by Logan Jacobs
Plus, her body looked perfect from this angle.
“Nice ass,” I called into the tent.
I startled Mira so bad she nearly dropped her sword, but she caught it gracefully at the last moment. Then the warrior turned to give me a playful glare.
“My king, it is very rude to sneak up on a lady like that,” she informed me.
“Well, it’s a good thing you’re no lady, then,” I replied pointedly.
Mira had made quite an effort to prove to me that she was not nearly the regal lady her sister was, and now, I could turn that in my own favor.
Mira rolled her large gold eyes, and then she gently laid the sword down near the side of the tent.
“I was merely practicing for when we are able to kill these fuckers of mothers,” Mira said.
“Yeah, you and me both,” I sighed.
“Ben, you are tense,” Mira murmured, and she motioned for me to step inside the tent.
I did, and I gently laid my hands on her hips as she stared at me with a small crease of worry between her brows.
“What?” I chuckled. I knew her too well and could see the hidden meaning behind every expression.
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “I just fear you take all the burdens of others onto your shoulders sometimes.”
“I’m the Dragon King,” I replied. “I have to.”
Mira hesitated, but she knew she couldn’t disagree. I was right. This was my destiny.
And I couldn’t have asked for a better one.
“Just remember to breathe,” the warrior ordered as she slipped her hands up to my shoulders and started to knead away at the hard knots there.
“Oh, man,” I groaned. “How’s this for breathing? Good enough?”
“I suppose it’ll do,” she chuckled, and the warrior was quiet for a minute before she spoke again. “Are we ready to go on the rescue mission?”
“About that,” I muttered.
Instantly, Mira’s hands froze on my shoulders, and she came around to stand in front of me with her hands on her hips.
“You haven’t changed your mind, have you?” she demanded.
“What? Of course I haven’t changed my mind!”
“Good.” She nodded. “That would not be the Ben I know. We don’t turn away from people in need.”
“No, we don’t,” I replied. “But, maybe this time, you do? Only you turn to other people in need. So, you’re not really turning away.”
I knew the moment the words were out of my mouth that they made absolutely no sense, but I was trying not to upset Mira. I knew it would make her sad not to go on this rescue mission with me, but her skills were needed here so much more.
In true Mira form, the warrior narrowed her eyes, crossed her arms, and pressed her lips into a thin, almost invisible line.
“What, precisely, does that mean?” she asked.
“Just that I think it would be better if you stayed here,” I told her.
“I’m not staying.” Her words were so quick it was almost as if her lips hadn’t moved. They were just suddenly in my ears, and their vibrations shook against my eardrums.
But I could tell by the stubborn gleam in her gold eyes she had very much said those words, and she was very much serious.
“Okay, let me explain the logic behind this,” I said diplomatically. “Because I’m pretty sure once you understand it, you’ll agree with me, alright?”
“By all means, go ahead.” The warrior waved me on. “But I make no promises.”
I could tell from the gleam in her gold eyes that this was a war of words, but I already knew I had the winning ticket.
“So, here’s the deal,” I started. “These women barely know how to fight, and we’re about to have a giant battle coming. Which means they need to get in tip top shape like, yesterday. Hence, why I know it is a good idea for you to stay. You can train the rest of the women here, run them through drills, make them sweat until their skin is permanently wet, do whatever it is you want as long as you get them ready for whatever battle we’re about to face.”
Mira wanted to argue. She wanted to do it so badly, and I could tell from the expression on her face it was the only thing in the world that would satisfy her right now.
But she couldn’t argue with the logic I’d just presented. Logic that was as sound as a bulletproof window, if I did say so myself.
“Hence?” Mira finally asked with a quirked eyebrow. “I have never once heard you use that word.”
“Hey, there’s a first time for everything.” I shrugged. “So, does this mean you’ll do it?”
“Yes, my king,” she sighed. “I’d do anything you asked of me.”
“Then I ask you to kiss me right now.” I grinned.
Mira, of course, obliged.
With that settled, I took another pass through all of our equipment and resources. The produce I’d planted in the hanging planters had started to blossom. There were stores of dried meat and fruit ready to eat if the women couldn’t go on a hunt while I was gone. There were plenty of bows, and extra ones, and extra ones for the extra ones, just in case. We had made tons of arrows, too, and tried to salvage as many as possible on our hunts, so there was no shortage of those.
That was all I could do. The longer I waited, the more torture Yin and Kola would have to endure, and that was the last thing in the world I wanted.
So, I began to prepare for my rescue mission. Theora and Netta had volunteered to come along with me. Then Jemma stepped up on the platform as well, with a pack on her back and a bow against her side.
“I shall come with you, of course.” The auburn-haired woman grinned.
Just then, Ainsley ran out of her tent and across the vine bridge to the platform where we stood, and her sister Kella trailed in her wake.
“Ben!” the strawberry blonde gasped. “I must come with you.”
“Me, too,” Kella added when she reached us. “I want to exact vengeance on those horrible intruders.”
The woman was still weak, but she’d managed to pull herself out of her sister’s tent and was using the railing of the bridges to help herself walk.
“You can’t,” I told the black-haired woman. “Neither of you can. Kella, you’re still too weak. I’d blame myself if something happened to you. And Ainsley, I need you here to protect the camp.”
I looked down into the strawberry blonde’s eyes, and she gave me a slow nod before she flung herself into my arms.
I wrapped her up in a warm hug and let her cling to me for as long as she needed to before she was ready to let go.
When the blonde woman finally stepped back, she gave me a small, weak smile, but it was a smile nonetheless. I hadn’t seen that expression on her face for days. She spent so much time with her recovering sister it seemed to have drained the life completely out of her.
“Please return safely,” she murmured.
Ainsley pressed a careful hand against my cheek, and I leaned into the warm touch as I returned her small smile with one of my own.
“I will,” I promised her. “And I’ll have them with me. Soon, this will all be over, and we’ll defeat the invaders.”
“One step at a time,” she sighed.
I could tell the statement was more for her than it was for me. Underneath the exhaustion was the strong woman I knew, but she’d been overcome by the newly heightened stress of our situation.
I bent my face down to meet her eyes, and I tried to reassure her with my gaze that it was okay to fall down on the job sometimes.
Ainsley tilted her head up and kissed my lips softly, and in that tiny gesture, I felt everything she wanted to say to me.
Then she slowly pulled away, gave me one last smile, and retreated to the medical tent.
I turned back to face the crowd, who had all politely decided to look somewhere else while Ainsley and I shared our moment.
“I’m leaving Mira here with you,” I told them. “She’s going to train you all as much as she can. When we return
with Yin and Kola, I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be an all-out war. Things are going to happen fast, and you need to be ready. So, work hard.”
Not a single woman protested. The kidnappings had unified even the naysayers from before. None of the women wanted to flee now. They were tired of this fight. It was like the unexpected kidnapping had made them realize just how awful it was to live in fear, as they had in the past, and changed their minds.
I despised the fact that it had taken such a drastic event to do this, but I was happy the deer women all seemed to have a unified interest now. They would fight to protect their home, or go down with it.
And I’d make sure the latter didn’t happen.
I shifted my sword in its sheath and adjusted the pack on my back, then turned to Theora, Netta, and Jemma.
“Ready?” I asked them.
“Ready,” they said in unison.
So, one by one, we climbed down the tree and headed out on our most dangerous mission yet.
Chapter Twelve
“Where do we start?” Jemma asked me when we hit the forest floor.
“The beginning,” I told her. “If we can track them down fast enough, we’ll cut them off before they get back to camp. They won’t be able to travel very fast with two unwilling passengers.”
So, the four of us made our twisted way through the maze of traps we’d set up, and then we took the hour’s journey back to the edge of the forest, where that piece of bloodied white cloth was still stuck to the tree near the beach.
I sucked in a breath as I looked at the cloth, and a flash of what might have happened entered my head completely uninvited. I saw Yin and Kola as the wargs snatched them. The monsters came up from behind and grabbed the women up quicker than they could think. The deer women didn’t have time to scream or run, but they fought.
I didn’t know either of the women well, but they’d been two of the first to join Ainsley when she’d announced she wanted to fight for her home. They’d been enthusiastic in training and always willing to step up and help out with whatever we needed.
“I wonder what happened here,” Theora murmured as she pulled the scrap of bloodied cloth from the branch.
“I know Yin and Kola were carrying weapons,” I sighed, “but anything could have happened. They could have been ambushed or injured beforehand. I just wish I had more information.”
“Hey,” Jemma murmured as she slipped up behind me. “Do not blame yourself for this, Ben.”
The auburn-haired woman was right. There was nothing I could have done short of keeping all of the women up in the village, and we both knew that wouldn’t do anyone any sort of good. These excursions had been necessary. We’d had to keep a watchful eye on the orcs and make sure we knew where the barrels of oil were placed. It would have been way too much work, and probably a nearly impossible task, to try and find them all at once, since the wargs had placed them strategically in multiple spots throughout the forest and along the beach.
“You’re right.” I nodded and stepped back. “There’s no use worrying about the past. We need to move forward.”
“What do you want to do, Ben?” Jemma asked.
I pursed my lips as I considered this. I needed to shake the worry out of my head and instead look at this place with the eyes of a tracker.
So, I thought back to all of my Coast Guard training, and even further back, to the mystery and thriller novels I used to read as a kid. I’d thought they were just fun distractions at the time, but maybe there was something I could use within those dusty yellow pages.
I remembered how, in one of my old favorite books, there had been a kidnapping in the woods, similar to this one. The victim had been a young woman, and the perpetrators had been a bunch of thugs who were after her mom’s money. Despite the different circumstances, though, I remembered one thing that I was sure would be useful.
The detective, the lead character in the story, had used a blood trail to track the woman to the street, where she’d been dumped into the back of a van and carted off. In the novel, he’d then used the security cameras to track down the whereabouts of the van.
Now, I didn’t have access to any sort of security cameras, but the wargs didn’t have cars or vans either. Which meant the blood trail wouldn’t end until someone bandaged the wound.
And, as savage as the wargs were, I knew they wouldn’t bother to take two seconds to wrap a piece of cloth around an open cut.
“We need to search for a blood trail,” I told the women. “It should be somewhere near here.”
I indicated the torn piece of cloth with my finger, and we got to work on the search.
I looked around the base of the tree, but I couldn’t find any blood just yet. The bark of the tree must have torn open the wound, and it had taken a few seconds for the blood to gather and spill out. So, I carefully took one step at a time away from the trunk and surveyed the area in a circle.
And then I spotted it. A splotch of dark, dried blood on the forest floor. It covered half of a dead, brown leaf, but there wasn’t a ton, which was a good sign. That told me the blood didn’t come from a serious injury that would bleed out and kill someone if not treated, so I assumed it was probably from an arm or a leg wound.
“Here,” I called out to the women and pointed to the blood on the ground.
“Oh, my Goddess,” Netta breathed. Her bright green eyes were shiny with tears, and her soft red hair fell across her face, as if to shield her from the outside world. She covered her mouth with her hand and took a moment to compose herself before she looked back up at me. “We follow it?”
“We follow it.” I nodded, and we set off into the woods.
The blood trail went on for a while. There weren’t enormous droplets, not enough to kill anyone, so I knew my earlier suspicion had been correct. The trail led toward the middle of the forest, away from the village and the beach, and into what I knew was fycan territory.
“Be on alert,” I warned the women. “And watch the trees above us. The last thing we need is to get attacked by a couple of big cats and lose our trail.”
“Understood,” Theora replied, and her green eyes darted up to the canopy.
To my surprise, the woman also took out her bow, nocked an arrow, and trained it up into the trees above her. Thanks to the grace of her long limbs, she was able to walk like that and never miss a single step, and I had to admit I was impressed with her prowess.
It wasn’t more than five minutes after that, however, when the blood droplets suddenly stopped.
I pulled up short, and the other women did the same behind me. Then I stared at the last drop of blood and searched the forest floor for the next. My eyes roamed over brown leaves and slimy black ones, dirt, sticks, weeds, and every little bit of the forest floor I could find. As a last resort, I crouched down and started to search the floor in a crab walk, but I still couldn’t find another single drop of blood.
“Damn it!” I cursed.
“We’ll find them some other way,” Jemma tried to say helpfully, but I could hear the absolute lack of hope in her voice.
I couldn’t believe I actually wished one of the women would have bled more. It was horrifying, to say the least, but without that blood, our trail went cold, since the dirt on this part of the island wasn’t wet enough for the wargs to have left footprints in it.
For a moment, I wasn’t sure what we could do, and I was about to resort to climbing through the trees and searching every single inch of the forest when something caught my eyes.
About two feet in front of the last drop of blood was a freshly broken stick. It was splintered and bowed right in the middle, like somebody had stepped on it.
Because someone had.
“I’ve got it again,” I announced.
I was up in a flash, and I followed the broken stick to a space of disturbed leaves, and then to another broken stick, and then to a tree with a hunk of warg hair stuck in its bark.
There might not have been any blood, but t
here was still a trail to follow.
So, I stalked through the forest with my proverbial nose to the ground, and the three women trailed in my wake until I heard the gruff, raspy voices that could only belong to orcs.
“I think I’ll take that one first,” an orc said.
The sound came from somewhere ahead of us, through the trees where we couldn’t see. Still, I stopped short and put a hand up to indicate to my companions that they needed to stop, too. Then we were silent for a few seconds as we listened for the orcs again. I needed to figure out just where they were, so we could sneak up on them.
“I like the brunette,” a second voice said.
“You dumbasses,” a third voice hissed. “We’re supposed to be quiet. This is a trap, remember?”
I clocked them just up ahead of us and a little to the left, and they clearly didn’t understand the concept of silence.
“Climb into the trees,” I breathed to the women.
We quickly and quietly padded along the forest floor to the nearest trees, and we swung ourselves up into and past the very first layer of branches so we could be obscured by the leaves. Then, just as Jemma and I had done before, we walked among the branches until we could see the orcs below.
They were seated in what was clearly a man-made clearing. Stumps littered the ground, but most of them were nubs so close to the forest floor they were practically even with the dirt. Some of the trunks had been left a little taller, though, as a place for the orcs to sit and talk while they carried out their evil deeds.
I peered through the branches and leaves to get a better look at what was below us.
I saw the three orcs seated on the stumps just at the edge of the clearing. Their conversation was clearly exciting from their body language, but they’d decided to listen to their third companion and lowered their voices while they waited for their trap to work.
“Ben,” Netta breathed next to me.
“Hold on,” I murmured, since I was too focused on the scene below me to tear my attention away for a second.