I turned to find him scowling at me.
“Onion already saw her and now she’s like this.” He waved his hand at my familiar, his movement sharp and jerky.
“Well, what the phaan would you have me do? I can’t just sit here and watch her get worse.”
Ace glowered, his dark gaze flashing and his body tensing as if he physically prepared for a fight. “I know someone.”
I rocked back on my heels. “What?”
“I know someone.”
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
He shook his head. “I know someone, and they’ll ask for payment.”
“Payment?”
“It will be more than a pretty smile and fluttering those long lashes.”
I scowled at him and ignored the little flip in my stomach. I refused to react to him saying my smile was pretty. I was better than that. Stronger. “You expect me to take my familiar to an unknown location to see an unknown person and pay an unknown fee because you know them?”
He shrugged. “I guess it will have to be a trust exercise.”
“It’s a stupid exercise. Give me something. I need to at least know where I’m going or who I’m seeing.”
He shook his head again. “I can’t betray their trust. I can tell you more when we’re there.”
“You can’t betray their trust, but you can test mine?” I squeezed my eyes shut while my mind scrambled. I didn’t know Ace anymore. He wasn’t the boy I grew up with, that much was clear. Why should I trust him and doubt everything I knew about Orion?
“Nala, let’s go.” I bent and plucked my bow and two of the three rabbits from the floor.
“What are you doing?” Ace asked. “You need to trust me if we’re going to work together.”
“Trust goes both ways.” I flung open the door. Nala brushed past me and walked outside. “And I never wanted to work with you in the first place, remember? My life turned to shit the moment you walked into it, and I’m not dumb enough to ignore coincidences like that. You ask me to trust you, but you’ve done the bare minimum to be worthy of that trust.”
“So you’re just going to leave and drag your sick familiar with you?”
Moving her could do more harm, true, but so could going to see some random mystery acquaintance of Ace’s or staying here and watching her deteriorate. Maybe this was a mistake, but only time would tell.
“We always worked better alone.” I stomped out of the cabin and slammed the door.
5
The rain held off for a grand total of ten minutes—long enough to give me false hope—before it broke loose from the clouds in a furious downpour. The sky itself had chosen violence. Sheets of cold water lashed down on me and Nala, soaking through my clothes in seconds and turning the forest floor into a swamp of mud and tangled roots.
With Nala padding grimly at my side, her normally sleek coat already slick and matted with rain, I trudged forward, each step a fight against the weight of waterlogged boots and freezing limbs. The cold bit through my skin, numbing my fingers and seeping into my bones.
I should’ve thought about the weather before storming out of the cabin like some tragic heroine in a story I didn’t want to be in.
I should’ve thought. Period.
Even if Orion could help, he was back in town, possibly surrounded by the very hunters who’d attacked us. Stomping back to Perga wasn’t one of my best ideas, but at least I was doing something, right?
Right?
The forest didn’t provide any answers. Only the rain, relentless and unforgiving, pounding against the leaves like war drums.
That was an answer all on its own.
