Page 244 of Silver Elite

I smile in the darkness.

“Said he’d loved her his entire life. I thought he was just talking crazy, drunk off his ass, so I laughed and said,Sure you have, buddy.”

I feel a poke in my ribs.

“I think he meant you, Darlington.”

My smile grows so wide it almost cracks my face in half.

—

We walk on. Slowly. Painfully, vexingly slow. As a sniper, I can remain still as a stone for hours. Here, inside this black nightmare, my body is wired, feet impatient inside my boots, fighting the impulse to speed up. Xavier is feeling it, too, and soon he gives up trying to match my pace. He stalks ahead of me, only to curse in dismay when his foot reaches the edge of the first black pit.

I hear it as the toe is instantly sucked into the quicksand like the slurp of liquid through a straw. I lunge toward him, and it takes considerable effort to help him pull it out. He almost loses the boot.

“Why do you refuse to listen to me? I’m not making this shit up!”

“Noted,” he mutters.

“Thank you. Now walk slow, stay behind me, pay attention to your footing, and don’t fucking touch anything.”

Literally twenty seconds later, he touches something.

I growl in the darkness, so annoyed that I’m willing to risk alerting the predators to our presence. At this point, maybe he deserves to get mauled by a cougar.

“Why are my hand and arm burning?” He releases a string of curses. “What the hell was that?”

“You touched a cluster of black snakeroot leaves.” I smelled that snakeroot from ten feet away. It releases an unmistakable sour odor.

“Is that what it was? Isn’t that shit poisonous?”

“Yes. But if you don’t touch or scratch your arm, the hives will go away in a couple of hours. You need to ingest the leaves for the poison to do any real damage. When it’s boiled, it corrodes your insides like acid. And you should never eat an animal you killed with black snakeroot. It taints the meat. Passes the poison to its eater.”

“How do you know all this shit?”

“This was my childhood home,” I remind him with a wry laugh. “My uncle taught me about every inch of this forest. There are tons of poisonous plant hybrids in here, some of them far deadlier than the animals.”

“I hate plants,” Xavier grumbles, and I laugh.

—

We reach the clearing seven hours later. Seven hours of painstaking steps, another dead predator, and an itchy, burning arm courtesy of black snakeroot. And then we see it.

Light.

The moment we stumble onto the sun-drenched grass, Xavier exhales in relief and sinks to his knees.

“Holy shit.” He shakes his head at me in dismay. “Why was that so awful?”

“Is now a bad time to tell you that I don’t know if we’re even halfway to the end?”

He glares at me. “Fuck you.”

Grinning, I drift toward the small hut that Uncle Jim built for us all those years ago. I can’t believe it’s still standing. In twelve years, infact, it’s barely changed, except that it looks so much smaller now. It felt enormous when I was a child.

I shift the strap of my rifle to my other shoulder and wander into the wooden structure. I’m…overwhelmed. Overcome with memories. I suddenly see Jim’s eyes crinkling at the corners as he flashed me a rare smile. I see myself chasing birds in this clearing, while Jim whittled a piece of wood or cooked us a rabbit on a skewer over the pit.

Speaking of fire. “We should get a fire going,” I tell Xavier over my shoulder.

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