Huntress Lost

by A. A. Chamberlynn

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I said, my words toneless. “Your task was to destroy the Artifex.”

  “I’m not going to turn you in, of course, but… I’m just saying it puts me in an awkward position.”

  I stared at him. “Well, it put me in an awkward position to become a fugitive in order to rescue you from the Timekeeper’s realm,” I said with no small amount of acid. Who was this person talking to me? Was this what Yarrian had meant—that no one could be the same again after going through something like this?

  “I appreciate what you did for me,” Kellan said. His tone was formal, and so…emotionless. “I just need some time to think about where I go from here.”

  “I think that’s a good plan,” I said stiffly, getting up out of my seat. “You’re not the fugitive, so you’re welcome to go where you please.”

  I cast one last look at the man I thought I loved, and I strode out into the flowers.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I walked down the hill toward the lake, becoming angrier and more distraught with every step. I could understand Kellan needing time to recover—he’d been through about the worst thing a person could endure—but he just didn’t seem the same person anymore. He acted like he couldn’t care less about me. I had gone to hell and back—pretty much literally—and he “appreciated what I’d done for him”?

  When I reached the lake, I strode out onto a small dock. At the end I flopped down, pulled off my boots, and dangled my toes in the water. It was a brilliant teal color, with large banana-yellow fish swimming just below the surface. I could have enjoyed it if it weren’t for the fact that the one thing I’d been holding onto through this disaster had just exploded in my face.

  Footfalls could be heard behind me and I turned to see Xavyr approaching. Of course he would follow me. Because he had to. Here at least was one guy I couldn’t get rid of, simply because he was paid to never leave my side.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  “That’s fine,” he responded. He stopped a few feet away from me, then seemed to think better even of it and began to retreat down the length of the dock.

  “He said he won’t turn me in to the Hunter’s Council even though the Artifex is inside of me… isn’t that so nice of him?” I growled.

  Xavyr’s footsteps returned.

  “I mean, it’s not like I disobeyed the lord of all the realms, became a fugitive, went to see the most sordid being in existence (the one who stabbed me in the heart) a second time, and then refused to flee the city where I was being hunted because I was so determined to find someone who could cure him.”

  “Yarrian said recovery could be difficult,” Xavyr said.

  “This isn’t difficult. This is something else,” I spat. “He acts like he barely knows me.”

  Sabin’s words, the ones she’d thrown at me back in Ifraine when we first started hunting Skye, ran through my head. He’s only being nice and romantic to get you to sleep with him. That couldn’t be it, could it? I mean, it had been more than that. I hadn’t just been some dumbass making things seem like more than they were.

  Xavyr touched my shoulder. “Just give him some time.”

  “I don’t really have an abundance of that.”

  Xavyr cocked a brow. “On the contrary, you are a fugitive, and fugitives don’t really keep a full calendar. You have nowhere to be.”

  “Are you forgetting the witch we need to find?”

  “Of course not. My point is, you don’t have a deadline. Give Kellan a day or two and see what happens. I’m sure he’ll come around. He’d be an idiot not to.”

  Xavyr’s amber eyes held mine until I nodded. “Fine.”

  We passed the day by the lake watching the fish, drawing with a notepad I got from Yarrian, hiking through the surrounding hills. At least I could do that, now that Kellan didn’t need twenty-four-seven mansitting. When it came time for dinner, Kellan went and ate by himself in his room, which apparently I’d been kicked out of. I certainly wasn’t going to try and be roomies.

  I slept out on the sofa that night and Xavyr took one of the chairs. I was afraid I’d have the same dream with the Timekeeper again, but this time it was the dream with the stag. It progressed as it had before, and this time, when my chest opened and the bird flew out, something nagged in my consciousness. The bird flew through the forest, and the forest turned to gold, night turned to day, and there was a woman.

  The woman had long red hair, not a natural red but a shade of deep burgundy. Her eyes were the same color. The bird landed on her finger and it twittered something to the woman. She nodded and said something back to the bird, so softly I couldn’t make it out. And then she turned, looking right at me, and she squeezed her fist, and the bird crumbled to ash in her fingers.

  Deep magic, she intoned.

  I woke up, heart pounding. Across from me in the chair, Xavyr twitched in his sleep as if sensing me but did not wake. Moonlight streamed in the windows. And I realized something.

  On Earth, starlings were a type of bird.

  Did that mean the witch followed birds? And what did it mean that I dreamed of the bird in my chest before I even knew that the witch had a connection to them? It was the night before we went to Obsidian Hollow that I had first dreamed of the bird. Not to mention she didn’t seem to treat the bird very kindly. Under my breath, I cursed dreams and their blasted cryptic messages.

  My mind spinning, I sat up. There was no getting back to sleep now. Plus, once I sat up, I saw that my fox was sitting on her haunches at the foot of the sofa, staring up at me. Quite solid, as she had been the last few times I’d seen her. She stood when she realized I noticed her and stuck her very wet and very cold nose against my fingers. Then she walked for the door.

  I got up and followed her out onto the porch, tiptoeing so as not to wake Xavyr. When I got outside, she was already trotting down the steps and out into the flowers. A chill breeze sliced down from the clouds above and I pulled my nightshirt tighter around me. Goosebumps popped up over my skin, which was not improved as I started trekking through the dew-covered flowers.

  My fox led us around the side of the hill, parallel to the lake. Dirt and flower petals soon coated my bare feet. After about a quarter mile my fox turned up the hill, which we crested before starting down the other side. The land swelled and undulated almost as far as I could see, except for an inky blot in the distance which looked like a forest. My sinking suspicion that we were headed there was confirmed as she beelined for it.

  It took more than an hour to reach the distant woods, by which time I was shivering and soaked with dew up to my thighs. The outer fringe of forest looked like a row of soldiers at the ready. They were firs, or pines perhaps, straight and tall with dark needles that glittered in the moonlight. The flowers stopped abruptly as if they’d hit against an invisible forcefield, giving way to loamy black soil that squished beneath my toes.

  And there, standing in the shadows of the trees, stood the stag.

  Well, stood perhaps not the right word, for he wasn’t corporeal. He was a wisp, a spirit, a thing that floated and shimmered. As I approached, he bowed his antlers to me, for in this form he had them both. I stopped and bowed in return. My fox’s body was warm as she pressed up against my calf.

  I realized at some point, as we stood in the silence, that I was crying. The stag stepped forward and nuzzled my cheek, although I could feel only the faintest whisper of touch against my skin. I could imagine the whuff of hot breath on my cheek if he had been flesh and blood, the sound of his hooves on the earth. But he wasn’t here to remind me of his physicality. He was here to remind me what I had to do.

  I wasn’t to blame for having Artemis’s blood in my veins, for being a pawn in the Timekeeper’s game. I was not something to be hunted and imprisoned. The Timekeeper and Casseroux had to be stopped and the hunt clans united once again. I was not going to spend my life in hiding. I’d done that, back on Earth. Always keeping my abilities a secret, always
flying under the radar.

  No more.

  And as soon as that thought went through my head, the stag shook his head and vanished. He’d given me the message I needed to hear.

  “Thank you,” I said into the empty forest. “And thank you,” I said, looking down at my fox.

  She gave me a canine grin, her tongue lolling out to the side, and then she turned and trotted back the way we had come.

  Xavyr was waiting for me when I got back to the house, his expression stricken.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “My fox—” and then I realized he couldn’t see her so I stopped. “I had a late night visit from my spirit animal.”

  “It’s not that,” Xavyr said, and his voice held a tone of panic that made my blood turn to ice. “Kellan is gone, and you’ve received a message.”

  “A message?”

  Yarrian came out of the shadows behind Xavyr and handed me an Aon. “I don’t know how she knew to transmit the message here.”

  I took the Aon from him and my fingers shook. An image popped up before me.

  “Greetings, Evryn,” said Soo Kai. “I wish to meet with you. And because you are not likely to comply with my request, I have taken your mother to ensure that you do.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I stared into the Aon at Soo Kai’s face, and then at my mother’s face as she moved into view. My mother held her chin up defiantly, her eyes glittering, but a slight tremble around the corners of her mouth belied her bravery.

  “I’m sure you can find us. Come alone,” Soo Kai said, and the connection was severed.

  I stood there for a moment, everything inside of me singing with the dread and horror of it. If I had ever known that finding my family would involve so much pain and heartache, I would have happily remained an orphan.

  “Well,” I said after a few moments in silence with Xavyr and Yarrian staring at me, “There’s not much to be done but do as she asks.”

  “You’re not going alone,” Xavyr said.

  “Yes,” I said, and our eyes locked and sparked against each other, “I am. This is one area in which I will not negotiate. You can rejoin me afterwards if I survive. But I’m going, and you’re not going to stop me.”

  “How do we know this isn’t just a trap?” Xavyr said, and he sounded angry.

  “We don’t,” I said with a shrug. “But I can’t leave my mother there.”

  The muscles in his jaw were pulsing and the muscles along his arms, which were crossed over his chest, looked tight enough to snap. “Don’t you at least want me to attempt to rescue you if this goes awry?”

  “I suppose that’s a fair concession. If I don’t come back in a couple of days.”

  “And how am I supposed to know where you are?”

  “I can link the two of you mentally,” Yarrian said.

  I cast him a wary look. “Like he knows everything I’m thinking?”

  “My techniques are a bit more sophisticated than that,” Yarrian said. “I can make it so that he only knows if you are in grave danger, and knows your location.”

  My eyes widened. “That’s impressive. Sure.”

  Xavyr looked slightly mollified, though he was still as tense as a pack of cornered mountain lions.

  Yarrian reached out a hand to each of us, touching the fingers of his right hand to my temple, and using his left hand to connect to Xavyr. He closed his eyes, and after a moment be began to glow. I felt a strange buzzing in my forehead as if someone had forced a piece of cotton gauze into my brain, and then it stilled.

  “All done,” Yarrian said.

  “Really? That’s it?” I asked.

  Xavyr shook his head slightly as if something still felt fuzzy. “How will I be alerted if Evryn is in danger?”

  “You’ll just know,” Yarrian said. “Emotions, images. You’ll begin to see what she’s seeing.”

  “Okay then. I’m getting my weapons,” I said.

  I headed into the living room. My bow was there, and my daggers were still inside of my boots. I changed clothes, happy to take off my dew-soaked night things. Soon I was dressed and ready to go. As ready as I could be.

  “Where did you go earlier?” Xavyr asked from the doorway.

  I turned and looked at him. The moonlight made him stern and beautiful. “My fox led me to the stag. Not alive, of course. But he visited me in spirit, I guess.”

  Xavyr had no reaction to my bizarre statement. “Did he tell you anything that can help?”

  I shook my head. “No. He just reminded me to keep fighting. To refuse to live my life in hiding. I’m not the one who should be hunted. Casseroux is.” I sighed. “But trouble has come from another direction.”

  “It usually does,” Xavyr remarked.

  “When did you notice that Kellan was gone?” I asked.

  Xavyr’s face tightened. “I think he left before you did. When I realized you were gone, I went to check in his room. He was gone, too. For a moment I thought—”

  “We’d made up and eloped?” I rolled my eyes. “No. It appears I was abandoned. Nothing romantic about that.”

  I said the words lightly, as if it were some big joke. Because if I let my true emotions out, I’d scream and likely not stop. How could Kellan do this to me after everything we’d been through together? And everything I’d been through to save him? Not to mention it couldn’t come at a worse possible time.

  “He shouldn’t have left you like that, without saying anything,” Xavyr said, a slight growl to his voice. “It’s dishonorable.”

  “Well, we can add that to the list of things that suck right now that I can’t do a damn thing about.” I slung my bow over my shoulder. “Tell Yarrian thanks for everything.”

  Xavyr’s tone was almost threatening. “Tell him yourself when you get back.”

  I nodded. “Xavyr—”

  “I’ll see you soon,” he said.

  His eyes burned into mine and I summoned the Call. The static heat of its magic moved over me, and I stepped through realms.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I landed on a thin strip of coast laid between high white cliffs and a steel gray ocean. A lime green sun was sinking toward the horizon. Natural caves tunneled into the side of the cliffs, some massive and some just tiny passages only a child could traverse. It looked like an apple core thoroughly enjoyed by a worm.

  An earth-shattering roar came from one of the tunnels, vibrating the white walls. I knew then where I was, and it wasn’t a shocker. Kyatae, realm of the Dragon Clan. And that roar hadn’t come from the tiny dragon Soo Kai carried around on her shoulder.

  I moved toward the caves. A cold wind whipped sand and sea spray into my face. Soon I stood within the entrance to the largest cave. The ceiling soared fifty feet over my head and a faint glow emitted from the white rock. The roar reverberated again, shaking my bones and making my throat go dry with fear. It seemed this was indeed the right tunnel. Who needed guards when you had dragons? I headed down it.

  The tunnel seemed dry and it blocked the buffeting wind. I saw no one as I traveled down it, though voices echoed back to me from somewhere ahead. A few thousand yards brought me to a huge underground cavern. The rock was white here as well, and pools of bright blue water dotted the floor, a series of underground lakes. Swimming in those pools were dragons. Dragons the size of a small house, red and blue and green, with long whiskers hanging from their chins and a soft, flowing strip of silky material running down their neck, back, and tail like the soft fins of a goldfish.

  At least if I was going to die I got to see dragons before I went.

  I walked a few yards into the cavern and stopped. Several dozen Hunters dotted the space. Some of them turned to look at me, unsurprised at my arrival, and then Soo Kai broke from the crowd and approached. My mother was nowhere in sight.

  “So, here we are, Evryn, once again.” Soo Kai circled me slowly, a wry smile on her lips.

  I clenched my fists at my sides. Inside my belly, I felt a flare from the Artif
ex. “Where is my mother?”

  “She is somewhere safe,” Soo Kai said.

  “You should have kept her out of this.” I let my eyes drill into hers, so she could feel the truth of my words. “If you’ve harmed her, nothing will save you.”

  Soo Kai only smiled wider. “Such a feisty thing. I think you have something of the dragon in you. Tell me, Evryn, if I had not brought your mother as a bargaining chip, would you have come?” I stared back at her with hatred and she nodded. “I didn’t think so. It’s an unfortunate situation.”

  “It’s unfortunate that you tried to kill me with a dragon fire bond,” I hissed, “And also tried to kill me by throwing me off a flying city, terrorized over two thousand people, and tortured my mother for the Artifex. Maybe if you weren’t that kind of person I would have agreed to meet with you.”

  Soo Kai shook her head back and forth. “And the Artifex was inside of you all along. Who would’ve thought.”

  “Let’s get to what you want so I can take my mother and get out of here,” I said.

  “We’ll get to that,” Soo Kai said. “But first, I want to show you something. It’s important that you understand how all of this started.” She began to walk across the floor of the cave, deeper into its depths. “You have a poor opinion of me, and I can understand why. But what you can’t comprehend is how I came to do these things that you view as so villainous. You have only been among the world of the Hunters for such a short period of time.”

  The floor of the cave began to slope down as we moved further in. I saw more tunnels branching off from the back wall of the large cavern, and Soo Kai led us toward one of them. Some of the Hunters we passed were attending to the dragons, bathing them or feeding them fish, and one even appeared to be reading to a dragon from a large, leather-bound book. Several small children less than ten years of age frolicked among the dragons, and one dragon was even allowing them to climb its back and slide down its spine.