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I look back over my shoulder and realize I’ve come quite a distance into the forest, certainly too far for Max’s comfort.Anything farther than his wingspan is too far. I’m going to have to figure out this scent and hurry back if I have any chance of not being discovered.
Just please let them be alive.
Please.
The scent increases with each step I take until it smells like I’m on top of the person. It’s honestly strange, so I slow, trying to figure out what the hell I’m scenting. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I look up, expecting to see a body hanging over me. But, thankfully, there’s nothing.
So where are they?
My foot slips and I nearly plummet into a small hole previously covered over with foliage. Confused, I look down to find a girl cowering in the earth. A girl. The source of the scent. And she’s alive!
She flinches as leaves and dirt rain down on her, then pinches her eyes shut. I stare down at her, trying to remember her. She has brown hair that’s long and tangled, looking like it hasn’t been washed in weeks. Her face looks like it might have been round once, but is so thin that the bones in her face seem to stick out in ways they shouldn’t. Nothing about her is familiar to me, but time can be cruel.
I crouch down and breathe her in, trying to identify her scent. Fear radiates off of her so strongly that an age-old instinct whispers the wordpreyto me, and it’s so powerful that it’s hard to pick up on anything else.She thinks I’m here to hurt her.But after seconds pass and she isn’t killed, she opens her eyes for a peek at her presumed killer.
“Asha?” she asks, her voice imbued with cautious hope.
Though her features are obscured by dirt, I think I recognize the teenage face underneath and the light voice. “Janie?”
“Yes,” she whispers, then a sob explodes past her lips.
She scampers out of the hole and into my arms. We squeeze each other tightly, clinging to one another fiercely.Family. Pack.The words fly through my mind, and my heart swells.Alive!
“Oh my god, you don’t know how happy I am to see you!” she says, her voice trembling.
“The feeling’s mutual,” I tell her, breathing her in. As I hold her, I can feel her legs shaking. Fear and exhaustion have drained her. “Come here. Let’s sit up against this tree.”
I help lower her and then sit beside her.
She holds my hands the entire time. “I didn’t think I’d ever leave this forest alive.” The last word cracks, and she squeezes my hands tighter.
“What happened?” I ask, then clarify. “After the Raven Pack and the Blood Mages attacked our lands, and you were taken.”
She takes a deep breath, and I sense that this story is one she’s thought about often. “There were about a dozen of us here, forced to do things for the Raven Pack. I had to clean their houses all day. I know others were made to chop wood, fix cars, whatever they wanted.”
Slavery. Those bastards enslaved my pack members. And, it finally hits me. Is that what the Blood Mages gave them for their help? A shudder rolls through me as my wolf claws to be released.
But it isn’t time for that. Yet.
I breathe her in again and get my second surprise. She smells, more or less, the same way she did before.There’s no dark magic on her.The silver lining, I suppose, is that Janie seems untouched by dark magic. The Raven Pack didn’t experiment on them like the Blood Mages did me.
“What happened next?” I don’t think I need to say,when the town was destroyed, I just stare and wait.
“The strangest thing happened. Your brother Simon came.”Of course, it had been Simon.The inevitable conclusion I’ve been staving off hits me like a Mack truck, but I retain my composure as Janie continues. “He just started killing the Raven Pack like it was nothing. Like he was squishing bugs. Nobody could stop him, though they tried. It gave all of us an opportunity to run away, so we hightailed it into the woods.”
“You all got away? None of the Blood Pack were hurt?”
Janie shakes her head. “They were all too busy trying to fight your brother.” She doesn’t realize my true fear, which is that Simon attacked our own pack with the same indiscriminate violence. It’s a small relief he at least spared their lives.Perhaps he hasn’t completely lost himself to the darkness. “Did you find him?”
“Simon?”
She shakes her head.
“What about the rest of you that escaped? Where did they go?”
She turns her head to indicate the forest. “They’re out there somewhere.”
My heart races. “Who? Adults or just kids?”
