Page 147 of The Hunter

“Cole!” Lacey and Sophia shouted in unison.

Telok glanced over his shoulder to see two winddancers aiding Koss, who had one kurghest latched onto his hindquarters and another biting his arm. Beyond them, a bloodied Tas was struggling up off the ground. Cole lay on his belly nearby. A kurghest’s claws were caught in the back of his leg, and his skin was red with blood. The two female humans were stabbing the thrashing kurghest from both sides, its snapping jaws and flailing tail coming alarmingly close to their delicate flesh.

Must go to her.

Must protect my mate.

Telok began to turn only to be halted by a bellowing roar from the den. The sound quaked through the jungle, reverberated into his bones, flooding them with cold, and made his head feel like it would split open. Telok swung his gaze forward.

A hulking, moss green giant charged out of the den with impossible speed and power.

Fangs sank deep into Telok’s lower foreleg. He snarled and snapped his gaze down as the female kurghest biting him planted its feet and yanked backward, attempting to drag him off balance.

At the edge of his vision, he saw the prime kurghest crash into Okkor and Elharat, who’d been fighting side by side. Both thornskulls were flung aside as though they weighed nothing.

Telok jabbed his spear down into the kurghest’s head in rapid, successive blows, feeling the impact jolt up his arm each time the blackrock tip struck the beast’s thick skull. The kurghest whipped its head from side to side, lodging its fangs deeper. Growls, shouts, and grunts filled the air, battling the sounds of wind and rain.

All around, lithe figures dropped from the trees—Var, Jehk, and the other winddancers coming to join the battle on the ground.

Bone cracked as Telok’s spear finally penetrated. The kurghest biting him slipped in the mud, its legs giving out, jaws slackening. He leaned down and pried it off his leg with his lower hands. Even as he shoved it away, he returned his gaze to the prime kurghest.

Nearly as tall as Ayali at the shoulder, the beast was a mass of muscle, scars, and wicked spines. Several of the winddancers’ crude spears jutted from its back and shoulders. If any had gone deep enough to cause real harm, the prime showed no sign of it. The beast was partly turned away from Telok, standing over a thornskull whose yellow hide was smeared with mud and blood, savaging him with teeth and talons.

“Elharat!” Okkor cried from the ground as he wrestled the female kurghest that had leapt atop him, barely keeping its snapping jaws away from his throat.

Not far away, Garahk and Droztar were ringed by beasts, fighting viciously as they were attacked from all sides. Elharat was cut off from aid.

Without wasting another moment in thought, Telok reversed his grip on his spear, raised it, and threw it as hard as he could.

The weapon struck the prime kurghest’s left side, the blackrock head piercing deep. The beast stumbled aside with a pained growl only to spin toward Telok, swiping the air with claws as long as his fingers. It stepped over the unmoving Elharat with as much indifference as it afforded the ground.

Telok’s gaze met the beast’s.

Cold talons seized his chest, and everything else faded away—the din fell silent, the chaos went dark, and he no longer felt his wounds or the pelting rain.

There was only the prime kurghest’s eye. Orange and blazing with fury and lust for blood, it stared at Telok from across a two-decade chasm, stared at him from his nightmares, from his worst memory.

Only the darkness of a ruined socket existed where the kurghest’s right eye should’ve been, somehow holding even more hatred in its emptiness. And that socket was bisected by a single jagged scar, not left by claws or fangs but by a stab.

By a spear.

The beast charged at him, kicking up muck, its hot breath bursting from its snout in clouds. It seemed to be moving so slowly, but Telok was stuck in place. He could not move, could not breathe, could not think.

A world away, someone cried out his name.

As clear as the day it had happened, he saw his sire slaughtered, saw his mother on her back, using her dying strength to restrain this beast so Telok could escape, and he felt the old wounds on his neck and face, warm, stinging, and throbbing.

The prime kurghest was massive, unstoppable. And Telok was small, weak, and alone.

Mere segments away, the prime opened its fanged maw. Oblivion lay within its slavering jaws.

His mother’s voice, broken and raw, echoed from memory. Ven’dak losar agar.

Do not look back.

But ahead was only death, bristling with spines, teeth, and claws. Ahead was⁠—

“Telok!”