Deadly Tongue

The mo‘o slithered in my direction with its mouth wide open, ready to chomp down as we made it to the front lawn. 

If it sunk its teeth into me, I’d get a nasty cut. But we didn’t have any money lying around for stitches, so I wasn’t looking to take chances. I’d have to cast something. My jaw locked as I planted my feet and pivoted to face the mo‘o. Breathing deeply, I ran through a list of words I could use that could make this damn thing stop moving.

Russian could work. It was simple and effective when there was an obvious target and I didn’t need to bother with definite articles, but I needed a word that rhymed with begat. Maybe run was the wrong idea though. Did lizards really run? At eight feet away, it certainly felt like it.

Scratch Russian. I didn’t have time to figure out a rhyme to make the spell work. My other trusty language, English, was always a no-go on the fly. Any attempt on my end to be poetical fell flat no matter how many Shakespearean arts, thous, or foes I threw in, even though it was an established fact that a good sonnet would work wonders. Emphasis there on good.

Hawaiian it had to be.

Six feet away now, the mo‘o crawled closer, a furious pace infecting its approach. Five feet. Hawaiian was so vague though. A simple stop might work, but it also might stop all the internal organs in both my body and the mo‘o’s from functioning. Only four feet left. Three. There was no time.

Keeping eye contact with the beast, I crouched low and dug my fingers into the lawn, entwining brittle blades of grass in my grip. With my other hand I dropped the leiomano flat to the ground and pressed hard on top of it for balance. The mo‘o was nearly right in front of me, its breath warming the air so close that I could feel the heat on my nose.

Reaching for the mana from my core, I said the first word that came to mind. “E ho‘opa‘a.” Stick.

Magic surged out of my hands and into the ground around us, rising up like a sudden breeze from the dirt. The lizard stopped moving. It writhed, tossing itself back and forth, but its efforts to escape were futile. My spell kept its legs glued firmly to the earth around it.

I breathed out a sigh of relief. One-word spells weren’t supposed to work, but they always had for me. Sort of. They had an effect, that was enough. Call it a quirk of my mana, an unexpected benefit to being absolute crap at all other kinds of magic. I tried to lift my left hand off the leiomano so that I could finish the job and found that my spell had worked a little too well. I was also firmly stuck to the ground.

Dammit.

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Copyright © 2026 Shay Kauwe, from The Killing Spell (Saga/Solaris Books, 2026). Excerpt published by permission.

Image by James Lo.