Page 39 of A Land So Wide
She trudged up the cabin steps on shaky legs before crashing against a porch post. Her clothes were torn and foul with a mess of sticky stains she did not want to contemplate.
The last of the bats swooped overhead, chasing after the remaining prey. Mangled bodies lay in twitching heaps, seized in death torments all across the cove.
Greer didn’t understand the waste of it.
None of the bats had fed.
It was not the urge to hunt that had spurred them into going after the moths or their own wretched brethren. The surviving bats had enjoyed themselves, relishing the destruction they wrought, driven by nothing but feverish bloodlust.
Greer ran a weary hand across her face. She knew she needed to go inside, knew she needed to clean herself, but couldn’t find the strength. Her head didn’t feel right—her thoughts loose and disjointed—though she was unsure if it was from injury or the sudden absence of sound after such prolonged turmoil.
She studied the sky with heavy eyes. Millions of tiny lights pricked the void, occasionally blotted out by a pair of murderous wings. Greer had always thought of the stars as friends, the same dots faithfully shining year after year, letting her know exactly where she was in her tiny corner of the universe.
But now they looked icy and indifferent.
They didn’t care.
They couldn’t help.
As she watched, soft waves of light formed, streaks of pulsing reds and azure blues. They surged and ebbed and returned, slithering with serpentine grace, undulating in dancing arcs and swirls.
Sky lights on Reaping night.
It had always been considered a lucky sign, a foretelling of good things to come. They should have been beautiful, but now the lights reminded Greer of the flickering caught within the Warding Stones, and she looked away, unable to bear the brilliance.
Why was this happening?
Mistaken had given so much, freely and without reservation.
Why hadn’t it been enough?
Greer wanted to cry as she thought of all the work she and Martha had—
Shame burned her as she realized that, in her haste to flee, she’d run without giving anyone else a second thought. The attack had happened so quickly, there’d been no time to think of others, and now Greer felt sick as she worried about all of the people she’d forgotten.
Martha.
Her father.
Louise and Mary and all the Beaufort siblings.
Ellis.
Her stomach pitched.
What had happened to Ellis?
She tried to push away the spiral of anxious contrition. Those moments with the swarm had been utter madness. People running, lanterns smashing. It would have been impossible to find anyone in such turmoil, and Ellis was more than capable of taking care of himself, of his family.
But Martha…
“Martha?” she called out uncertainly. “Father?”
She shifted, trying to stand, but the change in momentum was too much for her head. Greer pressed her temple against the post and willed the world to stop turning. Noises came in and out of focus, andshe was acutely aware that her hearing had diminished. The world was hushed and still. Such quiet was a sensation she was wholly unused to, and the wrongness prickled at the back of her neck.
People had scattered in all directions to escape the moths. People had fallen. People had been trampled. What if Martha, what if Hessel, had been among them? What if they were lying in the dirt now with broken bones, crying out in agony, and, for the first time in her life, Greer couldn’t hear them?
“Get up,” she ordered herself, grinding her teeth with determination. “Go find them.”
