Adrian glared at his sister before directing his attention toward Dylan. “This goes for you too. Don’t get close to that river. The Bloodbourn have hunted the kelpie for sport, mutilated them, even tried to rape them.” Adrian’s nose wrinkled with disgust. “And that’s only made them more vicious.”
“They didn’t look that vicious to me…” I said softly.
“Do not be fooled by their appearance. The moment you let your guard down, they won’t hesitate to kill you,” Adrian warned.
“Which is especially bad, considering we’ll need to make sure they don’t kill us when we cross the river,” Arisella added.
“Don’t you guys have bridges here? Pretty sure humans have been building those for thousands of years,” Dylan pointed out.
“Of course we have bridges, halfwit,” Arisella spat. Great, so now Dylan had been demoted from human to halfwit. “Except the only bridge that crosses this river is guarded by ten Bloodbourn sentinels.”
“The last time we fled to the Praetus, I was able to use my family name to get us past the Bloodbourn. Then, no one knew that I had defected. They’ll all be looking for me now,” Adrian frowned.
Dylan snorted. “Things just get better and better.”
“Anyway,” Arisella continued, ignoring him. “We can’t swim across because 1. the river’s too wide, and 2. the kelpie will kill us.”
“Uh, guys,” Dylan whispered as he tugged on my shirt with the urgency of a small child. “I think one of them is watching us.” Dylan gestured toward the river, where the head of the young girl with flaming red hair and a shower of freckles bobbed above the surface of the water.
The kelpie drifted close enough for me to get a good view of her scarlet-hued tail undulating beneath the water. Flowing in iridescent shimmers with the current, translucent, filmy fins fanned out from the end of her tail, her waist, and her back. She was the most demure, intriguing creature I had ever seen.
“Greetings, travelers. What is your business?” she inquired in a soothing, musical voice.
“Shit, it’s talking,” Arisella muttered under her breath. She warily moved toward the edge of the water, making sure to remain a sizeable distance from the creature. “No one say or do anything,” Arisella whispered through tight lips. “Especially you, boys. Kelpie especially despise males. I’ll handle this.”
I swallowed thickly. Something told me that Arisella wasn’t the best person to be handling this.
“Er, greetings, my lady,” Arisella awkwardly dipped her head in respect. Huh. Who knew she could be polite, much less be polite to something that probably wanted to kill her?
The kelpie produced a tinkling, melodic laugh like bells. “I am no lady. You may call me Kaela.”
Arisella nodded.
“I overheard your discussion. I take it you wish to cross my river, and the Bloodbourn bridge is inaccessible to you, is that correct?”
Arisella didn’t answer.
“Oh, you need not be so reticent. Tell me, why is it that you wish to cross?”
“Because we seek shelter on the other side,” Arisella answered vaguely.
“Ah, I see. I believe my sisters and I might be able to be of assistance, then.” Kaela raised her hands, summoning more goddess-like kelpie blessed with immortal amounts of beauty to the surface of the river. Seven of them bobbed around her now, their green eyes all transfixed on us. “We are willing to offer an exchange – an exchange that will guarantee you safe passage across the river. And do keep in mind that without us and without the bridge, this river is utterly impassable.” Kaela’s lips curled. “I would know. The river is mine.”
Arisella’s eyes lit up in cooperation. “Anything you want on land. If we can attain it, it’s yours.”
Kaela grinned, a set of curved fangs protruding from her perfect smile. “A smart choice, to offer us a gift of the soil that we could never otherwise attain. Unfortunately, as we have never experienced life beyond our river, we desire nothing we do not already have.
“That is, except for one thing.”
Arisella stepped closer to the kelpie. “Anything.”
Kaela’s eyes twinkled devilishly. “For every one of you who crosses, we demand a Bloodbourn life be brought to us.”
“We cannot murder for you,” Adrian said with resolution, breaking his silence.
Kaela’s expression flashed from serene to lethal. “So it is acceptable for them to mutilate us by the dozens, but unacceptable for us to seek revenge?” she seethed venomously. She slithered in front of Adrian, but he didn’t so much as move.
“If you only knew what they did to us—” Kaela suddenly grew quiet, her eyes focused intently on Adrian’s face. “You,” she whispered. “You are Bloodbourn!”
Kaela let out a bloodcurdling shriek, which her sisters joined in as they madly writhed about in the river.
“You tried to deceive us!” she raged, half-laughing with the fervor of insanity. “This was all a trick – to gain our trust so you could kill us!”
“No, you misunderstand,” Arisella insisted. But any opportunity for an exchange had already gone too far to hell for damage control.
“At the request of your Bloodbourn,” she spat the word acidly, “companion, we no longer demand four Bloodbourn lives,” Kaela compromised. “We want him. Then the rest of you may cross. A deceitful Bloodbourn in disguise is far more dangerous than any four Bloodbourn brutes you would find. You have until dawn tomorrow morning to present your Bloodbourn friend to us.” Before any of us could object, Kaela laughingly slid back under the glistening waters with her sisters.
For a couple seconds, we all stood staring at the river, frozen by the kelpie’s ultimatum.
“Well,” Dylan sighed. “I guess Adrian’s going to be sleeping with the fishes from now on.” Dylan smirked at me, expecting a high five, but all I could do was gape at his audacity.
“Adrian is not going anywhere,” Arisella snarled. “If either of you actually thought that—”
I held up a hand. “Of course we’re not actually going to give Adrian to the kelpie. Dylan was only joking.”
“Sick human humor,” she scoffed.
“Glad to know that you all value my existence,” Adrian remarked calmly, as if the kelpie’s sudden desire to see him dead hadn’t affected him at all. “But it’s clear that the kelpie are going to be of no help to us. And, since we have no alternatives and it’s going to be evening soon, we should set up camp early.”
We trudged back into the darkness of the Black Forest, far away from the grassy, sun-soaked hills by the river. Arisella wanted to sleep as far away from the kelpie as possible, and I think everyone was grateful for that.
After ten minutes of walking, Dylan finally threw down Arisella’s bag (I had taken mine back earlier) and refused to go any further. And that’s the way we chose where we would set up camp.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
What little light penetrated through the thick branches was fading fast, and Arisella wasted no time divvying up the work amongst us. Arisella immediately assumed the responsibility of hunting our dinner, which I was more than happy to leave to her. After assigning Dylan and I with the menial task of carving a fire pit out of the soil with our hands, Arisella promptly shifted into a grimalkin and slipped into the woods without a farewell. Adrian eventually left too, but not until he had reassured us that he would be looking for firewood nearby, and that he would be able to hear us if we called.
With no one else around and with nothing better to do, Dylan and I reluctantly set out on creating the fire pit. Everything was damp, and our hands slid right through the loose, black soil as we upturned it. I tried not to think about how I might as well have been digging a grave for whatever unfortunate animal Arisella would be bringing back.
Arisella must have thought that making a fire pit would have been a lot harder for us than it actually was, because when Dylan and I finished, she and Adrian were still nowhere in sight.
With a sigh, I resign
ed myself to setting up the rest of the camp. Meanwhile, Dylan nodded off with his back against a tree. Between driving, being chased by caeci, and trekking through the forest, he had gotten the least sleep of all four of us over the course of the last twenty-four hours. The day had visibly drained him, and the least he deserved was a nap.
The dank air had curled his messy hair around his temple, the wispy fog rolling over him like an ominous sheet. He looked so pale, so tired, so still. He almost looked dead.
My stomach turned at that ghastly thought, and I busied myself with the latches on my sleeping bag. We had brought three sleeping bags with us, and I arranged them with care around the fire pit. Where Dylan would sleep for the night, I had no idea – in the rush of our escape, no one had thought to bring anything for him.
Finished with the sleeping arrangement, I moved onto organizing our provisions. I had brought a few bottles of water, cans of vegetables, and some dried meat – basically, whatever I thought would withstand serious wear and tear. If Arisella couldn’t find food for us by hunting, I had enough in my bag for us to survive on for a couple of days. The water, on the other hand, presented a more pressing dilemma. The water would likely last us no more than another day, and since we couldn’t drink out of the river, we would have to find another water source soon before we started suffering from dehydration.
Although I felt guilty about it, I quickly rifled through Adrian’s and Arisella’s bags as well. If they had food and water, I needed to have an idea of how much. The most important things in Arisella’s bag were another pair of clothes, two half-full water canteens, and a couple of Slim Jims. I unzipped the top of Adrian’s bag, and I found it stuffed with sharp weapons of all sorts of odd shapes and sizes. I groaned at the excess of shiny, clinking metal. No way was I going to go rooting around in that.
In the hopes that Adrian and Arisella wouldn’t notice that I had snooped through their stuff, I meticulously returned their bags to their original positions. With the light almost completely gone now and Adrian and Arisella still missing, I was starting to feel uneasy. I thought about calling for Adrian, but Dylan was still fast asleep. Also, I wasn’t exactly in any trouble, so I really had no need to call for Adrian. What was I going to say if he came running back, expecting the worst? Yeah, my bad if you thought I was dying – I was just pathetically lonely.
But just because I wasn’t going to call for him, didn’t mean I wasn’t going to look for him.
I had actually remembered to bring a flashlight this time, so I fished it out of my bag before heading out into the dimming forest. I would be ready when darkness fell. When I left Dylan, he was still sleeping against a tree. He wouldn’t even notice my absence – I would be back by the time he got up.
I traveled in the same direction Adrian had gone, but I couldn’t find any sign of him. I made sure to travel in a straight line – no turns whatsoever. I refused to be that oblivious camper in horror movies who passes the same rock five times before she realizes she’s been walking in a circle.
When I couldn’t see the camp anymore, I started shouting Adrian’s name, my words harsh against the hum of the forest. For a moment, each shout silenced the alien cries of the creatures in the treetops. But the animals would always resume their dissonant music, seemingly louder and more savagely than before, as if aggravated that I had intruded upon their world.
But other than the broken songs of invisible animals, I heard nothing. No reply.
I shouted his name again into the oblivion.
“Amber?” came a reply.
“Adrian!”
“Stay where you are!” he shouted from afar. I spun around wildly, searching for him. I had no idea where he was, but I could sense the urgency in his command.
Behind me I heard the crunch of leaves under rapid, lithe footsteps. I turned hastily to find myself staring straight into Adrian’s bright sapphire eyes.
“Hello,” he said, a grin spreading across his face.
“Hi,” I breathed. I hadn’t expected him to appear so suddenly.
He watched me, as if he were waiting for me to say something. But I couldn’t think of anything to say, so he cleared his throat. “You called?”
Oh, crap, I had. What the hell had happened to my resolution not to do that unless I was actually in trouble? “You snuck up on me.”
“Completely unintentional.”
I bit my lip. “Sorry, I was…” Don’t say lonely “… looking for you.” Good.
Adrian held his arms out. “Well, here I am. But,” he frowned, “I did drop all the firewood in my rush to get to you.”
“Geez,” I muttered, beginning an apology.
“No, this is better. Now we can bring it to camp together.” Adrian seemed genuinely pleased by my presence, which surprised me.
We fell into step together, walking at a leisurely pace in the direction of wherever he had come from. Even though he remained a respectful distance away from me, wasn’t even touching me, I felt overly aware of his presence. Overly aware of the way he was gazing at me. Overly aware of the way he glided without making a sound.
“Do you do this often?” he asked, drawing me out of my thoughts.
“Go on the run from people who want to kill me?” I shook my head. “This is a first.”
“No,” Adrian grimaced, before smoothing his expression. “I was talking about what humans do outdoors for fun – camping.”
I snorted. “I highly doubt this qualifies as fun. Although the sleeping bags do add a nice touch.”
“But did you ever?”
I was amused by Adrian’s persistence. He really wanted to know. “A few times, with my family, when my siblings and I were younger. I saw a bear once. We were supposed to lock away our food overnight, but Heather had left a chocolate bar out and the bear must have smelled it. I thought I had heard something, so I, being a stupid six-year-old without a healthy sense of fear, left the tent to see what it was. Of course, I screamed, my dad pulled me back into the tent, the bear left, and no one died. The end.”
Adrian frowned. “It seems you’ve always been good at finding trouble.”
“Hey.” I put my hands on my hips. “Trouble finds me.”
“Either way, you must have been quite a handful. Not that I don’t enjoy a challenge every now and then.” His teeth gleamed in the darkness. “In all seriousness, do try to be careful though.”
“You know, you can come off a little domineering sometimes,” I said without thinking. I instantly regretted it and turned away, afraid he would be offended. He hadn’t meant any harm, and I didn’t want him to get the idea that I was ungrateful for his help.
Adrian was silent for a moment. “I apologize if I seem that way,” he said finally.
I turned back to him, the surprise in my eyes reflected in his. “You do?”
“I know I can be demanding at times,” Adrian admitted. “I just want you to know that I only want what’s best for you, Amber. I know you’re strong, that you’ve been through a lot – that you’re not some helpless seventeen-year-old girl who constantly needs someone hovering around her for protection. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to worry about you. I worry not because I view you as a liability – but because I truly care what happens to you.”
We had stopped now, and I felt his eyes searching my face, gauging my response. The only problem was that I didn’t really have a response. Did he care for me like a friend, a brother, or…something else? No, I was overthinking this. Really overthinking.
I realized we had reached a large pile of sticks, and since I didn’t know what to say, I just started picking them up. Adrian sighed and joined me.
“You’ve gotten very quiet.” Adrian shoved most of the wood under his arm before I had a chance to touch it, leaving me with an embarrassingly small bundle.
“It’s just – a lot has happened today, and I haven’t gotten much sleep. My mind’s processing things slower than usual.”
“We need to get you back to c
amp then.”
I winced at the trace of exasperation that seeped into Adrian’s concern. “I do appreciate what you have done for Dylan and me. I truly do. I also appreciate your respect.”
“Do you trust me?”
I was thrown by the sudden intensity of his question. “Of course,” I said without thinking. “With my life.”
Adrian grew grave. “You shouldn’t. I want you to, but you shouldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Have you ever even considered the fact that I am Bloodbourn, that the reason I might need you alive is so I can take you to the Blood King myself? That all of this might be a lie?”
I had considered that possibility. I had also dismissed it. “I don’t think you’d lie to me like that.”
Adrian scowled. “It worries me that you would trust anyone this much.”
“Oh, no, just you.” Well, and Dylan. But I’m sure Adrian must have known that.
Adrian raised an eyebrow, and I returned his gaze squarely.
It wasn’t until he had dropped his sticks with an abrupt clatter into the crudely dug fire pit that I realized we were back at camp.
“He sleeps like the dead, doesn’t he?” Adrian motioned toward Dylan. His words sent a trail of shivers down my spine.
“He can sleep through lightning storms. It’s a gift.” I deposited my share of sticks with an even noisier clatter. “See? Still asleep.”
Adrian shook his head disapprovingly and rearranged the firewood in a small tent-like pile, before showering them with crackly, gray leaves. He removed a small ebony stone and what looked like a Swiss pocket knife from the front pouch of Arisella’s bag.
“Can’t you just create your own knife?”
“My knives don’t have any steel in them. We need steel to spark the flint.” Adrian shaved some of the flint onto a cluster of leaves, then ran his blade across the flint, sparking it in a split second.
He breathed on the miniscule flame, feeding it until it had engulfed a sizeable section of the wood. I could instantly feel the warmth emanating from it, chasing away the dampness. I felt my muscles relax, and I eagerly crouched closer to the fire beside Adrian.
Feral (The Irisbourn Chronicles Book 1) Page 22