Page 74 of Tenebrous

A slow breath leaves my lungs. “I'm sorry.”

“So am I,” she answers quietly, meeting my gaze.

Silence stretches on again, broken only by the crackling fire. Eventually, I force myself to ask the question clawing at the back of my mind. “Why are you still alive?”

Her expression darkens. “I don't know.”

“He hasn't…” The words catch in my throat as my gaze flicks toward the strips of human skin drying over the fire.

Noticing where my attention has gone, Paula quickly shakes her head. “He hasn't touched me. But he made me eat… things.”

A pang twists in my stomach, remembering how my own monster tried to do that to me. Something in my brain suggests that this one isn't as open to feedback, though. “Then what does he want?”

“I wish I knew,” she whispers, tears once again springing to her eyes.

Before I can ask anything else, a deep, resonating thud echoes somewhere beyond the tunnel entrance. We both freeze.

Paula's demeanor instantly changes. “Don't speak,” she whispers, her voice barely audible as she buries her face into her knees. “Please. He doesn't like it.”

Heavy footsteps stop just beyond the circle of firelight. A broad shadow stretches across the cavern floor, and my gaze flies to the exit when one golden eye appears in the darkness.

Orion

This forest has never felt so large.

I move through it at a pace that would have exhausted any other creature, but I do not slow. My claws dig into damp earth, leaping over fallen logs and weaving between pines as I follow the only thing that matters.

Benjamin.

His scent is everywhere. On broken ferns where he stumbled, on the bark of trees he must have leaned against, the air thick with exhaustion. He was hurting, and that knowledge claws at me every time I find another place where he rested.

Kneeling beside a riverbank, I touch fresh handprints left in the wet soil. He drank here. The faintest hint of his scent lingers on the breeze, enough that my eyes close for a brief moment. Alive. He made it this far.

Relief washes through me...

...until another much more foul scent curls into my nostrils.

Old, rotting leaves. Stagnant water and blood.

Father.

The fur along my spine rises when a low growl vibrates through my chest.

He was here, not hours ago. His tracks gouge deep into the earth on the opposite bank, each stride longer than mine. Unlike Benjamin's, they circle the outside of the river once.

Watching.

Waiting.

Hunting.

I break into a sprint, following both trails, even as a trickle of fear quickens my pulse. Benjamin's scent wanders, but Father's does not. It remains just outside his, never too close and never too far.

Branches whip against my shoulders as the forest blurs past. Birds explode from the canopy ahead, startled by my passage, and somewhere in the distance a buck bolts through the underbrush. But I pay them no mind. Every heartbeat pounds one thought through my skull:

Too late, too late, too late.

After miles of searching, their scents collide. I skid to a halt so abruptly that loose earth sprays around my feet. A collapsed structure sits in the middle of the clearing, just feet from the village's main road. Benjamin's trail end, but Father’s continues, winding up the side of the mountain opposite mine. The territory I never dared cross into.