten gold under the men's soft, teasing touches over the center seam of her jeans, up and down her arms and legs. "I hope to whatever gods hear us that we're not going to be so caught up in this that we don't."

Kidlat brought his mouth to Jinx's left ear, nuzzling it as his big hands rose to cup her breasts with that sure touch that drove her higher. Cocoy cupped her derriere and ground his whopper of an erection against her, right smack against her clit, eliciting a groan of pained pleasure as he nipped his way up and down the opposite side of her neck. Her body's aroused undulations were, in turn, making Kidlat and Cocoy's arousal rise almost to the point of spontaneous combustion and it was only the acrid smell of burning leaves and twigs that brought them back out of the sex haze that was beginning to take over their thoughts.

The leaves beneath Jinx's feet began to smoke and Jinx shoved her men aside, her eyes the pale blue-gray of the ash cloud that once rose from the Mt. Pinatubo caldera.

"That's enough, for now," she said, her voice imbued with a definite tone of command and sounding as if it had seven deep, unearthly echoes to it—almost as if she were a one-woman speech choir. "Follow in my path of flame. Don't wait for the fires to go out."

The leaves and humus underfoot caught fire where Jinx walked right into the seemingly solid white rock and passed right through it as if it were air. Cocoy hurried after her, the glaze of passion leaving his eyes as he tried to pull Kidlat in after him.

Kidlat was still in the sex haze and moved much slower, his surprised yell muffled by the stone that had somehow solidified around him as the licking flames under his feet went out in the cool wind singing through the sudden opening. His right arm was sticking out of the rock as the seemingly melted stone engulfed the rest of him, leaving only that limb, the tip of his right foot, and one side of his nose exposed.

"Jinx!" Cocoy yelled after her as she walked on, pursuing her until he got a firm enough hold of her shirttail to pull her back against his chest. "Don't leave Kidlat stuck in the damn door."

Jinx seemed to be walking blindly. She didn't respond at all to Cocoy's yelling and he uttered a mental "fuck it!" before guiding her back as gently as he could to Kidlat, until the flames under her feet began to lick the white stone, turning it translucent.

"Ack. Pwe. Ptui. Ack."

Kidlat spat up chalky white grains as he pulled free of the rock and stepped fully into the huge cavern they'd entered. He took a deep breath and passed a hand over his face as he looked around.

Jinx's ashcloud eyes flicked over the *** prince without even a flicker of emotion, her face blank as tabula rasa. She nodded detachedly and turned back in the direction she'd been walking before Cocoy yanked her back to save Kidlat from death by rock door and resumed her barefoot trek.

"It is this way. Beware the guardians who see what we don't." Her words were strange, ethereal and her multi-layered voice sounded like the rumbling of a volcano close to eruption. "Walk only in my fire."

***

Bioluminescent lichens and worms glowed from the high ceiling of the cavern and its offshoots, making beautiful patterns in blue, green and yellow along the path of fire Jinx left in her wake. The walls were studded with what looked like amber and other semi-precious gems in their raw, unpolished state.

Jinx's skin looked like it had begun to crack, with gleaming molten light shining through the cracks that grew as she walked, making switchbacks through stalactites amid the rhythmic, slow drip of water from the cave roof. The air had begun to smell muggy, as if they were walking ever deeper into the mountain, as confirmed by the slight but constant downward slope of the cave floor.

A rushing sound, like that of a running stream, added to the eerie atmosphere through which the three walked, with Jinx keeping to a path of dry leaves, roots and twigs that lit up as she passed.

Somewhere to the trio's left, down a narrower branch of the cave, came the distant sound of a bleating goat and the snuffling of another animal, possibly a pig.

Save for the bioluminescent flora and fauna and the flame from Jinx's bare feet, the cavern was pitch dark. Cocoy thanked his lucky stars that he was sandwiched between a literally glowing woman and a tikbalang prince whose night vision was better, by far, than his mortal, human's sight.

"Stop." Kidlat pulled Cocoy back against him and Cocoy, reflexively, yanked Jinx back, too, as a large black shape rushed across their path, smelly and snorting angrily.

Kidlat flung his man and his diwata changeling behind him and charged the biggest, blackest razorback boar any of them had ever seen, grabbing hold of the creature's gleaming golden tusks as he threw his whole body into a flying tackle to bring all his weight into the defensive move.

Electricity enveloped the tikbalang prince as he called on all the strength he had. "Inay, if there was ever any time I needed something of your power, now's the time," he muttered with what breath he had left as he shut his eyes tight and visualized his mother calling lightning down unto the boar.

Squealing and bucking from the pain of the electricity conducted through the gold of its tusks, the razorback snapped at Kidlat's face with pointed, drool-wet teeth, its snout bloody where Kidlat was attempting to wrench off its tusks, the tikbalang's muscles strained to breaking point as the two rolled and wrestled for supremacy.

He wanted to change, but it was too early in the search for Maria Sinukuan to do this. He could only change so many times in a day (just once, actually) before he used up whatever magic he had. That is a last resort, he promised himself.

The bleating came closer and a huge black goat with red eyes stopped just at the mouth of the cave branch, within line of sight of Jinx and Cocoy.

Cocoy had dragged Jinx away from the fray, covering her body with his own. Not that it made sense, seeing as it was Cocoy who was the mortal in the group. Yeah, but my parents raised me to be a gentleman and to protect the women, yada, yada, Cocoy reminded himself briskly.

"Sigbinn." Jinx said from under Cocoy, her voice distant, almost disinterested. "You must kill the sigbinn."

"I need to kill the sigbinn? What the FUCK is a sigbinn?" Cocoy's voice was nearly shrill with both stress and exasperation. "And how the hell do I do that?"

"The demon-goat. Sigbinn." Jinx's words came out like a sigh of wind. "Ritual jar. Use the Ritual Jar."

The bleating was coming closer and Cocoy could smell the goat's stench. Kidlat kept up his wrestling match with the black razorback, which was now spouting gouts of intoxicatingly vile-smelling black smoke and white flames dangerously close to Kidlat's handsome face.

Cocoy tore the backpack off his back and, with shaking hands pulled the zippers free. He didn't bother to search the pack: He upended it and out came the Ritual Jar along with the other sundries he'd packed in that chamber of the bag.

"Okay, Ritual Jar's out. How do I use it, Jinx?"

"Focus on the sigbinn. You need salt and charred bamboo. Summon it from the jar," Jinx repeated in that same unearthly voice Cocoy was coming to hate almost as much as he hated the cave they were in. He thought of salt and charred bamboo, pictured them as clearly as he could in his mind and stuck a hand into the mouth of the jar, calling for them in Tagalog as loudly as he could.

And, nothing. Cocoy repeated his thoughts and actions, shouting the words louder this time. Still nothing.

In his frustration, the bayot-to-be threw the Ritual Jar at the sigbinn's head, screaming "die already you son of the syphilitic she-goat from hell!" just as Jinx reached for his shoulder and placed a molten hot hand there.

Strangely enough, Cocoy did not feel any burning. All he felt was a surge of power like a lava flow through all his blood vessels—if human blood vessels were impervious to lava as his seemed to be now.

He uttered his demands again, as the Ritual Jar's flipping trajectory turned the mouth of the thing to the sigbinn's head. Out of the mouth of the jar shot rocks of pure, unrefined salt, and inch-wide darts of fire-hardened bamboo stakes that were over a meter long. The salt rocks hit the sigbinn first, on its hindquarters, just as it was lowering its head to glare at Cocoy from between its legs—the sigbinn death stare he'd read about and just remembered as he threw the Ritual Jar.

Its bleats went from menacing to pained, then agonized as the charred bamboo stakes flew true and impaled its legs to the lichen beneath it, and put out one of the sigbinn's deadly eyes before the Ritual Jar changed trajectory from above the goat's back to beneath its belly and clouted the sigbinn neatly over its snout. The demon-goat was knocked unconscious, its chest still heaving for breath.

Jinx had risen to her feet and was standing unnaturally still behind Cocoy, her eyes fixed on Kidlat and the razorback. Both were still locked in a rolling, cave-wall banging nine-ball in the corner pocket struggle, with Kidlat losing his ground faster than the beast he was fighting.

"A bit of help here would be good," Kidlat grunted out as loud as he could. "Now!"

Boar and tikbalang were enveloped in nasty, crackling streaks of electricity that made the boar scream shrilly as it thrashed from the electrocution, its drool foaming and landing on Kidlat's exposed upper arms and hissing as it ate away at the tikbalang's skin.

"Hold still under the boar." Jinx said calmly, her face turned to Kidlat. "Keep up the electricity, and don't move an inch." She raised her hands level with the boar as it rolled atop Kidlat, its snapping teeth barely an a breath from his face (a very vile breath, at that).

Jinx approached the boar and Kidlat with sure steps. She grabbed hold of the black beast's tail and one hind leg. Her eyes went totally white as searing light bled through her clenched fingers. The boar's pelt began smoking from the molten hold she had on it. It squealed harder and struggled with ever more strength to escape the two who had it in their viselike grips.

Kidlat had enough of acid drool making holes in his clothing and skin and, with every last ounce of strength he had, twisted the boar's snout until he finally heard the snapping of bone. The monster above him went slack. The smell of roasting pig and burning hair made it through Kidlat's adrenalin surge—and it was bad enough to make him roll out from under the damned creature and dry-retch as he lay on his side, trying to drag enough air into his lungs to kneel up and away from the boar carcass.

"Oh, hey, yeah, forget about me, why don't you," Cocoy's voice bounced off the cave walls along with a dull sucking sound. He was pulling one of the charred bamboo stakes out of the sigbinn's skull. "I'm the one who had to kill Satan's scapegoat." He'd taken the opportunity to stick the sigbinn in its uninjured eye with the stake—all the way up to its brain and twisting it until the demon-goat stopped breathing—before he yanked it out again.

Jinx looked at Cocoy with slight censure in her eyes, which had returned to their normal dark espresso, and a frown on her brow. "Now, now, you had the smaller target."

"That could kill at range." Cocoy's wry remark had a spark of dark humor to it. "Kidlat's demon-pig had to get in close."

"To each their own," Jinx said with a tired smile. "You can fight from a ranged position. Kidlat's the tank."

"Well, don't worry, we'll either eat roast razorback or sigbinn papaitan," Kidlat said between gulps of air as he gripped the cave wall the boar had been battering him against and knelt up from his supine position.

"Ew. I don't think I want to eat that particular goat's stomach and stomach contents," Jinx said in utter disgust at what was a soupy northern delicacy of goat stomach, intestines and the bile that went with those (as well as, yes, the partially digested stomach contents—usually grass—of said goat). "Goodness only knows what it last ate."

"Well, I'm not too eager to find out what that monster razorback tastes like if its saliva burns like acid," Kidlat retorted. "That thing is probably poison through and through."

***

The trio tended to Kidlat's injuries, with Cocoy flipping through his notebook and Kidlat rummaging in his pack for the remedies they needed. "Who would ever have thought I'd need to use the herbs I brought? I'm brilliant, aren't I?" Cocoy's question was like cock-crow too many hours before dawn: Irritating and self-aggrandizing, but both Jinx and Kidlat were loathe to shoot his show of ego down.

The man did have the foresight to bring those herbs, as well as an actual first-aid kit Jinx used to suture a deep gash in the tikbalang prince's shoulder where the boar bit deep. The acid hampered Kidlat's preternaturally fast healing process and the three decided to make camp here before proceeding on their way, whichever way it would be.

With Jinx's molten changeling nature back under wraps, they were at a loss as to how to proceed. The main cavern branched off in seven directions, each branch being narrow, dark and slimy. Each branch smelled bad, something Cocoy's ever more sensitive nose could not abide.

"Here, use this," Jinx said as she tossed him a small canister of pungent Chinese topical decongestant rub that smelled like mentholated cloves. "This should dull your sense of smell enough so you can pass through the cavern we choose. Just rub it into your nostrils."

"Thanks. This is why I love you, woman. You're so practical. Even when you tell me to put stuff up my nose that's probably going to hurt like a badass bitch." Cocoy's words were delivered with a studied casualness, though he was as startled as Kidlat and Jinx that he had actually said "love" out loud and without hesitation.

"Well, before we get on with this adventure, if Kidlat is up to it, can we have a group hug? I need you both," she said with a naughty gleam in her dark eyes.

"Just a hug?" Cocoy's repartee was just as naughty, his now-raspy voice delivering those three words with enough seductive intent to strip a nun of her habit.

"I'm not hurt too badly to stop at a group hug," Kidlat said, shucking his pants faster than a one-syllable word could be uttered. He stood up, tarugo at the ready and grinned at his bayot and his diwata. "Ready?"