The Archer: Arrow's Flight Book # 2 Page 3

  We sit quietly now, hand in hand on the log—lost in our own thoughts—a peace settling over us. The others are forgotten for the moment. His eyes find mine; he runs a gentle thumb along my jaw line, pushing a stray piece of hair aside. I close my eyes.

  The quiet moment is abruptly broken by a whistle of air that seems to whiz from the trees. In that instant, Ian jerks forward, a sharp hiss of pain escaping through his teeth. My eyes fly open. He collapses to his knees, a puddle of water spattering up at the impact and splashing us both.

  “What’s the matter?” I tug on his hand, which suddenly tightens around my fingers. Too tight. “Ian, what is it?”

  He doubles over onto the ground.

  “Ian! What is it?” I repeat. I fall to my knees beside him, my plate of fish tumbling out of my lap, and I clutch his arm. “What?”

  A sudden panic floods my heart, and it ricochets against my ribcage. He squeezes his eyes shut tight with a certain pain.

  “My back,” he wheezes. “It’s my back.”

  I bounce to my feet and run my hand across his back. Almost immediately, I see the knife—or rather the black handle of a knife protruding from between his shoulder blades.

  “It’s . . . a knife,” I whisper, and gasping, I whisk my own blade from its sheath and whirl toward the trees from which it came. I expect to see some crazed, knife-wielding monster crashing across the ground after us, ready to take aim at his target once more. And if one did, what could I do? I have no experience wielding any kind of weapon. But there is nothing. No lurking figure hiding in the shadows. No one!

  The immense silence sends a flood of terror crashing through me. It is too quiet, too calm. I take a quick step back, both hands gripping the curved knife.

  Ian’s fingers clamp around my ankle, and I tear my eyes from the tree line long enough to focus on him.

  “Kate, you need to pull it out,” his voice is raspy, weak. “Pull it out now.”

  I freeze. His breathing puffs out a shallow, uneven rhythm. The black handle beckons me, waiting for me to take hold. I bite my lip, terrified.

  “I don’t know if I can. What if I cause more damage? What if I hurt you?”

  I’m shaking terribly, but his hand tightens fiercely, and the motion forces me to still my trembling.

  “You can, Kate. You can.” His words come slow and breathy. “It’s punctured . . . my lung. I can’t . . . get my breath much longer. You have to do it now.”

  His eyes fill with a desperate pleading, but he holds them with a steady assurance until I’m convinced. He lowers his head, nearly touching the ground, and braces himself.

  “I’m ready,” he wheezes.

  Shaking, I sheath my knife. My hand hovers briefly over the hilt protruding from his back before I wrap my fingers around it.

  I don’t allow myself to think. With one quick yank, I pull. It loosens a bit, Ian shrieks, and I grimace.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “Do it! Just . . . get it out!”

  I pull again, hard. The blade slides out of his flesh with a slurping of muscle and scraping of bone that causes my gorge to rise, but I swallow, forcing it down. His blood drips from the blade’s end clutched between my fingers. His delayed scream, loaded with fierce agony, suddenly erupts from his lungs. I press the back of my hand to my lips and watch as he grows from a squatting position to his full height in a split second. His gray t-shirt clings to his bloody back, the red liquid spreading into a gooey, crimson stain.

  Shocked, I slide to the ground, my fingers still clenching what I now see is a good-sized pocket-knife.

  “Why is someone throwing knives at us?” I whisper. The tree line stands silent before me.

  Ian doesn’t answer me. All his mobility has returned, and in a flash, his bow is in his hand. He jerks an arrow into place and swings toward the trees in one quick motion.

  “Gather up our things,” he orders. He stomps out the fire, his eyes never straying from the trees.

  I don’t move. I can’t pry my eyes from the knife which moments ago had Ian completely incapacitated.

  “Kate!”

  The harshness in Ian’s voice brings me back. I drop the knife with a clatter, and I haphazardly throw things into the pack. He hoists it onto his back.

  “Let’s go.” He stoops for the knife, quickly wiping the blood off on his jeans before folding it and shoving it into his pocket. And without another thought, he gathers me up into his arms. My heart thumps loud in my ears and my stomach lurches as he shoots out of our campsite. And I cling to him, grateful for the distance he will soon put between us and whoever just tried to kill him.

  Chapter 3

  W e don’t run forward; we run back, retracing ground we’ve previously covered. Of course, every bit of it appears the same to me, so unfamiliar am I with my surroundings. I can’t distinguish one tree from the next. Each bend in the road is equally bendable in comparison. The sounds of Ian’s feet beat against the black asphalt. The storm clouds rally again, darkening the skies.

  After a time, Ian decides we’ve put enough distance between ourselves and the campsite. We walk, but he’s tremendously quiet—focused. And so I remain quiet, too, even as a million questions gather inside my brain longing to be asked. I can’t help but wonder if this incident is a sign of the dangers of Eden John so fervently expressed. Is this what he meant? Do Ian and his friends have a hoard of enemies after them, and am I to be caught in the crossfire? And this question burns in me the most: What is there of Eden that Ian has not told me?

  Just as the clouds begin to spit at us, we hear signs of other people. Voices in the distance moving closer. Ian holds up a hand for me to stop. We listen—cautious. The voices grow louder, and I step closer to Ian. We wait, and in that moment, the rains choose to pour out in full force. Ian wraps his arm around me and pulls me with him toward a nearby tree. We squat low—me bunched against his chest. My nose brushes his neck, wet with tiny droplets of water that dribble down to disappear into his collar. I hold my breath.

  From out of the overgrowth just around a bend in the road, as if it’s parted to let them pass, Jesse comes into view, tromping heavily with Max on his heels. Ducking their heads against the rains, they are loaded with packs, tents, sleeping bags. Ian heaves such a sigh of relief that I feel the release of it against my body. He stands, dragging me back to the road with him.

  “Hey, dude,” Jesse calls out over the noise of the storm, greeting Ian with a strange handshake and a hug. He’s not a bit surprised to see us appear out of the shrubs. Rain water drips from the bill of his blue ball cap. He squints at us. “You do realize you’re heading the wrong direction, right? East is that way,” he points with a grin.

  “Yeah, yeah. Funny.” Ian feigns irritation with a grin of his own. “I was expecting to find Justin. We got separated in that last storm. But you two will do just fine.”

  The rain patters harder, as if to remind us that it’s still here, listening to our every word and plotting against us. I pull the hood of my rain jacket more snugly over my face.

  “Glad to see you two.” Max’s voice resonates more deeply under the overcast skies. “I had a bad feeling we might not.” He runs his forearm across his wet forehead and examines the sky. “Better find shelter. If this storm is like last night’s, we’re done traveling for the day.”

  “Let’s check it out,” Jesse offers, turning off our path and into the trees.

  “We need to mark the trail,” Ian says. “And hope Justin hasn’t already passed by here.”

  In answer Max flicks out his pocket knife and slashes a thick arrow into the crumbling asphalt at his feet. It instantly fills with pouring rainwater.

  “You all go on.” He produces a longer, straight knife, moves a few feet away, and digs it into a tree, gracing it with another arrow pointing in the direction Jesse has taken. “I’ll leave the markings.”

  We trudge into the sopping overgrowth as the rain begins its unrelenting dance of torture, pelting
our skin with harder slices. Max holds back, stopping every few feet to mark another tree or rock along the way. Ian tugs me after him. Ahead of us, Jesse scouts the area, tracking any paths that may lead us to some kind of protective covering. To my relief, it doesn’t take long for him to find a group of matching buildings huddled near the river, and we trundle into one of them, leaving Max to finish marking the trail.

  “I’d say we’re at a former kid’s camp, based on the many rows of smallish bunk beds in this dorm,” Jesse proffers, dropping his pack and shaking water from his shoulders. The building consists of one long room lined with rows of beds stacked in twos along the walls. Jesse wedges himself onto the bottom bunk of one of the few beds still intact with a decaying mattress. He lies back, and the bed bows dangerously under his weight. He grins. “Perfect fit.”

  I slide the wet jacket from my shoulders. Rainwater drips all around me. I wipe at my face.

  Ian peels off his own red rain jacket. The bloodstain from his wound nearly saturated the entire back of his shirt before the bleeding slowed, and at the sight of it, Jesse whistles through his teeth, raising himself slightly.

  “What happened to you, man?”

  Ian digs into his pocket. “This.”

  He holds out the knife.

  Jesse takes it, peers at it, flips it over, opens it. He raises a brow. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Someone threw it at us this morning,” Ian says. “Pinned me right in between my shoulder blades. It’s a good thing it hit me instead of Kate.”

  His words, so calmly delivered, send a rush of terror galloping through me. Because he’s absolutely correct. I would be dead if I’d been impaled instead of him. But who were they aiming for? And why?

  Ian peels off the shirt, tossing it aside, and ruffles through his pack. The knife wound is gone, not even a scratch remains, but there is something—something I’ve never seen before. Something he didn’t have when he was locked in the cave. A marking in the shape of an eight sits just below his left shoulder blade. It isn’t an upright eight; rather, it lies on its side. It’s intricately designed with the wings of a bird extending from each end. And they bend and straighten, mimicking flight, as his muscles flex with his motions. I forget my shivering as I trace the curving design with my eyes.

  Ian slithers into a clean black shirt with longer sleeves, and the marking disappears beneath it. He pulls the blanket from his pack and tosses it over my shivering shoulders, tugging it up close around me. He smiles, and pushes a wet strand of my hair away from my forehead.

  “Did you see who threw this thing?” Jesse asks.

  “Nope. But I didn’t stick around to find out, either. Whoever they were, I left them in the dust.” He looks poignantly at Jesse. “Have you seen anybody?”

  “Couple of stragglers a day ago. Miles back. They were harmless. Not too many people worth fretting over on this side of the river.”

  Ian nods, but I detect an uneasiness in him that makes me nervous all over again. I rub my hands up my arms as the chill consumes me. Diana is out there, and until I see her safe, my mind will continue to concoct all sorts of horrors. It could have just as easily been her and Justin who had an encounter with an invisible knife-thrower.

  We’ve seen a few stragglers ourselves in the last few days. Men and women, tattered and torn, with eyes sunken deep into their sockets and skin hanging upon their bones like the thin onion paper my village bound together to form the ledgers used by the Council. But I feel no sense of community from these strange people out here. No threat in their numbers. They seem to live like wild animals surviving on what they can find, and I can’t imagine how they last for long in this harsh and deserted terrain. But somehow they do.

  Jesse examines the knife more closely, his green eyes intense. With the end of his shirt, he wipes at a streak of dried blood to reveal the blade.

  “There’s something here.” He points to the upper portion of the blade nearest the handle. “It looks like a symbol.”

  I see a faint scratching in the metal, resembling a coiled snake with the head protruding from the top end of the circular center and the tail from the bottom.

  “What is that?” Ian lifts the knife into the light to get a better angle. The symbol gleams sharper.

  “Some kind of serpent,” Jesse shrugs. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “It took me out, you know?” Ian flips the knife over. The same symbol adorns the other side near the point. “I couldn’t move until Kate pulled it out of my back.”

  “What?” Jesse sounds skeptical. “That’s impossible.”

  “I’ll show you,” Ian challenges, a twinkle in his eye. “If you think you can handle the pain.”

  He smiles and aims the knifepoint slightly. Jesse merely smirks.

  “Oh, I can handle the pain. Did you not see me take on those cattle prods?”

  Ian laughs, shaking his head, and Jesse somehow gracefully squirms his big body out from between the bunks. I remember the cattle prods all too well. I remember, too, how Jesse ripped the bamboo gates from their hinges one by one as if they were mere sticks. And then, he’d been overpowered by the electrical shocks. I’d never seen such strength strangled so quickly out of someone so seemingly powerful.

  Jesse yanks off his shirt and turns to reveal a marking resembling Ian’s own—but wingless and larger. It’s carved into the lower right side of his back just above his jeans, and it crawls around the curve of his waist.

  “You’re sure you want to let Kate in on this?” Jesse removes his cap to reveal his nest of blond curls.

  Immediately, Ian catches my eye, capturing me like a voluntary prisoner. I read something in him I’ve never seen before. In his eyes, I see his entire heart and everything that exists inside of it. Full of trust—for me.

  “I’m sure,” he says, and then he adds “She knows anyway.”

  “Okay, then. Let me have it.” Jesse squeezes his ball cap between his fingers and braces himself before glancing at me. “You may not wanna watch, Kate.”

  My eyes widen.

  “She’s tough, Jesse.” Ian runs his fingers across Jesse’s back, assessing an area just inside his shoulder blade. “I figured you knew that by now.”

  “You’re going to let him stab you?” I exclaim. An apprehension tickles my stomach. I shift my gaze from Jesse to Ian and back again as Ian raises the knife.

  “Yes he is.” Ian winks at me, and then jabs the knife full-force straight through Jesse’s back.

  Alarm bells ring inside my head as Jesse gasps and falls with such a thud that it shakes the foundation of the cabin. I wince, averting my eyes.

  “Aagghhh!” The sound is a strangled cry.

  “Ian!” I scream, but he holds up a hand with an air of assurance.

  “Hold on.” He smiles. “I want him to get the full effect.” He leans over Jesse. “Scary crazy, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I got it,” Jesse gasps. “Now pull it out.”

  An eternity later, when I’m close to passing out from holding my breath, Ian yanks the knife from Jesse’s back. The wound is a deep slice, and blood spurts out and runs in a rivulet off his side. It slides downward as he sits back on his haunches and mingles with the strange figure eight, smearing it nearly out of sight.

  “What is the deal with that knife?” Jesse struggles to catch his breath.

  “Told you.” Ian wipes the blade clean with his torn shirt.

  They share a mutual exchange that sends my unease to boiling again. Ian folds the knife in on itself and shoves it into a pocket of his pack. I stand still, numb from the cold, or perhaps from the fact that I have yet to recover from the shock of what I just witnessed.

  “You are both insane!” I finally manage, moving past Ian to flop onto the ragged mattress of one of the lower bunks. I pull my knees up to my chest under the blanket and glare at Ian. “Someone clearly tried to kill you, and they would have if you were anyone else. And now you make a game of it?”

  My agi
tation creeps through my nerves at the thought of some invisible enemy purposely wanting to hurt any of us. And their response to it angers me. Jesse uses a cloth from his pack to wipe off the blood and shoves his head through his shirt.

  “No harm done, Kate.” He smiles and settles his cap back on top of his curls. “This is just what we do. You’re probably gonna need to get used to that.”

  Ian sighs and wedges awkwardly into the bunk to sit beside me, his head dipped forward. I deliberately edge away from him. His actions were thoughtless and foolish, and I refuse to hide my anger.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, his expression filling with a pouting sort of regret that is completely insincere. But it tugs at my heart all the same, and I give him another exasperated glance before I punch at his arm. The hardness of his muscles is like the strength of a rock. My fist throbs at the impact, but I simply draw my hand back under the blanket and scowl. He forces away the beginnings of a smile and slides into seriousness.

  “Look. We just—” He stops short, shrugs. “We experiment sometimes. To see what our bodies can endure. It’s not dangerous.”

  “Not dangerous? You truly believe this? Searching for the one sure method of dying is not dangerous?”

  He raises both of his blond brows, and I read in his expression what I suspected. I’ve jolted him. He’s never considered this.

  “You may have outlived such wounds until now,” I continue with a scolding air because now I have his attention. “But one slip in your ‘experimenting’ and you’re dead for certain. How can you be so reckless? You admit you don’t know how you can die. Why would you be so stupidly risky?”

  He shifts uncomfortably.

  Jesse clears his throat. “She’s kind of right, you know?” He looks uncomfortable, squeezing the bloody balled up piece of cloth between his big fists.

  “She is right.” Ian sighs. “We shouldn’t have done that just now.”