Sam gags at the foul smell emanating from the twitching corpse. This time, I throw every ounce of energy I possess into yanking the whip to drag the wolf toward me and bring down my sword on its neck. By the time I’m done beheading another, I’m panting as if I fought a horde of demons on my own. A bead of sweat gets stuck in my eyelashes. I blink to jostle it free as I takein our campsite. Headless corpses are scattered all over, while two of the tents are destroyed.
“Good idea for everyone to have weapons,” I say to Rhett, who’s breathing as hard as I am. I spin to look at Sam. “You all right?”
She nods, but she’s getting greener by the second until she jerks forward, bends at the waist, and starts projectile vomiting. I don’t blame her because the odor is downright fetid, though not much different from that of demons. It just lacks the strong sulfur.
The need to make sure Kaiden’s not injured is all-consuming. However, I’m not prepared for my eyes to slam into the wall of glistening, rock-hard muscles on his chiseled chest and abs as he lifts his tee to wipe the top of his eyebrows. Dammit. He winks, and I damn nearly combust.
“We should do something about your cuts before we go. Otherwise, these wolves won’t be our only problem,” Rhett says, snapping me out of it.
“Do you still have the salve I gave you on the plane?” Sam chimes in, her eyebrow raised in a manner that tells me she caught the way I was ogling Kaiden.
“Oh yeah, I completely forgot about it.”
She pushes past me as if her ass is on fire to rummage through my backpack in our tent, which has been spared. I join her while Malik, Kaiden, and Rhett gather what’s left of their stuff.
Her eyes widen as she inspects the wound on my cheek. “You got this by smacking into a branch?”
“To be honest, it felt more like the tree whacked me.”
“This place is really trying its hardest to kill us,” she mutters as she pours water from a bottle into my awaiting palms. She uses the rest to rinse her mouth while I wash my face. I hiss when she applies a thick layer of the minty salve to the throbbing gash on my cheek.
Kaiden strides toward us. He showed me how to put up and break down a tent, but he’s still taken it upon himself to do it for us every day, so I guess he’s here to help.
“I wasn’t expecting you to be so good at wielding a sword,” I say as I roll up our sleeping bags.
He drops to his haunches next to me. A small smile tugs at his lips. “I had an excellent teacher, who, even though I was a little shit and complained endlessly, instilled in me the fact that my power might fail me one day and I would be defenseless. It is one of the best pieces of advice I ever received. To this day, I train with it in mind.”
“And Malik? Where did he learn?”
“Well, I needed a partner, so I made him train with me. He usually asks for crazy shit in return, just to grate on my nerves, but I know he secretly loves it.”
We each taketurns bathing in the stream’s icy water while vermillion and pink streaks clash in the sky with the approaching dawn. Though, by the time we finish, a thick fog envelops the forest in a misty blanket that even the sun can’t penetrate.
The silence is oppressive—the type that belongs in a cemetery. Spiny bushes scratch at our legs while spindly boughs resembling claws seem to reach for us as we trek through the thicket of rotten trees. Scavengers have long since picked apart the animal carcasses scattered across the cracked ground.
Everything here screamsdeath.
“Holy Hecate! That’s big,” Sam says in a low voice as she stares at the skull the size of a truck peeking out the top of the steep canyon on our right. The haze covers the rest of the skeleton.
“That’s what she said,” Malik shoots back.
Kaiden shakes his head while Sam’s lips twitch slightly before she schools her expression into a scowl.
“Is that what I think it is?” I ask in awe. We’re all whispering as a precaution.
“Yeah. That was once a dragon,” Rhett replies.
I have the sudden urge to pinch myself. Never in my life had I imagined seeing a dragon’s skeleton. “If the head is this big, its body must have been over two hundred feet.”
“Well, that canyon probably formed when it fell, so that sounds about right.” He fishes the intricate compass from his pocket. “By my calculations, we should reach the oracle soon.”
“How does the compass work, exactly?” Kaiden inquires.
“By magic. It was created to find portals but can also point you to the thing you want to reach even if you don’t know its exact location. However, it doesn’t work that well for locating people—that’s why I couldn’t find the oracle sooner. But once I heard the rumor about the Wasting Woods, I could give the compass something to work with.” He pauses. “My mother received it as payment from a mage for some of the rarest books she had. We were all supposed to use it to escape to the human world, but our city got attacked the night before. Only I made it out.”
Kaiden sounds genuinely sympathetic as he says, “I’m sorry.”
We continue our journey in silence for the next few hours. When my muscles scream in protest because we haven’t stopped even for one second, a tiny wooden cottage squatting in a clearing takes shape through the dense murk.
