Chapter 32
The hunt resumed the next morning. Telok and his companions picked up the kurghests’ trail where they’d left off, but the tracks had deteriorated further, making them more difficult to follow.
Their slow pace instilled Telok with buzzing, anxious restlessness.
He knew the beast waiting at the end of this trail, the prime kurghest, was flesh, blood, and bone, but the longer it took to find it, the more images his mind created of a hulking, nightmarish monstrosity.
His imagination was transforming his quarry into an impossible, ravenous creature the likes of which even the gods had struggled to slay in the old stories.
His only comfort came when the group returned to Tovuunshai that night, where he could again pretend there were no kurghests, no Tangle, only himself and Lacey.
While they lay in bed, Telok again explored his mate with his hands, discovering new spots and ways to touch that brought her pleasure.
This time, he kept her face to face with him as he stroked her clit, watching her cheeks pinken, her lashes flutter, her lips part, and that lustful gleam make the green of her eyes darker in comparison.
The rain began just after her first climax.
And then he pleasured his mate with his tongue, her cries carrying upon the winds of the storm.
Suncrest came with clear skies that reflected in the moisture clinging to everything. The hunters were quiet as they gathered, frustration and disappointment apparent in their eyes and movements. Everyone knew what the rain meant, and it was confirmed when they trekked back into the jungle.
The trail they’d been following was gone, washed away by the nighttime storm.
Spreading out—but keeping well within sight of each other—they moved in the direction the tracks had been leading, searching for any remaining signs.
With each segment they traveled without finding anything, Telok’s chest grew tighter. He reminded himself that things like this happened frequently during hunts. Trails were lost, opportunities were missed, seemingly promising tracks led to nothing.
As midday passed and evening approached, it seemed the day would yield nothing. The hunters would trek back to Tovuunshai knowing only that their prey denned somewhere within this immense chunk of unforgiving jungle.
Until Elharat said he smelled something.
The odor struck Telok a heartbeat later. Rotting meat.
They followed the smell to a grisly discovery—the carcass of an unac, a predator as large as a female kurghest, surrounded by gore.
The beast was covered in savage wounds that had rent its hide and muscles and shattered bone.
Half its skull had been crushed as if beneath unfathomable force, and some of its insides had spilled onto the ground.
Despite the rain, much of the carcass and the surrounding vegetation was crusted with dark blood.
It couldn’t have been dead for more than a day or two.
“This was the kurghests?” Lacey asked.
Unsettling heat skittered up Telok’s spine, arcing outward to trace wild, tangled paths through his body. “Their prime.”
“Fuck.” Cole crouched and poked at the unac with a stick, shifting some of its ruined hide. “It didn’t even eat this thing.”
“Because it is not food. It is a message. A claim.”
Garahk hummed, the sound low and resonating. “We must be near their den.”
“We must watch with all eight eyes,” Okkor warned.
“The hyu-nanz do not have eight eyes,” Elharat replied.
Okkor smacked the butt of his spear against the yellow-hided vrix’s hindquarters. “They see more with two than you with eight.”
Elharat huffed. “I see all.”
“You see little unless it is food,” Droztar remarked with a chitter.
As the hunters searched the area, Telok kept very close to Lacey. His unease had grown into a ceaseless buzz in his belly, and crackling heat continued sparking under his hide.
He found the first mark on a nearby tree. Gouges almost a segment long and half a finger deep, left at eye level by huge claws that had penetrated the thick bark to score the reddish wood beneath.
Telok hadn’t thought the winddancers had exaggerated when they’d mentioned this prime’s size, but he was beginning to wonder if they’d understated it.
The group found two more trees marked in the same manner within forty segments of each other, one of which had a tuft of green fur, not unlike hanging moss, caught in the bark.
“We are on the beasts’ ground now. Protector, shield us,” Tas intoned. He crossed his forearms, one set above the other, and bowed his head in the sign of the Eight.
The other winddancers and a few thornskulls mimicked the gesture.
“To these beasts, all the Tangle is their ground,” Telok replied, staring into the jungle beyond the claw-marked trees. “But we will teach them otherwise.”
Wen’Xal Tas shivered. “Not this day. Sunfall approaches…”
Telok could tell the thornskulls were as torn as him. Why turn back now when they were so close? Why abandon the hunt when their prey had to be somewhere just ahead?
Yet he knew these were only a few of the marks the prime must’ve left in a territory that could well have spanned the distance between here and Kaldarak. The hunters might journey forward for days without ever finding another sign of the kurghests, much less their den.
Telok looked at Lacey. She stood with her spear at the ready, her fingers shifting around the shaft as though she couldn’t find a comfortable grip. His mate was as beautiful as always, but he did not like the fear evident in her tight lips and furrowed brow.
With everyone exceptionally quiet and wary, they journeyed back to Tovuunshai.
That night, Telok again eased Lacey’s worries with his hands, and again he denied her attempts to reciprocate. At least while she was unraveling under his touch, neither of them were weighed down by worry.
“Promise I’m gonna get you back…and then some,” she murmured before drifting to sleep.
He softly chittered. “I eagerly await that moment, my heartsthread.”
On the following day, the hunters delved beyond the prime kurghest’s boundary markers. They followed what little remained of the beast’s trail, only possible because its great size had sunk its footprints deep enough into the ground that some had survived the rain.
Quiet blanketed the Tangle like an oppressive fog.
It seemed as though nothing, not even the trees, dared to make a sound that could draw the attention of the beast lurking here in the jungle’s heart.
The elder hunters Telok had known would’ve considered this unnatural, unsettling quiet an ill omen.
A reason to abandon the hunt and make offerings to appease the Hunter.
But Telok and his companions pushed onward.
What words they exchanged were sparse, brief, and hushed, and their strides were slow and careful.
The weight of the silence was matched by that of the task lying before them.
With each step, that burden grew, feeding into the lump of dread in Telok’s belly.
He looked back at Lacey often, assuring himself that she was still there, still safe. Whenever their gazes met, she smiled, yet today those smiles were fast to fade and didn’t truly shine in her eyes. She was afraid, and some part of him was glad for that even as it made his hearts constrict.
Fear would keep her alert.
It wasn’t long before they came across the first remains, little more than blackening bones with shreds of tattered, rotting hide clinging to them.
Scrapes and cracks left by claws and fangs marred much of the skeleton.
Despite their collective years of experience, none of the hunters could come to an agreement as to what manner of beast those bones had once belonged to.
The second carcass was huge—a fully grown yatin, with only bones and hide remaining.
The cavity torn in its chest was large enough to fit Lacey, Cole, and Sophia at once.
Though it had been dead a good while, the area around the yatin showed signs of the struggle that had brought it down.
Broken branches, trampled undergrowth, deep gouges in the ground, a sapling taller than Ayali uprooted and lying on its side with clumped dirt clinging to its exposed roots.
As the party continued onward, they found the remains of several more animals that had fallen prey to the kurghests. The stench of rot strengthened.
That smell led them to a wide depression. While the jungle floor there was free of plants, it was anything but clear.
Dozens of carcasses littered the depression, most of them picked clean of meat, atop a bed of bones.
“Holy shit,” Cole whispered from Telok’s left.
“Yeah,” Sophia agreed, stunned.
“God,” Lacey rasped from Telok’s right.
Telok raked his gaze across the surrounding jungle.
This was not the kurghests’ den, but their feeding ground…
which meant their den was nearby. He turned toward the humans and pressed a finger over his mouth.
Once they nodded their understanding, he stalked around the edge of the depression, examining the nearby undergrowth.
In several places, the vegetation had been damaged in wide swaths, with many of the plants bearing bent and broken stems, forming paths into the deeper jungle. Likely the result of prey being dragged here.
Yet one spot was different. The path there, which resembled a tunnel through the undergrowth, became evident only when Telok was lined up with it. Patches of dirt lay bare along it, smooth and packed down. This hadn’t been created by careless damage, but by gradual wear.
Telok sank low, brushing aside some fallen leaves from the path to reveal a clawed print on the ground.
This was the thread connecting the kurghests’ feeding ground to their den.
His chest tightened, making it difficult to draw breath. He’d known all along that they were closing in on the kurghests, but this was much too close, much too soon, and there remained too many unknowns.
All the answers lay ahead, but if the group pressed on now, it would be no different than striding right into the kurghests’ open maws.
He beckoned Garahk and Tas over. After pointing out the trail, he drew the two vrix close, himself and the thornskull hunching to better match the winddancer’s height. Voice low enough to barely be considered a whisper, Telok said, “Tas, with me. Garahk, pull the others back.”
The thornskull nodded and straightened, throwing his arms out in exaggerated waves to get everyone else’s attention and guide them away from the depression.
At the edge of the feeding ground, Lacey looked at Telok, her features set in worry.
With a soft clicking noise and a pointed finger, Tas sent Swiftclaw to join the others.
Lacey walked backwards for a few steps, gaze locked with Telok’s until she turned to follow Garahk. Telok watched her careful progress, and his legs itched to go after her.
No.
The sooner he found the den, the sooner they could return to the village. The sooner his mate would be out of danger.
Telok pried his attention from her, shifting it to Tas. They nodded to each other, and he led the winddancer to the nearest tree, which they ascended swiftly and silently.
From the branches, Telok could just make out the kurghests’ trail below. That invisible tether tugged on his hearts as he moved forward, urging his gaze back toward his mate, but he resisted. He would see her again in a short time. A very short time.
Following the trail on the ground, Telok and Tas crossed into the boughs of the next tree. Telok’s hearts quickened with each step. Doubts and fears scratched at his mind from all sides, eating at his soul. He refused to acknowledge any of them.
He and Tas had traveled close to one hundred and fifty segments before he glimpsed the kurghest den ahead.
The unnerving stillness and silence gripping the Tangle settled inside Telok, pushing away his thoughts and clarifying his focus.
Staying low to the branch, he and Tas crept to a better vantage point.
At least twelve adult female kurghests and numerous young, male and female alike, lounged in a patch of sunlight on the jungle floor.
They were languid, hardly moving but for lazy flicks of their tails and ears and the rise and fall of their chests.
The ground beneath them had been trampled clear of vegetation, making their mosslike fur stand out against it.
A short, gentle slope beyond them led up to a huge fallen tree, partly sunken into the ground, with a gaping hole in its side like the mouth of a foreboding cave.
Even from this distance, Telok could tell by its rough edges that the opening had been expanded by tooth and claw.
Within the gloom of that opening lurked a mass of shadow far larger than any of the kurghests outside.
It swelled, and when it relaxed, it let out a low, rumbling breath that seemed to reverberate through the tree.
A huge tail swept out into the daylight.
Each of the wicked spines on its end must’ve been as long as Telok’s forearm.
The prime kurghest. Mate to all the pack’s females, sire to any young they spawned.
Memories echoed in Telok’s spirit, but he forced them down, preventing them from rising to the surface. He ran his gaze over the deceptively peaceful scene before him again, absorbing every detail.
Even without the prime, that many kurghests would be exceedingly dangerous to confront—and he was certain there were more of them out hunting right now.
How could Telok and his companions eliminate this threat without significant loss?
How could he lead the others to this place, knowing that no one was likely to return unharmed?
Ketahn had been forced to make many such decisions during the war, but Ketahn was not here. Could Telok make them now?
A light touch on his shoulder drew Telok’s attention to Tas, who was crouched beside him. Unease gleamed in the winddancer’s eyes, but there was something hard, something determined, beneath it. Tas tipped his head in the direction from which they’d come, toward their companions.
Toward Lacey.
Telok nodded, and the two soundlessly withdrew.
There was much discussion to be had and planning to be done…but it could wait until they were back in Tovuunshai. Until Telok’s mate was safe.