Page 111 of The Last One
The creature blasts its high-pitched chirp.
Both Jadon and I squeeze our eyes shut as the cry rattles our eardrums.
Rooster flutters higher…higher…and flaps into the forest.
“Ready?” Jadon asks.
Do I have a choice?
We trail the battaby with the bright-orange wattle, and our boots slip and squelch through battaby dung fouling the forest floor. Soon silence overtakes the woods, broken only by the flapping of the creature’s leather wings and our boots upon wet ground.
“We’re heading north,” Jadon says, head swiveling up and around.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, focused. “What are we doing once we’re at Azzam Cavern?”
“I’ve heard that the only thing that will destroy a battaby nest is setting it on fire.”
“So, we set a fire. Andthen?”
“Use more fire. It’s a big place.”
The shadowy forest bends into impossible shapes, like letters of a forgotten tongue. All these trees, all these frenzied vines and twisted trunks and darkness and darker darkness. Just existing here requires that I trust my feet.
Straining my ears, I can still hear Rooster’s wings beating above us. “Really,” I say, “how do you know these creatures? Sunabi, cursufly, burnu, and now battaby?”
“There was a mage I knew,” he says, “and she had all these sketches of otherworldly tacked to the walls of her hut. She told me that she’d fought them all, once upon a time. That these creatures appearing together meant that the realm would soon come to an end.”
I look back at him over my shoulder. “Yikes.”
“No one believed her. People called her crazy.” He grins, keeping his eyes on the slippery forest floor. “I didn’t think she was crazy. Her prophecy scared me to death. So I memorized those pictures of the otherworldly—there were so many. She got kicked out with the rest of the mages. I never forgot her, though, or what she taught me, and so I trained extra hard because I didn’t want to die, because I was scared that the realm would end before I got to kiss a girl.”
My smile spreads. “And here you are, years later—”
“Chasing Number Ten on old Myrtle’s chart.”
“At least you’ve kissed a girl,” I tease. “That means the realm can now come to an end.”
Jadon snorts. “But I haven’t kissedthegirl yet. Once I do, fuck it. Let it all burn down.”
I peek over my shoulder with a playful smile. “Let’s hurry up, then, so that you can kiss her.” I pause, then add, “Thenwe’ll burn it down. Deal?”
“Deal.” This time, his gaze lingers on me. It’s the look he’s given me before that makes me heated and woozy. Now that we’re out of Veril’s cottage with its wards, I can hear Jadon’s thoughts again.“A kiss there,”he thinks.“A kiss thereand especially right there.”He winks at me before he looks up to chase an end-of-the-realm flying beast.
This is my first time in a forest since that burnu fight. Chasing a battaby is not how I pictured my triumphant return to the woods. Though we aren’t in that part of this forest, I now dread any dark-green space that resembles the dark-green space where beasts left me shredded and bloodied.
Rooster shrieks and drops more crap.
We wince from the high-pitched cry and grimace because we’re being showered with flying shit. The trail has widened, and Jadon runs beside me.
“Can we get to the damned cave already?”
“You can say, ‘Hey, let’s take a bath together.’”
“She’d like that.”
“But no privacy.”
I can’t help but smile as I listen to him prepare for our next encounter.
