Merka looked at the dragon. “But I won’t live forever.”
Of course not, Emarys acknowledged, and that is a concern. But it need not be settled today. We have more immediate concerns.
Merka blinked at her. “Like what?”
Like what to do with all that gold I no longer need.
By day, Renee Whittington orders things like educational items and therapeutic horseback riding lessons for blind children in Houston, Texas. By night, she can be found at Eastern Star meetings and Lighthouse of Houston choir rehearsals. She has been most recently published in the YA science-fiction and fantasy anthology One Thousand Words for War and has placed a couple of times in Morgen Bailey’s 100-word monthly writing competitions in the past year. Her author blog, Muse Voices, is located at:
http://musevoices.blogspot.com.
The Witch and the Hunter
Ariane Felix
The Hunter
The trees rise like pillars. They grow from the dirt, their roots and trunks covered in lichen and moss, their leaves blocking the sun. The air clings to my cheek, to the paint on my face. The rifle feels heavy in my hand, sleek. I weave through the trees with slow steps, crushing dead leaves and moist earth. I don’t make a sound, but neither does she.
A flock of blue and yellow birds cuts through the sky. I aim my rifle left and right, following the shifting patterns of the forest. She walks through the shadows, in the spaces in between. She’s not ethereal, though. A well-aimed bullet will tear through her skin, ribcage, and heart, pierce through each layer of her and carve a hole in her center. I saw her bleed once, and I’ll see it again. I’m Hunt, the hunter. It sounds ridiculous, but Hunt is my name and hunting Witches is what I do, what my family has done for ages, ever since the world started the unification.
I lick my lips, tasting water. The forest sweats, and so do I. My tiny brother flanks my back, the rifle’s butt sinking into his lean shoulders. I told Kyle to use the smaller gun he carries inside his jacket, but he’s just as proud as our mother. Dad died in a hunt before I was born. There are only two of us now. The Witch killed my oldest brother during our last hunt, so now I take the front. I pull my hand up in a fist, a gesture that tells Kyle to stop. My earpiece signals a shift behind the bushes. The gadget drowns out the useless sounds of rivers and bugs and howler monkeys calling to each other. I hear only movement, anything that might potentially be a threat, that might potentially be her.
I swirl two fingers up, and Kyle circles around me, pointing his gun at the trees. I take aim at the bushes. A snake slithers through the moss, a red spiral flashing in my visor. I relax the grip on my rifle. It’s an anaconda, its stomach bloated from eating a rodent or a bird. The snake presents no threat to us, but I should get its skin. The species is endangered, but women still need purses. Kyle waits for my command to shot the anaconda with a tranquilizer. But I don’t give the order.
“We don’t have time to collect,” I say as an explanation to my brother. His shoulders deflate. He tries to conceal his pout, conceal the fact that he’s a kid. Collecting is his favorite part, but I don’t like to kill for nothing. I only like to kill for a reason.
I wipe my thumb over the lenses to clean the condensation. The visor reveals spots of heat. The Witch is made of fire, flames that burn under her fake human flesh. But my visor got cracked last time, and I can only see a messy cluster of red—capybaras and other small critters flashing by, not her. When she registers in the visor, she glows, takes up the whole screen. She looms like a storm cloud, dense and dark, impossible to miss.
We have never come this far into the forest, but the Witch has been taking people, one after the other. Hunting her is necessary. Humankind doesn’t need the likes of her. Before, the world had countries, but commerce made those borders thinner, until they became invisible. There are no lands anymore, no demarcations. We forgot about wars. But forests still need to be tamed.
People used to think of Witches as creatures in children’s books, but they’re real and don’t like when we cross their borders. I do the job for the job. The Witches get in the way of bringing resources to the civilized world, so I hunt them. I might be just a guy with a gun, but my work guarantees a world without diseases and hunger. It’s important. However, today, I hunt for myself. Because the Witch took my mother.
The Witch
The woman has four fingers now. I chopped off her pinky and squeezed the blood out into the cauldron. I used her snot and the dirt beneath her fingernails and a patch of her skin, too. Smoke rises from the pot and curls around my ears, wraps around my neck. It smells like death and life and all the things in between. It’s beautiful. The smoke travels up my nose, and I exhale power.
The potion turns from green to blue, and I take a mouthful. The potion tastes better with each human I add, and this woman has the right kind of blood, full of anger and purpose. I had to wait for two days for her composure to crumble, because I needed her feelings to be ripe. She clutches the bars of her wooden cage and stares at me like I’m a monster. But she’s the one who pointed a gun at my forehead, the heat of the laser prickling my skin.
I bang the finger against the edge of the cauldron to get the last drops, but the skin gets scorched and dry. I toss the finger aside. The woman’s blue eyes gleam under the firelight. I could scoop them out of her face and watch them melt into my potion. But it’s stupid to take a whole eye if a couple of tears will do.
The woman doesn’t cower when I approach her. She tips her nose up, and I can see the mucus inside her nostrils, the green dark goo within her.
“They’ll come for you,” she says. The woman is talking about her two sons, and I’m sure they’re in the forest now, stomping onto green leaves with their boots made of dead skin. They’re pointing their metal weapons into nothing and hoping to find me because that’s what hunters do. The two brothers have been after me since I captured their mother, and they’re not even on the right track. If they were close, I would sense their stench. The boys aren’t particularly good at their job. Their mother is good; their older brother was good. He is dead now. Such a waste of good blood and tears.
“What is this for?” The woman stares at her finger in the dirt.
I clutch her chin with my shadow fingers, turn her face from side to side until a tear slides down her cheek. I catch it.
The woman should know the answer to that. If I’m here, hidden in a cave made of branches, burning a fire in a forest that quenches flames with its humid breath, it’s because of the likes of her.
The Hunter
The Witch leaves a trace, a smell that can be detected by my visor. But nothing shows on the screen. She’s far gone. The Witch knows how to hide; the forest is hers, not ours, and that’s the problem.
A smile plays at Kyle’s lips, his eyes gleaming. He catches a butterfly resting on the trunk of a tree and seals it in a bag. He zips it closed, and the plastic sucks in, freezing the butterfly’s blue and bright wings in place. Its beauty has been immortalized. But the butterfly is dead.
Kyle shoves the plastic bag in his backpack. “Should we camp?”
We followed after the remains of her scent for as long as we could, and now we have to rely on the clues she has left on the earth. I scoop up dirt and smudge it across my watch’s screen. The software detects traces of the Witch, the screen flashing green. Her shadows leave a chemical behind. Some people think that using equipment in a hunt is cheating. They claim to be able to smell her acrid stench in the moist air. Sometimes, I believe them. I close my eyes and sense something in the air, beneath the smell of green and water, but I can’t name it.
I take off my earpiece, the buzzing of the forest hitting me like a flood. The cicadas fill the air with their song. A river flows nearby. The birds screech and twitter. Everything has a sound. It’s too much. But staying with the earpiece for too long causes cancer. Not that I should worry about cancer. Hunters don’t have a long life span.
“Hunt?” My brother says over the c
acophony of noises.
I think of the Witch’s shadow fingers wrapping around my mom’s neck, and I don’t want to stop to sleep or eat. All of that sounds unimportant. Nobody knows what Witches do, but I heard the stories of dismembered limbs and I have a good imagination. I would walk until my feet dropped, but Mother wouldn’t. She always says that you can’t catch a Witch if you’re dead.
“We camp.” The Witch thrives in the night, her shadows dissipate and blend into the forest, making it hard for the sensors in the visor to detect her. She knows that. The Witches have grown smart over the years. If we stay put, the tent will protect us. I pull out the miniaturized tent from my backpack and watch it inflate. The fabric expands, breaking branches and crushing leaves on its way.
The Witch
Humans stink. Their chemicals leave marks on the barks of trees. Their boots smash small plants, and leaves shrivel where they pass. They used to live among us, share the rivers, take the fish that they needed to eat and no more. They worshiped my kind, left offering on the roots of the trees. Now they want to contain the forest in their glass tubes and plastic bags. They want to understand it, and instead they kill it. It’s what humans do.
The potion has made me stronger. I don’t weave through the trees. I blend. I’m the moist air, the shift in the breeze. The birds fly along with me, the ants trail after my smell because I’m them and they’re me. I follow the stench of the brothers, run my shadow fingers through the barks, through the dirt and crushed bugs and fallen leaves.
A thing protrudes amidst the trees, a dark, green mole that tries to blend with the greenery. The two brothers sleep inside this cocoon. I hear their hearts beating in the wind. Their shelter smells like them, acidic and wrong. I slither through the branches of the trees, borrow the eyes of a snake, and see the heat of their bodies—bright, shifting spots of reds and yellows. They don’t notice me coming, but their metal objects do.
A screech cuts through the air in waves, makes me recoil my shadow fingers. The green of the foliage blends with the night sky, and now I have legs and hands and can’t stretch myself out through the forest. The brothers think they can stop me with their machines, that they can trap me like a butterfly.
They step out of their hiding place with their metal weapons in hand. I open my mouth full of sharp teeth, let them see the darkness inside. They stumble, and I advance. The power sings my body awake. The roar that pours out of my mouth shakes the ground, stirs the birds and bugs, makes the wind howl, and rivers rise. The forest screams for me.
The boys better run.
The Hunter
My vision adjusts, the colors gaining shape. Without my visor, the world looks too sharp and bright, made of curves and textures. Hundreds of sounds invade my ears, and I can’t distinguish them because I don’t have my earpiece. I force my heart to slow down, my mind to focus.
I’m in a cage made of twisted branches, my back pressed against Kyle’s back, our hands tied together. Leaves and dirt and I don’t know what else clogs my mouth, and I can’t speak or move. My eyes water in anger. The Witch caught us. The alarm should have made her shrink on the dirt like a kid, but instead the Witch screamed and shook the ground and trees and the air itself. I have fought Witches before. I have seen this Witch’s shadows dance in the forest, dark clouds of smoke shifting from branch to branch. Her shadows coiled around my oldest brother’s ankle and pulled him down; his skull hit a sharp rock hidden in a bed of leaves and cracked open. But she shouldn’t have been able to make the forest tremble with the sound of her voice. That’s new. Unnatural.
I try to wriggle my hands free and nudge Kyle with my shoulder. His head lolls forward, his weight dragging me sideways. She drugged us. The sharp, tangy taste of herbs lingers on my tongue.
The Witch’s shadows flicker past a small fire, but I don’t see my mom. My heart constricts, and that’s when the Witch notices me. The shadows gather together, mold into the shape of a face. Her hands move by themselves, peeling apart something pink and bloated.
She looks as young as me, her cheeks flushed red, her hair raven black. But her eyes have no white parts. They’re two bottomless pits. She used to have normal eyes. I remember her face before she knocked me down with a branch and took my mom. The Witch floats toward me, the shadows transforming into arms and connecting her hands to the rest of her.
I attempt to speak again but almost choke on dirt. Her sleek fingers probe my mouth, taking out a handful of leaves. I waste no time and spit on her face. “Where is my mom?”
She licks my spit, runs her tongue over her lips as if contemplating the taste. She scoops it up with a finger, sniffs it, and tosses it in a pot. “You’re already ripe.”
I shiver. “What’s this for?”
Black smoke rises from the fire, flames licking the bottom of the cauldron. I heard the stories, that Witches have cauldrons. She stirs its contents. “Your mother asked the same question.”
“Where is she?”
“You are repeating yourself.” The Witch’s voice moves around me as if being carried by the breeze, and then she yawns, the gesture too human for her.
I fight against the strings holding me, trying to reach for my brother’s gun. It’s under his jacket. The Witch might have missed it. Branches twist around my wrists as I struggle, the thorns digging into my skin. There’s a knife hidden in my left boot, but vines hold my legs in place, and I can’t move my hands. I need Kyle to wake up. If we stand, I can shake the knife out of my boot and use it to cut our ties.
“She’s in the forest looking for you.” The Witch wipes a tear from my cheek, and at first I think she’s consoling me. But she walks away from me and watches the tear drop from her finger into the cauldron. “I can see her now. I feel her heart inside my chest. I taste her dry lips.”
My vision sways as my heart catches up with my breathing. My mom is alive. Witches don’t lie. “How?” I say, but I’m more curious about the why. She should have killed my mother, same as she killed my brother.
“I didn’t believe in it at first either.” All the shadows merge together, and the Witch sits in front of me, her legs crossed. She has purple bags under her eyes, as if she hasn’t slept in days. But Witches don’t rest. “She’s part of the forest. You’re part of the forest, so you’re part of me.”
“Part of you? So why am I a prisoner?” I scoff. I shouldn’t scoff. If the Witch decides I’m too much of a nuisance, I’m dead, and my mom needs me and my brother alive. I can’t put his life at risk on behalf of my pride. Not again. If I manage to not spew the first thoughts that come to my mind, maybe I can convince her to release me and my brother like she released my mother. The Witch can keep my snot and tears and whatever else she wants, as long as I get to save Kyle and see my mom again. “If you let us go, we’ll leave the forest. We—”
“More will come.” She twirls her hands in dismissal. “And I need you.”
“For what?”
She cocks her head to the side, and if not for her pitch-black eyes, she would look like a girl. “To kill you.”
My breath catches in my throat, but I recover. I even put on a smile. “I thought I was part of you. If you kill me, aren’t you killing yourself?”
She stands up at once, dark smoke trailing after her. If I didn’t know better, I would say she looks tired.
“How many people have you taken?”
“Enough.” She feeds the fire with more wood. “No more than enough.”
“And how much is enough?” Rage itches the tip of my tongue. “Did my brother serve his purpose?”
“Your brother died too soon, which is a shame. I needed him alive to gather his blood and tears.”
She talks about my brother dying like it was an accident, like she wasn’t the one who murdered him. “He has a name. We all have names, unlike you.”
“You don’t use his name. You call him brother.” She smiles like a normal girl would smile, a hint of mockery in the curve of her lips. “You two used to fight a
ll the time, your raised voices like spiders crawling in my ears.”
“Why are you talking to me?” It’s the wrong thing to ask. The question gives me no upper hand. That’s why my oldest brother was the leader and not me. We did fight all the time, and he was always right. If I hadn’t tried to chase after the Witch at night by myself, he would still be alive.
“I don’t know,” she says after I have given up on an answer.
My jaw tightens. “Are you going to kill Kyle, too?” Again, it’s the wrong thing to ask. If she hasn’t considered killing him, she sure is thinking about it now. Mother always says that my mouth and heart are connected, and she doesn’t mean that in a good way. My emotions cloud my judgment. “He’s a good boy. He’s innocent.”
“Innocent? No human is innocent.” She turns to me, and her eyes have never been so dark. Smoke drifts around her. “I’ll kill all humans.”
The Witch
I find myself in a bed of leaves, ants crawling on my face. My head feels light; a softness spreads through my body. I rub my eyes for no reason and want to lie down again, stretch my arms, and forget. What is this? I have seen humans huddle together like bees do in the winter, but I never had to lie down and sleep. I’m like the air; the air needs no rest.
The fire recedes into the charred tinder, and I sprint to the cauldron to tend the flames. The potion almost dried out. I scrape the bottom and lick under my fingernails. Power courses through me, so much of it, I crumble to my knees. The boy’s tears mixed well with his mother’s tears. But the brothers are gone, their cage ripped open. If I wasn’t so drowsy from sleep, I would have noticed that sooner. I’m a Witch, not a human, and my eyes should always be open.
The potion changed me in more ways than one, but I have no time to dwell on it. The brothers are the key. They come from a generation of Hunters; their blood is stronger than I thought. It’s the right kind, and I need all of it.
Dragons and Witches Page 11