5. Chapter 5 #2
“It is.” The distant look in her eyes made my chest squeeze tight. I wanted to offer her space at the commune, offer her the companionship they clearly sought, but would it be too soon? I didn’t want to scare her away either.
“Oh, look,” she said, pointing to the ground ahead. “Pawprints.”
Right. The whole hunting down my pagwai mission.
“Pagwai ones too, multiple sets,” I said, spotting the mess of them by the bank of the stream.
Maybe this route wasn’t such a terrible idea after all.
Had Socks found other pagwai and made friends?
Would she resent me taking away from her newfound buddies?
At this point, I wasn’t sure if we’d be doing much strolling at the Everend Market.
The detour to hunt down Dynlan and find her had taken the majority of the time I planned on spending at the Midsummer festival.
Though, I didn’t mind at all. Spending time with Kali had been enjoyable, more than I would’ve ever expected from a random mercenary.
“They went this way,” Kali said, hopping over stones to cross the creek.
I followed at once, trying not to slip on the moss-covered rocks.
My shoes sank into the mud on the other side, making a slorpy sound, and I made as many tracks as the pagwai as we wound our way around a few looming trees and past a mess of bushes.
Pagwai sometimes formed colonies, so it wasn’t unheard of for them to run in packs.
I’d be so disappointed if we got all the way there only to find that Socks wasn’t among them though. I missed her.
“Do you hear that?” Kali asked, cupping a hand to her ear.
I focused and listened. Chirping sounds echoed through the trees but not that of birds. No, this was the sort of chirping I heard every morning when Socks caterwauled for her breakfast.
My heart rate picked up. Could she be here?
“Socks,” I called out, and Kali thwacked me in the arm.
“Don’t scare the pagwai,” she hissed.
I shrugged. “Socks knows the sound of my voice.”
“The others don’t,” Kali said. “And if they create a small stampede, who knows where Socks will end up.”
“If she’s there,” I said, lowering my voice the closer we got.
“I’ve got a feeling.” Kali glanced at me and offered a grin. While I didn’t think feelings were much of a metric for finding lost pagwai, we’d found a bunch of them, so the odds weren’t abysmal.
The chirping was growing louder, and anticipation brimmed inside me. A rustling in a bush here, a twitch of twigs there, meant we were getting closer. Would Socks be there? When we turned a corner, a massive tree stretched out before us, dominating the space.
The concentration of the chirping resounded in this clearing, and it took me a second to register where it was coming from.
The pagwais scampered around the trees, four-legged creatures with their tufted ears, clever eyes, and different autumnal shades of fur.
Their trills rocketed through the clearing, and a few hesitated to stare at us, heads cocked in curiosity.
Kali wasn’t wrong—with this many of them amassed, if I tried calling for Socks now, they’d all spook.
The air brimmed with tension as more and more of them observed us, as if trying to gauge if we were threats or not.
Still, I didn’t see those clever eyes or the streak of…mine. My chest sank the more I stood and searched for my missing Socks.
“Is that her?” Kali murmured, keeping her voice low. She pointed down by my feet.
When I glanced down, I spotted a small pagwai right by my heels—one I hadn’t seen since she’d darted off at the Everend Market.
A thrill rushed through me, followed by a gush of warmth. I dropped to my knees, and she scampered up my leg, then my arm to her usual shoulder perch.
“Socks,” I called out, and I nuzzled her. “You’re alive!”
The sound of my voice reverberated through the clearing, and then…chaos erupted.
The pagwais all panicked at once, dashing higher up the branches or racing away in every direction. I kept a hand on Socks to make sure she didn’t dart off the rest of them. After taking this long to find her, I wasn’t ready to restart the chase.
“Nuh uh,” I warned her. “You were hard enough to find.”
“Loud noises were going to startle them,” Kali said in wry amusement. Pagwais rushed all over the place, but Socks stayed put on my shoulder at least. I petted her soft fur, relief saturating my chest at having her back by my side.
“Seems like you’ve got another friend,” Kali said, arching a brow.
A brown pagwai with little paws and shrewd eyes stood in front of me, staring up at Socks.
“Me, or her?” I asked. She chirped at him, and he chirped back.
My brows drew together, and I lowered to a crouch and extended my other arm.
The little pagwai placed their paws on my hand and sniffed.
I held still, despite the way the other pagwais fled the scene in a flurry.
Once they saw I wasn’t moving, they tested their paws on my arm, and then they began to scale it, the prickle of claws slight.
The pagwai reached my shoulder, and they ducked behind my neck to chirp at Socks.
“The two of them are nuzzling,” Kali said, a wry grin on her lips. “It’s cute, honestly.”
“Should I take the other one with me?”
Kali shrugged. “We’ve got to get moving either way, so that one can make their decision en route.”
“Seems like a good plan,” I said. She said “we”…so maybe we weren’t heading in opposite directions. My heart thumped a little harder.
We began to walk in tandem out of the clearing, even though I hadn’t the slightest where we headed.
“I’ll be heading to Tunbrae to turn this in,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “Any interest in taking the scenic route back home?”
“You have no idea how easily I get lost,” I burst out, eager to accept. “So it’s better we go together.”
A grin played on Kali’s lips, a secretive one that I liked a whole lot.
“I have a little bit of an idea,” she teased. “I’ve seen you in these woods.” Then she picked up the pace. “Come on. If we get a move on, we might be able to reach an inn by evening.”