Feral (The Irisbourn Chronicles Book 1) (29 page)

“Stop, it’s not her,” Adrian
panted.

“We must go to her.” Arisella tried
to dive headfirst into the water.

“No!” Adrian roared and violently
drew his sister back.

“I killed her, I killed her,”
Arisella sobbed.
 
Tears slid down her
cheeks and mixed with the blue water of the spring.
 
I had never seen her this emotional before,
never even seen her cry.

“What’s going on?” I inquired.

“Don’t look in the water,” Adrian
ordered as he fought against the strain of his sister’s weight.

But it was too late.

I saw my entire family floating in
the rocks at the bottom of the spring, suspended, unmoving – my mother, my
father, my brother, my sister with her golden hair floating around her like
snakes.

My sister opened her eyes – or what
once had been her eyes.
 
Now they were
glassy blue spheres, her pupils tiny dots in her once brown irises.
 
She curved a stiff, hooked finger at me,
beckoning me to join her.
 
I leaned my
face closer to the water, my nose skimming the surface.

“Amber, take care of Dylan!” Adrian
shouted, breaking the trance that had bound me to Heather.

Dylan’s hands were in the water,
and he was in the process of gradually leaning the rest of his body into the
pool.

“Nate,” he croaked into the water.

I knocked him backwards onto the
grass, but he just got up and kept whispering his brother’s name to the water.

I cupped his hands in mine and
spoke feverishly to his blank face.
 
“It’s all an illusion, Dylan.
 
Your brother is not here.
 
He’s
still at home, probably opening your Star Wars dolls, even though you
specifically told him not to.”

For a second, I thought I saw a
glimmer of understanding flicker through Dylan’s eyes.
 
But he pulled his hands out of mine so he
could reach back into the water for his brother.

“It’s the sprites,” Adrian called
over his sister’s wailing.
 
“The water
shows you the people you’ve lost or left behind, the people who you won’t want
to leave again.”

I looked into the water that Dylan
was running through his fingers, but rather than seeing his brother, I saw my
sister again.
 
Her inhuman eyes seemed to
be screaming my name, begging me to stay with her.
 
With agony, I tore my attention away from her
and diverted it to Dylan, who looked like he was getting ready to plunge into
the water.

“No!” I grunted, pulling him
backwards again.
 
He deliriously clawed
at my chest and arms, leaving red welts where his nails had torn at my
skin.
 
I got behind him and, grasping him
by the arms, pulled him back toward the trees, far from the springs.

He writhed about madly in my arms,
all the while crying incessantly for his brother. As soon as I let him go, he
would crawl back to the springs, and I would just have to drag him away
again.
 
To prevent him hurting himself, I
straddled his chest, pinning him down with my sheer weight.
 
To prevent him from hurting
me
, I held his hands above his head with
one of my own, my other hand on Dylan’s cheek as I futilely pled him to stop.

I knew he wasn’t going to stop
though, and I couldn’t hold him like this forever.
 
I would need something to bind him.
 
My backpack was still by the springs, much
too far for me to reach.
 
In utter
desperation, I removed my shirt and tried to wind it around Dylan’s wrists, but
it wasn’t long enough.
 
It held tightly
for a moment before loosening and slipping away.
 
I groaned in frustration.
 
I had absolutely nothing left.

Except maybe…

I uncoiled the thick bandage from
around my chest, exposing Arisella’s black undergarments.
 
It was at least four feet long – more than
enough for me to tie Dylan up.

I wrestled him to the ground as I
snaked the bandage around his wrists and ankles.
 
When he realized what I was doing, he gnashed
his teeth at me like an animal.
 
His
savagery frightened me.

When I finished, he looked
strikingly similar to a dying spider, his arms and legs pointed up to the sky
as he struggled against his bonds.
 
The
fibers of the bandages strained against his skin, stretching and thinning.
 
They wouldn’t hold him forever, but they
would have to do for now.

I found my shirt and pulled it on
before snatching another roll of bandages from my bag and running to join
Adrian.
 
He was still locked in an
impasse with his sister.

I helped Adrian move her back onto
the grass, where together we wove the bandages around Arisella’s wrists.

She was much stronger than Dylan,
and she was able to break the cotton sheets almost as soon as we placed them on
her.
 
The only way we could keep her
still was by triple-layering the bandages and winding them about her in a
frenzy.
 
It was a two-person effort –
Adrian held her down while I bound her arms and legs.
 
At one point, I was afraid she would change
into a grimalkin and tear us both to pieces, but fortunately she never did.
 
Perhaps she required full consciousness to do
so.

When we were done, we placed her
next to Dylan, and they wailed and struggled like godforsaken animals in each
other’s company.

“How long is this supposed to
last?” I used the back of my hand to wipe away the beads of perspiration that
had accumulated on my brow.

“I don’t know.”
 
Adrian’s hair was slick with sweat, his
cheeks flush with tints of blood.

“Why did they react so badly to the
water, when we didn’t?”

“Well, Dylan’s a human, so it’s not
surprising that the experience was more overwhelming for him than it was for
us.
 
As for Arisella…” A pained look
crossed Adrian’s face.
 
“She genuinely
believes that she killed our mother.”

“But she didn’t…”

“No, she didn’t.
 
But she feels guilty for it, and that guilt
has taken a toll on her.
 
She’s gotten
exceedingly good at hiding it.”

“I see.”

After fifteen minutes of hollering,
teeth grinding, and even drooling, Dylan and Arisella finally quieted.
 
Upon coming to their senses, they were quite
surprised to find themselves with their appendages in the air, bound by sheets
of cotton.
 
Adrian and I cut away the
bandages warily and made sure to steer them clear the springs as we continued
walking onwards.
 
Now more than ever, we
were determined to make it out of those horrid woods before we retired for the
night.

Chapter
Thirty-Two

The forest ended at the base of a
mountain range, which we didn’t reach until long after nightfall.
 
We didn’t make a fire again that night, this
time out of pure laziness, and Arisella didn’t hunt.

When I rifled through my backpack
for a half can of peas I had saved from the night before, my hand came out
covered in nauseating, green-tinged sludge.
 
I flipped off the cover of my bag, and the stench of rotten meat
overwhelmed my senses.

I squinted my watering eyes and
found what seemed to be a slime of decomposing bread and meat slices in my
bag.
 
Making a big show of putting her
hand over her nose, Arisella demanded that the toxic waste be disposed of
immediately, and I got rid of it in some bushes far from the edge of camp.
 
Since most of our food had been sitting
half-eaten in opened containers, I had to throw almost all of it away.

When I returned to the camp, Dylan
owned up to the fact that he had found an opportunity to cram sprite food into
my backpack when I wasn’t looking.
 
Apparently he had been looking forward to eating it, until he discovered
that it decomposed as soon as it left the forest.

I went to bed that night with an
empty stomach, while Dylan stayed up to clean out my backpack.
 
He knew I wasn’t pleased with him, and he
seemed determined to at least return the inside of my backpack to its original
smell, if he couldn’t do anything about the color.

I squeezed my eyes shut, but I
still couldn’t submit myself to sleep.
 
I
felt the minutes go by, and I heard Arisella snoring somewhere nearby, but I
still didn’t feel the slightest bit tired.

“Hey, Adrian, will you smell this?”
I heard Dylan say, followed by the soft clink of my backpack buckles.

Adrian snorted.
 
“I can smell it from here, and you have a
long way to go.”

“Damn it.”
 
Dylan scrubbed the fabric noisily.
 
“It has to be clean when she wakes up
tomorrow.”

“You should probably sleep
soon.
 
She didn’t tell you that you
had
to do that.”

“No, but I kind of owe it to her,
don’t you think?
 
I don’t want her to
smell like this shit-scented backpack.”

“I admit, it would ruin the
lavender…” Adrian mused.

“You noticed she smells like
lavender?” I could hear the astonishment in Dylan’s voice.

“Uh, sure.”

“It’s her shampoo.
 
Not that she’s smelled much like lavender
recently, but I agree, the backpack would not smell nice on her.”

I felt really uncomfortable with
listening to them discuss the way I smelled, not to mention how Dylan had
basically just pointed out how I was smelling worse than usual.
 
We had been sweating in the same clothes for
days – and where was I supposed to find lavender shampoo here, anyway?

“You’re very devoted to her,”
Adrian acknowledged.

“Best friends, in it to the end.”

“How was she when you first met
her?”

I was taken aback that Adrian even
cared enough to ask this question.

Dylan laughed.
 
“It was the first day of preschool.
 
Her mom had given her this horrible haircut,
but she was still the prettiest girl in the class, by a landslide.
 
Anyway, this hot-shot group of boys thought
it would be really funny to take my animal crackers from me, but Amber was
there to stop them.”

“How?”

“She said she would eat all their
lunches when they weren’t looking.
 
She
threatened them with a frightening amount of authority for a four-year-old,
too.
 
They didn’t bother us again, and it
wasn’t until after school that I realized that she was the daughter of our new
neighbors.
 
We’ve been together ever
since.”

“She must mean a lot to you if you
were willing to move halfway across the country for her.”

“I’d follow her past the ends of
the Earth.
 
Do you have any idea how many
of my animal crackers she’s saved?”
 
Dylan’s voice grew solemn.
 
“I’d
die for her.”

“That makes two of us,” Adrian said
so quietly I almost wasn’t sure I’d heard him.

“I’m not just saying that for
dramatic effect, though.
 
I really mean
it,” Dylan emphasized, as if he doubted the genuineness of Adrian’s
declaration.
 
“I also realize I’m the
weakest link in this group, the least likely to keep her safe.
 
That’s why I was the first to jump into the
kelpie boat, or the first to volunteer to eat the sprite food.
 
Sure, being captured by the Bloodbourn and
secretly stuffing her backpack with rotten food may have been mistakes, but my
actions are usually good-intentioned.”

“That’s really… dumb.” Adrian
concluded.
 
“And you two were always
just… friends?”

“Yeah, it never really progressed
beyond that.”

“But you love her?”

I cringed at the curiosity in
Adrian’s words.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Dylan said
hastily.
 
“You and I aren’t even friends,
and this conversation is starting to get uncomfortable.”

“You do,” Adrian sighed.

“I will be whatever she needs me to
be,” Dylan explained.
 
“If, for now,
that’s a friend, so be it.”

I couldn’t listen to this
anymore.
 
It felt wrong, eavesdropping on
them like this.
 
I coughed twice, and
they both shut their mouths and didn’t utter another word – or if they did, not
until after I had fallen asleep.

Chapter
Thirty-Three

We woke up in the midmorning to the
patter of rain on our faces.
 
The gray
sky hung above us, illuminated occasionally by a thin streak of light, followed
by a sharp crack that echoed off the black crags.

We packed up the camp in a flurry,
and our wet bags, now doubled in weight, cut into our shoulders.
 
Fortunately, according to Adrian, we didn’t
have much further to go.

But it felt like a century to
me.
 
The steep, unstable incline of the
mountain coupled with the heaviness of my bag was sucking the life out of me,
which, of course, Adrian noticed.

He insisted that we stop under a
stony ledge that could shelter us from the frigid rain that had been pelting us
for the last hour.
 
Ever since we had
woken up, the storm had only grown in ferocity, and deafening gusts of wind
whipped our damp hair into our stinging faces.
 
The sky was a chaotic show of light and thunder, the magnitude of which
was unlike any I had ever experienced on Earth.

As we regained our energy under the
ledge, I squinted into the rain, down the slippery side of the mountain we had
just risked our lives scaling.
 
The dense
sheet of fat raindrops that fell from the sky obscured everything, except for
the hazy outlines of large objects.

Dylan appeared beside me, peering
off in the same direction.
 
“Is that
boulder moving?”
 
Dylan pointed at a
vague, vibrating blob that seemed to be getting larger.

Arisella rudely pushed Dylan out of
the way so she could have a better view.
 
“It looks like it’s rolling up the hill?”

I gaped at her.
 
She had said something dumber than Dylan had.

Arisella noticed my dumbstruck face
and quickly amended her statement.
 
“That’s just what it looks like, though.”

“Well, whatever it was, it’s gone
now,” I pointed out.
 
The blob had
disappeared behind a darker, larger shadow, leaving no traces of its existence.

“We’d best be moving,” Adrian
advised.

We resumed the treacherous hike
through the rain, this time with thin but unbreakable rods Adrian had
miraculously been capable of creating as hiking staffs for us.
 
I clutched the black stick made from Adrian’s
blood with my life.
 
It was the only
thing keeping me on the ledge of the mountain, from slipping away into the
abyss beside me.

I heard a series of deep, throaty
grunts behind me, and I turned to check on Dylan to see if he was okay.
 
But he wasn’t behind me.
 
No one was behind me.
 
For a second, I was gripped with the
overwhelming terror that Dylan had fallen from the side of the mountain.
 
Until he started obliviously humming “She’ll
Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” ahead of me.

The inexplicable grunts continued,
and a large outline grew increasingly distinct through the rain.

What in the world?

An enormous blackish bear creature
charged into visibility straight at me, roaring savagely. I fell on my behind
in shock.
 
The bear took my walking stick
in its jaws and, I assume as a show of power, tried to snap it in half.
 
But it couldn’t, so it settled for thrusting
it off the side of the mountain.

I sneered at the animal that was
gradually approaching me and forced my body into its panther form, effectively
exploding my last pair of sneakers.

Ahead of me, Adrian cursed
loudly.
 
One of his blood blades promptly
whizzed past my ear and grazed the shoulder of the beast.
 
Adrian ran in front of me, blades in hand,
and flung them at the animal.
 
Three of
his knives found their target in the bear’s back.

“Run!” Adrian shouted over the cry
of the wind.

I hesitated.
 
The bear was by no means dead – only
temporarily stunned.

A cruel roar momentarily claimed my
attention, and I found Arisella circling another large bear that seemed to have
appeared out of thin air.
 
They bared
their teeth at each other, their lips curling viciously.

“Now!” Adrian shouted again.

I followed his directions and ran
toward Dylan, who was shaking against the side of the mountain, utterly
unprotected.

Together we fled the scene, leaving
Adrian and Arisella behind.
 
They became
a blur of teeth and fur and knives behind us, and I tried hard not to think
about how monstrously big the bears had been.

We hadn’t gone very far when a rock
skittered out from under one of my paws, and my head collided with a sharp
rock.
 
Even feline grace and padded feet
couldn’t save me from my own clumsiness.
 
I didn’t have to feel the warm trickling down my neck to know that I was
bleeding.

My vision shifted in and out of
focus, and a moist, salty smell filled my nose.

“That’s a lot of blood,” Dylan
whispered from behind me.

I growled at him in the cadence of
“I know” and continued forwards, more careful with my footing this time.

Despite my blurry vision, I could
distinguish a pair of snarling, tan wolf-like animals blocking our path.
 
Where the hell were all these animals coming
from?

I retreated backwards, nearly
stepping on Dylan, and realized we had no choice but to descend the way we
came, back to Adrian and Arisella.

With his arms flailing about him,
Dylan had already started slipping down the mountainside.
 
I took off after him.
 
Without me to test the rocks, I was aware of
the very real possibility that he might concuss himself and die.
 
And, considering the situation and how far we
had gotten, I refused to lose Dylan to death by rock.

The wolves snapped at my heels,
their breath hot on my hind legs.
 
In a
last-ditch attempt to slow them down, I attempted to kick one of them in the
muzzle, but only succeeded in getting my foot sheared by razor-sharp teeth.

Burning sharpness shot up my leg
with every step, but I couldn’t afford to slow my pace on account of my
injuries.
 
I strained myself to catch up
to Dylan, so I could lead him back to Adrian and Arisella.

We found the pair, flashes of
movement slick with blood and rain.
 
One
of the bears had pinned Arisella down and was in the process of burying its
claws in her torso.
 
Arisella howled
wildly, desperately.
 
Adrian was balanced
on a boulder far above the other bear’s reach, firing his black shards from
afar.
 
His hair whipped wildly in the
wind, his skin glistening with blood-tinted rain, his eyes full of confidence,
bloodlust, power.
 
He looked like a god.

Seven knives protruded from the
bear’s back, no doubt puncturing several of its vital organs.
 
It was dying, but its eyes were still filled
with as much bloodlust as Adrian’s.

In an inhumanly rapid movement,
Adrian leapt off the rock and plunged a long, thick blade into the bear’s
chest.
 
The bear that had been thrashing
with fury only a second ago moaned feebly, collapsed, and died.

Behind me, mournful howls filled
the air, and I remembered the wolves that had been chasing us – or rather, I
realized now, herding us back to the bottom of the mountain.
 
Their eyes glistened with unmistakable sorrow
and rage, and I swallowed nervously.

One of them locked its eyes on
Dylan and approached him slowly, purposefully.
 
A rumble tore through my chest and I protectively placed myself between
the wolf and Dylan, but it looked straight through me.
 
It had found its prey.

In the back of my mind, I
registered that the second wolf was speeding toward Adrian.
 
But, unlike with Dylan, I felt fairly
confident in Adrian’s abilities to take care of himself.

“Shit,” Dylan cursed.
 
The wolf was staring him down, and he,
understandably, looked like he was on the verge of wetting his pants (if he
hadn’t already – his clothes were already drenched, so I wouldn’t have been
able to distinguish a difference between rain and an accident).

The fact that the wolf was ignoring
me to go after Dylan infuriated me.
 
Of
the two of us, I was undeniably the bigger threat.
 
I snarled at the dumb dog, but it still
wouldn’t look at me.
 
Instead, it sprang
at Dylan.
 
Without thinking, I tackled it
by its fleshy underbelly and sent us tumbling precariously close to the edge of
the cliff.

The wolf got to its feet faster
than I did and drove me backwards.
 
On
the one hand, I had gotten what I wanted: its attention.
 
On the other, it was going to push me off a
cliff.

My hind feet balanced unstably on
the mountain’s edge.
 
From where I was, I
could see Arisella struggling against the bear, Adrian darting around the wolf,
Dylan crouched behind a rock.
 
We were
losing the upper hand.
 
We would not all
make it.
 
I would not make it.

My head spun from a combination of
blood loss and the reality of my impending death.
 
I had no one to save me and nowhere to
run.
 
I briefly considered catapulting
myself off the edge, just to get it over with.
 
But that, I felt, would have been much too cowardly an end for me, a
betrayal to everyone who had helped me get where I was.
 
But, more importantly, the sooner I was gone,
the sooner the wolf would move onto someone else.

Putting on an air of bravery, I
stepped forward to challenge the beast with every ounce of strength I had
left.
 
The wolf almost seemed to smile at
this, and it approached me with dignified confidence.
 
The smug thing knew that I didn’t stand a
chance.

As it lowered itself to the ground
in preparation to pounce, the wolf scrutinized me.
 
I felt its eyes pass over my tail, my legs,
my back, and finally rest on my face – more precisely, my eyes.
 
Something always had to be staring at my
eyes.

A glimmer of recognition flashed
through the wolf’s expression, and, in the blink of an eye, the animal was
replaced by a short, wiry man in crimson robes.
 
His dark hair skimmed his shoulders, identical to the color of the
wolf’s fur, and his wide, hard-set jaw was covered in stubble to match.

“Stop!”
 
His deep voice boomed over the pouring of the
rain.

And, to my surprise, everyone
stopped – the bear and other wolf at his direction, and Adrian and Arisella at
the shock of the stranger’s presence.

The remaining wolf disappeared, and
a girl, perhaps even younger than I, stood in its place.
 
She bore a striking resemblance to the man in
both features and stature.

Beside her, the bear took the form
of a stocky woman with a copper-ish complexion.
 
She looked positively livid.

“What is the meaning of this?!” she
exclaimed.

The man ignored her.
 
“Who are you?” he demanded to all of us.

“We are travelers,” Adrian
answered.
 
“And who are you?” he demanded
with equal persistence.

The man directed his answer toward
me rather than Adrian.
 
“We are the
Praetus.”

So we had made it.
 
An enormous weight lifted from my shoulders,
and I sank to the ground.
 
The sharp
stones cut into my knees, but I was too tired to care.
 
Until then, I hadn’t realized just how broken
I felt, how far I had pushed my body.
 
Blood was still running down my neck.
 
It had turned the collar of my shirt red, I noticed emotionlessly.

There were more words, but they
were all a jumble.
 
It didn’t matter
anymore, anyway.
 
We were all safe.
 
We would be fine.

I barely noticed myself being
hoisted onto a strange man’s back, being carried into the clouds.
 
The mountain’s view of this unusual world
would have been lovely, I suppose, if it hadn’t been too blurry for me to see
it.
 
I didn’t feel the crash of the
waterfall on my back, the chill of water on my skin.
 
I didn’t gaze into the cavernous entrance,
nor did I admire the glowing crystals that lit our path.

But, somewhere near the end, I did
hear the echoes of screaming, of pleading.

A stream of words broke through the
confusion.

“He murdered Rakerys, I will not…
allow it.”

“What should become of him?”

“He has the blood… of the enemy…
You may do what you wish.”

The screaming grew louder, and I
wanted to scream too, but I couldn’t.

Instead, I did what I always did
when things became too much for me to bear – I lost consciousness.