I knew he wasn’t going to stop though, and I couldn’t hold him like this forever. I would need something to bind him. My backpack was still by the springs, much too far for me to reach. In utter desperation, I removed my shirt and tried to wind it around Dylan’s wrists, but it wasn’t long enough. It held tightly for a moment before loosening and slipping away. I groaned in frustration. I had absolutely nothing left.
Except maybe…
I uncoiled the thick bandage from around my chest, exposing Arisella’s black undergarments. It was at least four feet long – more than enough for me to tie Dylan up.
I wrestled him to the ground as I snaked the bandage around his wrists and ankles. When he realized what I was doing, he gnashed his teeth at me like an animal. His savagery frightened me.
When I finished, he looked strikingly similar to a dying spider, his arms and legs pointed up to the sky as he struggled against his bonds. The fibers of the bandages strained against his skin, stretching and thinning. They wouldn’t hold him forever, but they would have to do for now.
I found my shirt and pulled it on before snatching another roll of bandages from my bag and running to join Adrian. He was still locked in an impasse with his sister.
I helped Adrian move her back onto the grass, where together we wove the bandages around Arisella’s wrists.
She was much stronger than Dylan, and she was able to break the cotton sheets almost as soon as we placed them on her. The only way we could keep her still was by triple-layering the bandages and winding them about her in a frenzy. It was a two-person effort – Adrian held her down while I bound her arms and legs. At one point, I was afraid she would change into a grimalkin and tear us both to pieces, but fortunately she never did. Perhaps she required full consciousness to do so.
When we were done, we placed her next to Dylan, and they wailed and struggled like godforsaken animals in each other’s company.
“How long is this supposed to last?” I used the back of my hand to wipe away the beads of perspiration that had accumulated on my brow.
“I don’t know.” Adrian’s hair was slick with sweat, his cheeks flush with tints of blood.
“Why did they react so badly to the water, when we didn’t?”
“Well, Dylan’s a human, so it’s not surprising that the experience was more overwhelming for him than it was for us. As for Arisella…” A pained look crossed Adrian’s face. “She genuinely believes that she killed our mother.”
“But she didn’t…”
“No, she didn’t. But she feels guilty for it, and that guilt has taken a toll on her. She’s gotten exceedingly good at hiding it.”
“I see.”
After fifteen minutes of hollering, teeth grinding, and even drooling, Dylan and Arisella finally quieted. Upon coming to their senses, they were quite surprised to find themselves with their appendages in the air, bound by sheets of cotton. Adrian and I cut away the bandages warily and made sure to steer them clear the springs as we continued walking onwards. Now more than ever, we were determined to make it out of those horrid woods before we retired for the night.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The forest ended at the base of a mountain range, which we didn’t reach until long after nightfall. We didn’t make a fire again that night, this time out of pure laziness, and Arisella didn’t hunt.
When I rifled through my backpack for a half can of peas I had saved from the night before, my hand came out covered in nauseating, green-tinged sludge. I flipped off the cover of my bag, and the stench of rotten meat overwhelmed my senses.
I squinted my watering eyes and found what seemed to be a slime of decomposing bread and meat slices in my bag. Making a big show of putting her hand over her nose, Arisella demanded that the toxic waste be disposed of immediately, and I got rid of it in some bushes far from the edge of camp. Since most of our food had been sitting half-eaten in opened containers, I had to throw almost all of it away.
When I returned to the camp, Dylan owned up to the fact that he had found an opportunity to cram sprite food into my backpack when I wasn’t looking. Apparently he had been looking forward to eating it, until he discovered that it decomposed as soon as it left the forest.
I went to bed that night with an empty stomach, while Dylan stayed up to clean out my backpack. He knew I wasn’t pleased with him, and he seemed determined to at least return the inside of my backpack to its original smell, if he couldn’t do anything about the color.
I squeezed my eyes shut, but I still couldn’t submit myself to sleep. I felt the minutes go by, and I heard Arisella snoring somewhere nearby, but I still didn’t feel the slightest bit tired.
“Hey, Adrian, will you smell this?” I heard Dylan say, followed by the soft clink of my backpack buckles.
Adrian snorted. “I can smell it from here, and you have a long way to go.”
“Damn it.” Dylan scrubbed the fabric noisily. “It has to be clean when she wakes up tomorrow.”
“You should probably sleep soon. She didn’t tell you that you had to do that.”
“No, but I kind of owe it to her, don’t you think? I don’t want her to smell like this shit-scented backpack.”
“I admit, it would ruin the lavender…” Adrian mused.
“You noticed she smells like lavender?” I could hear the astonishment in Dylan’s voice.
“Uh, sure.”
“It’s her shampoo. Not that she’s smelled much like lavender recently, but I agree, the backpack would not smell nice on her.”
I felt really uncomfortable with listening to them discuss the way I smelled, not to mention how Dylan had basically just pointed out how I was smelling worse than usual. We had been sweating in the same clothes for days – and where was I supposed to find lavender shampoo here, anyway?
“You’re very devoted to her,” Adrian acknowledged.
“Best friends, in it to the end.”
“How was she when you first met her?”
I was taken aback that Adrian even cared enough to ask this question.
Dylan laughed. “It was the first day of preschool. Her mom had given her this horrible haircut, but she was still the prettiest girl in the class, by a landslide. Anyway, this hot-shot group of boys thought it would be really funny to take my animal crackers from me, but Amber was there to stop them.”
“How?”
“She said she would eat all their lunches when they weren’t looking. She threatened them with a frightening amount of authority for a four-year-old, too. They didn’t bother us again, and it wasn’t until after school that I realized that she was the daughter of our new neighbors. We’ve been together ever since.”
“She must mean a lot to you if you were willing to move halfway across the country for her.”
“I’d follow her past the ends of the Earth. Do you have any idea how many of my animal crackers she’s saved?” Dylan’s voice grew solemn. “I’d die for her.”
“That makes two of us,” Adrian said so quietly I almost wasn’t sure I’d heard him.
“I’m not just saying that for dramatic effect, though. I really mean it,” Dylan emphasized, as if he doubted the genuineness of Adrian’s declaration. “I also realize I’m the weakest link in this group, the least likely to keep her safe. That’s why I was the first to jump into the kelpie boat, or the first to volunteer to eat the sprite food. Sure, being captured by the Bloodbourn and secretly stuffing her backpack with rotten food may have been mistakes, but my actions are usually good-intentioned.”
“That’s really… dumb.” Adrian concluded. “And you two were always just… friends?”
“Yeah, it never really progressed beyond that.”
“But you love her?”
I cringed at the curiosity in Adrian’s words.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Dylan said hastily. “You and I aren’t even friends, and this conversation is starting to get uncomfortable.”
“You do,” Adrian sighed.
“I will be
whatever she needs me to be,” Dylan explained. “If, for now, that’s a friend, so be it.”
I couldn’t listen to this anymore. It felt wrong, eavesdropping on them like this. I coughed twice, and they both shut their mouths and didn’t utter another word – or if they did, not until after I had fallen asleep.
Chapter Thirty-Three
We woke up in the midmorning to the patter of rain on our faces. The gray sky hung above us, illuminated occasionally by a thin streak of light, followed by a sharp crack that echoed off the black crags.
We packed up the camp in a flurry, and our wet bags, now doubled in weight, cut into our shoulders. Fortunately, according to Adrian, we didn’t have much further to go.
But it felt like a century to me. The steep, unstable incline of the mountain coupled with the heaviness of my bag was sucking the life out of me, which, of course, Adrian noticed.
He insisted that we stop under a stony ledge that could shelter us from the frigid rain that had been pelting us for the last hour. Ever since we had woken up, the storm had only grown in ferocity, and deafening gusts of wind whipped our damp hair into our stinging faces. The sky was a chaotic show of light and thunder, the magnitude of which was unlike any I had ever experienced on Earth.
As we regained our energy under the ledge, I squinted into the rain, down the slippery side of the mountain we had just risked our lives scaling. The dense sheet of fat raindrops that fell from the sky obscured everything, except for the hazy outlines of large objects.
Dylan appeared beside me, peering off in the same direction. “Is that boulder moving?” Dylan pointed at a vague, vibrating blob that seemed to be getting larger.
Arisella rudely pushed Dylan out of the way so she could have a better view. “It looks like it’s rolling up the hill?”
I gaped at her. She had said something dumber than Dylan had.
Arisella noticed my dumbstruck face and quickly amended her statement. “That’s just what it looks like, though.”
“Well, whatever it was, it’s gone now,” I pointed out. The blob had disappeared behind a darker, larger shadow, leaving no traces of its existence.
“We’d best be moving,” Adrian advised.
We resumed the treacherous hike through the rain, this time with thin but unbreakable rods Adrian had miraculously been capable of creating as hiking staffs for us. I clutched the black stick made from Adrian’s blood with my life. It was the only thing keeping me on the ledge of the mountain, from slipping away into the abyss beside me.
I heard a series of deep, throaty grunts behind me, and I turned to check on Dylan to see if he was okay. But he wasn’t behind me. No one was behind me. For a second, I was gripped with the overwhelming terror that Dylan had fallen from the side of the mountain. Until he started obliviously humming “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” ahead of me.
The inexplicable grunts continued, and a large outline grew increasingly distinct through the rain.
What in the world?
An enormous blackish bear creature charged into visibility straight at me, roaring savagely. I fell on my behind in shock. The bear took my walking stick in its jaws and, I assume as a show of power, tried to snap it in half. But it couldn’t, so it settled for thrusting it off the side of the mountain.
I sneered at the animal that was gradually approaching me and forced my body into its panther form, effectively exploding my last pair of sneakers.
Ahead of me, Adrian cursed loudly. One of his blood blades promptly whizzed past my ear and grazed the shoulder of the beast. Adrian ran in front of me, blades in hand, and flung them at the animal. Three of his knives found their target in the bear’s back.
“Run!” Adrian shouted over the cry of the wind.
I hesitated. The bear was by no means dead – only temporarily stunned.
A cruel roar momentarily claimed my attention, and I found Arisella circling another large bear that seemed to have appeared out of thin air. They bared their teeth at each other, their lips curling viciously.
“Now!” Adrian shouted again.
I followed his directions and ran toward Dylan, who was shaking against the side of the mountain, utterly unprotected.
Together we fled the scene, leaving Adrian and Arisella behind. They became a blur of teeth and fur and knives behind us, and I tried hard not to think about how monstrously big the bears had been.
We hadn’t gone very far when a rock skittered out from under one of my paws, and my head collided with a sharp rock. Even feline grace and padded feet couldn’t save me from my own clumsiness. I didn’t have to feel the warm trickling down my neck to know that I was bleeding.
My vision shifted in and out of focus, and a moist, salty smell filled my nose.
“That’s a lot of blood,” Dylan whispered from behind me.
I growled at him in the cadence of “I know” and continued forwards, more careful with my footing this time.
Despite my blurry vision, I could distinguish a pair of snarling, tan wolf-like animals blocking our path. Where the hell were all these animals coming from?
I retreated backwards, nearly stepping on Dylan, and realized we had no choice but to descend the way we came, back to Adrian and Arisella.
With his arms flailing about him, Dylan had already started slipping down the mountainside. I took off after him. Without me to test the rocks, I was aware of the very real possibility that he might concuss himself and die. And, considering the situation and how far we had gotten, I refused to lose Dylan to death by rock.
The wolves snapped at my heels, their breath hot on my hind legs. In a last-ditch attempt to slow them down, I attempted to kick one of them in the muzzle, but only succeeded in getting my foot sheared by razor-sharp teeth.
Burning sharpness shot up my leg with every step, but I couldn’t afford to slow my pace on account of my injuries. I strained myself to catch up to Dylan, so I could lead him back to Adrian and Arisella.
We found the pair, flashes of movement slick with blood and rain. One of the bears had pinned Arisella down and was in the process of burying its claws in her torso. Arisella howled wildly, desperately. Adrian was balanced on a boulder far above the other bear’s reach, firing his black shards from afar. His hair whipped wildly in the wind, his skin glistening with blood-tinted rain, his eyes full of confidence, bloodlust, power. He looked like a god.
Seven knives protruded from the bear’s back, no doubt puncturing several of its vital organs. It was dying, but its eyes were still filled with as much bloodlust as Adrian’s.
In an inhumanly rapid movement, Adrian leapt off the rock and plunged a long, thick blade into the bear’s chest. The bear that had been thrashing with fury only a second ago moaned feebly, collapsed, and died.
Behind me, mournful howls filled the air, and I remembered the wolves that had been chasing us – or rather, I realized now, herding us back to the bottom of the mountain. Their eyes glistened with unmistakable sorrow and rage, and I swallowed nervously.
One of them locked its eyes on Dylan and approached him slowly, purposefully. A rumble tore through my chest and I protectively placed myself between the wolf and Dylan, but it looked straight through me. It had found its prey.
In the back of my mind, I registered that the second wolf was speeding toward Adrian. But, unlike with Dylan, I felt fairly confident in Adrian’s abilities to take care of himself.
“Shit,” Dylan cursed. The wolf was staring him down, and he, understandably, looked like he was on the verge of wetting his pants (if he hadn’t already – his clothes were already drenched, so I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish a difference between rain and an accident).
The fact that the wolf was ignoring me to go after Dylan infuriated me. Of the two of us, I was undeniably the bigger threat. I snarled at the dumb dog, but it still wouldn’t look at me. Instead, it sprang at Dylan. Without thinking, I tackled it by its fleshy underbelly and sent us tumbling precariously close to the edge of the cliff.<
br />
The wolf got to its feet faster than I did and drove me backwards. On the one hand, I had gotten what I wanted: its attention. On the other, it was going to push me off a cliff.
My hind feet balanced unstably on the mountain’s edge. From where I was, I could see Arisella struggling against the bear, Adrian darting around the wolf, Dylan crouched behind a rock. We were losing the upper hand. We would not all make it. I would not make it.
My head spun from a combination of blood loss and the reality of my impending death. I had no one to save me and nowhere to run. I briefly considered catapulting myself off the edge, just to get it over with. But that, I felt, would have been much too cowardly an end for me, a betrayal to everyone who had helped me get where I was. But, more importantly, the sooner I was gone, the sooner the wolf would move onto someone else.
Putting on an air of bravery, I stepped forward to challenge the beast with every ounce of strength I had left. The wolf almost seemed to smile at this, and it approached me with dignified confidence. The smug thing knew that I didn’t stand a chance.
As it lowered itself to the ground in preparation to pounce, the wolf scrutinized me. I felt its eyes pass over my tail, my legs, my back, and finally rest on my face – more precisely, my eyes. Something always had to be staring at my eyes.
A glimmer of recognition flashed through the wolf’s expression, and, in the blink of an eye, the animal was replaced by a short, wiry man in crimson robes. His dark hair skimmed his shoulders, identical to the color of the wolf’s fur, and his wide, hard-set jaw was covered in stubble to match.
“Stop!” His deep voice boomed over the pouring of the rain.
And, to my surprise, everyone stopped – the bear and other wolf at his direction, and Adrian and Arisella at the shock of the stranger’s presence.
Feral (The Irisbourn Chronicles Book 1) Page 26
