Page 199 of Hunters and Prey

Without waiting, I rippled my body up, leaping to my feet in a single move and landing on the soles of both feet in the reed-covered sand. I looked down at it, at its pained eyes and the black, blood-like substance coming from its nose.

Winding up, I kicked it as hard as I could.

Then, without either of us exchanging a word, without me making so much as a sound, I bolted back into the trees.

IFOUGHT SIX more of them, hand-to-hand, before I got out of the bog.

They weren’t very good fighters.

They didn’t strike me as very strategic, either, which was definitely a good thing for me.

They were strong though, and their bones were like iron.

They had strong fingers, strong arms, and it wasn’t easy to pierce their flesh, at least not below the neck. They seemed to have adapted like the trees had, with odd, reddish skin that acted more like a lizard’s skin, or maybe an elephant’s.

Only the bones of their faces seemed vulnerable to injury.

Unfortunately, hitting them multiple times in the face didn’t kill them, or even slow them down much, as far as I could tell. It just hurt them and seemingly made them even more determined to follow me.

One bit me, sinking its flat, strangely thin, razor-sharp teeth into the fatty part of my forearm. It only let me go when I punched it repeatedly in the face, and then it took a chunk of my flesh with it.

I was starting to get worried.

Despite my attempts to discourage them, I wasn’t shaking them.

I would run out of wind, or get too tired to fight them off, or simply run into too many of them all at once, and it would be over. They’d either eat me, or drag me back to their hovels, or whatever else it was they wanted from me.

I knew this. It was a statistical certainty.

My clinical mind told me this. It had taken over that side of things, assessing the situation from somewhere detached from the actions I took to try and beat them back. I’d clicked into pure survival mode, and I’d noticed the two mental states were relatively similar.

I fell into a detached, strangely-clear state. Even my light got clearer.

It also grew laser-focused.

I knew from previous times, this wouldn’t last.

I had theories as to why that was.

I suspected at least some of that newfound focus came from Black, even more than it did from my memories of Afghanistan. The longer I was away from him, the more tenuous my connection to those parts of him I’d adopted as part of being his mate. He’d told me all along that being bonded mates meant our lights would change, that we’d adopt one another’s traits, even skill sets we’d earned in our current lifetime.

We’d pick up idiosyncratic similarities too, according to him––tastes in food and drinks, assorted phobias and hang-ups, even trauma markers and neuroses.

Funny, I’d never thought to ask him what would happen to that bond, or all of that shared light, if one of us ended up in a different dimension.

Now that I was running for my life, in a horror-movie forest with bleeding trees that didn’t really look like trees, and zombies that either wanted to eat me, lock me in a cage, or possibly rape me, I found myself thinking it might be something like death.

Meaning, my being here, separated from his light, might be the same as if one of us had died.

Given that we were life-bonded mates, that meant we’d both die. Now that our lights were interdependent, we couldn’t live without one another.

Literally.

It was only a theory. I didn’t want to stay here long enough to test it, though.

It felt like I’d been running from those things for hours by now. I’d found a section of forest that was drier, being further away from the massive, crawling lake that had once been a vibrant and blue-watered bay.

The forest here was overgrown as well, but the land was firmer, less covered in moss and rotten plant matter. Fewer of those whip-like bushes grew here, too, and the thick-bladed grasses were absent entirely, so I could dart around trees without injuring myself too badly.

---