Instead of grabbing her, he brushed rudely past her with a sneer on his face. Following him with her gaze, she saw that he was glaring at a group behind her.
Oh, thank the gods.
She let out a relieved breath as he began yelling at them for reasons she didn’t understand. Using that distraction, she quickly swept into town before someone else stopped her for real.
That was the easy part.
The hard? She had no idea where to go. There were people everywhere.
Literally everywhere.
They swarmed through the streets like a colony of ants, heading in all directions with no rhyme or reason. There were buildings all around, but she didn’t know what they were. Some had signs, but the pictures on them made no sense to her.
Where in the world had Halla and Dash gone? The stables? A barn?
Why hadn’t she asked them where they’d be?
Because I’m an idiot.
No, she’d been panicking and not thinking clearly.
“Move, girl!”
A man brushed past her, with his arms full of bloody hides.
Bile rose in her throat. She felt terrible for those poor, butchered animals. Humans were monsters! Did they respect nothing? Why kill so indiscriminately and so many? Had there been a purpose for it?
Were the animals rabid?
Suddenly, she wished she’d stayed in her dragon body and had just torched this entire place. It would have been a courtesy to the world to rid it of the vermin rustling around her.
Horrible memories flooded her of her days in captivity, and she didn’t want to be here, especially not alone.
Worse, she felt as if she were being watched. But she didn’t see anyone in the crowd that was paying her any heed. Still, that feeling persisted. It made her skin crawl...
“Where are you, Dash?” she breathed.
She silently kicked herself for letting them go on ahead. As bad as the panic attack had been, she should have forced herself to stay with them.
The one she had now was making the old one look like a hiccup.
“Are you a huntress?”
She turned around with a frown, expecting to see one of the nasty men.
Instead, it was a young boy who barely reached her hip. The sight of him there, with a bruise on his cheek and tears in his pale eyes caught her off guard. “Pardon?”
He gestured at her sword and bag that she wore across her back. “Are you a huntress, my lady?”
“Uh...” Tanis wanted to say no, but technically, that was what she was and how Dash had dressed her. The only question was why this boy asked her that. “Yes?”
The boy hesitated, then swallowed audibly. “Have you any meat I can buy?”
She scowled at his odd question. “What?”
He held his grimy hand out to her to show her a small silver coin there. “Me pa’s passed out again from his drink, but he said for me to fetch some meat. He said that huntresses usually give more meat for the coin, and if I don’t have meat when he comes to, he’ll beat me. Do you have any meat I can buy from you?”
Those words infuriated her. Even if the child was human, he didn’t deserve to be hit.
