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  Wren’s face lit up, showing her happiness. That was all? She had plenty of experience doing those things, and it beat having to slay a nightmare.

  “Yes!” she said quickly. “I can do that.”

  Rifter seemed satisfied with her eagerness and nodded as if to seal the agreement. He put his fingers to his lips and whistled loudly, drawing the others’ attention, and they all perked up like dogs being called by their master.

  “We hunt?” asked Finn eagerly.

  “We hunt,” Rifter confirmed. As Wren had heard them do before, the boys howled like wolves and made noises of cheer as they began to grab their weapons. They rushed about, collecting their belongings, and Wren was a bit unsure of where she should be to get out of their way.

  Rifter nearly slipped away from her without another word, but she managed to catch him before he had moved far down the rabbit tunnel.

  “Wait, you’re all going? Right now? I’m going to stay here by myself?”

  “Sure,” he said, then gave a short shrug. “Well, unless you want to come, but I figured you wouldn’t like that.”

  Images of the night before passed through her mind, and Wren guessed that nothing good could come from her going along with them. She didn’t want a repeat of yesterday.

  “No, I don’t think I do. But when will you be back?”

  “We’ll be back near night. You should be safe here until then. If you go outside, don’t go too far. No one knows where we live, so just lay low if you think there’s trouble.”

  Whisper flew dangerously close to Wren’s ear and darted up toward Rifter to get his attention. He turned to go, and then they were all dashing out into the woods, and it wasn’t long before Wren was left alone in the silent tunnel, forgotten.

  Chapter Eleven

  1

  Who would have thought that one girl would make such a difference? Rifter wondered this to himself as he led the others away from the refuge.

  When he’d seen Wren the first time, he hadn’t known what to think about her. No girl had ever found this place. He’d always guessed it was because the idea of a world like this didn’t appeal to a girl. Wren was different – or desperate. She said she wanted this dream. How could he deny her that?

  It was true that he’d spoken to the Pack about her after the first time. Some of them had been intrigued at the idea of bringing a girl in, but after it had all been hashed out, they’d decided that it was a bad idea. A girl couldn’t appreciate this place as they did. As Nix had said from the beginning, a girl would be a burden.

  Rifter had been willing to forget about her – even if his mind didn’t seem to allow him that – but the very next night, she was there on the beach again. He couldn’t believe that it was coincidental. He had to take her in.

  Even though it had been proven that she couldn’t fight – that she was practically helpless as far as defending herself – he didn’t want to give up on her. He knew there was something about her that was important. The sea had approved her for some reason. Wren had pierced the veil to get here and he knew she was meant for something.

  He just didn’t know what.

  He was sure that the others had changed their minds once they had met her, but Nix hadn’t seen his side of things. Rifter didn’t like it when they were discontented, especially in his direction, and now he hoped a hunt would distract their minds. This was not the first time he had gone against them, but he always knew how to win them back.

  Rifter put Wren behind him as if she had never been there to begin with – as if she was not a subject of controversy between them. He wasn’t willing to bear any difficulty that her presence might have brought on. In fact, the boys all seemed willing to forget her for the hunt, and even Nix had put the matter aside, looking as pleased for their excursion as the rest of them were, following Rifter with his whole self.

  This was how Rifter liked it. Life was good when they were unified.

  There were not many days that the boys didn’t hunt – whether for food, sport or necessity. It was common that they went to the beach at night to ward off the nightmares that washed in, but other times, they sought out some of the larger beasts that had managed to get past them on a previous occasion, or had come up on a night when they hadn’t been on guard. Whatever the case or the reason, hunting ranked very high on their list of favorite things to do, and they never wasted much time doing things they didn’t like.

  Rifter led them through the trees. He was the leader of the Pack – the strongest among them. When he was with them, they all felt a bit cockier, and that showed even in the way they walked. When they moved across the land together, they didn’t feel any need to hide. They stepped boldly, believing that anything that opposed them would be struck down. They were young and strong and unstoppable. They would never be bogged down by the feebleness of age – would never lose sight of their goal.

  They would fight hard to keep their freedom. They would live forever.

  “What are we going to kill today, Rifter?” Finn asked with a sly smile, but it was exactly what they all had wanted to know.

  “Tell me it’s not just a couple of rabbits for the witch,” Nix said, referring to Wren. Even though she was a forbidden subject for now, Rifter smirked.

  “You called me out earlier for being late, and you’re right; I did get sidetracked. I was distracted by a trail that led into the marsh.”

  “Couldn’t kill it alone then, aye?” Finn jeered.

  “I thought it might be good for you all to see it for yourselves,” Rifter returned. “You’re terribly out of practice, and Finn, you’re getting so damn fat.”

  “Hey!”

  “Must be a big one,” Sly said. He was grinning madly at the prospect. “Tell me: is it more reptilian than mammalian?”

  “You’ll see when we get there,” Rifter told him. He enjoyed keeping them in the dark at times when it came to hunting, and it wasn’t always because he didn’t know the answers to what they asked. He often liked to hold back what he knew just to keep them on their toes.

  “I’ll bet I get the final blow,” Finn declared with confidence, just to stir the rest of them up.

  “Oh please,” Sly mocked.

  “Want to put a wager on it?” Mech asked.

  Finn laughed. “Yeah, yeah okay! I’ll wager my Chimera head against your Lamia tail. Plus, you have my watch duty the next–” He paused to think. They all had trouble keeping up with days. Eventually, he gave up. “Well, the next time I don’t feel like it.”

  The twins whispered together over those terms.

  “Fine,” Mach said eventually, “but instead of the Chimera head, we want that ore you found the other day, and we want you to take two watch duties.”

  Finn rolled his eyes. “That sounds just like the two of you: always wanting something more. Well that was my final offer, you slugs. Take it or leave it.”

  The twins began to protest and Rifter smiled a little, but he didn’t say anything to their bickering. He would let them go on like that for hours sometimes without a word. At others, he was easily annoyed and shut them down quickly, but this was what he liked about them all. They made things interesting – much better than it had been when he was all alone here. He had tried his best to forget the specifics of that, but he knew he didn’t want to go back to it.

  Whisper was staying close to him, hovering slowly near his head. Moving slothfully was a great pain to her, but she was attentive to him in case he ordered her to do something. She didn’t go ahead of him – she knew he hated that when they were hunting. She kept herself quiet, and he liked to pretend she wasn’t there unless he had need of her. He was doing well with that so far, but when a light drizzle of rain began, the fairy pulled up his hood in a quick motion, as if he didn’t know better than to get out of the rain on his own.

  “Thanks, Wisp. You want to be my mother now?” he said sourly, but he smiled because that indication always made her angry. As he’d suspected, his ears were filled with cursing and
other terrible things, but he only laughed. “Would you shut up? We’re almost there.”

  He could have flown on ahead of them much faster than they could keep up, but Rifter knew the importance of staying grounded at least some of the time. Just because he could fly did not mean it was always the best way. Staying on the ground usually offered him a better challenge. There were times when he didn’t like easy kills, so he kept himself rooted when he was with the others – though he did often cheat by walking a finger’s width above the earth.

  They walked over the land until the trees changed – until the tall oaks and pines all but disappeared beneath Spanish moss. Even as their boots began to sink into the soft ground, they moved on. The stink of the sodden terrain surrounded them, but they didn’t care. All that was important were the signs they saw all around them – the broken trees and sinkholes where water was standing. They had arrived on the trail that Rifter had spotted before.

  “Something has definitely come this way recently,” Sly said, and at that moment took up one of the monster feet hanging at his belt and slid his hand into it like it was a glove. He had two – one was a scaly, red reptilian hand with black claws, and the other was a furry paw much like a bear’s, but both had come from nightmares. It made his hand much larger and gave him long claws – trophies as well as his weapons of choice.

  Sly knelt down toward the ground and examined one of the tracts in the soil.

  “Trail’s cold though,” he commented.

  “Alright, where is this thing?” Finn wanted to know. “I’ve got a trophy to get.” He walked on a few steps ahead.

  “Don’t be so brash,” Nix warned. “We don’t even know what it looks like.”

  “It’s just one more big, ugly bastard!” Mech said.

  “Yeah, they all look the same to me,” Mach agreed.

  Whisper settled on Rifter’s shoulder, folding her wings back. Doing this helped her relax, and when she had remained still for a bit, her light would go out so that she couldn’t be seen. She spoke to him quietly.

  “I smell it,” she said. “It’s close.”

  “Whisper says it’s close,” he told them lowly, holding his sword.

  “Where is it then?” Mach asked, looking around, but all he saw was the marsh.

  “Yeah, you wouldn’t think something so big could hide that well.” Finn was edging toward a deep pit of water, testing the bank of mud.

  “Be careful, Finn,” Toss warned, but it sounded like pleading.

  “Thanks, mum, but I’m perfectly capable of—” His words were cut off, transcending to a helpless wail. It happened quicker than any of them anticipated.

  A fleshy tendril shot out of the water and wrapped around Finn’s leg. Toss was standing near enough that he was able to grab Finn’s arm before the thing – whatever it was – could pull him off into the water. Rifter dashed forward and chopped down on the tentacle, but it was thick and did not slice cleanly. That was good enough, however. It abandoned the boy as prey and retreated.

  “Whisper did say it was close,” Nix observed, standing aside to observe the spectacle.

  “She’s not usually wrong,” Rifter agreed.

  The creature rose up from the swamp, its flesh slimy and lumpy. At first glance it was like a giant toad, slick and gray, but its wide mouth was full of small, sharp teeth. It seemed to smile at them. Its amber eyes were like those of a crocodile, sinister and evil, appraising the feast before it.

  “Ahhh,” said Sly, slipping on his other glove, “Amphibious!”

  “What the hell?” Finn groaned, standing with Toss’s help. “These things just keep getting weirder!”

  “And it smells,” Mach added. Both twins had covered their noses and mouths.

  “Stop whining,” Rifter scolded them. “This is prime nightmare hunting. Are you with me, or do you want to run back home and hide with the girl? Are you girls?”

  “Hell no!” the twins declared at once.

  The tongue shot out again at lightning speed and the twins dove out of the way to avoid it. The beast turned a little, but it was not very fast. Only the tongue was able to strike with fatal accuracy.

  Rifter assessed it quickly. “The tongue is important. Hopefully, it only has one. If that’s so, one or two of us can keep it distracted while the others go to work on it. Who wants to be bait?”

  “Well, you are the fastest,” Sly pointed out, slipping away so that they wouldn’t be such an easy target as a cluster – and also so that he wouldn’t be tagged.

  “He’s right. Good luck!” Nix said, backing off to choose the perfect weapon for this task.

  Rifter laughed at the way they left him there, as the rest hurried away as well, but he didn’t hold them at fault for that. There were consequences to being the best.

  “It’s just you and me, I guess,” he said to Whisper, knowing that this would please her. She didn’t like to deal with the other boys when she didn’t have to. As far as she was concerned, she owed no loyalty to them.

  “When you’re ready,” she told him, knowing what to do.

  The beast was trying to focus on the others as they spread out around it. It made a few more attempts to catch them with the tongue. They leapt out of the way, but the rapid shots made it nearly impossible for them to aim at it or otherwise get near it at all. As much as Rifter enjoyed seeing them fall in the mud, they wouldn’t get anything done this way. It was time for the diversion.

  “Do it,” he instructed Whisper.

  He let himself become weightless, lifting off the ground just an inch or two. The fairy flew around him in a swirl, zipping so fast that her trail of light seemed continuous all around him, making him glow. Just as he’d suspected, the flashes of light drew the monster’s attention. Nothing was quite as annoying to a beast than the lightning-quick movements of a wisp, and Rifter often used that as an advantage.

  The nightmare looked his way and forgot about the rest of them, just as he’d expected it to. He stared into the creature’s eyes, daring it. If the thing had a soul, he would have been seeking to melt it.

  “Come on, you son of a bitch,” he threatened, drawing his sword. “Show me what you’re made of!”

  2

  Finn was usually easy-going, giving jokes as often as taking them, but he had his pride like the rest of them did. Even with all his goofing off, it was unacceptable to be bested by a creature in front of his brothers. He wasn’t the weakest of them, though he had to remind them of that periodically. He was determined to get his dignity back – and win that bet.

  The group had spread out, most of them keeping on the move. A stationary target would be an easy catch for the tongue. Finn guessed that if they’d all stood in a row to wait, the tongue could have pulled every one of them to that jagged mouth in a matter of seconds. This was why they moved.

  Finn had a short blade at each hip, but these were not going to do him any good for this beast. He couldn’t get close, but that was alright. He had the perfect weapon for the job.

  Finn drew a pistol from his belt. This was a gun he’d gotten off a pirate he’d slain, which was how the Pack had obtained most of their firearms in the beginning. He’d taken the gun apart and put it back together so many times that he had learned exactly how it worked – until he’d grasped everything there was to discover about it. Then he’d made it better. He’d added a rotating chamber, and now instead of two shots, he could get ten.

  Perhaps he didn’t have as much useless knowledge as Sly, but no one could say that he wasn’t smart. He was a regular genius when it came to gadgetry.

  A blessing from Whisper would have done them good, but they’d had to scatter too soon for that. Finn would do without. He held the pistol with intent, already sure of what he would try.

  This shouldn’t be too hard, he thought to himself. The tongue is the danger. If I can unload a few rounds into it, then maybe we can get in close enough to kill this thing.

  It was a good idea, he thought – one as good as what
Rifter or Nix could come up with – and he supposed they had left it that way on purpose. The rest of them were supposed to find their own way of getting at it.

  Rifter had caught its attention by now, and the toad beast was focused on the fairy light. Finn waited, holding his aim until the tongue shot out again, and he deftly pulled the trigger, managing to fire three rounds into the base of the tongue before it was pulled back in and the mouth closed again.

  The nightmare roared and stomped, shaking the ground beneath them and splashing great amounts of the swampy water out of the pool.

  “Ha!” Finn shouted triumphantly. Though it wasn’t the final blow – yet – he felt he was well on his way to getting his victory. He started toward the nightmare, ready to take the creature down, but quickly learned that it was too early to celebrate.

  A dark spew began to roll out of the beast’s mouth, thick and black. The monster spat amounts of it from the back of its throat, and that was more effective than even the tongue was. Within just a few seconds, there were gallons of it on the ground, and any one of them who stepped in the tar was immediately weighed down by the heavy mess that collected on his boots. Toss and the twins fell to this, and even Sly had accidentally gotten his right foot in it as he ran past. The stuff was horrible, not only disgusting, and it made the boys much easier targets for the tongue.

  “Oh yuck!” one of the twins yelled, though Finn didn’t give much thought to which. Instead, he sighed dejectedly. Yes, he may have been a master at tinkering, but his approach in dealing with monsters was a bit lacking.

  From across the way, he heard Rifter’s laughter, and he winced as it cut into his ego.

  3

  Rifter laughed as he watched the others wade through the bile, convinced that he would never have made a mistake like that. They didn’t always fall to errors in trivial battles like this, but when they did, he found it impossible to be angry. He only wanted to laugh at their misfortune – considering they weren’t in any real danger, which he didn’t feel that they were.