Page 198 of Hunters and Prey

I’d seen those eyes move, though. I’d watched them track me, so I knew they could see me just fine, and probably better than I could see it, especially in the dark.

I’d seen its body move, as well. If not this one, then one just like it.

When they were motivated, they were damned fast.

Forcing my eyes off it, I leapt to the next rock, then the one after.

I waited until I reached a strip of dry ground before I looked back again.

It had vanished.

That didn’t reassure me at all.

Looking down the slope, I tried to sense any movement in the wooded area underneath where it had been standing. Extending my seer’s sight, I fought to glimpse anything out of the ordinary. Inside the Barrier––the space where a seer’s sight operated––everything grew that familiar dark rose and purple. My view of the world around me darkened, all but the living light of the beings surrounding me.

But it was too different from the Earth I knew.

Everything glowed strangely, even the rocks and the earth itself. I struggled to differentiate the trees and plants from anything that might qualify as an actual animal.

The trees especially had a bizarre signature from the Barrier space––and surprisingly complex aleimi––assuming they were trees at all, or even plants.

Fighting my way up the bank, I wished like hell I had some kind of weapon.

I was about to reach another grove of those black-skinned trees, just past the muddy bank, when movement in my periphery drew my eyes back to the opposite shore.

Not one. Six.

Six of those pale, skeletal creatures with the urine-colored eyes appeared out of the trees just above the bog. I stared at them, and they stared at me.

Taking in their various heights, their uniform-seeming, bone-like forms, their gaunt faces with the strangely-veined and too-tight skin…

I didn’t think.

I ran, bolting into those black and bleeding trees, once more shoving my way through the undergrowth. I protected myself as well as I could with my hands and arms, but branches and sticks hit me in the face and body, cutting my bare skin, making me gasp.

I was panting in seconds, but I didn’t let myself slow.

Not until I stepped, then half-fell, into another bog.

Landing on my palms in the foot or so of bilge water and mud, I grimaced at the smell, shoving myself up, fighting my way back to my feet and throwing myself forward through the reed-choked swamp. I didn’t bother with rock jumping that time, or even looking down. I waded and splashed through the water-soaked undergrowth, then fought my way up the next bank, gasping for breath in the humid, poison-choked air, and looked for more cover.

I was still standing there, on a slight rise covered in reeds and reddish-black, razor sharp grass, when something tackled me from my left.

Instinctively, I made my body soft, going with the energy of the physical throw.

When I hit the dirt, the breath left my lungs.

I let all of my muscles go loose until I hit the ground––then I rolled, taking the thing on top of me with me, until it fell off me with a grunt.

It was one of those things. They must have flanked me on the other side of the bog.

Its sickly yellow eyes stared up at me.

Those eyes blinked at me in confusion, unclear what I’d just done, and possibly why I’d done it. I didn’t wait, but wound up and punched the thing in the face, as hard as I could.

Something cracked, moving and shattering under my fist.

The thing let out a wailing, keening kind of moan.

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