Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
THING
I return from the other realm, and my eyes open wide when I see how far the sun has fallen.
I miscalculated, losing myself among the numbing shadows in the netherworld. Whenever I plane-jump, I return exactly where my body was last.
There’s nothing to do but begin running. How far ahead of me is she? Knuckles to the ground, I sprint in the direction I told Ksenia to go.
Immediately I am swamped with regret, eyes looking between the falling sun and the ground beneath my knuckles and feet. I can travel three to four times faster than her, but instead of the hour or two I meant to leave her alone and a distance I could have covered in no time, it’s been—
I cannot think about how long it has been. Far, far longer than I ever intended to leave her alone.
In my selfish escape, I have left her vulnerable. And I know more than most the dangers of the near-arctic, especially in winter when predators become desperate with hunger.
I push myself even faster, flying across the ground, spitting snow in my wake.
The sun falls further, near to dropping behind the mountains now.
It will be fine, I try to tell myself. She is capable. She always keeps those precious knives of hers close, and from how she handled them with Remus, she knows how to use them.
But what good will they do from another lynx? It’ll rip her throat out before she gets in a single swipe. She is small. She smells of prey.
I sprint still. Nothing else matters except getting to her. If I fail her—
No. I will not think of it. I will not.
The white blurs around me. I’m ruthless as I push myself harder.
And then my worst fear—
A feminine scream cuts through the cold quiet.
By the time I finally catch up to her, one wolf is on top of her and the entire pack circles.
I let out a blood roar and extend all thirty claws as I leap to pull the wolf off her and scatter the rest. I land claws first.
Howls and snapping jaws meet me as I pierce the wolf’s pelt. Several wolves run, but others attack, leaping on me and biting at the heavy pack on my back. The one on top of Ksenia doesn’t move, and I reach down with my bottom pair of arms to wrench it off of her.
She is pale beneath it. Hannah’s pale pink coat is drenched with blood, and a large hunting knife sticks out of the wolf’s belly. My nose scents that the blood is the wolf’s, but it does nothing to calm my rage.
I’m furious at myself, but I will take it out on these predators for daring to attack who I was not here to protect.
With my upper arms, I peel the biting wolves off my back, spinning and hurling them into the forest. A few others make threatening yips at me, baring their teeth. But I roar back and stand to my full height with all my arms out.
These wolves might be hungry, but they know a bigger and more dangerous predator when they see one.
One after another, they retreat, streaks of gray bounding back into the woods as twilight falls.
Ksenia is still on her back in the snow, and we both breathe heavily. I reach out a hand to help her, but she jerks away, scrambling back and eventually getting to her feet herself.
“Where were you?” she shouts, bending over and yanking her knife from the wolf’s belly. She cleans it in the snow without looking at me.
“I should have been here,” I say. “I should not have left for so long.”
“No, you shouldn’t have,” she says angrily, and I see she is shaking. She’s cold. The sun has dropped below the horizon, and she is now covered in cold, sticky blood. Already, it freezes on her coat.
The temperature is dangerous for her frail human body, and if I do not work quickly, she will be in even more danger.
I sling the pack down from my back, dismayed when I see the wolves have torn it. What if they punctured the tent? But I cannot worry about that now.
Hurriedly, I pitch the small tent. It is meant for negative temperatures, but my chest clenches when I see that the wolves have indeed ripped the tent, too. But there are bags for sleeping, and I will zip her in both of them. The cold does not bother me.
Ksenia paces anxiously, back and forth, back and forth. She does not seem to be doing well, but I cannot even attend to her because I must get a fire started.
If I had been here like I was supposed to, all of this could have been seen to while there was still light in the sky. My head hangs as I race to the forest and tear branches from trees for kindling with all six of my arms, shaking heavy snow from them as I go.
I work quickly, but it is still too long before I have a fire crackling beside the tent with its terrible, flapping tear.
Ksenia doesn’t say a word as I work. But what is there to say?
I have failed her. She moves close to the fire, and the flames dance off the thick mask covering her face to protect her from the cold.
I worry about her exposed, fragile human eyes darting frantically as if she is having difficulty being still.
I race to gather more wood, trying to ignore the wolf’s blood on her coat as it melts in the heat of the fire and drips down her front onto the snow.
It takes another half hour before I have everything arranged—bags in the tent and a pot over the roaring fire with enough melted snow to begin stewing some wolf’s meat. The entire time, there is only silence from her.
I preferred it when she was yelling at me.
“I should have been here,” I say again if only to break the silence.
Her head jerks up at my words, and even though she has been sitting on a log I propped up by the fire for most of the last half hour, boots all but buried in the flames, she has not stopped shaking. “You keep saying that. But that’s not a real apology.”
I blink. I don’t think I’ve ever—My brothers and I don’t apologize.
It’s never been in our vocabulary. But she’s right. She deserves one. So I try out the strange words I know of even if I’ve never heard them said to me or ever said them myself. I take a seat in the snow across the fire from her. The cold does not bother me much through my tough hide.
“I am. . . sorry.”
Her eyes flash in my direction, even if they don’t quite land on me. “And you swear never to leave me like that again?”
I nod. “I give you my oath. I will not leave you again.”
“Where did you even go for so long?” she asks, and I can hear the pain of fear in her voice. She rocks back and forth on the log, gloved hands clutching her thighs. After cleaning the knife, she replaced it in the sheath in her pants pocket, and I’ve noticed one hand is always on the outline of it.
I swallow hard as I turn my eyes to the cooking stew. I don’t want to tell her that I abandoned her so that I could go walk amongst the dead in the nether realm. It would only invite more questions. . . But considering I almost consigned her to that dark land through my absence. . .
I sigh. What does my pride matter anymore? And doesn’t she at least deserve the truth about who she travels with?
“We did not tell you all that we ought to have,” I say, my breath puffing in the cold air. “My brothers and I, we are not just monstrous looking. We have been around for a long time. Long enough that stories have been told about us. We are named among your kind.”
She frowns, and her rocking slows some. At least I can distract her from the cold and discomfort with my tale. “What did they call you in the stories?”
I take a deep breath. “I do not want to scare you.”
She sits up straighter. “I’m not easily scared.”
Considering she tangled with a wolf today and came out the victor, I can attest to that.
“They called us the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.”
She is quiet for a moment, her eyes blinking repeatedly, the only sign of her surprise. “Which one are you?”
I suck in a quick breath. “Death.”
“What does that mean?” she asks. “Being death?”
She is taking this far more calmly than I expected. Her question sounds only curious, not fearful.
Still, I try to be careful as I answer. “My father created my brothers and I for a purpose. To be his army. For thousands of years, we were an unstoppable machine of devastation wherever we went. Alongside every great army, we were there.”
“So, if you were there during the battles, what did you do?”
I suck in a breath. “During the bloodiest of battles, humanity’s lusts to destroy one another were inflamed by my conjoined twin brothers War.
My other brothers Famine and Pestilence attacked their physical bodies.
I was the one who finished them off, carrying men by the thousands to the otherworld. ”
“What does that mean, carrying them to the otherworld?” she asks.
I do not want to continue answering her questions, but in her curiosity, I notice her clenching hands have relaxed.
So I expel a great exhale, the vapor puffing out in a cloud. “I am a plane-crosser. It was my job to take their souls to the realm where they rest for eternity in death.”
Her eyes widen slightly. “So there is an afterlife?”
I shrug. “A resting place, yes.”
“What’s it like? Like heaven?”
Again, I shrug. “It is the shadow realm. Peace and warmth for some. Darkness and endless wandering for others.”
“Like hell?” she asks, sounding alarmed.
Another shrug. “Not like some of your religions paint. There is no creature with little horns poking souls or great fire pits. Souls wander for eternity if they did not find peace during life in this plane. They carry that restlessness to the next realm.”
“What about people who do? People who were happy here?” she asks.
I pause, thinking. “It is not a place of happy or sad. There is peace and not peace, I think. Rest, and not rest. Some souls live in a spacious place in that realm but are not frantic or searching. They are content forever. Others. . . wander endlessly, searching for a peace they will never find.”
“And you’re like, what? The Grim Reaper who takes everybody on Earth there?”