27. Hunting the Hunters
Chapter 27
Hunting the Hunters
10 th Day of the Blood Moon
Níthianelle – Winter, Year 3081 After Doom
The snapping of twigs and rustle of leaves woke Ella. She shifted in place, white mist drifting from the thick branch beneath her. Strands of gossamer light passed through the canopy overhead, pale and sickly. There was no day or night in Níthianelle, only this eternal ghostly twilight.
Another snapping sound caused her to lean over the edge of the branch upon which she was perched, twenty or so feet up the trunk of the tree.
Below, the branches and leaves of the brush moved back and forth lazily in the wind, leaving trails of white mist behind them. A squirrel, leaking the same ethereal glow, scampered through the foliage, bounding over fallen branches and rocks. Ella leaned back, closing her eyes for a moment. Assuming sleep worked in Níthianelle as it did in the waking world, it had been five days since Tamzin had found her. They were almost to the Darkwood.
Since coming across the Bjorna Angan and that wraith, Tamzin had pushed them both to an exhausting pace. They’d not come across another of the Bjorna, but now Ella saw the wraiths everywhere. The vast majority were not like the one that had attacked her. They were not ‘hungry’, as Tamzin had put it. They were simply lost, wandering endlessly, their minds gone. There was something sadder about that.
A short time passed with more rustling below, creatures shifting in the undergrowth, birds flapping their wings and chorusing their songs, until voices broke the serenity.
“Anything?” The voice belonged to a man – young and tired. He was twenty feet away, maybe thirty. His heart galloped like a rabbit’s and his sweat smelled stale and sharp. That was something new Ella had learned about this place: people still sweated. At first, the sound of the man’s heart unsettled her. Then she felt the wolf prowling in the back of her mind, a low rumble in its throat.
“The trail is hard to read. But they passed through here.” The second voice was much closer, only a few feet away. It was older, harder. His pulse was slow despite his heavy breaths. The wolf within her was wary of this one.
“Who do you think found the Fragment?”
“It matters little. It was not our people.”
“But what if it was the Bjorna? What if?—”
“Calm yourself, eyas. Watch and listen. Attune your senses.”
The younger voice didn’t speak, but Ella could sense the change in his smell. He reeked of anger, of frustration. The wolf in her blood stood tall, hackles rising. It urged her to leap from the branch, to take the elder first, then stalk the cub. They were hunting her. She needed to hunt them back.
No. Tamzin told her to run if something came for her. There were too many things she didn’t know about this place. Too many ways something could go wrong. If she stayed where she was and didn’t make a sound, they would pass, she was sure of it. She leaned back and pushed her foot into the branch, trying to press herself tighter against the trunk. The branch gave the slightest groan in response, a near inaudible rustle of its leaves.
“You see, eyas. Patience is a virtue.”
Ella’s hackles stood on end, and she leaned over the branch to see a grey-haired man staring up at her from the base of a nearby tree.
She snapped back, pressing herself against the tree’s trunk, her pulse pounding.
Wingbeats thumped on the wind. A hawk perched on the branch across from her, its head tilting side to side, its eyes fixed on Ella. The bird’s crest was a rusty orange, its wings striped black and white. It stared at her for a moment, then unleashed a sharp shriek that rose and fell.
Ella pushed herself back as far as she could without falling, but the creature leapt from its branch and swooped towards her, its talons extended, white light streaming in its wake.
The wolf within her took over, and Ella swung her hand. Her fingernails lengthened and hardened, claws ripping through the hawk’s wing and into its chest, hollow bones cracking.
The strike tore the hawk apart and it smacked against a branch, limp, then fell like a stone, feathers floating in its wake. A howl came from below.
But as the hawk fell, Ella lost her balance and slipped from her perch. She scrambled, her claws raking furrows in the branch’s bark. For a moment, she thought it would hold, but then her claws ripped through and she was falling.
A thick branch knocked the air from her lungs. She spun, bright light and shadows swirling across her vision. She slammed into another branch, then hit the ground. Hard.
Ella’s head spun, stars flitting across her eyes as she lay on her back, gasping for air. Her lungs burned, and her entire body throbbed. She could barely move, but the wolf within howled, demanding she rise.
She hauled herself upright, ignoring her body’s screams. Voices floated, dull and faint.
“Kadal, no!”
Something slammed into Ella’s chest and sent her bouncing back off the hard-packed ground. Fingers wrapped around her shirt, pulling tight, then someone knelt over her.
“You killed him.” Ella’s vision was still blurred, but the face above her was all angles, sharp and sleek. Vibrant amber eyes shone through the haze. “I will make this slow.”
Ella let the wolf loose. The familiar red mist tinted her vision, and before she could think, her claws were buried in the neck of the man who knelt over her.
She could feel the vibrations of his attempted scream, but all that came out was a gurgle, luminous white blood spitting from his lips. She dragged him closer, claws tearing skin, then opened her jaws and ripped out his throat, spitting a hunk of flesh into the dirt.
The man dropped in a heap at Ella’s side, white blood spilling from the wound.
She looked again into the man’s eyes, her head no longer spinning. It was the younger of the two. More a child than a man. Fourteen summers at most. Her stomach lurched but she held herself together. She didn’t have the time to dwell. She could feel the older man’s heart, the pulse steadily rising, growing louder.
Ella crawled backwards, shaking the stars from her eyes. The older man just stood there, staring at the boy’s body. He didn’t speak, didn’t move an inch, but Ella could smell the bitter blend of sorrow and rage wafting from him.
She stumbled to her feet, grabbing purchase on a rough tree trunk. Her head spun again at her sudden change in orientation, her stomach turning. With each passing moment, more aches and pains set into her bones as the rush from her fall faded.
Something shifted in the air, a change in the smell.
The older man’s eyes snapped to Ella, his pupils widening, head cocking to the side. Ella’s hackles stood on end and signalled only one instinct: run .
Ella bolted through the brush, half-sprinting, half-staggering, her legs disobeying like petulant children, still shaken from the fall. She clambered over fallen trees and tore through dense foliage, never looking down, her instincts carrying her.
The wolf was in control.
She didn’t have to look back to know the man was in chase. She could hear his every movement, feel his fury. At any other time, she would have turned and fought, but the wolf refused. Whoever this man was, he had seen Ella tear that boy to pieces and still chased her like a predator would a fleeing doe. Something about his smell told her he was far more dangerous than she was.
A shriek erupted to Ella’s left. She twisted just in time to avoid the hawk that swooped past her, talons readied. The creature spun in the air and whirled off between two trees. Before Ella could collect herself, the hawk dropped from above, screeching.
She wasn’t quick enough. The bird’s talons wrapped around her forearm and sank into flesh. She screamed and went tumbling, bouncing off the earth and rolling to a stop with a crack .
The hawk’s talons squeezed, sharp as razors, and Ella screamed again. The creature tore through Ella’s shirt with its beak, ripping a strip of flesh from her shoulder. Ella lashed out with her free arm, sinking her claws into the bird and squeezing with every drop of strength she had. Bones snapped, but the bird’s talons continued to carve into her arm.
The red mist consumed Ella, and she slammed the hawk against a tree trunk, her claws crushing its hollow frame, ghostly white mist streaming into the air. Again and again, she smashed until the bird was nothing more than shattered bone and white-bloodied feathers.
Ella rolled onto her back, her entire body throbbing, silvery-white blood flowing from the wounds in her forearm and shoulder. She crawled backwards on her elbows, but the older man was atop her in seconds.
He loomed over her, his head cocked to the side, three more hawks perched on branches above him. The man’s hair was long and grey, his body lean, his skin marked by time. His eyes were an unnatural yellow, his pupils huge and black as coals. Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose as he let out a slow breath. “Fenryr then… You dogs never seem to die easy.”
“Who…” Ella swallowed, trying to get some spit in her dry mouth. “Who are you?”
“Doesn’t matter, girl. Dead people have no use for knowledge.”
“I don’t understand.” Ella grimaced, wrapping her fingers around the pumping wound. “Why?”
The man snorted, a bead of sweat dripping from his nose and onto Ella’s neck. He lifted his foot, then stomped on Ella’s leg. She cried out, her flesh tearing open as though sliced by knives.
Ella lunged forwards desperately. She would not just lie down and wait for death. She swung her right hand at the man’s leg, but he crunched his fist into her face and her head bounced backwards, her vision blurring and eyelids drooping.
“Why do we do anything, girl?” The man spoke with a calm, level tone as though this were just another day, just another life he would snuff.
Ella’s head flopped to the left in a daze, and she saw he wore no shoes. The skin on his bare feet blended from human flesh to wrinkled and leathered, taking on a yellowish hue. His toes were bent and curled, long black talons sinking into the earth.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t take any pleasure in this.” Through drooping lids, her head ringing, Ella saw the man bend over and lift a large rock into his arms. “War is war.”
“Please,” Ella managed to mutter, the taste of blood on her tongue. “You don’t have to.”
“I do…” The man’s tone shifted, rising higher. His pulse quickened, the slightest tinge of fear in his scent.
Ella flinched at the sound of the rock hitting the ground a few feet away. It was then she noticed the other scent in the air, heard the other heartbeat.
Something about the smell was familiar, yet she couldn’t put her finger on it.
A low growl was followed by snapping branches, rustling leaves, and thumping feet. Then there was silence as Ella slipped in and out of consciousness, her head spinning.
She didn’t know how long she lay there in the dirt before she could drag herself over to a tree trunk. White blood still oozed from the deep gashes on her left arm, her leg much the same. The strip the hawk had torn from her shoulder throbbed, her head thumped, and her nose felt as though it had been broken for a third time. It would have been easier for her to list which parts of her body weren’t in pain than the other way around.
She grunted, straightening her back against the tree trunk and lifting herself more upright, then proceeded to tear strips from her shirt with a claw to bandage her wounds. There were too many questions to which she had no answers: could wounds become infected in Níthianelle? Would blood loss kill here? Were the plants and flowers here the same as the living world? Did they have the same healing properties? Would her wounds in this world take shape in the other?
The thought of that last one sent a shiver down her spine. She pushed it into a dark corner of her mind and sealed it off. Thinking on it would do her no good. Her mam had always taught her to focus on the things she could control instead of dwelling on the things she couldn’t.
“Stop the bleeding. Fix the wounds you can. Deal with everything else as it comes.” Ella remembered her mother saying those words after Joran Brock had fallen from a horse and broken his femur. Everyone had said it was a miracle Joran had even survived, let alone that he’d walked again. “If you’re too busy worrying about something that might happen, you’re more likely to miss something that is happening. Fear and panic, Ella, those are the real killers.”
Ella grunted as she pulled a strip of linen tight around the wounds on her arm, white blood flowing.
She sat there for what felt like an hour, but which could have been either half or double that time, until a familiar scent touched the air, followed by a familiar voice.
“I told you to run.” Tamzin stepped from the shadow-obscured forest, her vibrant blue eyes glistening in the white light, her pupils thinned to slits.
“I did run. It didn’t work.”
“Well, you’re alive.” Tamzin knelt before Ella, examining her make-shift bandages.
“No thanks to you.”
“You’re a big girl. You don’t need me here to hold your hand. Can you walk?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Let’s find out.” Tamzin wrapped an arm around Ella’s back and hauled her to her feet, receiving many a grunt and groan for her efforts.
A pain jolted through Ella’s calf when she put weight on her left foot.
“That’ll do,” Tamzin said, standing back and watching Ella. “Wounds heal faster here, so long as they aren’t mortal. If we start moving now, you’ll be right in a few hours.”
“Infection?”
Tamzin shook her head. She turned around, leaving Ella to lean against a nearby tree. The woman knelt by talon marks in the ground, noting the white blood clinging to the soil. She lifted her head. “The other one?”
“I’m not sure. I couldn’t see… I thought he was going to kill me, but then something else came and chased him off, I think. How did you know there were two?”
“Well,” Tamzin said, rubbing the earth, “besides the imprint of talons in the soil, the one I found in a pool of his own blood back there was too young. Vethnir would never send an eyas out on a hunt alone. Particularly not on a hunt for a Fragment. They’d have known there’d be others prowling.”
“An eyas? The older man said that. What does it mean?”
Tamzin rose. “It’s what Clan Vethnir names their young. The unfledged nestlings.”
“Vethnir,” Ella repeated. “The hawk.”
“Hmm.”
“Why try to kill me? They don’t even know who I am. What would that gain for them?”
“It’s not what they would gain but what others would lose. Like I said, our people are broken into many factions. Some are simply fighting to survive, others cling to the old ways, and some seek a better future. The likelihood is they were searching to see if you were a child of Vethnir. When they saw you weren’t, well…”
“But we’re not the same bloodline and you haven’t tried to kill me. Why?”
“Doesn’t mean I haven’t wanted to.” Tamzin smiled. “Amatkai wants to build a future where we stand together. Vethnir does not.” Tamzin rested a hand on Ella’s shoulder. “Don’t dwell on the boy. Far younger souls have died in this war, and younger still will continue to do so. Vethnir hunters are no easy prey no matter their age. Come. We must make good pace today. There are not many things that would scare away a Vethnir hunter, and I didn’t find any bodies on my way here. Which means the hunter and whatever scared him off are likely both still out here.”