Hunted [Wild Hunt Series: 1]

33: Short-lived

The will was there to argue with Dakota. Strength, however, was not.

I laid where I was, head turning only to watch the woman use her spear to try and knock my shirt off a lower branch. Failing that, she leaned her weapon against the trunk and hefted herself into the tree. The bloody tunic drifted down a few minutes later. The woman stood balanced on one branch, her arm braced against the main trunk. She stood there a long time, at least I thought so. Then, very slowly, she began to stretch for other scrapped garments, pulling them from snarled branches and gathering them into her arms one by one. Snarled rips and the occasional curse whenever she lost balance settled into a sort of peace for me as I rolled onto my stomach. The ground, bits of frozen grass and dirt, stuck against my skin. It crackled and flaked off my skin and stayed embedded in the deepest scores. Even worse, glacial breakage from inside my shoulder felt like I'd just torn deep muscle.

My skin flinched and twitched of its own accord, narrowing pockets of flared pain that disappeared like sunstreaks into overall hellish agony. I felt like my spine was ripping open all over again, but more slowly, and much less clean. Dakota assured me I wasn't. Without even looking at my back. While I was saying I could most distinctly feel heat running over my skin again, heat that quickly slowed and cooled and thicken an awful lot like blood.

I thought I should be thankful that we were in some sense nearly indestructible in the Mid. But then a dress flomphed to the dust. Tiny flashes of memory pulled at my seams, memories I didn't want to acknowledge, memories I wished I could've died before experiencing.  I thought about what Akta had done to me, and, clenching frost-tainted fingertips, what perhaps he had released from me.

And what had he done to Chiro? I knew what I'd seen, but ...

Thoughts came quick and lucid. It was a struggle to stay conscious, it was a fight to reflect back on what had happened when it was still happening all across my body. My focus bounced from hours past to present and eventually settled in sleep.

*

When my eyes next opened the heat of the day had dissipated; not that I could feel the temperature shift. The only difference in position was how I'd twisted around in sleeping, but I'd still been abandoned in a glittering wide radiance. 

Starlight filled the carvings on the remaining stumps of Akta's cursed grounds. A few had been uprooted and destroyed by the withered vines. Thin clouds blotted the inky sky, shadowing it a dozen shades of tipped purples and teals. Gowns of varied shapes, sizes, and states of decay flapped ill on the night wind's sick breath. Dakota had managed to get most down into a dirty mass at the tree's base, while some bits, either too frayed, far, or high, ghosted on above. After a day of baking, the air had taken on a dried, corrosive scent, an odor that, as the wind hissed ash down the surrounding slopes, made my stomach churn. I shot upright to vomit, and in doing so startled my companion.

Shail leaped to his paws with a warning snarl, ears pinned against his plated hide. The cat was a pale shadow in the light. His clubbed tail squelched against Akta's corpse. I grimaced, felt extra stars twinkle in my veins, and tried to locate Dakota with minimal movement. Everything was stiff; everything was most certainly not healed. Healing, yes, I didn't feel tremendously torn, but one delicate touch to my spine confirmed the nasty truth that I had a long way yet before I was feeling, and thinking, like myself.

But I could stand, I decided. I'd managed to stumble around earlier; I could do it now. "Dakota?" I called, wiping my mouth as I took a knee, then another, and finally pushed off the frosted earth. Even my pants struggled to get going. They weren't, it seemed, 100% frost proof. Might be a big problem going forward, if my clothes started getting to the point where they were frozen solid. A little stiffness was alright, but...