Page 94 of Taking Jenny
He lunged, swinging his staff at me. I ducked his first blow and slammed the end of my staff into his jaw, then smacked it across his throat. He coughed and shook his head as though it rang.
I moved to strike again, but he recovered fast. His staff struck the side of my knee, buckling it. I fell to the ground and tried to scramble backwards away from him.
He laughed, kicking my staff out of my reach. “It’s going to be so satisfying to watch your sister’s face when I tell her what I did to you. Do you know what kind of power it is, to kill a queen’s sister?”
Just like last night, I feigned ignorance. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, eyeing my leather bag, which lay on the ground nearby.
He stalked me, which gave me the opportunity to shift closer to my bag. “I’m getting hard just thinking about it,” he said, his eyes nearly black with his glee. “I will strangle you, slowly, like I promised. And for my trophy, I’ll take your tongue. I may haveit gilded. It will go with my collection of the other two avatar tongues I’ve won.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Oh my god, are you going to strangle me or bore me to death?”
He arched a brow. “No attempt to talk me out of it?”
I jutted my chin out mutinously. “Why? You’re pathetic and you will die pathetically, Pleon. No matter how many women you strangle between now and—”
He leapt onto me, straddling my waist. His knees crushed into my sides as his hands closed around my throat with terrifying precision, leaving no doubt in my mind that he’d done this before.
He snarled, mouth twisted, eyes glittering with bloodlust.
My airway started to collapse, so I took the only shot I had. My left hand reached around his leg and into my bag, scooping up the liquid in there. Still struggling to breathe, I threw a handful of the poison water into his eyes, then squeezed my own shut as tight as I could so it didn’t harm me, too. He screamed, a sound of raw agony as the poison scorched his eyes. He recoiled, his hands leaving my neck to press against his face.
I shoved him off me and climbed to my feet, heart racing as I stood over his yowling, writhing body.
Panic surged through me.All that shrieking is going to attract the rest of the hunters and then I’ll be dead for sure.
Stomach roiling, I did what I had to do to survive. I picked up a heavy, jagged rock and bashed him in the side of his head. Again. And again. And again. Until he finally stopped screaming. Until he stopped moving.
Until his blood clung to my hand, my arm, my clothes. I dropped the rock, panting. My entire body shook.
I checked his pulse and found nothing. But I also didn’t know where a Ladrian pulse was the most accurate. Tentatively, I putmy ear to his chest. I had to know that he wasn’t coming after me again.
No heartbeat. No breath sounds. Nothing.
I waited for the guilt to crush me. It didn’t come. I only felt relief, because Pleon was the worst sort of man. Had I not killed him, he would have killed me.
I gathered my things and kept climbing up the trail, on and on. I prayed some beast would find his corpse, instead of following the scent of his blood on my clothes.
As the distance passed by, the adrenaline rush and fight left me weak with hunger. No supply drops in sight. No water to drink. I had eaten the fruit I had found a while ago. Strange that there had been a supply drop with both poison and safe fruit at it, but Ladrians clearly had a twisted sense of challenge. I was just grateful that Discord had shown me the lip trick to figure out poison and allergies.
An hour or more later, I was shaking from lack of food. When I saw movement ahead, I cursed my luck.Another fucking hunter. Has to be.
I hunkered down and hid behind a tree to let them pass me by. But as the person came closer, I realized that I could seethroughthem.
Fuck me, it’s a ghost.
I wasn’t sure if ghosts were friendly on Orhon or not. The ones I had met on Halla were a mixed bag.
She was a Ladrian girl, younger than most I had met. Pretty, too. Tan skin, black hair, brown eyes. She wore a strange dress, not like any I had seen before. Her hair was styled into thin braids down her back. She wandered through the forest, smiling at the occasional flower she came across.
I was tempted to try to speak to her, but I didn’t know if she would rat me out to the hunters somehow.
She strolled past me, and I relaxed. But suddenly, she was in my face.
“You poor thing,” she muttered, a pained look in her eyes.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
She gasped, her eyes widening. “You can—can you see me?”
