TRENT STOOD EXPOSED in the center of the pit, surrounded by bones, but nowhere to hide. His mind raced, trying to work out any plausible scenario in which he lived.
As he desperately searched for a plan, the Hunter took aim and loosed his arrow.
The arrow moved so fast that Trent didn’t even see it pierce his left shoulder. The force was strong enough to make him step backward, but the arrow went only partway through his body. His arm erupted in searing pain as he looked down at the arrow’s fletching that protruded from the front of his shoulder.
His mind tried to cope with the shock to his body, even as he tried to stand straight and defiant against the Hunter.
“I know you didn’t have to miss, asshole. You might as well finish me off now, because if I get out of here, I’m going to kill you and make sure you stay dead this time.”
“Brave words from a man who has nowhere to run,” the Hunter said as he loaded another arrow.
Trent laughed derisively.
“Don’t talk to me about being brave. Is this how all great hunters finish off their prey—just shoot them when they’re trapped and can’t put up a fight?”
The Hunter grinned again.
“Only if the trap works correctly.”
Trent closed his eyes, hoping again that the power of Ka’a had returned.
The Hunter laughed.
“Do you feel like a part of you is missing, Walker?”
Trent ignored the Hunter’s jeers. If he was going to have any hope of defeating the Hunter, he was going to have to outthink him.
“You know that old man you shot a few minutes ago was your grandfather, don’t you? You’re not going to win any grandson of the year awards with behavior like that.”
“Oh, I know who that was. I also know that I hit him right in center of his back. It might have even been a heart shot. Either way, he won’t live much longer. Now, here’s a question for you, Walker. Did you know that you aren’t the only one who’s been getting a little assistance from the spirit world? Growing up, I thought all that talk about spirits was bullshit, but like my father used to say, live and learn.”
“Your father’s the one who’s been helping you, right? I didn’t make the connection between you and the Elder at first, but now that I know, it reminds me of something my father used to always say.”
“And what is that?” the Hunter said as he raised his crossbow and aimed it at Trent.
“He always told me that assholes don’t fall far from the tree,” Trent said, with a smirk.
As the Hunter took aim, the sky above them darkened and the wind began to throw the branches of the trees back and forth. Snow fell in wet sheets, covering everything suddenly in white, and although Trent couldn’t see them, he imagined a thousand dark spirits encircling him, desperate for the Hunter’s blood.
Suddenly, a bolt of lightning lit up the sky with a crack of thunder that shook Trent’s teeth.
“Do you see that?” the Hunter yelled above the roar of the wind, as he held his crossbow leveled at Trent. “That’s my father kicking your bear’s ass in the spirit world. I was wondering how you were able to get the best of me back in Vegas. No man or animal has ever beaten me before, but now I know that you were something entirely different—an aberration to humanity. A monster.”
“You were the monster—not me,” Trent said. As he felt the spirits circling him faster, Trent hoped that one of them would enter him and give him the strength and power he needed to finish the Hunter once and for all.
But as he silently cried out for help from the spirits, none came.
“It’s easy for you to call me a monster,” the Hunter said, “but I was helping those homeless people in the tunnel. I gave them a purpose in life.”
“You made money from their slaughter, the same way your grandfather profited from killing all those animals. At least he realized that he fucked up and has tried to atone for his sins.”
The Hunter laughed again.
“My grandfather is a traitor to the human race who chose animals above his fellow man. He’s been protecting their bones up here all this time, letting them possess the people in town. He’s the reason Whittier’s been cursed all this time—not my father. My father protected the people of Whittier.”
“He used them and kept them caged up to protect his own ass. And now he’s using you to get back at me. Same old story.”
“He’s helping me,” the Hunter bellowed. “He’s the only reason I’m still alive. Look at what you let them do to me!”
“This is going to come out harsh, but I actually think it’s an improvement,” Trent said with a completely straight face. With no other options, at least he was going to die feeling good about himself.
Without another word, the Hunter released an arrow. This one hit with such speed and force that it went straight through Trent’s right thigh, and he screamed and fell backward into the bones.
His mind reeled as he tried to hold back the shock that was trying to overtake his body. He glanced down at his leg. It was bleeding steadily, but the blood wasn’t spurting, and it wasn’t bright red. Somehow the arrow had missed his femoral artery.
He shook his head to focus his mind as he struggled to get to his feet again. He didn’t understand why one of the spirits wouldn’t enter him through one of his wounds and use him to take their vengeance against the evil Hunter.
“Did that hurt?” the Hunter jeered. “Don’t worry. My next arrow will end you. I’m feeling generous for some reason.”
As the Hunter loaded another arrow, the storm grew even louder around them, forcing him to yell so that Trent could hear him.
All around Trent, bones rattled, filling the pit with a frightening cacophony that sounded like an unearthly set of demonic chimes.
He was out of options and losing blood fast. The dark spirit of Ka’a had abandoned him the one time that he really needed and wanted it. The other spirits that surrounded him wouldn’t possess him.
And he had nowhere to take cover.
His hand brushed against a sharp piece of bone. He looked down and saw Ka’a’s giant-sized skull—the sockets of which were as dark as coal. Staring into Ka’a’s dark gaze, Trent reached out with a shaky hand, grabbed one of the animal’s long, sharp canine teeth with his good hand, and pulled it out.
With all the effort he could muster, he pushed himself to his knees and then to his feet. As he stood, wobbly and with all of his weight on his left leg, the storm high above them raged on.
But inside and around the pit, the air turned deathly still.
The Hunter seemed just as surprised as Trent was about the sudden, eerie silence.
Without even thinking about it, Trent drew back his good arm and threw the giant grizzly’s tooth with all his might at the Hunter’s face. Trent had practiced his manual dexterity all his life and could hit a man with a playing card from twenty feet, but even for him, this throw was a gamble at best. As if it were flying in slow motion, the tooth shot through the air as the wind restarted and propelled the tooth even faster at the Hunter.
To Trent’s surprise, the tooth hit the Hunter on his cheek before bouncing off, seemingly without effect.
The Hunter stood looking at Trent, then burst out laughing.
“I have to give that one to you,” he said. “I wasn’t prepared for that.”
Trent grinned as the wind built to full momentum again, blowing the snow all around them both, and hopefully obscuring the Hunter’s vision.
The Hunter furrowed his eyebrows at Trent, then reached his hand up to his cheek where the tooth had struck. He pulled his finger away, and it was red. A trickle of blood ran down his cheek as his face turned into a snarl.
“What did you do?” the Hunter screamed, his eyes widening in fear.
Trent was frustrated with himself for not understanding sooner. The reason the spirits had not used him to take their vengeance on the Hunter was because they wanted to possess the Hunter directly.
With th
e pathway of blood now open to them, Trent could only imagine the horde of black spirits descending on the Hunter—jostling to destroy the last of the Elder’s hated bloodline.
Trent watched as the Hunter arched his back and stepped back, like he had just been struck in the head. With a scream, he hunched over, dropping his crossbow and clutching his stomach. It was like watching a man getting pummeled by an invisible force from inside his own body.
Trent was still in a massive amount of pain and could barely stand, but he knew that this was his one chance to get back to Zana, Christina, and the Shaman.
He picked up four of Ka’a’s giant claws, then inched himself to the opposite side of the pit. He turned around and saw that the Hunter was struggling to stand, as blood ran from his mouth.
Falling to his knees, Trent took the first bear claw and shoved as much of its five inches as he could it into the dirt side of the pit. With his right arm, he pulled himself up so that he was leaning against forward against the wall. He removed the claw and slammed it into the side of the pit above his head. Then he used it to pull himself, slowly and painfully up the wall.
He kicked the boot of his good leg into the wall over and over again until he had made a step on which he could support his weight.
He stopped for only a few seconds to catch his breath.
When he glanced behind him, he saw the Hunter flying through the air as if he had just been tossed into the bone pit. When the man landed, his body made a loud crack, and even though his swollen flesh, his face showed the intense pain he was feeling.
Trent turned back to his climb. He took another bear claw and slammed it into the side of the pit above his head and the claw to pull himself up a little farther. Once he was there, he held himself in place with his good arm while he kicked the side of the pit with his left foot to create another step in the snow and dirt.
He continued that way for what felt like forever, even though he knew it was less than five minutes’ worth of work. When he finally reached the edge of the pit, he pulled himself up the rest of the way by holding onto the trunk of a sapling.
Before he rolled himself into the shrouded forest, he looked down and saw the Hunter, with several of the sharp animal bones flying at him through the air and slicing into his flesh. He wanted to watch the man die, but his instinct told him that he was barely in good enough shape to walk and that he had to get as far away from the Hunter as possible.
The spirits had him now, but Trent had learned one thing about the Hunter. He was a lot of things, but easy to kill was not one of them.
Chapter 38
THE SPIRIT OF the Hunter’s father had left him to do battle with the spirit of Ka’a. The Hunter felt unprotected with his father gone, but he finally had the peace and quiet in his mind that he had been craving for the last several days.
He also had the abomination known as Trent Walker trapped and in his sights.
He could have taken Walker’s life with his first arrow, but he wanted to make him suffer.
The first shot hit its mark—piercing his left shoulder. The wound wouldn’t kill him, but it would hurt like hell, and if tried to pull the arrow out, the rotating steel arrowhead would rip him to shreds inside.
The Hunter had enjoyed seeing the look of hopelessness in Walker’s eyes as lightning crackled high above them—a sure sign of the battle between his father and Ka’a taking place between worlds.
After the first strike, Walker had been desperate to stall the inevitable—trying to buy more time, to find a way out of the Hunter’s trap.
As if the spirits had decided to help Walker, another storm exploded within and around the pit itself. The winds howled and blew the snow in mighty torrents, making it difficult for the Hunter to see his target.
A lesser man might have panicked, but he calmly aimed and released, his arrow hitting its mark with such speed and intensity that it went clean through the man’s right thigh.
As Walker fell to the ground, the storm grew ever wilder, as the man somehow regained his feet again. Walker was almost done for and resorted to name calling and talking about his family.
Through it all, the Hunter had remained focused.
Just as he was about to release the final arrow that would end Walker’s life, the storm in the pit grew calm. At that precise moment, Walker drew back his good arm and threw something.
The Hunter was not concerned, but he lowered his crossbow to get a better look at what Walker was up to.
Suddenly, he felt a hard sting on his cheek as the piece of bone or whatever it was hit him. It was the last futile attempt of a man about to die. He had seen similar acts before. When all hope was lost, men often reverted to any kind of action that allowed them the delusion of true resistance.
Then the Hunter felt something warm and wet on his face and saw blood come back on his finger.
As the blood trickled down his cheek, he remembered his father telling him about spirits having the most hold on a human being when they entered through a path of blood.
Suddenly, his mind was filled by not just one, but by many dark spirits that crammed their way into his head, filling the space where his father had been.
But unlike his father, these spirits wanted to kill him.
It felt like his organs were being pummeled from the inside as the pain made him double over. As his body was being brutalized by the angry spirits, he glimpsed Walker trying to make his way out of the pit.
Before he knew what was happening, the Hunter’s body was thrown into the pit by invisible forces, and he felt his flesh being impaled by sharp bones that came to life, stabbing at him and slicing through his clothes and into his skin.
It took all his might to look up again and see that Walker had made it out of the pit and was watching him from above. As the Hunter looked on, Walker disappeared into the shrouded forest that surrounded them.
Just as the Hunter felt his own life start to ebb, he felt another entity enter his mind and begin to push the animal spirits aside. One by one, the Hunter felt his mind clear and his pain lessen.
He fell back on the bones that were no longer attacking him, and he tried to take a few deep breaths.
I left you alone for a few minutes, and you lost Walker, and almost got yourself killed.
The Hunter rolled onto his side and vomited onto the snow-covered bones.
He was so glad that the animal spirits had finally left him, the sound of his father’s voice berating him felt like soothing honey.
“Just put me back together enough so we can go after him and finish this.”
His father didn’t answer, but the Hunter felt his insides being rearranged and his organs starting to function properly again, even as the storm settled down in the pit, and he was left with just the cold of the land.
Within minutes, he could stand again, and he stumbled back to where he had dropped his pack and his weapons. He suited up and knocked another arrow as he went to the opposite side of the pit and scrambled up after Walker.
“Did you destroy the bear’s spirit?” he asked out loud as he stood at the edge of the pit and looked down at the clear trail Walker had left behind.
His father did not answer.
Chapter 39
TRENT DRAGGED himself through the woods, eager to make it as far away from the pit and the Hunter as possible. He wanted to believe that the spirits would finish off the Hunter, but he knew he couldn’t count on it. Instead, he had to keep moving, get out of the Shaman’s forest and then somehow try to find Zana and Christina.
And the Shaman—even though Trent no longer was in need of his services, Trent still wanted to find that Shaman as well.
Trent already had accomplished what he had set out to do. He was free of Ka’a’s spirit and in full control of himself again. Other than the arrow piercing his throbbing shoulder and the fact that he could barely walk, he’d had worse days.
About twenty feet away from the pit, he picked up a long branch that was relatively straight an
d used it like a crutch to help himself hobble through the trees.
Navigating the forest still defied logic, and even though he wanted to make a straight line to leave its misty boundaries, he knew that doing so wouldn’t work. Instead, he would have to use his intuition and his senses to feel his way along the correct path.
As far as paths went, he knew he was leaving an obvious trail that the Hunter could easily follow, but he made no attempts to conceal it.
Instead, he continued through the woods, swerving in a seemingly random pattern through the trees, dripping blood into the pure white snow beneath his feet. As he did so, his mind calculated and discarded scenarios of what he could do when and if the Hunter caught up to him.
He took right turns, then left, and sometimes he kept taking turns in the same direction that should have led him back to where he had started. But he always found himself in a different place, among completely new sets of trees. Even though he didn’t understand where he was going, he knew he was making progress, even as his mind raced to memorize each turn of his unusual course.
After another fifteen minutes, he felt something or someone following him.
He didn’t hear, see, or smell anyone, but he could tell. In a normal situation, he would have tried to double back on his trail, but given the already confusing nature of his path, trying to conceal his steps was useless.
As he walked on with the assistance of his walking stick, he checked his suit. Other than a few decks of cards, and one remaining bear claw, he had nothing else up his proverbial sleeve.
No more paracord to set a trap.
Not enough time to set a more elaborate snare.
His only hope was to escape the Shaman’s forest, make it to the real woods, and hope that some kind of advantage would present itself once the laws of physics started working properly again.
Each step seemed to chew at his last bit of strength, and only his will to survive kept him going. He thought he had understood what it felt like to be hunted back in Vegas, but out here in the open woods, he truly felt like prey.
The Whittier Trilogy Page 48
