Page 33 of Rogue Familiar

“That will take days,” she pointed out. She was used to going without food, though water had always been plentiful. How long could she go without? She’d left the water flask in the bags on Vale, unfortunately.

“Posssibly, but you are mortal and mussst sssleep. I am not mortal. I have time. I can wait.”

“My people will come to rescue me.” It sounded good, anyway.

The hunter grinned, tongue rolling out between rows of fangs. “I will sssoon have reinforsssementsss.”

Well, shit. It could be bluffing, but Selly definitely was. She highly doubted Jadren would heal in time to heroically rescue her, especially not without the help of her magic. It was burgeoning inside her, too, which didn’t help, her mind beginning to swim with the potency of the stuff trapped inside with nowhere to go. She should’ve prevailed on Jadren’s guilt and made him tap her magic to save her, since the obdurate wizard wouldn’t do it to save himself. In the meanwhile, the overstuffed sensation only combined with the incredible frustration of not being able to use all that power to do anything to help herself.

Well, there was always Gabriel’s manual chop-chop method, a classic for a reason. Melting the hunters was fast, efficient, and permanent—but cutting them into pieces too small to do damage also worked. Gathering her legs beneath her, she extracted the big dagger she’d wedged into the tree, adjusting her grip on it. She didn’t bother to disguise her actions, as she doubted the hunter cared whether she was armed or not, in its immortal confidence.

“All right,” she announced, “I’ll come down.”

It nodded, still grinning in its canine, weasel like way. It didn’t seem to question her easy capitulation, pleased that she was cooperating as it expected familiars to do. She gauged the distance. Farther than she liked to jump, especially given the difficulty of assessing the exact drop in the deepening shadows, but she’d scaled greater heights. The hunter remained obligingly right beneath her.

Deciding not to give it any time to question her motives—or for her to lose her courage—Selly gathered all her considerable, moon-bright, dammed-up-water frustration, and dropped onto the hunter, blade angled down.

She didn’t catch it entirely by surprise. That would’ve been too much to hope for. As she fell it opened its arms in a parody of an embrace, talons flaring wide, a cage to imprison her.

No more cages, the feral creature within her snarled.

Then she didn’t have to think anymore. Couldn’t have, even if she’d wanted to. She whipped the blade across the hunter’s eyes, blinding it in one stroke. Its fangs and talons ripped at her, but she felt nothing, only the burning fury to dismember, dismantle, destroy. Crimson rage filled her vision and she drew a second blade—another of Gabriel’s enchanted ones—with her left hand and attacked the hunter as if the knives were her own claws. Wild cat from the western marshes.

The bespelled weapons didn’t melt the hunter any more than the arrows had, and it fought back with desperate ferocity. Gradually, however, it fell to her determined onslaught, soon no more than a pile of severed limbs, still twitching with unnatural life. She was almost sorry, as she had plenty of the killing rage left and no target for it. So, she redirected the urge to destroy, applying it with meticulous thoroughness and cutting the pieces ever smaller, hurling the bits into the underbrush, scattering them as far as possible. From what Gabriel had told her about the hunter he’d chopped up and locked in a trunk, those pieces might grow into new, individual hunters—possibly also resistant to the enchanted weapons, unfortunately, if they retained the properties of their parent—but what mattered most in this moment was to get Jadren and herself clear of the things.

Finally, with nothing left on which to vent her fury, she realized she’d better find Jadren and Vale. That meant walking and trying to track Vale’s passage in the dark. Plus side, it would be a big trail. Downside, it was really dark. Where was the moon when she needed it? She briefly considered lying down to sleep and finding the trail in the morning light. She wanted nothing more than to sit down and rest her increasingly weary bones. But more hunters might arrive and Jadren definitely needed her.

Screwing up her determination, she made herself search the bodies of the Hanneil wizards. They’d taken Jadren’s supplies and she might not have another opportunity to reclaim them. It was a gruesome, depressing task. Though it had been easy to harden herself against her captors’ fate when they were alive, the dead bodies saddened her, their slack faces those of regular people, their lives unnaturally cut short, and in savage ways.

Sure enough, however, she found Jadren’s treasured machete. She also found the bag she herself had scrounged from House Phel supplies, the one she’d left in Jadren’s rooms there, containing all the bits and pieces his mother had attempted to install in him and that had been extruded during his healing process. She hadn’t thought to check to see if he’d taken that, but he clearly had. For what purpose?

It didn’t matter. If they both lived, she could ask him. She also scavenged her arrows from the piles of goo that were the former hunters, and anything else that seemed useful. Jadren had convinced her of the usefulness of supplies, though she began to regret the decision as she started walking. It was a lot to carry and she was ridiculously weak. Her legs felt both impossibly heavy and flimsy as overcooked vegetables. She really hated overcooked vegetables.

As she stumbled through the dark, boots catching roots and rocks as if they leapt out to trip her, it occurred to her that she probably wasn’t in her right mind. A different kind of not-in-her-right-mind than usual. Though the magic overload pulsed within her, this wasn’t the crazyland of shifting mists. This was something else and she had a very strong feeling that she should figure it out before it was too late.

Too late for what though?

Suddenly, a black shape loomed before her, huge and heaving hot breath. She screamed a little, a frightened yip and fumbled for a weapon. Somehow she ended up on her back in the prickly leaf litter, head swimming and not remembering how she fell. Something whuffed over her face, scented with grass. Vale?

“Jadren,” she gasped. Managing to roll over—why did everything hurt so much?—she used her arms to push into a more or less seated position, then reached up to cradle Vale’s head. Peering up, she could see Vale still wore all of his gear, but lacked the most important baggage. Jadren was gone.

Despite the crushing disappointment, she held onto Vale’s lowered head with relieved gratitude. He’d found her and maybe he could take her to Jadren, clever horse that he was. Vale whickered, which she took to mean he would, and backed up a careful step. Ah yes, just like when he pulled her out of the sinkhole. Only this time he was lifting her out of her own weakness.

It took a stupid amount of effort to get her clumsy feet under her, but after several tries and failures—and really only because of Vale’s determination—Selly managed to get upright. It was a precarious state, full of wobbling and an enervating dizziness that threatened to drop her to the ground again. Turning his great head, Vale nudged her hip, clearly intending her to mount. The saddle might as well be the moon, as far above her as it seemed to be. She considered the monumental effort of lifting a boot to the stirrup and discarded it as impossible.

“Sorry, Vale,” she mumbled against his sleek, warm hide. “I don’t think I can.”

He nudged her again, then rumbled what sounded very like a long-suffering sigh. Under her clinging weight, he shifted, lowered, and was soon kneeling beside her.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” she breathed, overcome and close to tears for no good reason. Except that she was so very tired. She collapsed onto Vale’s back more than climbed on, barely managing to swing a leg over to straddle him. As if he understood her difficulty, Vale waited for her to settle, then got to his feet with only a bit of lurching. She stayed on, anyway, though her thighs seemed to be too numb to grip as they should.

Vale, best of all possible horses, carried her so smoothly that she didn’t have to worry about falling off. And she could stop thinking about which direction to go, because Vale knew the way to Jadren. Good thing, too, as her thinking continued to degrade. She rode through the dark night, her mind similarly obscured, everything drifting in an ungentle haze. Pain and dizziness tangled together, so that she imagined them as dance partners, sweeping around in the ballroom of her head, bobbing and spinning, egging each other to go faster and faster. Queasiness chased after them, bound to catch up eventually. That would turn the party into a real mess.

Gradually, she became aware that Vale had stopped, and that some of the swaying motion she’d attributed to the wild dance was him lowering himself down so she could dismount. Poor horse. She did her best to scramble off, which resulted in a mouthful of dirt as she faceplanted at the final moment. The ground, hard and prickly as it was, felt really good. She melted into it, lassitude filling her, darkness washing over and through her, taking her down like the sweet, slow fall of the sinkhole.

Like the sinkhole. Which meant death.

That still-alert, quite-alarmed-though-much-quieted voice in the back of her consciousness started shouting that yes yes yes, this was the problem. Though she didn’t understand why it would be. Jadren was the wounded one. But, according to the prodding of her internal panic, she couldn’t just lie there and sleep. Besides, where was Jadren? Surely Vale would have taken her to him.

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