Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
I petted Bear, straightened, walked over to the nearest furry body, and flexed. One hundred and forty-three pounds. I grabbed the stalker by the front paws and lifted it off the ground. My shoulder whined in protest. I clenched my teeth against the pain.
I was holding one hundred and forty-three pounds of dead weight. It wasn’t resting on my back, no, I was holding it in front of me.
I wonder…
I spun around and threw the corpse. The stalker flew and landed on the cave floor. My shoulder screeched, and I grabbed at it. Okay, not the brightest moment.
The stalker corpse lay ten feet away. I threw one hundred and forty-three pounds across ten feet. Two weeks ago, I’d used a forty-five-pound plate for some overhead squats at the DDC gym, because someone was hogging the Smith machine, and I had a hard time holding it steady for ten reps.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Bear.”
Bear looked at me, padded over to the corpse I threw, and bit it.
“No worries. It’s dead. You are the best girl, Bear, you know that?”
Somewhere in the tangle of the tunnels a creature howled. We couldn’t stay here. We had to keep moving.
I pulled the antibacterial gel out, slathered some on my bleeding shoulder, popped four Motrins, and turned to Bear.
“Okay, girl, let’s treat your battle wounds.”
Something was wrong with Bear.
We had cut our way through the stalker tunnels. Our trail was littered with corpses, and we had just killed our fifteenth beast. It hadn’t gotten easier, not at all. I was so worn down, I could barely move. My body hurt, the ache spreading through the muscles like a disease, sapping my new strength and making me slow.
Bear stumbled again. I thought it was fatigue at first, but we had rested for a few minutes before this last fight, and it hadn’t helped at all. I had kept her from serious injury. She’d been clawed and bitten once, but the bite had been shallow, so it likely wasn’t the blood loss.
Bear whined and fell.
Oh god.
I dropped to my knees by her. “What is it?”
The shepherd looked up at me, her eyes puzzled but trusting.
I flexed, focusing on her body, concentrating all of my power on her. What was it? Blood loss, infection…
The faint outline of Bear’s body glowed with pale blue-green, but I got nothing more. I had to push deeper. I focused my power into a thin scalpel and used it to slice through the surface glow.
It resisted.
I sliced harder.
Harder!
The glow broke, splintering vertically into multi-colored layers, and before I had a chance to stop, I punched through the top one. It was almost like falling through the floor to a lower level.
On this lower level, Bear’s body lit up with deep blue, the glow tracing her nerves, her blood vessels, and her organs. I had never before been able to do that, but that didn’t matter now.
Toxin. She was filled with it. I saw it, tiny flecks glowing brighter as they coursed through her like some deadly glitter. I had to find the origin of it. Was it from a stalker bite? No, the concentration of poison wasn’t dense there. Then what was it? Where was it the highest?
Her lungs. That fucking glitter saturated her lungs, slipping into her bloodstream with every breath. I had to go deeper. I pushed with my power. Before, it was like trying to slice through glass. Now it felt like punching through solid rock, and I hammered at it.
The top layer of the blue glow cracked, revealing a slightly different shade of blue underneath. I hit it again and again, locked onto the glitter with every drop of willpower I had.
The tiny specks expanded into spheres. What the hell was that?
I pounded on the glow, trying to enlarge it. The spheres came into greater focus. They weren’t uniformly round; they had four lobes clumped together and studded with spikes.
What are you? Where did you come from?
A flash of white cut my vision. It lasted only a moment, but I knew I hit a wall. I wasn’t going any deeper. I would have to work at this level.
I blinked, trying to reacquire my vision.
My thighs were glowing with blue.
I jerked my hands up. Pale glitter swirling through my arms and fingers. This dust, this thing was inside me too, and I couldn’t identify it.
We were both infected, and it was killing us.
Panic drenched me in icy sweat. I wanted to rip a hole in my legs and just force the glitter out.
Bear whined softly like a puppy.
I was losing her. She trusted me, she followed me, and she fought with me, and now she was dying.
“You can’t die, Bear. Hold on. Please hold on for me.”
Bear licked my hand.
The urge to scream my head off gripped me. Wailing wouldn’t help. If only I could identify the poison.