by Amber Lynn
“Today, we aren’t. Because whether Krinla wants you to come with us or not, I’m requesting a detail be assigned to us while we go explore the neutral sector.”
“As I’ve already said, you’ll have it. On top of me, I’ve got twenty people ready who will go with you. With the three of you, I assume that will be enough to make anyone think twice about attacking us while we search.”
It sounded like Trilla believed they were all going to be searching. While it was nice to get some input from the others, which Krinla was mainly using to try to keep her wits, it had been clear from Rose’s words that it was all on Krinla’s shoulders to find Hunter.
How exactly she was going to do that was something she’d have to figure out on the fly. The good news as the team was set in motion was that Krinla’s legs decided to cooperate. Since they were going to the only place she’d considered going, it didn’t make a lot of sense why they didn’t move when she’d first commanded them. All that mattered was they were moving and Krinla was determined to find Hunter before the sun went down. It was high in the sky, so that didn’t leave a lot of time.
Chapter Thirty-eight
It made no sense that Krinla wasn’t leading the way to where she first met Hunter. She’d never had to deal with a royal guard, since her father kept her a secret from everyone for as long as he could. She supposed if she wasn’t kept in the shadows, he would’ve been the protective type of father who made sure her every move was monitored.
That was something she’d never know for sure, but apparently being a true leader of something warranted Beasts surrounding her as they made their way through the woods. There were two people in the group who knew exactly where they were going, and Krinla thought for sure they’d let her lead if she didn’t tell them where that was.
The plan had worked for half a second before Rya opened her mouth. She knew more than Krinla did as far as directing people, instead of just going by instinct like Krinla was.
The other Draculs out in the world hadn’t made any moves, a phenomenon that truly was getting more bizarre with every step they took. There was no way they didn’t feel them out there.
Trilla had even mentioned how weird their lack of movement was for the cycle. She was used to them roaming the woods every cycle. Since Krinla and her group had come back when the sun was still up, the troops hadn’t been out and about. Nights had come and gone, though, and no one showed up looking for them.
The other Draculs obviously had moved down Krinla’s list of priorities. As she walked, she mostly filled her mind with Hunter, trying to spark a connection with him. She imagined he was trying to do the same thing from some cold and dark location. Whether that cold and dark location was just her mind going to the extremes was hard to tell, but Krinla kept coming back to it, like he was underground or something.
The feeling in the pit of her stomach got worse the longer she concentrated on that fact, so Krinla was doing a lot of unnecessary deep breathing to try to calm the unease. Hunter’s memories weren’t doing much to help matters as medical diagnoses like anxiety attacks floated around in her head. Krinla had always had a decent imagination, a requirement when you spent a lot of time by yourself. Adding in Hunter’s thoughts and the plots to hundreds of movies and books wasn’t helping matters.
“Are you sure you can’t hear him?”
Krinla had asked Rya the question more than once, hoping that it was just Krinla’s connection to Hunter that had been hindered. Rya’s answers were always quick and decisive, but Krinla hoped the answer would eventually change as they got closer. They were well within normal hearing distance, and Krinla wished Hunter still had a heartbeat she could track. Chances were it would’ve been blocked as well, but Krinla was grasping at everything.
“It won’t be comforting to you, but I’ve had to listen to him obsessively think about you for cycles now, so it’s kind of nice to only have to listen to your manic thoughts.”
Krinla had to concede she probably deserved that after asking the same question twenty times. That didn’t mean the response went over well as she growled at the girl running next to her.
They were almost to the spot they were going to investigate first. Krinla’s frustration was growing with every touch of the ground her bare feet made. She’d done everything she could think of to call to the power that supposedly was hers for the taking.
Not having a good sense of exactly what it was supposed to feel like made it hard to know whether it was turned on. When she’d turned her fire on full blast and pushed Rose without touching her, Krinla didn’t feel anything different. She didn’t understand how she was supposed to master something she couldn’t feel. It obviously wasn’t just a matter of her thinking about something and watching it happen, because they would’ve found Hunter the second he disappeared if that was the case.
“Okay, so this is the spot,” Rya said as she slowed the fast moving pack down to a crawl so they could start using their senses to see if Hunter was somewhere in the vicinity.
Krinla came to a dead stop on the exact spot Hunter had sneaked up behind her when she tried to call him out of the woods. It was interesting to remember that even as a human, there was a sense of power hidden under his surface.
Thinking about the moment, it became clear to Krinla there was intrigue, but not love at that point in their acquaintance. She’d been almost positive that was the case. Sighing deeply, she shook her head as she felt tears welling up in her eyes.
In eighteen years, Krinla had never cried. Even when her mother died, there was sadness, but no tears. It wasn’t impossible for Draculs to cry, but it wasn’t something they did. Krinla blamed the knowledge she got from Hunter for the liquid she felt running down her cheeks a few moments after she felt the tears coming on.
“So it wasn’t love at first sight,” Rya said, having stuck close to Krinla’s side.
Krinton was also staying close to his daughter, but he hadn’t provided anything to the minimal conversation they had while they were running. Krinla sensed he was silently trying to lend support, but it was hard for him to know what to do or say to help things.
“No, loving him came later. And it didn’t happen anywhere around here. Without the remotes, there’s no way to get back there.”
Krinla remembered thinking it was foolish for Hunter to break all ties they had to his world, but she thought about it more in the sense that maybe someday he’d like to try to visit his dad again. They’d left a lot unfinished as far as Noah was concerned, so it made sense that maybe sometime they’d go back to see if they could find some kind of resolution.
The thought of needing to rescue Hunter from the past wasn’t something that would’ve been considered in Krinla’s wildest dreams. Even the movies Hunter watched didn’t have anything that impossible hidden in their plots.
“I still think there’s something to the fact that Rose lied about everything being gone.”
Krinton broke his silence, but Krinla wasn’t sure how much his instincts were going to help. Even if Rose lied, they were standing on the spot the building Hunter had lived in once stood. As he’d told Krinla from the start, there wasn’t even a small piece of the foundation still left standing.
Looking around the area for what seemed like the hundredth time, Krinla continued to see nothing but the tall, dark trees jutting up from the ground and the earth under their feet. The tree canopy above them was so thick that she couldn’t see the blue sky and the sun’s rays didn’t make it through.
At that realization, Krinla focused above them and tried to remember more details from the day they met. She had all the interactions with Hunter memorized, but it was the woods around them she was trying to remember. It was early in the day when they met, so the sun would’ve been in a different position, but Krinla remembered seeing the sun breaking through the trees. The amount of sun was a little hazy, but there was definitely sun.
Krinla fixated on the trees above her head, trying to figure out why in the world t
hey’d be thicker. She’d never thought to analyze her surroundings when it came to the trees. The ground could reveal tracks, which were worth keeping an eye on, especially if you were following someone in the woods.
Trees remained unchanged when you walked around them. They grew and did their own thing over the years, which went unnoticed by most people. They didn’t form a canopy in less than a month’s time.
“That is kind of weird.”
Rya’s focus had followed Krinla’s up in the air. At her words, it felt like everyone stopped the sniffing around they were doing and focused their attention up. Krinla was trying to remember when exactly the forest had gone dark as they ran through it. She hadn’t spent much time in the neutral sector before her adventures to find Hunter, but she assumed the forest didn’t change every day.
“I’m going to climb up there.”
Krinla didn’t allow room for questioning in her statement. She’d never once climbed a tree, but the oddity of the canopy was enough to take a look at. Thankfully, no one bothered trying to mount a reason why climbing was a bad idea. It had to be a pretty new idea for all of them, unless they had monkeys among the Beasts.
Krinla had always associated Beasts with more aggressive animals, like wolves and bears. Those seemed like the animals mentioned most in the few stories Krinla had read about them. Asking if they happened to bring any tree climbers or birds with them seemed silly, so Krinla walked over to the closest tree and looked up.
Somehow it looked higher being underneath it. She reached out and touched the rough bark of the oak tree. It wasn’t the first tree she’d touched, but the feel of life tickling her fingertips was different than anything she remembered. It momentarily stopped her from moving forward as she tried to analyze what the tingling meant.
It was a waste of a few seconds, because Krinla couldn’t get her brain to focus on what the information was trying to say. Maybe sometime there would be room in her thoughts to figure out what had changed about the world around her, but that was definitely something to focus on another day.
“We’ll send a couple of our people up first,” Trilla started to say, but let the thought die on her lips when Krinla whipped her head around to face her.
“You can follow if you want, but I will be the first one to the top.”
It was another case when Krinla wasn’t leaving any room for discussion. She didn’t know what she expected to find at the top of the trees, but she knew it was up to her to find it.
To make sure no one had ideas of defying her command, Krinla let her long nails dig into the bark of the tree as she started her climb up. A part of her expected the tree to protest, but the feeling the bark gave her didn’t change. With the threat of others getting to the top before her, Krinla was quick to wrap her legs as far as she could around the tree and start scooching up it.
It wasn’t an elegant climb. Her legs were awkward as they made it halfway around the trunk. She didn’t think she’d picked the thickest tree, but it was pretty clear it had to be up there on the list for general girth.
Once she got to the halfway point, which seemed to be at least fifty feet in the air, things got a little easier. She was waiting for her arms to get tired, something a Dracul without human memories wouldn’t even consider. Krinla found thinking the thought was more likely to cause her to feel fatigue than the climb itself, so she tried not to think about it. That wasn’t an easy task, since she was trying to focus on Hunter and she knew it would be something he thought about.
There were others below her following the path she set out, but most of the group chose other trees as ladders. Krinton, Rya and Trilla were the ones trailing behind Krinla. They gave her a little room, but her father was just outside arm’s length.
When it came to picking a branch of the tree to follow, Krinla continued on a path that was the straightest to her goal. The higher she got, the more something seemed to be trying to work its way into the back of her mind. It tried to break her concentration, but she remained focused on getting to the top.
In all, the climb didn’t last more than a few minutes, but it seemed like a lifetime as anxiety ate at Krinla. When the first rays of sun hit her, a sense of relief warmed Krinla. It was more a sense of things being over than knowing she’d accomplished something, but it was a welcome feeling after all the tension eating at her.
Krinla wasn’t sure what she expected to find after she decided to climb the tree. During the climb, she had briefly thought that Hunter would be on top of the canopy in a cage waiting for her. That seemed like something logical waiting for her, even though it was a little odd.
What she didn’t expect to find was the front of an imposing building standing like it was stuck in time. She’d never seen the outside of one of the biggest capitols the humans had during their time on the planet, but she knew exactly what she was looking at.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Marveling at the structure was impossible to pass up. It was at least ten times taller than Krinla and the pillars holding up the front looked almost as big as the tree she’d climbed to get up to it. Not to mention the fact that the white paint covering it was the brightest thing Krinla had ever seen with the sun hitting off of it.
One of the strangest things she saw was the bright green grass under her feet, prickling her toes. Her mind had a problem trying to process how they’d climbed a tree and ended up in potentially another universe. There was no evidence they’d crawled through any of the dirt the grass had to be growing from.
“She was lying,” Krinla said softly as she continued to take in the view.
Not only was the building there, but as Krinla took a twirl, she saw that other buildings and structures were also still intact. She had to rub her eyes a few times to verify she wasn’t dreaming. When she pulled her hands away, she saw red stains on her hands, causing immediate alarm.
“You cry blood. I’m sure it’s not that big of an anomaly.”
Rya sounded nonchalant as she shrugged and took a spot standing next to Krinla. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the tears were the cause of the redness, but it caught Krinla off guard. As did the fact that after her staring around was done, she picked up the faint blip of Hunter on her radar.
“He’s here,” she said as tears regrouped and started falling fresh.
Without caring who did what, she took off in a run to try to find him within the building. She was worried that his presence only offered a dull ping. When they were anywhere near each other he offered vibrant life between the scent he gave off and his overall attitude towards life with her. Those were things she should’ve been picking up strongly, but all she smelled was a foreign odor that smelled a little like a fresh coat of paint.
It wasn’t a smell she’d had the privilege of inhaling before, and it didn’t seem like something she was going to get rid of anytime soon. She could almost feel the nauseating scent making a permanent home in her nose.
“I have to say one good thing about Hunter.”
Rya was quick to stop her train of thought when Krinla turned her head and glared back at the girl. They hadn’t made it to the front door yet, but were almost to the stairs leading up to it.
“One of the many good things about Hunter,” Rya reworded. “Is that your thoughts have livened up a lot. I wouldn’t even be able to equate that smell to fresh paint if it wasn’t for him.”
Krinla thought about letting Rya know she didn’t appreciate the input, but she was at the door, which was standing open. There was a moment when her pace faltered just a bit as she worried about what she’d find once she entered the building. She had no doubt Hunter was in there. Knowing the layout of the building, she knew it would take her exactly thirty-two seconds to get to him after traversing a number of sets of stairs.
What she didn’t know was why he felt so weak. Rose had said she wouldn’t hurt him, but the woman had proven she was crazy. On top of that, chances were they had two very different definitions of the word hurt. To Kr
inla, it meant that not a hair on his head was out of place. The fact that he’d been taken from her already negated that in her mind.
“He’s fine, Krinla. Evidently, I can’t hear him while we’re in separate universes, to use your word, but I can hear him perfectly fine now.”
Krinla wasn’t sure how much she believed Rya, but if she could hear him again, it was good news. They were to the first set of stairs that led down into the lower levels of the building. Hunter didn’t know about the basement area that Rya claimed was their home for gruesome experiments, but the lab where his father worked on time travel was two floors under the building.
It would’ve been nice if the person who constructed the parts of the building no one saw made just a single staircase that navigated between the floors. Alas, the maniac developer thought it’d be a good idea to have staircases on opposite sides of the building. Since the underground levels were even bigger than the exterior up top, it meant a lot of running to get to their destination.
After hearing that Rya could hear Hunter, it would’ve been logical for Krinla to ask what he was thinking. She wanted him to tell her for himself, so she didn’t bother grilling the girl for every detail.
“We’re not going to Hunter’s room?” Krinton asked.
A few of the Beasts had stayed outside the building to monitor for danger, but most of the group was trailing behind Krinla on her journey. Hearing her father question where they were going made Krinla’s forehead crease.
Going back to Rose’s clue, Krinla knew the moment she’d admitted to herself she loved Hunter, so she had no doubt where they were going. It was strange that her father couldn’t sense Hunter around them when they were just doors away from him at that point.
“You can’t feel him?”
It was weird to have to ask the question of the strongest Dracul Krinla knew. She had assumed her inability to feel Hunter was part of the messed up Naturist magic at play, but others’ abilities wouldn’t be affected. Rya had already said she could hear him, so it would make sense that others could feel at the very least his location.
