“The Pride is too smart to attack us head-on. We’ve got too large a group,” Dana told Lily as she huddled miserably inside her jacket. The dead brave had been one of hers. She’d never liked Lily’s command that they only kill attacking Woven to begin with, and Lily could feel resentment building in her. Dana’s whole point in joining her was to kill the Woven, not study them. “They’ll follow us like we’re a walking icebox, picking us off one at a time,” Dana grumbled.
Caleb grunted his assent and threw another log on the fire, trying to drown out the sound of a human being eaten. “We need to get out of the mountains,” he said. “With a raptor above and the Pride all around us, we’re sitting ducks.”
Lily could feel the hatred her tribe harbored for the Woven building with every growl from the Pride. She felt her tribe’s anger seeping into her. She didn’t want to be merciful and fight off only the ones that attacked anymore. She wanted them all to die. Lily pulled the heat of the fire into her skin. A witch wind moaned, silencing the lions.
“Kill them,” she ordered.
Enflamed with Lily’s strength and anger, Caleb, the Tristans, Una, and Dana stood up from around the fire and rolled into the darkness like a cloud of deadly smoke.
Leave one alive, Lily whispered in her Tristan’s mind. Dana said the lions were smart.
What are you going to do with it?
I’m going to run a little experiment.
Lily could hear sounds of a skirmish, but it was over quickly and none of her braves were injured. It wasn’t a fair fight with a witch fueling one side, and Lily repressed a twinge of regret before thinking of the brave she’d lost. Then she didn’t regret a thing. A few hisses, a few shouts, and then she heard her Tristan’s voice in her head again.
It’s a female. She’s badly injured.
Lily released the loop of power and her witch wind died, allowing her to drop to the ground and go to Tristan. Caleb and Una had joined him, and they were looking from her Tristan to the injured Woven, confused.
“Just finish her off,” Una said. “She’s suffering.”
“No. Hold her down,” Lily countermanded as she strode through the brush.
She got close enough to clearly see the massive, leathery body of the mountain lion Woven. She was twice the size of a regular lion and she had the rounded shoulders and sloped back of a saber-toothed tiger, but her hide was not covered in pretty striped or golden fur. It was bare, thick, and nearly armored, like a rhino. Her eyes were different, too—rounded instead of almond-shaped. Lily leaned in, looking the Woven in her all-too-human eyes.
“Don’t get that close!” Caleb chided, pulling her back. “Tristan, kill that thing.”
“No,” Lily insisted. “Hold it steady.”
The Woven struggled under Tristan’s and Una’s hands, but it couldn’t move. Her back was broken and she could barely raise her head. Lily grabbed her neck and felt the skin along her throat. She could hear Dana and Caleb protesting, but tuned them out. Her fingers found a lump at the notch in the Woven’s collarbone. She pinched the lump through the skin with the tips of her fingers and looked the Woven in the eye.
Lily felt a mind there, shying away from hers. She delved deeper and reached through the Woven until she found the suggestion of other minds attached to this one, the way a shadow is attached to a body. Those minds weren’t there anymore, but the shape of them was. Lily realized the shadow minds were the dead of her Pride.
As the Woven heaved her last breath, Lily felt a surge of emotion directed at her, coming from the Woven. It wasn’t anger or animal terror. It was a complicated emotion she could only describe as defiance.
“Give me your knife,” Lily said, holding her hand out to Una. Una gave her knife over, and she cut around the lump.
“Your hands!” Dana warned as stinging fluid landed on Lily’s fingers. “Woven turn acidic after death,” she added needlessly.
Lily ignored the sting that quickly turned to an itch and then a burn, and dug around inside the pocket she had cut until she extracted the root of the lump.
“Water, quick!” Caleb said, and started rinsing the acid off Lily’s hands.