Page 81 of The Last One
“Maybe? You’re better at sensing those vibes than me.” Jadon kneels beside the two intact burnu corpses, and his eyes roam across their bodies, across their pools of blood. “Yeah.Somethingstopped that burnu, and it wasn’t us. There’s more than just burnu here.”
He makes a quick scan of the forest, then positions himself before the dead beta. With both hands, he pries open the burnu’s jaws until there’s a sickening, wet crack of bone and muscle. The eyeteeth twinkle in the morning light. Jadon grabs one of those canines and wiggles it back and forth.
As he works, I notice the bandage that protected Jadon’s hand is gone. It must have fallen off during the fighting. But there’s no bloody wound there. Just a tattoo with an intricate design that I can’t make out.
“What’s that?” I ask, nodding at his hand.
“What’s what?” He doesn’t stop pushing around the burnu’s tooth to look down at his hand. “Nothing.” The tooth pops out, and he says, “Success.” He tosses me the trophy, even though it hadn’t been my power to end this beast.
I catch the tooth, then watch as he tugs his sleeve down to shield his marked hand.
“We shouldn’t linger.” He pulls out the second tooth easier than the first. He drops his trophy into his breech’s slitted pocket, then turns to the poplar grove and shouts, “Phily! Olivia! Come down—it’s safe!”
I take a step toward Jadon, but I sink to one knee. The adrenaline from combat is draining from me, and now, pain in my leg and forehead runs free across my body. I try to stand, but a potent combination of exhaustion, fear, and bone-breaking pain pushes and punches me. I stagger over to a tree trunk, completely unable to hold myself up.
“Shit, Kai.” Jadon bounds across the fallen burnu to reach me. His eyes search for my injuries, pausing at my banged-up hands, my scraped forehead, and the worst injury of all: my ripped, bloody leg. His eyebrows rise, and he mutters, “Shit,” again. “Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?”
“I didn’t think it was this bad.” My words are slurred and soft. My vision swims, and two Jadons gape at me, their four eyes filled with concern.
“We need to look for help,” he says. “You’ll die out here.”
“We need to get back to camp,” Olivia whispers.
Just the idea of walking back to camp makes me sink against the tree.
“We’ll go back once we get her someplace safe,” Jadon says.
Philia says, “But we might have something in our packs to—”
I wince as pain fragments explode from my leg up to my hip.
“She needs something more than whatever’s in our bags,” Jadon says, voice strained.
Through a gap in the trees, I see a slope that ends with white smoke rising in the daybreak.
“There.” I point toward it.
“Where there’s smoke,” Jadon says, “there’s fire.”
And where there’s fire, there’s a house filled with people.
“Let’s get you some help,” Jadon says. “Can you walk at all?”
I close my eyes, my lashes now tacky with tears and burnu gore. I rub my temples and try to convince my body thatwe’re fine, we’re okay, we can make it to the white smoke. We’re fine, we’re okay, we can make it to the white smoke. I keep thinking that, over and over until I’m standing and limping through the grove of trees. The undergrowth quickly swallows us, and between the fire in my leg and the pain ripping through my head, I can only trundle, trip, run, start, stop, and—
“Jadon?” I’ve lost track of him. Maybe he’s fallen back to check on the girls. “Where did you—?”
And then I hit a wall and cry out as I crash back onto the ground. I try to sit up on my elbows to see what I hit and I see that it’s not a wall at all. AndIdidn’thit it.
No, an old man has just plowed into me. He’s gray-haired and silver-bearded, with smooth, parchment-pale skin. His eyes are bright lavender, and in his long hands he clutches a dark wooden staff topped by an iron snake eating its tail. There are cutouts through the snake’s metal body, and all of it pulses with the same lavender glow that killed the burnu.
I can’t take my eyes off that illuminated ouroboros.
“Oh goodness,” the man says.
“Kai?” Jadon calls somewhere behind me.
But I don’t turn around. I can’t. My eyes are caught in this old man’s lavender gaze.
