Hunted(21)

Blood.





BEAST


Blood everywhere. It burns us, horrifies us, sets us ablaze. We hunger. We roar. We want to revel in it, and we want to run. We pace across the blood-soaked snow, our heart thrumming in our ears.

But something comes. We pull back and hide our scent, waiting. Another hunter—so like the first, but younger, smaller. We slink closer through the thick trees to look.

It is female. We stop abruptly, sniffing again. Her scent is unmistakable. A mate? No. She is young and he was old.

Offspring.

Perhaps our plan is not lost. We watch her from our hidden place, breathing her smell and listening to the silence of her steps. She moves like an animal in a woman’s body.

She moves like beauty.





FIVE


YEVA DROPPED INTO A hunter’s stance. Where there was blood there would be scavengers—and wolves fed as a pack. And while wolves would ordinarily flee a human’s presence, if they felt their kill was being threatened, they might try to defend it. With her every sense tuned, she crept forward, feet feeling for any hollows or obstacles that might trip her up.

Whatever had been killed here was much larger than a rabbit or a fox. Blood splashed the area, painting the trees and the snow red in the half-light. The falling snow had covered large portions of it—she estimated that the blood had been spilled only hours before.

Had her father been here? Had he encountered the Beast of his stories, and killed it? Yeva dropped to one knee to touch a finger to the ground. The blood was frozen. Perhaps it had been longer than she’d guessed. A shadowy irregularity caught her eye a few steps away, and she reached down and cleared the snow from the object.

It was her father’s ax.

Yeva stared at the weapon, her mind refusing to process what it was seeing. A sense of wrongness built up in her gut. Why would he have abandoned it? Its handle was specially-carved, shiny-smooth from use, and fitted to his hand. Had he dropped it after killing the Beast?

And then Yeva saw what the sense of wrongness was trying to tell her.

The blade of the ax was clean, unbloodied. It had not shed the blood staining the ground.

Some distance beyond, a familiar shape dragged her forward—she uncovered his bow, then a few feet farther she found his pack, the leather torn and the contents strewn about beneath the snow.

With shaking hands she knelt over the next snow-covered hump, brushing the snow aside. She glimpsed something like raw meat, the white of bone glinting in the dim light.

A moan tore itself from her throat as she hurled herself away from the thing, which was too small to be a whole body. She fell onto her hands and knees, gasping for breath, staring blindly at the red snow before her eyes. There was only the rushing in her ears and the agony in her chest as her lungs fought for air.

She realized she was clutching his bow, its string pressed against her cheek, its long curves digging into her chest. Her numb arms refused to let it go. Her body shook, nausea clawing its way up from her belly.

A smell made its way into her awareness and her mind seized on it, grasping for anything with which to distract itself. This scent wasn’t blood, but something wilder, richer. Musky, but not unpleasant. Yeva opened her eyes, staring through the gloom of the forest. Her blood surged through her, a wild flood of fury.

The bow was still in her hand. She gripped it hard enough for her knuckles to shine white as bone.

All at once an immense shadow moved, and Yeva was stunned into momentary inaction. She had been searching for a creature the size of a wolf, but it was as though an entire section of the forest had suddenly thrown itself backward through the clearing.

Without further pause she swung her father’s bow around and drew it in one smooth movement. The arrow flew straight and true. There was a bone-shaking roar of fury and pain that threw her to the ground with its intensity, and then the shadowy giant bounded off through the wood.

She lay there stunned, brain trying to understand what it had seen. No natural animal could have made that sound or loomed so huge. It wasn’t until the smell of her father’s blood reminded her of where she was that she shook her head to clear it.

Yeva strapped her father’s ax to her back, then lurched to her feet and took off after the Beast. She left her own bow behind, gripping her father’s bow white knuckled, no space left for rational thought. There was only the hunt, the need to kill, to spray the creature’s blood across the snow. The blizzard had stopped, and the sun was setting behind its concealing layer of clouds. The forest grew darker by the second, but she didn’t care. The Beast who had slain her father was here. And she was going to destroy it.

Just there—a spatter of fresh blood some distance from where she stood. Too fresh to have belonged to her father. Droplets led from the spot, and a trough in the snow told of something large moving away.

She broke into a long, smooth run, her eyes on the ground, intent on the trail. Even if the tracks of its great body dragging through the snow weren’t a clear path, she would have been able to track its scent. Its blood was a black, wild tang of metal in the back of her throat. Were it a smaller creature she would’ve guessed it to be an arterial hit, but she had seen the size of the Beast as it loomed up, before she pulled the trigger. For an animal so huge, the quantities of blood spattering the ground would not be fatal. If she was lucky, she’d punctured a lung, and the Beast would be slowly suffocating. If she could track it far enough, she’d be able to kill it.