Exquisite Poison (Original Draft)

Chapter 35 - Kindred Shadow

Netta laid back on the stone slab and fell asleep. As she slumbered, she wished that through the snow-shrouded darkness surrounding the temple there would come a Monster.

When she awoke, she realized that the day was starting, the beginning glow of the morning sun peering through the skeletal of the trees and their barren limbs.

Grunting, Netta sat up, stretching. It was when she happened to move her hurt ankle that she realized that the pain that had been there, before, was gone. Had disappeared.

Startled, Netta lowered her hands, grasping along the length of her ankle. She was astonished at the lack of pain, swelling or discoloration - anything that could have shown that there had ever been an injury there to begin with.

Turning, Netta found that the females on the ground were asleep. Sometime in the night it seemed that they had forgotten that they were supposed to have been sleeping in shifts.

Netta had been a little worried about what was going to happen to her, if and when Ash showed back up. Just one thought that had crossed her mind was if Ash would even remember her.

She certainly could not recall much - if anything - about him.

She was broken from her reverie when she heard a sound.

It was like a great, sudden crashing - through what sounded like the underbrush to her left.

Startled, Netta turned and tried, desperately, to peer into the darkness there. When she couldn't see anything, she felt a wave of anxiety start low in her stomach, then sweep through her, a terrible fear of the unknown.

She blinked, then turned to her right, for a moment glancing down at the two females on the temple's floor. Netta examined their exposed faces, saw that their expressions were slack with sleep, their eyes gently shut.

Netta hesitated for a moment, afraid of what could be waiting for her as she stared into the darkness of the woods.

It was the weight, the momentary burst of heat that pulsed from the chain that hung from her neck, that jarred her attention.

In that darkness, she thought that she had seen eyes that glowed, red, in the gloom. There was a scrap of something in the withered vestiges of memory that she felt in her mind like a phantom pain calling out.

Netta leaped from the slab, swinging her legs around so that she was standing, then running from the raised platform of the temple.

She ran into the snow, without giving a thought to the fact that one of her feet had no covering for it. It was when she reached the edge of the clearing that the temple stood in the center of that she realized that she felt no pain from the cold of the snow on her naked foot.

She struggled through the underbrush, kicking and shoving branches out of her way. For a moment, she was lost, thinking that there was no way that she could find where those familiar eyes had gone.

And then she smelled it - like the aftermath of a forest fire, in the middle of a frozen, still forest.

She followed the scent through the wind, running in the shadowed, rich darkness of the wood. In her mind, where almost nothing else remained, she recalled that smell with a hitch her her chest.

Netta was unable to repress the sob that choked out of her chest.

For a moment, she felt despair, certain that she would never find the source of her desperate hope. And then it came to her, a potent increase in its strength. She felt, then, as though she was standing not very far from where a great fire had just died.