Feral (The Irisbourn Chronicles Book 1) (28 page)

“We need to stop the bleeding,”
Arisella said quickly.
 
Her hands were on
my back too, now.
 
She must have changed
back into her normal form.

Through my fuzzy vision, I
distinguished Dylan handing her a backpack.
 
My backpack.

“Is she going to be okay?” Dylan
demanded.

“I don’t know,” Arisella said
anxiously.

The entire time, pairs of hands
moved about my back, applying pressure and removing the thickened, cold blood.

“What do you mean you don’t know?”
Dylan cried in a distressed voice.

“She’s going to be okay,” Adrian
answered with calm certainty.
 
“She
will.”

With that, Dylan became silent.

Adrian and Arisella worked quickly
and quietly, save for the few instructions they gave each other, like “apply
pressure on this area” and “we need gauze here.”

“That’s strange,” Arisella murmured.
 
“I was sure she would need stitches before we
cleaned the wounds, but I guess not.”

“Not deep enough,” Adrian agreed.

Not deep enough?
 
They had seemed pretty deep to me!

My vision was beginning to clear,
my awareness beginning to sharpen.

My abdomen was being bound tightly
with cloth, and I coughed at the unusual pressure around my ribcage.

“There’s nothing else we can do for
her,” Adrian sighed when the binding had stopped, “except wait.”

“You can give me an aspirin,
actually,” I said in a shaky voice, as I rose to a more respectable sitting
position.

“You shouldn’t be sitting,” Adrian
began.

“I feel better already.
 
Aspirin, please,” I motioned toward Dylan,
who hastily removed the bottle of medicine from my bag and shook one tablet
into my hand.

I raised my eyebrows at him.

“Oh sorry,” Dylan mumbled.
 
He shook three more into my palm, and I
smiled at him graciously.

I popped the handful into my mouth
and swallowed dryly.
 
The pain was
already beginning to dissipate.
 
Could
the aspirin be working this quickly?

I looked at the two dead Bloodbourn
on the ground with repulsion.
 
The
reality of what I had done was just beginning to dawn on me.

“We killed them,” I stated in an
empty voice.

Arisella sneered at their
bodies.
 
“We had to.”

“They had Dylan.
 
They were asking him questions – his birth,
his loyalty. His answers confused them, and they were going to kill him,” I
remembered, and turned my attention worriedly toward my friend.

He looked terrible.
 
His arms were covered in bruises, one side of
his face swollen from where he had been beaten.

“They always sent the stupid ones
out on pointless patrols,” Adrian muttered.
 
“What were you thinking, attacking two trained Bloodbourn soldiers like
that?” Adrian growled at me.

“They had Dylan,” I repeated.

“They almost killed you!” he
practically shouted.

“They would have killed Dylan!” I
shouted back.
 
“What was I supposed to
do?
 
Watch him die?”

“Yes,” Adrian said with a straight
face.
 
“We have a responsibility to get
you
to the Praetus, and you alone.
 
Dylan knew full well the moment he joined us
that he was not fit for this world.”

I gaped at Adrian with
incredulity.
 
“You can’t be serious.”

“I am.
 
If we had arrived a moment later… Dylan’s
recklessness would have killed you.”

“No,” I objected.
 
“A Bloodbourn soldier would have killed
me.”
 
I wobbled to my feet, and Adrian
moved to help me, but the look I gave him was enough to tell him to keep quiet
and keep his distance.
 
“Now, I’m going
back to camp, where I will sleep in my makeshift bed, content that I saved the
life of my best friend.
 
Dylan?”

Despite my refusal of Adrian’s
help, I would need assistance getting back to camp.
 
Dylan took my arm and didn’t complain when he
had to support a considerable amount of my weight.

Together we hobbled back to camp without
looking back.

Chapter
Thirty-One

I rose stiff and sore the next
morning.
 
I had slept solely in
Arisella’s undergarments, and my back burned under the bandages.
 
They felt thick and wet on my skin, and were
starting to smell a pungent odor.
 
They would
need to be changed soon, but by whom?

I couldn’t do it myself.
 
Dylan wouldn’t know how, and asking Adrian
was out of the question.
 
That left
Arisella.

I pulled myself out of my sleeping
bag and grabbed my backpack.
 
The glow of
the sunrise had just begun to tint the horizon, and everyone was still
asleep.
 
I nudged the back of Arisella’s
head with my foot, and she made a purring noise before opening her eyes and
shifting into her normal form.
 
At least
she had remembered to wear her magic Spellbourn clothes she had found before
going to sleep, so, fortunately for me, she was fully clothed.

“Your bandages need to be changed,
don’t they?” Arisella surmised, as she tiredly ran her hands through her
disheveled hair.

I nodded and led her outside.
 
We sat in the middle of the street, on an
out-of-place stone block jutting out of the ground.

She carefully tugged at the layer
of bandages that encased my skin.

“What you did last night was really
dumb,” she said curtly.

“I know,” I admitted with a
scowl.
 
She had a very disagreeable way
of saying good morning.
 
The last thing I
needed was a lecture from her.

“But you don’t regret it,” she
sighed.

“No.”

“I don’t think you should have done
it,” she admonished.
 
“But that doesn’t
mean I don’t understand why you did.”

I looked at her in disbelief.
 
This last thing I expected to receive from
her was understanding.
 
But perhaps that
was because I had always expected so little from her in the department of human
emotion.

I winced as she peeled away the
cotton that had fused to my skin.

“My brother can overreact
sometimes.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

“Is something going on between you
two?” Arisella asked me suspiciously.
 
“You were really going at it last night.”

“No, nothing,” I assured her.
 
“We can both be very stubborn, I guess.”

“I see…”
 
To my relief, Arisella dropped the subject.

“Your back looks quite a bit better
than it did last night.
 
A lot better,
actually.
 
You heal very quickly.”
 
She cleaned the wounds with a wet rag and
applied fresh bandages to them before rebinding my chest.
 
She stood up and inspected her work with
satisfaction.
 
“You’re done.
 
You should be fine to walk today.”

“Thanks.”
 
I slipped on the clothing I had collected the
previous night.
 
They felt stiff, like
clothes that had been dipped in starch, but as long as they stayed together, I
was content.
 
I couldn’t afford to ruin
another pair of clothes if I decided to change spontaneously, and I had no idea
what the rest of our journey would have in store for us.

***

We had been walking for half the day
when the grassy hills transitioned into another forest, this one brighter,
warmer, and, much to my relief, more alive than the Black Forest.
 
The unbelievably wide trees were a deep
purple shade, extending far into the sky, where their branches housed singing
bird-like creatures and scampering rodents.
 
Tree roots as big as me jutted out of the ground, and the bark of the
trees was smooth and polished, unlike anything I had ever seen before.

This was where the remaining
sprites who hadn’t been cursed as wraiths had fled, Arisella told us.
 
Like with the kelpie, she cautioned us to
avoid them as well.
 
Forest creatures
weren’t meant to be trusted, she had said.

Who was meant to be trusted in this
world?

It was when Dylan and I were
filling our eco-friendly water bottles in a kelpie-free river (I had made sure
to check first) that I noticed the table overflowing with food no more than
four yards away.
 
My stomach growled
ferociously as the smell of sweet cakes and pudding drifted past my nose.

Dylan smelled it too, and when he
caught sight of the unattended feast before us, I could practically see the
drool spilling out of his mouth.

“I want.
 
All of that.
 
Inside of me,” he whispered.
 
Before I could stop him, he took off toward the table with a mad look in
his eyes.

“Dylan!” I shouted after him.
 
He picked up a long slab of glazed meat in
his bare fingers, and I slapped it out of his hand, sending it falling to the
forest floor with a wet splat.

“You wasted it!” he whined.

“I don’t think we should be eating this,”
I tried to reason with him.
 
“There’s
something off about finding a fully made meal in the middle of a forest.”

“Hell, Amber, it’s not like we’re
accepting candy from strange people in ice cream trucks.
 
I don’t see the risk here.”

“We should ask Adrian and
Arisella…”

Dylan scowled.
 
“So Arisella can just eat all of it?
 
Oh, don’t give me one of your judgmental
looks.
 
You’ve seen how much of our food
she’s eaten.”

It was true.
 
Arisella had eaten more than her fair share
of our food, and for the past two days I couldn’t seem to get rid of the
constant hollow feeling of hunger that had been gnawing at my stomach…

But no, there was definitely
something strange about finding food when we needed it most.

“We’re going to go get Adrian and
Arisella.”
 
Before Dylan could say
another word, I took him by the wrist and pulled him back to where Adrian and
Arisella were waiting for us.

“You two took quite a while,”
Adrian commented upon our arrival.

“Sorry, we were –”

“Where did Human get
that
?” Arisella raised a finger to
Dylan’s hand, which appeared to be clutching something tightly.

A little yellow cake.

“I found it.
 
This one’s mine,” Dylan said
possessively.
 
He must have been hungrier
than I had thought.

“We found a table of food right
over there.
 
It all looks fresh, like
someone was about to sit down to lunch, but no one’s around.”

“Did you eat any of it?” Adrian
asked with urgency.

I shook my head.

“Good,” he sighed, more
relaxed.
 
“It’s the sprites.
 
Anyone who eats their food can’t survive off
anything else.
 
And for that reason, they
can never leave.
 
For thousands of years,
the sprites have been snaring travelers in this forest by tempting them with
what they most desire.”

“So,” I said slowly.
 
“As long as we don’t eat the food, we should
be able to leave?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Dylan, look who was
right.”
 
I turned around to smugly tell
him “I told you so,” and my eyes fell on his tiny golden cake.
 
Where a small but unmistakable bite-sized
piece was missing.
 
I widened my eyes in
horror.

“You didn’t…” I whispered.

“I didn’t!”
 
Dylan exclaimed.
 
“It crumbled off on the way here.
 
I was just looking at it, I swear!”

I was just looking at it.
 
I was
just looking at it.
 
That was exactly
what he used to say as a ten-year-old when he tasted desert his mother had specifically
told him not to touch.

“Gods,” Arisella muttered.

“Throw up,” I ordered.
 
“Throw up now.”
 
I looked to Adrian.
 
“Would that work?”

Adrian shrugged.
 
“Maybe.”

“But I didn’t eat it!” Dylan
griped.

“I don’t care.
 
Just do it.”
 
I pointed to a far off tree where he could do his business.

Dylan looked at me like a kicked
puppy-dog, but my resolution didn’t waver.

“Fine, if it makes you feel
better.”
 
He grumpily started in the
direction I had been pointing.

I tried not to listen to the
retching noises that were coming from behind the tree, and in ten minutes Dylan
returned, pale and damp with a sheen of sweat.

“I did it,” he said in a weak
voice.

I offered him a granola bar, and he
waved it away with a sick expression.

“Not now.
 
Definitely later, but not now.”

We continued onwards, wary of any
more suspicious offerings of food.
 
I
kept a closer eye on Dylan now, and we moved at a slightly slower pace so he
could regain his strength.
 
When Dylan
tried to get us to join him in a hearty rendition of “One Thousand Bottles of
Beer on the Wall” – yes, not ninety-nine, but one thousand – we knew we could
pick up our speed without feeling sorry for him.

We traveled along the river now,
moving up a barely noticeable incline.
 
Adrian wanted to get out of the forest quickly, so we planned to walk
later into the evening than usual.
 
For
that reason (but mostly for Dylan’s sake), we took a short break near some
pools of clear blue springs before continuing the long walk we had ahead of us.

I discreetly detached myself from
the group and busied myself with the repetitive exercise of piercing a tree
with a switch blade.
 
I needed to be
alone with my thoughts for a while, and the knife made me look busy, so it
didn’t seem like I had just decided to dickishly ignore everyone.

But it didn’t look like I would get
the solitude I wanted.

“Your aim’s improved.”
 
Adrian was leaning on a tree behind me,
studying my movements.
 
How long had he
been there?
 
My pulse quickened as I
remembered our heated encounter two nights ago.
 
Then I remembered how he had yelled at me the previous night, and my
blood boiled.

I shrugged uncaringly.

“You’re mad,” he observed.

I shrugged again and turned to
retrieve my knife.

And then he was in front of me, his
hands on my shoulders.
 
I froze instantly,
startled by the speed with which he moved.

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you,”
he apologized.
 
The look in his eyes was
sincere.

“No, you shouldn’t have.”

“It just makes me so upset when you
do such reckless things…”

“You suck at apologies.”

Adrian’s lips quirked up.

“I’ve never had to apologize to
anyone this much before.”

What was he trying to tell me? That
I was easily offended? Or that he usually didn’t care how people felt?

“Does this mean we’re talking to
each other again?”

Adrian ran his hand along his
brow.
 
“We should probably talk about
what we did a few nights back…”

“No,” I said with hard
resolution.
 
“We should not.”

“Why not?” Did I catch a fleeting
look of hurt in Adrian’s expression?

“Because I have more important
things to deal with right now.” I cast a cursory glance at Dylan, which I was
sure Adrian noticed.
 
“Anyway, I don’t
need you to tell me that you’re not looking for anything serious, or that it
just wouldn’t work, or that it was a bad idea.
 
I already got that.
 
I’m a big
girl, I can handle it.”

“I didn’t think it was a bad idea…”
Everything I was saying seemed to be coming as a shock to him.
 
“Is that how
you
feel?”

“Is that how you feel?” I
countered.

“Of course not.”

Well, then.
 
I had drastically misjudged the situation.

“I really do care about you,”
Adrian continued.

I held up a hand.
 
“Please, don’t.
 
At least, not right now.
 
We really do need to focus on reaching the
Praetus, and if anything happened to us along the way…”

“I see.”
 
Adrian’s face was expressionless, impossible to
read.

“Until we get to the Praetus…” I
trailed off awkwardly.
 
What were we even
considering here?

“I understand,” Adrian nodded.

“Thank you.”
 
I felt like one of those girls who kept
telling guys they were busy in order to avoid them.
 
I secretly hoped that was a strictly human
behavior, so Adrian wouldn’t think I was one of those girls.

I squirmed nervously under the
unrelenting gaze of his blue eyes.
 
They
seemed to be staring into my soul, reading my private thoughts.

“Adrian!” Arisella’s voice cracked
in the distance, and Adrian was gone.

I stumbled forward before
retrieving my knife and chasing after him.
 
Arisella was screaming into the water of one of the springs, and Adrian
was restraining her by her waist.

“Mother!” she yelled into the pool.
“Can’t you see her? Mother! She’s calling to us, Adrian!”