Hunted [Wild Hunt Series: 1]

20: What lies within

The fly walked along my eyebrow maybe a good twelve seconds before I summoned enough annoyed energy into my hand to smack it. Sunlight warmed me where I lay sprawled against the cocooned bodies of the demon's previous victims. Every part of me ached. I thought—AKA I wasn't really sure because the light was making my thoughts somehow fuzzy and disoriented—I thought I might've thrown up a couple times before I managed to stagger onto my wobbling legs. 

It was then, when my fingers pushed against desiccated limbs to stand, that I heard a crinkle in my wake, a musical crunch as my feet pushed into decayed leaves. I looked over my shoulder at my resting place for the past twelve hours or so. 

Crystalline silk spread across the scene in geometric splendor. The heavy frost illuminated the sunlight, added a fuzzy gentility to the grotesque scene. I leaned forward as much as my stomach could bear and squinted down at the radial strands as they melted and combined with other bits of the spun web. No, the fuzziness was definitely my eyes. I rubbed my face with gloves stained a rich blue-violet, remembered dimly what I'd done last night, and looked down at my clothing with mild surprise.

The spider's hemolymph- that dried, beautiful fluid stained into my attire, had frozen into a black pile of goo near my feet, the remnants of what I'd wrenched out of the demon's abdominal area. On closer inspection, I couldn't tell at all what I was looking at.

My stomach clenched. I moved away thinking maybe it was for the best that I didn't know what I'd shoved my fingers into. 

Further on, the monster himself lay well and truly dead.

But it took me about twenty minutes to feel bold enough to kick and yell at it a leg to make sure.

He lay curled into a ball, six legs tucked tightly into its heavy abdomen. Filthy, ratty hair fell across its many eyes, eyes that reflected the green sky above. I grimaced, looking at that lifeless, fanged expression, a sneer even in death, and turned my attention further down its body. 

A big, inky stain with still-wet fluid poured from the gaping hole I'd ripped. 

Looking at it in the light of day, I had to wonder why on earth I thought it would heal from that kind of injury. I'd gutted it. You don't just make a new spleen or whatever it was I'd tangled into my fist. What had the Walrus told me? Scratches and such heal fine, but if you lop off a limb or a head...? Internal organs applied to that rule, I supposed. 

I looked again, just to confirm the sneaking suspicion I had. The demon hadn't been frozen, just the stuff around where I'd fallen. So after a week of trying to Elsa my way through this Hunt, I turned some leaves and spider web into frost when I was under the influence of venom. Or already passed out. Yippee. Such progress. After finding my knife, I scratched at my bitten neck and leaned against the frozen pile to think.

The afternoon sunlight was a smarting reminder that I had to get out of here. My head was pounding, my muscles ached like it was the day after ten hours of a full body workout, and I was so thirsty I was tempted to lick the dewy frost if I didn't know about the maggots and flies crawling over and beneath the fragile surface. 

When I turned my attention on escape, however, the webbing around the clear was thicker and more dense than when I'd first stumbled into this mess. If it wasn't for laying in one spot all night waiting for the demon, I wouldn't have known which way I'd come through. The spider had spent at least some of the time before our fight weaving repairs to his realm. It took several minutes to hack a reasonable hole into the webbing, at which point the forest opened up to the same, nasty level it was outside of the spider's den: coated from leaf to root in webbing, but manageable if you didn't mind walking through enough sticky, fibrous strands to make a lip gloss.