Hunted [Wild Hunt Series: 1]

5: Nothing

Last Hour Story -- Julia Kent

There's peace in nothingness.

Nothing doesn't care about missed flight times. Nothing isn't worried about a lost calf or if you can live up to the creative competition in New York. Nothing doesn't care about who's dead, who isn't, and those skirting the border between.

Nothing is a promise of peace.

Nothing is all there is, for a while.

No pain, no fear, no ...nothing.

A lightning bolt of awareness surged through my body and I woke to reality, scrambled up into a world pouring snow.

"Lucas?" I croaked and, clutching my arms against my chest, remembered his screams. Screams of a dying animal, I thought, staggering into the long shadow of the ridge. "Lucas? Lucas!"

Nothing. Worse than nothing: silence.

Night had won the hour and buried it under a good six inches of snow. Dragging my feet, stumbling over hidden roots and stones, I scrambled back up the ridge, high as I could before steepness sent me sliding. My right arm burned; the left was a throbbing apartment fire. The coat had been singed straight through to blistered skin. I could feel the pull and crack of ruined flesh with every desperate lunge up- but even that sensation was fading under the strength of the storming cold.

"Lucas!" I yelled.

Silence.

Sapling after sapling, rock after rock, I grit my teeth and pulled myself higher. Halfway, I cut my hand on Luc's shattered lantern- and a short distance later my bloody fingertips discovered the rifle. Without losing hold, I managed to get a hand around the strap and sling it over my shoulder. I took a moment to catch my breath, then kept climbing. You only have so long before numbness eats away at your limbs and supple flexibility stiffens. The peak was just above, a sheer vertical. I needed my toes and fingers functional.

A low, fearful bray broke through dark.

Aching fingers digging into a dangerously bent sapling, I paused, squinting through sheets of snow.

The calf moved along the base, stopping to sniff my tracks.

With an abrupt snap, the sapling came out roots and all. I skidded then fell the rest of the way, landed in a great whoomph of snow that sent the calf dashing through the trees. After the stars finally blinked out of my vision, I stood in time to see the calf taking her first tentative steps back.

"Lucas?" I yelled again, keeping an ear toward the animal's careful approach.

No answer.

Lucas was my Schrodinger's cat, alive and dead and I didn't necessarily want to peer over that top and learn the cold hard truth.

The calf, meanwhile, was alive and frightened. The ridge slope lessened if you followed it west long enough. I could lead the calf around, climb the gradual incline and get back to Lucas. It was a longer walk, but I'd conserve energy. I might need that energy, depending on what awaited me.

"You're okay," I told the calf, dusting snow off her hide. Her body twitched and shivered; her legs folded underneath her skinny frame. Frost glittered on the soft whiskers of the snout she lifted toward me. We needed to get back quickly if she had any shot. Hell, we all needed to get back. Hypothermia was setting in; I wasn't feeling cold. Just numb.

Young and newborn though she was, the calf weighed about seventy pounds. Supporting her chest and rump, I lifted her into my arms and began the long walk around the ridge with nothing but memory as a guide.