Hunted(22)

Her father had taught her this stride, steady and low to the ground, covering distances smoothly and quickly and quietly. She raced along behind the Beast. The smell of it grew stronger with each step as she closed the gap between them.

All was silent save for the occasional dull thud of snow sliding from the pine boughs. With the storm now passed, the forest was still and dry and aching with the weight of winter. There were no other animals, only the Beast and, closing on its heels, its hunter.

The dusk leached the color from the world, and the spots of blood on the snow were a rich gray. Not long now.

Up ahead she heard a sound. Something coughed. Wet, labored breathing rippled through the air. Yeva’s pulse beat fiercely in her temples. Her father’s bow held at the ready in her right hand, she reached up with her left to finger the handle of her father’s ax. The weight of it was a comfort.

A clearing opened up ahead of her. The gloom of the forest lightened to a treacherous twilight, revealing the massive shadow slumped in its center. The rise and fall of it was uneven. It heaved labored, rattling breaths that caught and gasped on the exhale. Great clouds of condensation rose, catching the mix of moonrise and sunset.

She crept forward, searching under the snow with the tip of her boot until she found a stick. She stepped on it smartly, sending a sharp crack into the air, no quieter for its muffling white blanket.

The lump of shadow twitched, its breath wheezing. It extended a forepaw and tried to rise, only to collapse to the snow again, where it lay still but for its heaving breath and quivering fur.

Yeva could wait for it to die, for the air and the blood to run out. But she could not bear to wait, and that was too gentle a death—a gradual slowing of the body that ended in sleep. That death was too kind for this monster. The lust was rising in her, the wild hiss of revenge bubbling up to replace the hunter’s cold reason.

She wanted to feel the crunch of its skull through the handle of the ax, see its life spill onto the snow in a steaming torrent. She wanted to see the face of the Beast that killed her father in the moment it understood it had lost. She wanted to watch it die.

Slinging her father’s bow over her shoulder, she reached up to free her ax from its strap, gaze intent, every step pillow-soft in the powder. As she drew nearer she saw that it was not a monstrous bear, as she had thought, but something different and strange. She decided she would sever its spinal cord and take its head, which had the delicate elegance of a wolf’s with the bone-crushing jaw muscles of a wolverine’s. This trophy she would not sell. This one was hers.

She shifted her grip on her ax, careful to stay back out of range of its claws, which now dug into the snow, grasping for salvation.

Closer still, and she could see its eyes in the gloom. It rolled them at her, baleful, pleading, animal. The bloodlust swelled.

How had her father ever given up this life? In her mind’s eye a tapestry unfurled, the life she could have led as her father’s daughter, side by side with him. If only he had brought her on his final hunt. If only he had then not found this Beast on his own. If only.

The Beast growled and the tapestry vanished like the ghost of its breath in the air. The growl turned to a whine, and she guessed her earlier shot had indeed punctured its lung. It tried once more to rise, but buckled again with a thump, its fur dusted white with snow. Its eyes rolled shut, mouth hanging open as it gasped and bled.

She was close enough now that the force of its breath stirred the fur lining her hood. The air smelled of blood and damp, and wild musk. She inhaled, nostrils flaring.

“For you, Daddy,” she whispered, lifting her ax.

Her only warning was the glitter of its eyes as they opened. Too late she saw that the Beast’s hind legs were crouched beneath its bulk, muscles tense and ready. Too late she saw the corpses of several rabbits, decapitated and cooling in the fresh blood that led her to the clearing. Too late she realized how close to the Beast she was standing.

The Beast lunged at her, knocking her ax aside with a blow that numbed her from the shoulder down, arm falling uselessly to her side. The sound of its roar was the sound of the forest, the vibrations shaking snow from every branch and flinging it to the ground in a perverse echo of the winter storm that had brought it. The impact of the Beast’s body hitting hers sent her head snapping forward out of its concealing hood, as it lifted her from her feet.

Her last thought, strangely rational as their bodies sailed through the air, was: This is no Beast, to lay such a trap for me. This is a hunter.

And then its body crushed hers into the ground and it was to the dull snap of her bones breaking that she lost consciousness.

Yeva woke in utter darkness. The air was heavy with the sense of earth pressing in on her. She blinked several times, convincing herself that her eyes were working—there was no difference between having them open or closed.

She was lying on her back, spread-eagled on stone. Staving off the panic that she’d gone blind, she attempted to sit up. Shooting pain pierced through her right side, causing her to gasp aloud. She tried to clap her hands to the spot, but only her right arm moved. The left twitched with the clanking sound of metal, a frigid cuff cutting into her wrist.

Yeva slowly took inventory of the rest of her body. With careful fingertips she found not one but three ribs that made her eyes water when touched. She could move her legs, bend her spine—with great pain in her side—and her neck. Her head ached, and when she moved it she felt an agonizing tender spot at its back. Whoever had put her here had dropped her without care. She must have hit her head on the stone floor. She could smell blood in the air, and wondered if it was hers.