I look away.

“Sure are a quiet one, aren’t you?” he asks, and caps his flask of water. “Always thought of you as a girl with spunk and guts. Never realized you were afraid to open your mouth.”

The bitterness festering in me bubbles up.

“How much spunk and guts does it take to chatter nonstop about nothing of importance?” I stand and stow my flask in my bag. “I have bigger things on my mind than discussing my skills. If you want conversation, choose a better topic.”

He stands as well, irritation on his face, and drives the bottom quarter of his ebony walking stick into the forest floor. I imagine I can feel the ground beneath me tremble with the force of it.

“Nobody appreciates a woman with vinegar in her soul.”

I slide my pack into place and stalk toward him, a distant roaring filling my ears as the anger inside me locks on to a handy target.

“Vinegar in my soul?” I’m closing in on him, and his hand tightens within the bladed glove he wears. “Is that what they call betrayal these days?”

My voice is louder than it should be, but I can’t seem to find the air I need to calm down. “You stand there and pass judgment on me like you’ve earned the right. What have you lost?” I’m yelling, my fist raised as if I’ll hit him. “What have you lost, Melkin?”

I need to hurt him. To lash out and hope that if he bleeds, it will somehow erase the specter of Oliver’s blood washing me with crimson.

“Almost everything,” he says, and pulls his walking stick free of the ground, raising both hands as if to show me he means me no harm. “I’ve lost almost everything.”

I don’t know what to say to this. I can’t tell if he’s lying. Before I can study his eyes to see if he understands the sense of overwhelming loss howling within me, the ground beneath us rumbles slightly, and something that sounds like thunder, muted and distant, comes closer.

I meet Melkin’s eyes and we leap into motion. Shoving my Switch into the strap sewn on the side of my pack for this purpose, I grab the nearest low-hanging tree branch and start climbing. Melkin lunges for the tree as well, wrapping his long arms and legs around the trunk and shimmying up its length until he finds a branch thick enough to support him.

The rumble becomes a roar, and the ground below us begins to crack.

I’m one quarter of the way up the tree. The crack runs directly below me.

“Jump!” Melkin yells.

Frantically, I scan the branches around me until I find one that reaches into the heart of the tree beside it and is thick enough to support my weight. I scramble along its length and leap for the next tree. My feet skid along the branch as I land, and I start running, grabbing branches for balance, swinging my body into the upper reaches of the tree, and then leaping for the next. Melkin is tree-leaping as well, though I’m too focused on my own survival to worry about him now.

I’ve put seven trees between me and my starting point when the roar becomes a deafening bellow, the ground we stood upon just a moment ago dissolves into nothing, and the Cursed One explodes out of the ground.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

RACHEL

I freeze. I’m about seventeen yards from the monstrous beast slithering its way into the open. I don’t think it’s enough. At the very least, I need to move higher, but I can’t without alerting it to my exact location.

The Cursed One coils its body along the ground and pulls itself from the hole it created. Up close, it looks like a giant wingless dragon covered in thick interlocking black scales with a tail the length of two grown men lying end to end and a ridge of webbed spikes running along its back. Thick yellow claws protrude from its muscled limbs.

Our weapons are useless. Swords break against its scales, arrows glance off, and the only area of weakness seems to be its sightless milky yellow eyes, but to get close enough to stab the eye is to court a fiery death from its mouth.

Besides, stabbing it in the eye is pointless. Nothing dies from losing an eye.

The only escape is to stay off its radar. It tracks by sound and smell, and when it stops and swings its head slowly side to side, huffing smoky little breaths, I don’t dare move a muscle. I’m grateful I don’t have the food in my pack. It would only add to my human scent and make me a bigger target.

Melkin isn’t as fortunate. I slant my eyes to the side and see him clinging to the upper branches of the tree beside mine, but his pack is nowhere to be seen. I guess he had the presence of mind to drop it.

The Cursed One puffs its breath out, and small flames jet through its nostrils, scorching the earth in front of it. The burned dirt seems to infuriate it, and it shakes its head, puffing increasingly large flames from its snout.

If we’re quiet, absolutely silent, it will leave. I focus on breathing in and out with slow precision, though my lungs scream at me to drag air in as quickly as possible so I can flee or fight.

I won’t have to do either, though. I just have to be still.

Suddenly, it jerks its head up and points its sightless eyes straight at me.

My stomach lurches, and as I glance around for a way out, I catch sight of Melkin’s pack hanging on a branch several feet below me. I didn’t realize he’d climbed up behind me before switching trees, dropping his pack along the way. I’m about to pay the price.

Abandoning my efforts at controlled, silent breathing, I give in to my body’s demands, dragging in a huge gulp of air while I tense my muscles for action.

The beast sniffs again, its body coiling like a snake about to strike.