Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1)(5)

She tries to talk, her mouth working soundlessly, but the damage is so bad that she can’t speak. Her eyes are big, wide and glazed over. She can’t be more than twelve years old. And, as I’m looking at that wound, my gut says she’s not going to make it to thirteen.

I go to her, crouch down so we’re closer to eye-to-eye. She looks a lot like me. The same dark hair, the same brown skin and broad angular face.

I still have the B?ker in my hand, but I keep it flat to the ground, out of sight.

“The monster got you,” I tell her quietly. I point to the wound. Her eyes roll, trying to see the bloody place on her neck. “Do you know what that means?”

A low painful sound is all she can manage.

Neizghání once told me that evil was a sickness. He told me he could see it on people, like a taint. That the bilagáanas had it wrong, and evil wasn’t just some spiritual concept or the deeds of a bad man. It was real, physical, more like an infectious disease. And you could catch evil if something evil got inside you. And once inside you, it could take you over. Make you do evil things. Destroy what you once cared for. Hurt people you wouldn’t have hurt otherwise, and eventually, kill. And if that happened, you ran the risk of becoming just another monster.

He told me I had some of that evil in me, that I’d been touched by what happened the night he had found me. And that it manifested as K’aahanáanii, and it made me strong, made me vicious when I needed to be. But it was a narrow road that I walked. I had to be vigilant not to let it grow, not to feed it unnecessarily. Because my fate wasn’t decided yet. I could be a monsterslayer, or I could be a monster.

I laughed it off when he told me this. Said it sounded like superstition, old people’s talk. Never mind that I was talking to an immortal. But the truth is, he scared the piss out of me. Because I knew why he was telling me this.

We were standing in a field of corpses at the time, his eyes on me, but as distant and unfathomable as the farthest corners of the universe. I was cleaning my B?ker on a dead man’s coat. But the curl of Neizghání’s lips and the pinch in his heavy brows told me clear enough what he was thinking.

He was gone the next morning. Why he, the Monsterslayer, didn’t just kill me if he thought I was becoming a monster, I’m not sure. Maybe those years as his apprentice meant something. Maybe he had second thoughts about it all in the end. But here, facing this girl who doesn’t look so different from me, it hits me like a punch in the gut.

I think of giving her the speech Neizghání gave me, but I’m not cruel, just honest. I keep it simple. “It means you’re infected.”

Her wet panting grows louder.

“Even if you survive, the infection is only going to get worse. You’ll have to fight it all your life. It will dig into you, take you over.” I swallow to clear my throat. “I met your family. Back in town. They seemed nice.” I rub at my nose with the back of my hand where it suddenly itches.

She sways where she sits, but her eyes stay on me.

“They would try to say the right things. Try to fix things. Fix you. But they won’t understand. What’s happened to you can’t be fixed.” It’s the most I’ve said to another human being in months. But now that I’m talking, it feels urgent that she know. That she understand why I have to do what I’m going to do.

“The infection,” I tell her. “It’ll make you . . . something else inside. Something that hurts people. Something you don’t want to be.” Something monstrous, I want to say. “Do you understand?”

She swallows and I can see the muscles of her throat working, slick and wet where they show through her ruined skin.

I nod, tighten the grip on my knife. I want to tell her I’m sorry, but I settle for “Close your eyes.”

Her eyes flutter shut. I brush her hair away from her face. Expose her neck.

I murmur “I’m sorry” after all. And I tell myself she understands that I’m saving her, even if it doesn’t seem like it.

I swing the B?ker.

Her head separates cleanly.

Her body wilts to the forest floor.

There’s a hard ball in my stomach that bends me over, makes me want to heave. I try to ignore the way my knife suddenly feels heavy and wrong in my hand. How the familiar grip grates like sandpaper against my palm. And I can’t help but think that if this was the right thing to do, why does it feel so fucking wrong?

I stagger back from her body. The ground is littered with the carnage I have wrought in only a handful of minutes. I make myself take it in. The smells, the blood, the headless bodies. I commit it to memory. It’s the stuff of nightmares.

The forest around me is quiet and whatever judgment it makes of me, merciful or monstrous, it keeps to itself. The bare kindling of the campfire sputters and hisses in the distance before it finally surrenders to the flames. Moments later the flames die too, leaving me with only darkness and ash.





Chapter 3


I don’t make it back to Lukachukai until well past midnight.

I break the monster’s makeshift camp down, briefly rekindling the fire to burn anything that can’t be salvaged for supplies, and collect the two heads into separate canvas bags. I split open one of my shotgun shells, pour a little corn pollen into my hand, and dust it over both bodies with a quick prayer. Not that I’m much for praying, but Grandpa Tah tells me that the pollen binds the flesh to the earth. I think removing the head is pretty effective too, but who am I to argue with a medicine man?