Chapter 13
“The Dracae are a sort of water-spirits who inveigle women and children into the recesses which they inhabit, beneath lakes and rivers, by floating past them, on the surface of the water, in the shape of gold rings or cups.”
Too few hours later, I jolt awake before the sun with another insistent urge, this time to find my father.
The feeling pressing into me is of biting insects ransacking my skin, swarming through me like fire.
I’ve heard Father talk about the Hunter’s urges, but this is new to me.
The feeling, like the one last night, ought not be mine.
It’s a magic tied to the Hunter, and I am not him.
My injuries ache.
My microscopes beckon.
Still, the need to find my father feels increasingly urgent, so I leave the town house and hire a horse before dawn has broken. I am ready to ride with the rising of the sun. I cannot go without telling my family, lest they think I have been grievously injured on patrol.
I pause at the town house and enter to stand at the dining table where Mother and Rylan are seated. The urge to ride fills me, but I must be sure they also know to be cautious.
“I need to go to the manor. You will stay here.” I look at my sister and add, “Do not go out of doors at night while I am away. Guard Mother.”
Rylan nods.
Mother sips her tea in silence. The cup’s clink as she lowers it to the saucer is the only hint that she is unsettled by my remarks. “You sound like your father just now.”
“He is in peril. I can think of no other reason I would feel this need to rush to him,” I confess. “I swear I will—”
“No vows, child.” Mother eyes me warily. “Hunters are bound by their vows.”
I nod, hearing the grief and acceptance in her words. “I must go.”
Rylan’s chair clatters as she stands to embrace me. “Be safe, please.”
My arms tighten around her, but I cannot promise safety.
I am out of doors and mounted within moments, and in the next few hours, I race toward home.
I know not what’s happening, but the urge inside me feels not dissimilar from the need to breathe or eat.
I must heed it. My very bones and marrow demand it, and I am increasingly powerless to resist. I’ve never felt such a thing, and I fear the import of it.
The last time I traversed Brimmond Wood alone, I was knocked to the ground and injured. I feel the weight of that fear bundling into my worry for Father as I ride, and it adds a heaviness to the shadows around me that is embarrassing for a Hunter to carry.
Still I ride.
The path from the city takes me first toward Maudite Castle, and I think idly that the dowager duchess is home with only guards and servants.
She was there in her grief as I cavorted with her daughter.
Guilt blossoms, although I know well that Isabeau was not in Regina Centrum to see me.
There is a monster too near Maudite Castle, though, and that worry slides into the mass of weight I am collecting.
Still I ride.
I reach the darkened heart of the forest where my father burned Hugh’s corpse. Nothing amiss stands out, aside from a pall of silence in the forest, the sort of silence that means the wildlife has fled from an area.
I slow and call out, “Father?”
My borrowed horse lifts her feet in discomfort.
Unlike the horses in our stable, this one is apparently unaccustomed to death or perhaps just feels the uneasy pressure that hovers in the air here.
The gateway to the land of monsters is nearby, and I wonder—not for the first or twenty-first time—why we do not have a contingent of guards stationed right here.
Typically, I would think about the changes I intend to make, including that one, but in this instant, I am certain my father is injured.
Thinking about a future that might come too soon does not feel proper.
“Father?” I repeat, letting instinct guide my path now.
For all that I have my complaints about his parenting, I know that my father and I are inextricably bound. There is a line that runs from me to him to his father to his, and so on. Right now, that line is like a glowing thread pulsing between leaf and moss.
I rush toward him, urged by the bond tying us together.
“Daughter.” He looks up at me with one unbloodied eye. The other eye is gone, lost in a gash across his face. “Been waiting.”
My stomach twists at the sight of him. Claw marks rake over his chest and stomach. Something wet slips out of a wound that is not merely blood. His hand presses there, holding things inside where they ought to be.
“How long were you here?”
“Before middle of night.”
My every muscle tightens. The urge last night . . . Quickly I fill him in on my midnight encounter. “It attacked you and then came to the city?”
“Wants to end the Hunter line,” he says. “Said so.”
“That won’t happen,” I swear. Irate at the thought, I stare at the injuries on my father. I am lucky to be alive. I know it. “Let’s get you to help.”
“No need. I knew you would come.” He smiles at me, proud in a rare way, but it, too, is a grisly sight.
I’m on the ground kneeling there in my father’s blood as he reaches out to take my hand. In the moment, I think he wants comfort, but I realize that he’s pressing a swath of fur into my palm.
“Find the beast. Beast spoke . . .” His words sound haunted, but perhaps that’s simply from the pain.
I stare at the thick scrub and shadowed wood, thinking that it certainly had time to return here. If it has, I can’t see it. My hand goes to my hilt. “Have you seen it today?”
“Left after it killed me and hasn’t returned.” Father makes a noise that’s either a groan or a laugh. I can’t tell which, and I’m not sure I want to know.
“Hush. You’re hurt, not dead, merely—”
“Don’t be daft, child,” he bites out in a voice that sounds like unoiled gears. “Same creature. Killed the others. Killed me.”
“This is its fur?” I ask, trying to recall whether it matches the beast that attacked me in the wee hours. “The beast?”
He nods slightly. “Kill it. You must kill it.”
“I will. Let me get you to Maria now. She can stitch you up. I know she has plenty of magic in stock.” I eye several saplings I could fell and fashion into a litter.
The ride would be jarring, though. I don’t see a better option.
I cannot leave him here defenseless, and I have no idea how to help this sort of injury.
“I felt you, like you were calling for me.”
“Dying now.” He swallows hard. “Magic tried to heal me. Can’t. So it summoned you. Passing the Hunter’s magic.”
“Let me give you water.” I hurry to fetch a drinking pouch from my bags. I have more questions than I know how to ask. The only ones that matter are practical now. “What is it? What did this?”
“New. Not known.”
That’s far from comforting. My father is one of the longest surviving Hunters, and he’s dying.
What chance do I have against such a beast?
An unfamiliar faery? I feel useless. There’s nothing I can do to make this easier on him.
He’s been viciously attacked. I cannot fathom the pain he’s in right now.
He pulls in a visibly painful inhalation and says, “You can do this, Gabrielle.”
“I’m not ready. I’m not as strong as you or . . .”
“Neither was I.” He blinks tears of either pain or regret or fear. I don’t know, and I cannot ask. Another deep breath and he adds, “Tell your mother she was my last thought.”
“I will.”
He meets my eyes and orders, “Samples. Fire. Hunt.”
And then my father dies. He ordered me to take samples. The thought turns my stomach. He was my father. How am I to do this?
At first, I sit silently alongside his body. I have always known that he, as with all Hunters, would die in a battle or as the result of one. I had assumed wrongly that I would not bear witness to his end, that he’d be on a hunt, and I’d just . . . know. He said I’d feel it when he died.
Is this what he meant? That I’d be summoned? I wish he’d warned me if so.
There is little comfort in knowing that I shared his last minutes. The image of him in this heinous state will plague my dreams. Of that, I am certain. The invincible man that he has always seemed held his guts inside his body as he died in the dirt.
I stare into the trees as I force back every daughterly instinct I have.
I am not a daughter, not a noble, not a woman.
In this time and place, I am only the Hunter, and I need the evidence that was hopefully left behind on his body.
He would have tried to gather it, shoved a hand in the beast’s mouth or .
. . I look at the handful of fur and smile. He cut off a bit of hide.
Concentrating on what he would want me to do in this moment, what he trained me to do, I gather swabs from my own supplies and collect any potential saliva from his cuts.
No green blood lingers on his clothing or on the soil, telling me that my own father—the Hunter—was unable to stand against this beast.
My eyes burn as I blink back the tears that want to escape. I draw in a deep breath, then another, then a third. Never mind the stench of death, I must not contaminate my samples with salty tears.
Salt purifies, his voice echoes in my mind. Never cry on the dead until you collect all evidence.
No tears fall, although a choked noise slips from my lips.
I cut away samples from each wound. This takes so long that my muscles cramp oddly. I stretch out my sides and roll my shoulders. The pain only increases, but I’m not sure why. I haven’t ridden that hard.
By the time I’ve collected everything, emptied his pockets of any notes or clues to read later, and removed his jewelry and any hidden weapons, there is no avoiding what comes next. I do pause as I finally slide his sword from under his arm and remove his blood-ruined scabbard.
His sword gives me hope. I set it aside, blade resting away from where the fire will be. There on the blade’s edges are hardening green crystals. Despite my gory task, I smile. “Took a bite out of the thing, didn’t you?”