Spirit (12 page)

***

After
a while, we finally broke for camp again. I slid clumsily off of my horse,
landing first on my feet, but falling back on my ass in a cloud of dust. I
coughed and waved the dust away from my face. I pushed up to my feet, slower
than normal, feeling the sting in my rear from the long ride and the subsequent
fall. My legs were stiff and sore, pins and needles ran through my twitching
muscles, and when I tried to walk, my steps were more of a waddle. I groaned
and slapped the dirt off of my jeans, but bending over strained my back.
Horse-riding wasn’t as glamorous as I had always thought.

Craning
my head back, I put my hands into my back as I arched it, trying to stretch out
the cramped muscles. I opened my eyes and saw, same as before the ride and
before I went to sleep, the moon was in the exact same spot in the sky. I stood
up straight, but I kept staring at it until I heard the telltale sniff of someone
crying.

The
captured man sat on the ground against the wheel of one of the wagons, his
knees pulled up and his head dipped low as he tried to huddle into the wheel’s
shadow. Others were setting up fires and preparing food for the camp while
still others were erecting their crude shelters, everything just the same as
before, only now we were in the valley between two mountains rather than a
hillside. I dusted my hands off and straightened my sweater before walking over
to the man.

He
wasn’t a large man, maybe a few inches taller than me, but thin and wiry. He
looked to be in his mid-twenties. His eyes and mouth were showing signs of
strain. His hands were tanned and lined and dirt colored his nails. The skin
over his knuckles was split and bloody. His hair was curly and bright
orange-red, hanging lank over his forehead where his hat had pressed it down.
He sniffed again while I watched him. When he realized I stood there, he
quickly wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket and cleared his throat.

“Sorry,”
I said, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

He
had a thick Irish accent that swallowed some of the words he spoke. “No, no, s’all
right.”

“Do
you mind?” I asked, gesturing to the ground in front of him.

“Oh,
yeah, sure.” His feet scraped the ground as he adjusted himself to sit up
straight. I crossed my ankles and dropped to the ground to sit cross-legged in
front of him. “Kind of nice to see another human around here.”

“Kind
of, not that either of us wants to be here at all,” I replied, making his mouth
twitch in an almost smile.

“True.”
He nodded.

“Shayna,”
I said, holding my hand out for him.

“Jacob,”
he replied, taking my hand in his and shaking it briefly. We sat there in
awkward silence for a few moments, listening to the noise of the camp around
us, smelling boiling soups and roasting meats.

“So,”
I finally broke the silence, “you know where you are?”

“Seems
the Slaugh got me, didn’t they?” His accent hit
Slaugh
harder than even Gwyn’s did, drawing the word out to sound
like it should:
Sloo-ah.

“Seems
so,” I agreed. “Why though? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Me
sister-in-law, the dirty-” He bit off the sentence, swallowing the insult that
surely pressed against the back of his teeth.

“She
called them down on you?” I felt an uncomfortable fluttering in my chest.

“Suppose
she did,” he said with a nod.

“I
didn’t know people still did that. I mean, that people still believed,” I said,
tilting my head to the side.

“Most
don’t,” he said. “But the stories are still told. Me grandmother, she used to
tell us all the stories of the old faiths.”

“Mine
too,” I said, making him look up at me.

“You’re
American though?”

“My
grandmother was first generation. Her parents were from Ireland, so she knew
all of the stories,” I explained. “Scared the crap out of me, and obviously the
stories are true.”

He
laughed. “So they are, so they are.”

“Why
did your sister-in-law do this to you?”

“Ye
mean, what did I do?” he corrected me. I just stared at him; we both knew what
I was asking. He waited before he answered, whether to control his anger or if
he was deciding to answer me at all, I wasn’t sure.

“It’s
fine.” I put my hands up in front of me, suddenly feeling very awkward. “I shouldn’t
have asked; it was rude of me. You don’t even know me.”

“No,
no,” he said, a note of resignation in his voice. “I mean, what’s it matter
now, right? I’m here; there’s no going back now.” I bit my tongue then. He’d
been hunted and caught, so according to Gwyn, there was no going back for him,
but it didn’t seem fair to tell him I might still have a chance of getting out
of here.

“My
brother was in a car accident,” he began slowly, dropping his eyes to stare at
his hands. “We’d been at the pub most of the night, had one too many. He’d been
having troubles with his wife and he needed a night out, you know? He just
needed some space to calm down.” He paused then, taking a breath and holding it
for a long time before exhaling loudly.

“The
whole damn time his wife was calling his cell, over and over, texting him when
he wouldn’t answer. She even called the pub to have the bartender look for him.”
He shook his head then, and I saw the muscle in his jaw jumping as he ground
his teeth. “Anyway, eventually we knew he’d avoided her long enough and had to
get home. Neither of us was in any condition to drive, him more so than me. I
tried to take the keys from him, I swear it; we even fought over them.” He held
up his bloody knuckles as proof of his story. “But in the end, he got the best
of me and got into the car.”

He
paused again, color rushing to his cheeks as the anger crested through him. He
closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing. I knew the end of the story, but
my stomach was still in knots as I waited for him to go on.

“I
caught a cab outside of the pub and told him to follow my brother. His car went
off the road, flipping and rolling until it looked like a crushed soda can. The
cabbie wouldn’t let me get out to run to him, said it was too dangerous. They put
him in the ambulance and rushed him to the hospital, but I knew he was already
gone.”

“And?”
I whispered when he hesitated. A tear leaked out and rolled down his cheek.

“Mira,
his wife, was at the hospital by the time I got there,” he said. “By then, they
had told her he had passed. She screamed at me it was my fault, that I had
taken him to the bar. That it was my fault he got behind the wheel drunk as he
was. But I tried to stop him, really I did.”

“Sure,”
I said, nodding.

“Well,
Mira…” His voice dropped as he gritted his teeth again.

“Yes?”
I said, feeling myself leaning toward him, anxious to hear the end of the story
despite the knots in my stomach.

“She
called me a kinslayer,” he said. “The bitch called for the Slaugh. Actually
lifted her face and screamed out for vengeance on me for killing my brother.”
He stopped again, shaking his head, an ugly smirk on his face as he thought
back to that moment. “Anyway, nothing happened. I think, for a moment, I
expected something to a happen, after all of the stories me Nan told me, but
not a damn thing happened. The nurses and doctors all looked up at me with this
look on their faces like they were afraid she was some crazy person. I walked
away, leaving her with my brother’s body, and went home.”

“I
don’t understand; how are you here then?” I asked.

“Because
that’s not the end of the story,” he said with that same ugly smirk on his
face. “I walked home, through town. After his car accident, I didn’t want to be
in a car, so I decided to walk. I’ll admit Mira’s cries and curses were
following me around, and I might’ve been a little scared to get into a car.
Made no matter though.” He shook his head.

“I
walked for hours; the hospital was so far from my home, it was almost dawn when
I made it to my street. Then I heard them. The horses came up behind me; I heard
the hounds howling for me. When I turned to look behind me, there was nothing,
but when I turned back around, the houses, the road, they were all gone, and I
was here.” He gestured to the mountains around us before dropping his hands and
wrapping his arms around his knees.

“Just
like that?”

“Just
like that,” he said with a nod.

“I
don’t understand,” I said again. “You didn’t kill your brother. You tried to
stop him from getting in the car; it was his choice.”

“That’s
how I saw it too,” he agreed.

“You
shouldn’t be here!” I said, feeling my face flush with anger. “That’s not fair.
You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Just
killed him is all.”

“No,
Jacob,” I said, shaking my head at him. “You didn’t kill him. He killed
himself. Hell, I’d say Mira had more to do with his death than you did.”

“I’d
be inclined to agree with you, but what does it matter?” He shrugged, holding his
battered hands up in surrender. “I’m here, I’m caught. It’s done.”

“It
shouldn’t be,” I argued. “Listen, I’m trying to get out of here. You’re welcome
to come with me and see if you can leave too.”

“How
do you propose to do that? Me Nan always said, once the Slaugh caught you, you
were caught for good,” he said.

“I
wasn’t caught. They weren’t hunting me; we just sort of stumbled upon each
other.”

“How’s
that? How do you come to the Outlands and not be hunted?” He furrowed his brow
at me.

“Well,
see, I was already dead, but I didn’t ‘
move
on
.’” I made a vague gesture with my hand. “So I was trying to contact my
friends, and one of them inadvertently banished me and I ended up here.”

“Come
again?” he asked.

“Yeah,
I know, kinda hard to believe, but it is what it is,” I said, but the look on
his face said he didn’t believe me. “Look, you don’t have to believe me; it’s
fine. We just met, so for all you know, I’m a crazy person, but I know how to
get out of here. Gwyn told me.”

“Gwyn?”
he asked.

“The
Hunt Master.” I looked around for a moment until I spotted his long silver mane
and pointed him out to Jacob. “That guy.” Jacob leaned forward, craning his
neck to see. When he finally realized who I was pointing at, his eyebrows shot
up and his eyes went wide.

“I
wouldn’t be trusting no elf if I was you.” Jacob shook his head and leaned back
into the shadow of the cart, as if he was afraid of Gwyn catching him staring.

“Oh,
I don’t trust him, but it’s all I have right now.”

“So
what did this elf tell you?”

“He
said if I found the edge of the Outlands, I could leave.”

“Uh
huh,” Jacob said with a nod. “And did he tell you how to find the edge?”

“Well…”
I glanced toward Gwyn’s back again, hesitating. “No.”

“No,”
a small smile broke out on his face, “I didn’t think so.”

“Be
that as it may,” I rallied, “it is something.”

“For
you, maybe,” he said. “But I was caught; means I gotta stay.”

“What’s
the harm in trying?” I pressed. “If you can’t leave, fine, but what if you can
leave? Do you really want to stay here, always wondering ‘what if I’d gone with
her?’”

“You’re
persistent,” he said, making me smile. “That’s not necessarily a good thing,”
he finished, making my smile fall.

“All
right, well, if you change your mind…” I uncrossed my legs and got to my feet.
I paused a moment to brush off the dust on my pants and hands, wincing as my
sore muscles protested, before I turned to leave. I really thought that after I
took a few steps away from him, Jacob would call out to me to wait. I really
thought he would change his mind and say that he wanted to come with me. But he
never did, and when I turned to look over my shoulder, he had bent his head
forward to rest his forehead on his knees, leaving me, once again, on my own.

Chapter 7

I
stayed with the Hunt, riding with them, for a few nights, or at least what I
called nights. I started to hate that moon. I glared up at it, screaming in my
head for it to just move, but it never did. As we passed through mountains, I
would lose sight of it for a few miles, giving my mind a little rest, but it
always came back, just over my left shoulder, glowing dimly in the starless
sky.

Occasionally
I would ride with Jacob. After the first few nights, he seemed resigned to his
fate and started taking to the rides more and more. Once I even caught him
starting to smile as the hunters closed in on their prey. As soon as he saw me
looking, the grin vanished into a hard line, a wrinkle forming between his
eyebrows. I held on to the hope that he would change his mind and come with me,
but I kept my thoughts to myself. Whenever he thought I was about to bring up
my escape plan, he veered away from me and stayed away longer and longer. Hope
seemed to terrify him. Gwyn, I noticed, was also drawing away from me. Every
time he looked my way and saw me keeping company with Jacob, he would scowl and
turn away. Maybe he liked me coming to him for help, but he hadn’t been much
help since that first night, so I had grown tired of wasting my time with him.