“Pick it up, boy,” Breck mutters behind me. “I can feel us slacking.”
When I peek back, she’s nudging Colin, who’s wearing a dazed expression—as if unsure whether the cries in the black woods are actually from flesh-eating animals or the innocent in need of help.
“Colin, focus!” I yell through my cloak. “Breck, punch him!”
She does, somewhat awkwardly in her blindness, and his eyes snap clear again.
“They sound so real,” he says.
“Well, they ain’t!” Breck barks. “So keep your fool self together.”
Another shadow looms ahead through the fog. The stench grows stronger as we pass by a stream that smells of cadaver.
The second time the shadow appears I have the distinct impression of extra hoofbeats again. Coming from behind us. Or maybe from the side?
A shriek erupts and the forest crunches, and abruptly a body has charged onto the path thirty paces ahead. I blink twice because—What in—?—it looks like a man. Like Eogan. But then suddenly it’s morphing into a black, slime-covered bolcrane.
We slam to a stop fifteen paces shy of it just as the monster opens his crocodilian mouth and screams, blowing chunks of drool through jagged rows of teeth. My skin crawls. Judging by its fangs, the animal is young, but it’s still bigger than Haven, with jaws that could wrap around my entire torso.
He elongates his neck and tastes the air with his tongue.
Then screams again.
The horses spook, prancing to the side before lurching back as the beast moves his leathery, bloated form forward and flares his poisoned quills.
“Easy, girl.” I pat Haven and prepare to pull a charge from the air, but as my fingers tingle, my eyesight blips and goes hazy, and then Colin’s horse is in front of me and to the side of me, and I barely have time to hear him yell before the beast lunges.
My breath slows.
The moments slow.
Until all I see are flashes in my head, like a series of paintings in which Breck is thrown off the horse just as the bolcrane’s oozing teeth come down. With a snap of its jaws, the monster clamps around Colin’s chest and drags him, writhing and shrieking, off his mount.
Noooo!
I am screaming.
I can’t stop screaming.
Then I’m coughing and gasping, and my lightning strike’s exploding, but it somehow just misses the beast. The bolt’s force ripples the space around us, wavering the atmosphere until it crackles and clears.
And with it, my vision alters.
I shake my head.
And squint.
It’s as if time somehow reeled backward because Colin and Breck are still on their horse and the bolcrane is still charging, and what I saw never happened.
The mount flips around as the beast skids past. Abruptly Colin’s warhorse leans out and bites the monster on its bare haunch, ripping a chunk of flesh off. The bolcrane shrieks and lurches, but another twitch of my hand brings the next fire strike down like a knife. It severs the beast’s spine, and the thing falls into a black, smoking lump on the ground.
I barely have time to look at Colin, let alone feel relief or confusion, before our mounts hurtle back onto the path. After that, it’s all I can do to hold on as my feverish mind begins to slip further and the world around us enters a haze. Eventually, I get Haven to slow enough for me to beckon Colin to take the lead. He nods and plows ahead while behind him Breck’s got her arms tight around his waist and appears to have passed out.
What I wouldn’t give to pass out . . .
I rub my sleeve across my eyes and refocus on holding the temperature low for one hour.
Two hours.
Three.
Four hours of ice and miasma, ticks, and bolcrane shrieks.
Not until the gradual graying of dawn does it occur to me that the sounds are slowly fading and the path we’re on has been climbing for quite some time. And it’s lighter here with patches of morning moonlight sifting through the trees.
Another spell of listless time passes, and suddenly something cold hits my nose. The next thing I know snowflakes are falling. Like tender white kisses gifted onto such a hostile landscape. They’re so eerie and whimsical, I almost laugh at the irony.
Soon the snowdrifts are thicker, mounding across the ground, encroaching on the steep trail.
Colin brings his horse to a halt.
“We can’t sto—” I start to say, but I do stop.
Because even in my daze I notice it too.
No breeze. No beasts rustling or breathing other than the horses and Colin and Breck and me. Even the bolcranes and miasma clouds have abandoned their bloodthirst. Suddenly I’m leaning over to vomit, discharging what little is left in my stomach as the scent of rotting flesh hits me and clashes with my pain-induced nausea. It smells of death here.
Colin watches until I finish, then offers me his water.
I grab it and take two tablets, drowning them with big gulps before handing the bag back with a thank-you.