Chapter 5
Dakota saw me to the river where I rinsed my hands clean of blood, a few flecks was all, but still it was smarter to not to be a walking dinner bell for predators.
“Maybe…we’ll meet again,” Dakota said. “I hope that is the case, Mallory.”
I rubbed my hands in a patch of moss, then stood and held one out to him. He clasped my arm, his fingers tightening around my wrist. “Be safe, Dakota. Lead these people until Red is well, don’t let anyone else take the reins.”
Voices behind us, and I turned away, following the creek up stream.
Using the water as a guide, I picked up a jog that wasn’t too fast. Enough to put strain on my ribs, though they were not nearly as sore as they had been when I’d been dragged out of the Rift.
As I wove my way through the forest, slipping through the bush and under branches, making sure that I didn’t stumble over downed logs, my mind flicked back and forth. The only memories I had were of today.
Waking in the Rift, climbing, being pulled out.
Fighting the riftwolf. Shooting the karruk.
Killing Aron.
A lot of fucking deaths for someone who is supposedly a baker.
With the adrenaline and a familiar feeling to the pace I’d set, I moved easily, finding a rhythm with the world around me, even with the weight of my pack and weapons. Sweating, sure, but not as fatigued as I should have been if this wasn’t familiar to me.
I knew that a run through unknown territory in the middle of the night was stupid but perhaps the bigger stupidity was that I was basically following the sorrowbird that had made my life difficult to begin with—the one who’d set suspicion on me before I’d even done a thing to draw it myself.
The large bird would fly ahead and watch from a tree branch, wait for me, then fly again, occasionally dropping back to pull at my hair as if I were going too slow for his taste.
“Sorrow, you know you got me kicked out?” Was that true? No, but he’d started a chain of events that hadn’t helped me.
“F-caw-f.” He screeched.
I blinked and stumbled to a stop. Did that bird just tell me to… “You fuck off!”
He cackled, his laugh echoing around us, the only noise in the night. Gods, he was going to get me killed. Why was I following him? Maybe because he hadn’t left me to the riftwolves. Because his warnings had been more than timely. He was in his own way trying to keep me alive.
But that wasn’t the only reason. Because his eyes were black shot with silver. The same as the handles of my new weapons, the ring on my finger even, and the coincidence was not lost on me, in a world where things so often happened for a reason—a distant truth that spoke softly to me.
There had been a pull to the weapons and even to the stupid bird—so I ran after him, trusting my instincts, just as I’d trusted them to get me out of the Rift, as I’d trusted them with the hybrid, and Aron.
The night waned as I ran, and as the morning drew near, I finally slowed and let myself feel my own body. Sweat slicked me head to toe, my muscles were beyond fatigued, though my ribs were so close to being good I wondered if I had imagined the injury. “Sorrow, come back. I’ve gotta rest.”
Yes, I named the stupid bird. He circled back to me, swooped by my head and tugged at my hair, turning me to the left.
In the dim light I would have missed it if not for his directions.
An old relic from the past stared up at me where it had been half eaten by the earth, the yellow and black paint, sunk deep over its tires, windows that had been mostly blown out.
School Bus written in faded paint across the front.
It would do for a shelter for a few hours’ sleep.
Fresh sweat popped up over my face and my adrenaline spiked…as a new fear slammed into me.
I’d woken up in this place, in a hole in the ground, with no memory of the past. What would happen if I fell asleep and woke up without my mind again? Would I have to start over and over and over?
Shaking, I went to my knees, recognizing that this fear was warranted given my circumstances, but I didn’t know how to work around it. This was not the fear of dying, or of a monster, or a fight.
All the training in the world, buried in my body couldn’t have prepared me for this—an unknown within my own mind.
What I did know, was that if I didn’t get control of it, the fear would get me killed as surely as a lack of training.
As the fear raged through me like a wildfire, I couldn’t move, couldn’t think past the fatigue that told me I was at the end of my reserves.
I had to sleep. I was going to pass out whether I wanted to or not.
How the fuck could I sleep?
Maybe I didn’t—maybe I didn’t have to sleep yet? I dug my fingernails into my palms, the pain pushing the mind-numbing fatigue off, but only till my palms went numb and then my shoulders started to slump again.
I wasn’t going to have a choice, which meant I had to somehow make the best of this.
How though?
Sorrow dropped to the ground and from the corner of my eye I watched him approach me, head down, making soft clucks as he walked slowly, cautiously, his body fluffed up.
“Go away.” I wanted the words to come out angry, harsh, and they were a bare fucking whisper as I fought this panic, my hands buried in the earth as if that would ground me.
He didn’t say anything, just slid his way over until he was under my arm, his head butting up under my chin, the hard, rounded point of the horn on his head pressing against the skin at the base of my neck. Warmth flushed through me, and some of the fear faded, as if he’d leached it out.
Still shaking, albeit less, I dragged my hands from the grip I had on the ground, and wrapped my arms around him, scooping him up.
He didn’t so much as squawk as I carried him, half stumbling, to the dilapidated school bus.
Sliding out of my pack, I laid it down and curled up in the driest corner with a sorrowbird wrapped in my arms like he was a damn teddy bear.
My eyes closed.
Sleep took me in seconds.
The dreams were a mess of images that I couldn’t quite grasp, as if they were coated in oil and the more I tried to hang onto them the faster they slipped away.
I wanted to rage at the flickering images to let me see, to let me understand what I’d been forced to forget because they felt familiar.
Somewhere in my dreams were the truths of my past that I couldn’t take a hold of no matter how hard I tried.
The one constant that kept swirling across my mind’s eye were the numbers on my ring. They spun in front of me, repeatedly. I’d known they were important and this dreamscape only confirmed I had to find the other person attached to the date. My other half.
The place I called home—that’s what it felt like.
Something tugged on my hair, pulling me from my sleep just as a pair of eyes rose from the darkness, a face I could almost see, a man…
eyes of ice-blue, ringed in darkness and ice, like a wolf on the prowl that had seen its prey.
He locked on me and the breath in me stilled.
Those eyes pinned me, ice-blue and merciless, and every part of me screamed that I should know him. That I needed to remember.
My life depended on it.
A soft cluck from Sorrow and my eyes opened to the waking world.
For just a moment, a terrifying, horrifying moment there was nothing. Just the breath in my body and the coolness of the air.
Sorrow clucked again, and the day before flooded back. Dakota, Red, the riftwolves.
“Fucking thank you,” I whispered.
Sorrow was still tucked in tight to my chest, his head buried under his wing…and he started shaking.
A scent of something putrid reached my nose, like rotting meat and shit. I swallowed against the bile that it drew up my throat, my mouth clamped shut against tasting it fully.
I sat up slowly, my body sore but my ribs fine—as if they’d never been broken. I didn’t have time to consider the fact that I healed fast.
I had more pressing concerns.
The thump of a massive something outside shook the entire bus, dust and debris falling from the ceiling, dusting my face.
Sorrow went from shaking to absolute stillness, his strange eyes closed, his chest barely rising and falling.
Continuing, careful not to make a noise I lifted myself enough to peer out the bottom of one no longer intact window.
At first, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing until the muscles in the calf flexed.
The leg in front of me was six feet across and the knee was near the middle of the trees, and similar in color and texture of the silverbark trees.
Ashy gray, skin peeling and showing open sores in places.
If the body was on par, the creature was easily thirty-five feet tall, maybe even forty feet.
A low rumble emanated from the giant and it took another step, the ground giving way under its wide foot, moss and little bushes squelching out to either side.
My brain kicked into high gear and a women’s voice that was not my own, and not one I remembered, whispered through my mind.
“Giants are across the board, violent, and always hungry—they are constantly hunting as their size requires them to consume far more calories as you can imagine. Though they are large and thickly muscled, their sheer size and leg length allow them to run down even faster prey. Hamstringing them so they can’t run is one of the best ways to deal with them.
While they will heal, typically it will give you enough time to escape, or to deliver a fatal blow. Aim for the base of the neck.”
“And if I can’t hamstring them?”
“Stay quiet. Hide. Wait for it to pass. The rotten scent will stay longer than the body.”
Good advice. I stayed there in the bus while the giant’s ashy legs thumped on by—not that I’d wanted to jump out and fight the big fucker, but it was good to know that there was a play if I ever had to—that my training had covered giant killing and perhaps not filling crème puffs.