PROMISE

CHAPTER 15

Light stabbed through the basketweave canopy overhead, lancing into the ground like spears thrown from heaven. Trees creaked. Birds sang. The air was cool, almost cold. Leaves shook on finger-thin branches in the slight wind.

Hain swiped hair from where it clung to his forehead, the strands damp despite the chills cascading over him. He felt feverish, the heat in his palms inching up his wrists, the skin hot and tight as broiled sausage. Every part of him ached, though from the fever or from the travel, he couldn't say. Either way, he needed to rest. Of that much he was sure.

Hain trudged east–or, at least, what he thought was east–toward Sierra. With the sun tucked behind the clouds, and the clouds shrouded behind the forest canopy, he felt adrift and rudderless. But he drove on all the same, intent on finding safe harbor.

Because he was bound to stumble across another clearing, wasn't he? A clearing free from Cats or shadow creatures. He told himself it was true. Promised it. Because the alternative was unbearable.

Plants and leaves crunched underfoot as he trudged onward with plodding steps, and he tried to focus on the rhythm. On the sounds, rather than the fever purging his core of heat. Rather than the three words of that oily voice slithering through his mind, its rank breath like poison in his heart.

Coward.

Bastard.

Traitor.

Bile boiled in Hain's throat. Yes, he thought. He was all those things. All of them, and worse.

He'd abandoned his friend, just as he'd left the Boy. He'd fled from her. Left her to fend off that nightmare of teeth and claws and screeching words. Because whatever courage he'd pretended to possess had drained from him like blood from open wounds at the sight of the Cat. Driving him toward escape. Toward staying alive.

He trudged onward until his legs begged to rest. But the Godless offered no respite, no further clearings where he could pause to take a breath. Instead, it grew thicker with each step. Vines sprung from gaps between the trees, their thorns clawing at his loose undershirt and the flesh beneath it. He drew his sword–that useless strip of steel he'd kept hidden when the Cat had come at him–and slashed weakly at bushes as he drove on. Deeper. Farther.

The work was hard, made worse by the fever taking hold in his bones. His sword arm pitched back and forth like a clock pendulum until pain bloomed in his shoulders and twilight smeared the sky in violet.

Desperation hooked its fingers in him. Clearing or no, he thought, he needed to make camp soon.

Hain had nearly resigned himself to the brutal task of carving his own place from the bushes, when the forest broke open into a clearing blanketed with knee-high grass and studded with ferns.

Hain nearly fell to his knees in relief.

He sheathed his sword with swollen, tender hands, wincing as he pried the pack's straps from his back and let it thump the ground. He rolled his shoulders, relishing the feeling of being free from the thing, and surveyed the bruise-colored sky to where it brushed the forest. The clouds had moved on, but it didn't make a difference for finding his direction. Trees rose too high to see any bit of the horizon, and the sun had sunk too far for any kind of reckoning. He had no idea how far he'd gone or in which direction he'd traveled.

But Lilith might.

Hain cringed as her name invaded his brain, as if some part of his mind had betrayed him. Lilith might still be safe, he thought, and he wanted to believe it more than anything. The Cat had been coming for him, not her. And she was of the Clans. One of their own. They wouldn't hurt her. They couldn't.