Then we were back on the trail. I studied the ground from my saddle for signs of our quarry’s passing. It wasn’t as if this one we were after was trying to cover his tracks any longer. He was probably too far gone for that. Two huntsmen had almost ridden him into the ground before he killed them. He’d be exhausted and desperate with us coming up behind to finish the job. Desperate wasn’t good, not with two kills under his belt, but exhausted was, and we’d use it.
After another couple of miles, Pie lifted his head and blew softly through his nostrils. He knew better than to warn our prey. “He smells water,” I said softly. “There must be a spring up ahead. That’s where the bastard’s going. He must’ve run out of water.” And monsters or not, they needed water the same as any other creature.
We picked up the pace to a slow gallop. We passed a horse ridden to death, its tongue as dry and lifeless as the sand it lolled across. Another victim. Maybe that made me pick up the pace a little, pulling ahead of Scotch. Or maybe it was that I was so damn tired of them. Slaughterers, nightmares made flesh, evil…evil in a way that even I had never known the meaning of. I’d put down so many of them, but at that moment I wanted this one dead more than all the others put together. He’d killed two of our comrades, rode an innocent animal to an agonizing death, ruined all that I could see and ever would see, even the stars at night were blinking out one by one. For all that, this one meant more than all the others put together. I wanted it. I needed it.
When you want it, it sharpens you, makes you better.
When you need it, it makes you sloppy.
I was sloppy.
Pie and I crested a gentle swell and I saw the water. It was a putrid shade of green, glimmering in a red rimmed basin with stunted, oddly twisted shrubs clustered here and there around it. I heard slurping and saw a tree with silvery leprous bark and long blade shaped leaves. The tree had grown in the painfully sharp shape of a bow bent beyond endurance until its leaves trailed in the water, drinking with a passionate thirst. What I didn’t see was the son of a bitch with the gun.
Not until it was too late.
I felt the bullet hit me in the chest. They say it feels like being kicked by a mule. Yeah, that’s what they say. It didn’t. It was a hundred times worse. There was the free-fall as I was thrown from the saddle and the hard thump as I hit the ground. All I could see then was sky. I longed for the forever-gone blue or the black of night with the thousand and one stars…not the random handful that remained, but gray was all there was. The gray of nothing. The gray of indifference. The gray that would slowly eat this world’s remains and move on to eat the whole of reality for all I knew.
I heard Pie lie down next to me with a grunt, blocking me from further fire. It’d be nice to say I’d known Pie since he was a frisky colt, but Pie had known me when I’d been the shaky legged newborn. He’d no doubt thought I was a nuisance the same as I’d once thought about Scotch. I hope he’d changed his mind like I’d changed mine.
Scotch’s rifle fired, the shots so quick that the sound blended into one massive crack. I heard a scream, I was glad of that. I wanted to hear that murdering freak shriek until his throat bled and much more—so much more, but I settled for the scream and then a second one followed by a splash. I managed to turn my head towards the spring and saw Pie’s lambent gold eyes staring into mine. The cat’s-eye pupils dilated. “Hungry,” he muttered, the words pushed harshly through the long throat. “Eat. Now. Hungry.”
“Go,” I said, words slow and painful. “Feast as you deserve, honored one.”