Page 21 of A Hunt Bound in Blood

My face flushed. “No. I was making a point.”

“What can I expect, then? To have my hair set on fire? To be drowned in a half-inch puddle?”

I raised my chin. “I suppose you’ll have to hope you’re not lucky enough to find out.”

He held my gaze for another second, but once he accepted I wasn’t going to answer him, he returned his attention to the road. I breathed out a sigh of relief. It seemed he’d finished with his experiment in conversing with me.

The sun passed its zenith and began its slide into late afternoon as we reached the glade. As soon as we rounded the bend and came upon the sight of lush grass smeared in dappled light, I knew our odds of having chosen the right spot were high. It was exactly the sort of space Mage Tersey would have loved based on the number of pages he’d filled expounding upon the beauties of the woods and the secrets they shared with him. Something, I had to admit, I hadn’t given much thought to before. My experience with nature was limited to the manicured gardens around the palace and the glimpse of wilderness beyond the city limits. So far on this journey, I hadn’t taken much time to appreciate the more aesthetic benefits of being far from home, but standing here, with all this open nature spread out before me, I couldn’t ignore it.

The forest lay behind us, the towering birch trees reaching towards the sky and bathing the edges of the glade in shadows. Ahead of us, the trees had thinned, the forest older, less touched by any human presence. This glade, I deduced, marked the boundary of Golthwaine’s capital region.

I fought a sense of how small I was in the scheme of the world. I felt like I’d wandered so far already, but I’d only reached the edges of civilization. From here on out, we were officially entering the wild.

I exhaled slowly and wiped my palms on my skirt. It was fine. I could handle this.

“You good, Buttons?”

I tensed and narrowed my eyes at Cammon. “Fine.”

The skepticism in his expression was enough to push me past my moment of trepidation, and I strode across the glade, out of the comfortable shade of the trees and into the centre of the empty stretch of grass. There were no bushes, no stones, no hundred-year-old sign pointing us in the right direction, yet somewhere here might hide the third clue. The hints left in the last signpost hadn’t revealed much more than the general location of where I should look, and I suspected we were about to get our first exposure to the more unusual of Tersey’s puzzles.

Like last time, Cammon kept his distance. More specifically, he stayed in the shade, leaning against a tree with one foot crossed over the other and his arms folded. I rolled my eyes at his willingness to let me do the work, reminded myself I preferred it that way, and focused on my task. The glade spanned at least twenty metres, with no breaks in the field of flawless green other than the single dirt road that cut along its southern edge.

“Well, this looks…”

“Odd,” Cammon agreed. “Like it’s been maintained by someone who hates having anything out of place.” He quirked an eyebrow. “You sure you haven’t been here before?”

I ignored the comment. “What do you think this glade is used for? Grazing?”

He shook his head. “No farms anywhere near here. Wild animals might use it, but they wouldn’t keep it this neat.”

Some form of magic, perhaps. Or something else I wasn’t seeing.

Not knowing where best to start, I chose a spot at random and walked full east until I reached the treeline, then cut back, tracking the glade in a grid pattern to ensure I didn’t miss anything.

The sun shifted, the shade with it, and Cammon gave up chasing it. He chose instead to lie across a patch of neatly trimmed grass, tucked his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes. Despite my efforts to keep my attention off him, I couldn’t help but take in the sleek lines of his outstretched body, from his muscular thighs to his flat stomach to the hard ridges of his chest. The demon was everything Ashara had warned me about.

Fortunately for my libido, he was also in my way.

I scowled when I was forced to break my stride to veer around him, and although his eyes weren’t open to see it, the corner of his mouth hitched upwards. Damn him and his emotional feeding.

I refrained from kicking him as I passed and reached the edge of the glade. Frustration bore down on me, nipping at my heels along with a healthy dose of discouragement. Once again, I tried to slip into Mage Tersey’s mind. In a big, open field where there was no place to hide anything, where would I leave a message for my future self?

I stopped my pacing, turned, and stared out at the glade. He might have buried it, but he still would have needed to leave himself some kind of marker to indicate where to dig. He might have tucked it into another tree, but how would he have remembered which one? I pulled the last clue out of my pocket and read it again.

In the glade you’ll find where the road next winds, but choose with care or the caves will devour their unexpected fare.

Which was all well and good except there were no caves and the road didn’t wind. It cut straight across.

I raised the loose tendrils of hair off the back of my neck to let the cool breeze whisk away my rising anxiety, wishing I had enough air magic to make my own breeze when it was slow in coming. I’d trusted Cammon’s guess, having none of my own, but if we’d come all this way for nothing, it would take us a day to backtrack and start again. That would mean two days we didn’t have to spare. I should have checked the map myself. Why had I been so quick to believe his assessment was correct? I’d allowed him to take over, and now I had no idea how far off route we might be. We—

“I can hear you overthinking from here, mage.”

His rumbling voice broke me out of my thoughts, and I curled my lengthening nails into my palms. What did he know about it? He was used to this life of exploration. Venturing into the wild and learning things on the go. Everything I’d ever needed to know had always been within easy reach of my carefully curated books. Now I was being forced to step into unknown after unknown, and the consequences if I failed were terrifyingly high.

I sucked in a few more breaths, striving to find my equilibrium, and as I readied myself to point out Cammon’s failings, my eye fell on a dip in the grass. It was a section I hadn’t inspected yet—maybe two or three passes away from where I’d left off. I might have overlooked it as a natural groove in the earth if it weren’t for the bizarre uniformity of the rest of the glade.

Hope interrupted my wild flurry of emotions, and although I kept it at a distance, not wanting to be crushed by disappointment if this anomaly proved to be nothing, I crossed towards it.