Hunted(45)

What is it you’re looking for out there? Asenka had asked her.

“I hear it,” she whispered, mesmerized.

“Hold the sound in your mind,” the Beast murmured in her ear. “Imagine that it is not only a sound, but that it is a vision as well. Imagine that you will be able to see it when you open your eyes.”

She instantly saw colors playing against the backs of her eyelids, pulsing in time with the not-quite-music. Blue and white and green streaks of light shot across her vision. She did not dare breathe to speak, but nodded instead, slowly, as though moving too quickly would jar the vision free.

“Now,” the Beast whispered. “Open your eyes.”

Yeva did as she was told. All around were the trees, and the snow, and the underbrush, and the light in her mind’s eye was transposed against the scene. There was a focal point, a spot from which the light seemed to emanate, and Yeva stared at it. Suddenly a woman stood there, leaning against one of the trees. Her hair was long and raven black, and she was naked, as though the cold meant nothing to her. Yeva felt her face warming, suddenly all too aware of the rough wool on her own skin, and of the Beast’s presence behind her. The woman was beyond beautiful, and she stood running her long fingers through her hair like a maiden waiting for a lover. Then she paused, and turned her head. She looked straight at Yeva, and when their eyes met Yeva felt something inside her shatter.

She cried out and stepped back, falling against the warm bulk of the Beast. She fumbled with the bow at her shoulder, trying to grab for an arrow but getting only handfuls of the Beast’s fur. She gasped for breath, fear coursing through her veins, and looked back at the woman—and she was gone. There was only a pair of startled thrush that burst from the underbrush, crying and fluttering off into the distant wood.

Yeva stood, heart pounding. All at once she noticed how much she was leaning against the Beast, and that all her fear was for the strange woman in the wood, and that rather than terrifying, the Beast’s warm presence behind her was reassuring.

She had forgotten for an instant that the Beast was her enemy, that she existed now only to kill him. It had been only a few heartbeats, her thoughts flooded with the music of this strange other world, but she’d forgotten. Her stomach lurched, sickened, and she stumbled away from him.

When she turned, he was calm, watching her as though nothing strange had happened.

“What was that?” Yeva fumbled with her quiver strap to adjust it, disentangling her cloak from about her, trying to compose herself.

“Her name is Lamya,” the Beast said. “She and her sisters live in the next valley but they travel often, and Lamya prefers lying by the side of my river to shed her skins in the sun.”

“Shed her . . .” Yeva blinked, trying to understand. “Shed her skins?”

“She is a dragon.” The Beast’s brow furrowed. “Have you not seen a serpent’s shed skin before, in the wood?”

“But . . . but she was a woman, not a serpent at all.”

“She is that too.”

Yeva stared into the trees, trying to summon back that burst of color and music. She thought she heard a distant, rhythmic pulse, like the leathery flapping of great wings, but then it seemed nothing more than a far-off gust of wind. Yeva’s head spun. “Beast, what . . . what is this?”

The Beast sank down on his haunches. “This is my world.”

“The . . . the thing you need me for,” Yeva said. “You want me to hunt a creature from this world, your world.”

The Beast nodded.

“Lamya?”

“No, not Lamya.”

“But you won’t tell me what it is?”

“I cannot.”

Yeva let her breath out in a rush. “How can I hunt a thing if I don’t know what it is?”

The Beast was silent. Yeva had come to know him well enough to see from the set of his face that he was troubled. “I . . . I do not know,” he said finally. “But if you can see Lamya, then you will be able to see her, too.”

Her.

Yeva filed the tidbit away, tying it down in among the other scraps she’d collected. For now they were shreds of next to nothing, but perhaps, if she gathered enough of them, she’d be able to stitch them together into a tapestry with answers. For now, she would wait and listen for that far-off music. For maybe, somewhere in its rhythmic pulse, in the way it seeped into the empty spaces of her heart like warm honey into dry bread . . . maybe in that music she’d find the way to kill the Beast.

“Beast,” she said, making her voice steady, letting it warm.

“Yes?”

“You said that you didn’t hear music.” Yeva watched his face. “What do you hear?”

“For me,” the Beast replied, “it is like a heartbeat.”

Yeva fought a smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. “The heartbeat of the forest.”

The Beast gave himself a little shake, then tilted his head eastward. “That is enough for today. We will return now.”

As he turned to pass her, the Beast moved on top of the snow, his paws not even stirring the loose snow dusting the icy crust. Yeva’s boots crunched through, but he moved like wind, like spirit. He was showing her how he could travel through the forest without leaving a trace, and Yeva watched each step as if hypnotized.