Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 92392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 462(@200wpm)___ 370(@250wpm)___ 308(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 462(@200wpm)___ 370(@250wpm)___ 308(@300wpm)
Then I heard it.
Another scream.
Faint.
Distant.
Muffled.
As though someone had wrapped silk around a bell and struck it anyway.
I tilted my head toward the sound as the cart rattled beneath my boots.
“Get back in!” Yoichi hit the cart’s ceiling. “Hiro, we are almost there!”
Another cry reached me.
Thin.
Strangled.
Smothered.
Yet it reached me all the same.
Someone’s hurting her, and I’m going to fucking kill them.
"Hiro!" Kenji's voice cracked across the dark. “Where do you hear her screaming coming from?”
"Guys, she’s fine!" Yoichi shouted.
Kenji and Yoichi began to argue. I didn’t even pay attention. The cart lurched as Yoichi hit the brake.
And with that, I leaped off the cart and raced off into the forest, tracking our Tiger’s screams.
Yoichi yelled, “Hiro!!”
I ignored him and sped away, faster than I’d ever run before.
The forest opened before me. Roots twisted across the earth. Branches reached overhead. Moonlight spilled through the canopy in broken silver pieces.
More of Nyomi’s screams hit me.
I sped up so much, my boots barely touched the ground. The wind caught my clothes and pulled at them.
The night rushed past.
Trees became streaks.
Shadows became blurs.
The world narrowed to one thing.
Nyomi.
Another scream drifted through the darkness.
Faint.
Muffled.
Her.
My heart slammed harder.
No!!
I pushed faster. My legs burned. Leaves exploded beneath my feet. Low branches whipped against my shoulders and snapped behind me.
The island flew past.
I flew with it.
The wind became my companion. It wrapped around my body and carried me forward. It whispered through my hair and pressed against my back.
Faster.
Faster.
Faster.
Another scream reached me.
Closer.
Stronger.
A strange sound hid beneath it.
Odd chanting.
Many voices.
What the fuck?
I vaulted over a fallen log.
My boots struck a boulder.
I launched from it.
For one brief instant, I soared through the darkness.
The wind held me.
Then gravity remembered me.
I landed and kept moving.
The scream came again.
Our Tiger.
Rage ignited inside me.
Cold.
Sharp.
Beautiful.
The sort of rage that belonged in our bloodline.
The sort that ravaged empires.
The sort that buried enemies.
Someone touched her.
Someone hurt her.
Someone made her scream.
I would repay that mistake with generations of suffering.
Far behind, Yoichi’s yelling chased me. “Don’t, Hiro!!! It’s not what you think!!”
What is he talking about?
“Hiro, come back!!!” Yoichi yelled again. “She chose!! Don’t ruin this!!”
Chapter seven
What the Trees Knew
Hiro
Another scream tore through the trees.
Then another, right behind it, higher and rawer than the last.
I'm coming. I'm coming. Hold on.
The wind shifted off the slope ahead, and it carried a new scent into me, under the salt and the gun oil and the green crush of the leaves.
Copper.
Blood.
I had spilled enough of it to know it in the dark with my eyes shut. But this blood was hers. I knew it the way I knew my own name before my mind could argue.
Someone cut her? No! I’ll fucking cut them open!! And all their family! I’ve got to get there faster!
The ground was too slow.
Fast, almost in a blur, I planted a boot against the nearest trunk and ran three strides straight up the bark, then caught the lowest limb with both hands and swung up onto it.
Come on! Push!
The branch bowed deep under my weight and flung me higher.
I let it throw me.
Then I ran the trees.
The canopy became a road only I could see. I jumped from one branch to the next before the last one finished bending, riding the bounce of each limb into the leap for the one ahead.
Pine needles whipped my face.
Cold air tore past my ears.
Below me the forest floor dropped away into black, and I stayed up where the moonlight lived, weightless as smoke off a snuffed candle.
Nyomi’s screams grew closer.
A branch dipped under my heel. I rode it down and let it sling me across a gap no man should clear.
For half a breath I hung over nothing, arms wide, the whole dark island spread beneath me. . .then I dropped, and my boot found the next tree.
I ran on.
Her scream came again.
Even closer.
For one breath the screaming sounded like her laugh in the kitchen, the way she threw her whole head back when something caught her funny, loud, unbothered, and alive. Then it broke back into agony, and the wrongness of it nearly tore me out of the trees, and under it now came chanting.
Many voices wound around her cries like rope around a throat.
What are they doing to her? And why are they chanting!?
Then suddenly all this red came up to meet me.
What the fuck?!!
Tons of hooded people in red.
They rose out of the branches ahead.
Out of the black between the trunks.
Out of every place the moon refused to touch.
More people than I could count. All hooded figures in deep crimson. Their capes lifted and pooled on the wind, moving through the high limbs as easily as I did.
Somehow they sensed I was coming, and had waited up here the whole time, patient as spiders.
The fucking Silent Ones.
“I don’t want to kill you.” I sneered at them. “Get out of my way!”