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Jimoh stretched and yawned. “Yes, Ethan, but very hungry now. What was in arrow?”

After Ethan and Tariro had caught Jimoh up on all they’d learned about the Tokoloshe while he slept, Jimoh said, “We must do as Tokoloshe do. We must find something to eat before sun goes down and Adze come.”

Rafiki and his gang had spread out in the nearby bushes in search of snacks. They picked small sections of bark off the trees and ate the grubs wriggling underneath. Ethan tried, but as hungry as he was, could not bring himself to eat them.
 

“Ethan, you must eat this thing, you fussy boy. There is no time to cook something,” Jimoh said. He popped a brightly coloured mopane worm, the size of a finger, into his mouth and smacked his lips.

“Yes, Ethan, you fussy boy,” Tariro echoed with a smirk. He popped a mopane worm into his own mouth, stifling a gag reflex behind his hand.

“Suit yourselves,” Ethan laughed, “I am going to go and set up camp.” Apart from the disgusting meal, he was acutely aware that they were tramping around the bush where wild animals may be lurking and he had an urge to have his back to the safety of a tree trunk.

Setting up camp only took a couple of minutes. After hanging the four mosquito nets from the lower branches of the msasa tree, as they had done at the hippopotamus pool, and putting their backpacks underneath, Ethan flopped down on the ground, and waited for everyone to come back from their foraging. He tried to ignore his grumbling stomach. Finding himself entirely alone for the first time, he longed to take a peek at the gemstones, but did not want to risk them being seen if Tariro or the Tokoloshe came back suddenly. Instead, he took out his small Swiss Army knife and a tiny vial of machine oil and rubbed the blades with a corner of the mosquito net. Once he had done that, he looked for the bigger knife amongst Jimoh’s things, to oil it, but was unable to find it. Jimoh must be wearing it he guessed. He would have to explain to the boy that the knife needed oiling from time to time, he thought, but then shrugged; Jimoh knew as much about equipment as he did, more, probably, since he came from a farm. It felt odd to think that he had grown closer to the boy in one short trip than he was with any of his friends at home. Tariro too, he admitted grudgingly to himself. His uncle Alan had been right; the boy kind of grew on a person. Yet he still knew very little about either of them. Following Jimoh’s practical example Ethan turned the scissors attachment of the knife on his trousers and cut them into shorts. They were much more comfortable afterwards.

Eventually, at sunset, Tariro, Jimoh and the Tokoloshe drifted back and crawled in under the nets for protection. With an approving glance at Ethan’s handiwork, Jimoh slipped Ethan a handful of marula berries.
 

“Here, Ethan,” he said. “I feel sorry for you. This I think you can eat.”
 

Ethan guessed Jimoh had picked them up off the floor. Some of the little yellow fruit had started to ferment, but he was so hungry he ate them anyway, stopping only to inspect them for maggots.
 

The Tokoloshe laughed when they saw the fermented fruit, and told a story of baboons falling over drunkenly after eating them. Then nothing would do but that they should find the tree and gather some to see if the fruit could make them fall over.
 

Jimoh pointed out the marula tree through a gap in the trees, then scanned the nearby scrub and pointed. “I see Salih in tree over there, but where is Fisi.”
 

It still gave Ethan a little bit of a chill, the way Salih disappeared and then you found him right nearby, slung over the branch of a tree, and he had been there all along.

“I have been meaning to speak to you guys about Fisi,” Tariro said. “I am not a hundred per cent sure we can trust him. You see how quickly he changed shape and went on the attack at the top of the waterfall. I am beginning to wonder if there isn’t any truth in what the leopard told you at the whirlpool, about him being just as likely to turn on us.”

“Tariro, you were getting on so well with him,” Ethan said. “I thought you liked him.” The hyena youth was also beginning to grow on Ethan, despite his dubious personal hygiene, but Tariro was probably right; it was a bit odd the way he had run off as soon as they reached the bottom of the escarpment.

“I do like him,” Tariro said. “He’s fun in a shallow kind of way, but have you noticed how we all seem to give in to him.” His tone was suddenly sombre as he regarded Ethan with a calculating expression. “By the way, heads up on getting Jimoh’s hat back, I kept meaning to tell Fisi to give it back but sort of got distracted every time I wanted to. No. Not even distracted. I would go to say it, and then the idea would just slide right off into the ether, like he was deflecting it in some way.”
 

“Maybe Tariro is right,” Jimoh said, rubbing his leg where the arrow had hit him. “But Fisi also big help today with getting down cliff and with luggage. I am liking him.”

“I kind of like him too,” Tariro said, “but I am worried that Fisi is up to something.”
 

Intense negotiations interrupted them from beneath one of the other mosquito nets. A Tokoloshe crept out from under the net, tugged anxiously at the few wisps of hair sprouting around the base of his head, and then, apparently making up his mind, dashed towards the marula tree. Quietness and stealth clearly not a priority, he was accompanied by the loud jangle of the assorted bits of tin and seedpods dangling from his waist, and equally loud cheers from his buddies. He shimmied up the tree and started throwing fruit down towards the others.

More Tokoloshe ducked out from under the other nets, made a wild dash for the marula tree, collected the fruit and bolted back towards the safety of their nets.
 

Suddenly, lights erupted out of a nearby bush and streaked after the scrambling Tokoloshe.

“Oh! No! The little guy in the tree!” Ethan yelped. But when he looked for the Tokoloshe he seemed to have melted against the bark and disappeared from sight.

“Legend say the Tokoloshe go invisible when he is scared,” Jimoh said.

“Not quite invisible, but they are most adept at camouflage,” Salih said. “You won’t be able to see him unless he moves.”
 

Ethan whipped around to find the leopard had snuck inside the net behind them at the first sign of the Adze. He wondered if Salih was afraid of them, or just being protective.

It took over an hour for the little man to leopard-crawl back to the safety of the nets once the lights had wandered off into the jungle in search of easier prey, but a loud whoop went up when he made it. Eventually everyone settled down to sleep, except an old Tokoloshe who volunteered to keep en eye out in case they came back.

Salih curled up against Ethan’s back. He found the closeness of the leopard quite comforting. After several days without bathing, he realised the leopard was no dirtier than himself. Being dirty had turned out not to be as terrible as he’d imagined it would be. He hardly thought about it at all any more. He’d discovered that Salih’s fleas made no attempt to transfer to him either. He guessed he did not have enough fur for them to cling to. And that was another thing he hardly ever bothered to do anymore – search himself for fleas.
 

An occasional pinprick of light hovered nearby, but the Adze seemed to understand that they would not be able to pass through the nets, so eventually Ethan dosed off.

He twitched angrily in his dream; his path to the wonderful thing was blocked by a thick rope net. His frustration at not having the strength to break through was just escalating into rage when he heard Tariro calling out to him. His eyes flew open and he froze. Salih was no longer beside him.
 

Barely a foot away from his face, Adze were trying to rip a hole in the mosquito net. His own anger had been so real, Ethan wondered if he had read their minds.

They scattered at his sharp intake of breath, and then drifted back tentatively, trailing phosphorescent light off the ends of their wild, long-flowing hair. Ethan’s hand crept carefully to his forehead. He flicked on his head lamp and peered intently into one’s miniscule face, which looked unearthly, but would have been quite beautiful if it were not pinched into such a hateful, benevolent scowl.
 

“Ethan! Thank God you’re awake,” Tariro whispered. “I’ve been trying to reach into your head like Salih does, but I don’t think I’ve drunk enough magic. I didn’t want to wake everyone up and have a panic on our hands. I think I can hear these little creatures in my head. Their thoughts woke me up. If I concentrate very hard I can still hear them.”
 

“You can hear them buzzing,” Ethan said, realising that that was probably what he had heard.

“No. No, I can hear them thinking. One minute they were all angry, searching for a big enough hole in the net, and the next they were terrified. Something startled them.”

“That was me feeling terrified,” Ethan said.

“No, it was definitely them!” Tariro said. “I can’t read your mind. After drinking the magic, I already tried... Okay, maybe it was you! Do it again.”
 

Ethan studied the tiny creatures. They had elegant, sylph-like bodies covered with a scrap of a velvety petal in different colours. Their wings beat so rapidly he could not make out the shape of them. They look more like fairies than vampires, he thought, except for the sharp pointed teeth. Not that they looked big enough to bite anyone. He’d had such faith in the mosquito nets. Perhaps he had not taken the Adze seriously enough. He wished he had found out more about them from Salih, and what to do in case they broke through the net.

“Hurry up, Ethan, I can hear them planning another surge forwards!” Tariro said, and Ethan cocked his head to one side. Tariro was right. If you listened really hard you could hear them. Not their voices, exactly. Their voices were pitched too high, but he could hear a miniscule general roar and then they surged towards the net for another attack.

“Salih showed me a trick to get into their heads that might manipulate them,” he whispered to Tariro. “Do you think I would scare them if I imagine the net to be red hot?”

“Don’t give them any ideas!” Tariro said. “We don’t want them setting the net alight with their glow.”

“I don’t think they can,” Ethan said. “If they are anything like fireflies their glow comes from some sort of bioluminescence. It’s not actually flammable.”

“For goodness sake, they are vampires, Ethan. This is not exactly the real world, in case you haven’t noticed. Who knows what they are capable of? Think a scary movie at them or something,” Tariro said.

What could scare such a thing? Ethan wondered.
 

“Bats!” Tariro urged. “Bats are fast and eat insects, that should scare them.”

Ethan imagined the snowflake particles whirling around his head. He searched his brain for an image of bats. He had seen a documentary once of bats boiling out of a cave, their call so disturbing that they had to contract their own middle-ear muscles when emitting it to avoid deafening themselves. He tried to match up bat images with snow particles. He could almost hear the boom as the snow particles fragmented and each bat doubled and then became four, then eight, then sixty-four, then four-thousand-and-something, then hundreds of thousands of bats exploded outwards, concentrating their sonar on the Adze as they searched for them.
 

He opened his eyes. The Adze glared back at him, unmoved. They carried on working at tearing a hole in the net as the bat tornado passed them by.
 

The Tokoloshe all lay wide-awake now, stiff with fear. Only their eyes were darting to and fro as they followed the bats in ever increasing circles before they disappeared into the forest.

Ethan flinched as millions of burning hot arrows, the thickness of a hair, shot through his head. Was that a mind attack from the Adze, he wondered, or just another of Salih’s consequences?

“They’re not real!” he decided. “It’s only a sensation.”
 

“Of course they’re bloody real,” Tariro shouted, obviously assuming Ethan meant the Adze. “And what ever you did, they don’t seem to care.” He pressed his fingers to his temples in exasperation. “Are you sure you’re doing it right?”

“I sent them bats! Just like you said. They don’t seem to be afraid of them,” Ethan panted. Fortunately, his pain passed as quickly as it had come.
 

“Hey! You know before, when they scattered like that? It was actually you who was scared. What if you project your own fear on them? What about thinking about something that scares you?” Tariro said.

“They scare me!... Okay, I’ll show them themselves.” He gathered the snowflakes in his imagination. Turned each into a shard of glass, converted the glass into a mirror and pushed away from himself with all his might, watching the imaginary glass fragment and multiply as it flowed out around him.
 

Ethan sensed rather than saw his mistake as the first few Adze forced their way through cuts in the net. He’d thought the scaring was a manipulation of their imagination. Shockingly, several of the shards of glass had materialised into something more tangible.
 

Pain lanced through him, and he staggered back, clutching his head with both hands. If he didn’t hit on a solution soon, the pain in his head alone would kill him, he thought, watching in horror as they came drifting towards him. What was going to repel them?

“Repel!” he yelled. “Insect repellant!” He twisted around to face them once more. Weak now, and queasy, he desperately tried to rally his imagination. Snowflakes. Whirl. Fragment. He hurled out imaginary particles of pyrethrum and watched them multiply. The acrid stench of the insecticide swept outwards in a slow oily whirlpool, causing even Tariro to stagger back holding his nose.

The nearest Adze writhed, baring its sharp, pointy little teeth at him and fell to the ground. Followed by another, and another.
 

“At least they’re backing off,” he gasped as overwhelming pain burned into his head. His vision a kaleidoscope of white lights, Ethan wavered and sat down abruptly, putting his head between his legs. It passed. Not as quickly as the other two headaches had, but as completely as if he had imagined it.