Wow. Round seven was a fight to the finish and the results were very close. In the end only three points separated the competitors. The winner of round seven is:

Story Title: The Boys from Witless Bay

Author: Pat Flewwelling

Equine Combatant’s Name: unknown

Species: Kelpie

Starting tomorrow our new combatants will be:

A Mother Unicorn’s Advice for her Daughter

vs

Riders in the Sky

Excerpt from “The Last Ride of Hettie Richter” by Cat McDonald:

Hettie chased after them. At first, the running was easy, and she could hold the riders in her vision as solid earth flew by beneath her. Her breaths carried in the scent of the nearby creek, bloated with summer heat and rot, and thick, wet summer air coursed in and out of her.

But step by step, they drifted away from her. She bruised her feet on stones in the road, struggled to fill herself with air, wore her knees out, and still the riders drifted away. Hettie only managed to keep up with them—screaming until she had to choose between screaming and running—until the crossroads where her family’s lane met the main road.

There, at last, hats and heads disappeared around a corner, shrouded by thick greenery. Without that fixed point in her vision to focus on, she collapsed. A pain leeched out of her knee to the rest of her leg, her ankle rolled under her, and she toppled to the ground, knees first, in a wheel-rut.

“Damn you,” she whispered through the wreckage of her voice on heaving, desperate breaths, “damn you both. Walk tall in heaven my ass.”

Dirt wedged its way under her fingernails as she tried to force herself back up, and brutal sunlight beat on her back. The rage that had drawn her out of the house still pressed on her insides, squeezed against her stomach. She fought for every breath, and coughed bitterly as her burning lungs failed each time.

She coughed and choked. The burning rose up inside her, past her heart, under her ribs, and into her throat as a huge, solid mass. Another cough brought something thick and warm up to touch the back of her throat. She gagged as it slithered out over her tongue and fell to the earth in front of her, a huge black-red fleshy lump about the size of an apple.

As she watched, it soaked into the ground at the crossroads. Spit and iron-tasting bile dripped over her teeth after it, and she sat there shaking for a few moments, confused and cold and slightly hollow.

If you like what you’re reading, you are going to love Equus. And good news — you can reserve your copy now to make sure you’re among the very first to get it when it’s released on July 18th!

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Fourteen Equus contributors have agreed to pit the equine in their story against all the other horse-like creatures in the anthology and fight it out until only one is left standing. That victor shall win bragging rights… and maybe I’ll make a little ‘I won!’ graphic of some sort 😛

How it Works:

Each Tuesday the competitors will be announced and voting will open. Every vote a story receives counts as one point.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday the competitors will each roll a twenty-sided die. The resulting number of points will be added to their own score. I will update the scores via a comment on the blog post and social media.

Voting closes on Sunday at midnight MST.

Monday the winner (the story with the highest score) will be announced and move on to the next round.

In addition, anyone who votes will be entered to win a book. Details are here.

Story Title: The Last Ride of Hettie Richter

Author: Cat McDonald

Equine Combatant’s Name: The Demon of Richter Hollow

Species: Demon

Strength: 18 (The demon takes the shape of a plough horse of abnormal height and strength)

Dexterity: 7 (It has hooves)

Constitution: 18 (Just huge man)

Intellect: 4 (The Demon of Richter Hollow is a creature made entirely of hate. It lacks any other decision-making or problem-solving skills.)

Charisma: 14 (The Demon of Richter Hollow is magnetic in the way all hate is.)

Special Attacks: None.

Special Defences: The area surrounding the Demon of Richter Hollow is hot, so hot that vegetation scorches and burns, wood catches fire, and water boils.

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Cast your votes now, and may the best equine win!

Round six was a story of RNG — good or bad depends on which equine you were cheering for. In the end, some bad rolls decided the victor of this competition more than anything.

The winner of round six is

Story Title: Riders in the Sky

Author: V. F. LeSann

Equine Combatant’s Name: Peregrine

Species: Damned soul

Starting tomorrow our combatants will be:

“The Boys from Witless Bay” by Pat Flewwelling

vs

“The Last Ride of Hettie Richter” by Cat McDonald

Excerpt from “Neither Snow, Nor Rain, Nor Heat-Ray” by M.L.D. Curelas:

No one had been alarmed when the first Martian vessels had landed, pocking the ground like open sores. They’d only been mildly concerned when the cone-shaped ships vomited forth the spindly, tripod machines. It wasn’t until the trains stopped running that panic had set in. Then the tripods had come with their Black Smoke and heat-rays.

…

The Martians had disrupted communications. Nothing worked, not the telegraph machines nor the new telephones. Messengers were needed. Messengers on horseback, because human runners were too slow and easily killed by the Martians and their Black Smoke. But horses were scarce so when the general had sighted Beezus, a fine hunter, with a skilled rider—her—they’d been pressed into service on the spot, no matter that she was a girl, a civilian, and a daughter of good family.

And now she and Beezus would be part of the messenger team sent out to the docks—integral to the coordination of the Navy escort for the evacuee ships, or so she’d been told. Emma scowled. Her revolver would’ve been of better use helping her family travel to Chelmsford than giving messages to a boat.

The mare snorted against her neck and started mouthing her hair. Emma laughed. “Enough of that.” She pushed the horse and Beezus obligingly pulled her head back into her stall.

Emma rubbed the mare’s nose. “Can’t fool you, can I? Yes, we’re going out.” When Beezus nodded her head, Emma wagged her finger. “Business. Not a pleasure ride.”

Beezus huffed.

After checking the mare’s water and hay, Emma resumed her equipment check. It was the mare’s nervous whinny that halted her. She caught sight of Beezus’ wide, rolling eyes and cast a furious glare at the stable door.

“Stay out there!” she yelled. Scowling, she set down the saddle and shut the top half of Beezus’ stall door. Maybe that would block the pungent scent of that Moreauvian fiend enough for Beezus to calm down.

Emma opened the stable door, grabbed the arm of the man standing there, and tugged him around the corner of the building toward a garden shed—it wasn’t safe for anyone to linger long outside, in case of Martian patrols.

The soldiers had watered down the grounds, washing away most of the deadly Black Smoke, but Emma could see traces of the black grit in the flower beds. She stayed clear of those areas, just in case.

Once inside the shed, she crossed her arms over her chest. “Well?”

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After a week of dice rolling and vote collecting the results of round three of the Equus Battle Royal are in. It was very tight this time around, but in the end

Our victor is:

Story Title: A Mother Unicorn’s Advice to Her Daughter

Author: J. J. Roth

Equine Combatant’s Name: Mother “Badass” Unicorn

Species: Unicorn

She will be moving on to compete in future rounds, but not right away. Starting tomorrow our combatants will be:

A Complete Mare by Tamsin Showbrook

Vs.

Rue the Day but Laura VanArendonk Baugh

Excerpt from “To Ride a Steel Horse” by Stephanie Cain:

“Not this time.” Jack King was a white-bearded guy of about seventy, with sinewy forearms and powerful shoulders. He was shaking his head. “It’s dead, Demeter. Threw a rod. That’s a whole engine rebuild. Don’t throw good money after bad.”

Demy blinked several times, staring at him. In six years, nothing had been too much for Jack to fix. She’d bought the used Triumph as an act of defiance in the face of turning twenty-five—her sister had laughed and called it a quarter-life crisis. That had been the only truly good thing about her twenty-sixth year. That had been the year the magic took her mother and sister both, but Demy had gotten through it because of the, well, zen of motorcycles.

“I’m sorry, D,” Jack said, patting her shoulder. “Go next door and make Bear feed ya. I’ll drop ya by home when I close up shop.”

Demy shook her head. Jack was open until seven, and it was already past six. She didn’t want to be stuck at home with five more hours to get past midnight—there was too much temptation there. As much as she’d refused to follow in the footsteps of her matriarchs, she hadn’t been able to part with the various magical paraphernalia she had inherited. If she were home when the witching hour of Samhain hit…

“It’s fine. I’ll get Bear to take me home when he closes.”

Jack’s thick, white eyebrows shot up, but he smirked. “Raise a glass for me, too, then,” he said. “Happy Halloween.”

Demy trudged across the parking lot, her boot heels grating on the gravel. There were two dozen bikes parked outside the roadhouse, mixed with a few trucks from local non-bikers, because Bear made the best breaded tenderloin in north central Indiana.

She paused halfway across the parking lot and shoved her hands in her jeans pockets, tilting her head back to stare up at the stars that were beginning to appear. This bike had gotten her through the toughest years of her life. How was she supposed to just turn her back on it?

You could fix it, whispered a voice in the back of her head. Magic can do anything.

“Not anything,” Demy snapped, her voice harsh. It hadn’t brought her sister back. It hadn’t kept her mother from dying.

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