Page 91 of Huntress

“Rat demons are fine, but bugs are too much?” Saint teased, pulling a fox burr out of her hair.

“Leave me alone,” she muttered, swiping at her sleeves again, just in case. She glanced over the edge to the rushing water below. “Even someone with water magic wouldn’t try walking through that, but he didn’t come up the same way we did.”

She scanned the opposite side, leaning over the ledge to check out the lazily inclining bluff that looked like an easier climb than the sheer cliff they’d scaled. About halfway up was the front half of a boot print on open rock, left behind with mud he’d gathered from the bottom.

A grin spread across her face. It came from a hunter clan-issued boot. She pointed out what she’d spotted to Albright, though he couldn’t see it. “He was here!”

“Good eye. You’ve been lucky this far.”

“Lucky?” she snorted. “You’re witnessing the results of my brilliant powers of deduction.”

“You’ve stayed on the same side of the river for the past four hours, relying on your gut instead of actual evidence. Levi could have veered off at any point, and you’d have no idea you lost him,” Albright said. “So yes. You got lucky.”

Elsie ducked her head with embarrassment, forced to admit to herself that he’d hit her with an accurate assessment.

“I’ll do better.”

He gave her a sharp nod. “Now that you’ve confirmed what side of the river he’s on, how are you planning to get over there?”

Elsie frowned. She wasn’t going back down the damned cliff. They’d have to backtrack nearly a mile to find a place the water was safe enough to cross. She scanned the map, noting their location and how much further they had to go until they reached the waterfall she was so confident about.

“We keep pressing forward,” she decided, pointing at a place about an hour ahead. “The river keeps a steady incline, and almost breaks even with its surroundings here. If he’s still heading in the same direction, that’s where he’d get back in the water.”

“Will you teach me how to read those maps?” Saint asked after a few minutes of trekking along the rock face.

“Why do you need maps with a nose like yours?” she asked. “I thought demons had some kind of internal compass?”

“Is that what they teach you?

“Not in those exact words, but basically. Apparently demons never get lost, they make it sound like an instinct you guys have, like migratory animals that manage to get back to where they were born a thousand miles away.”

Saint chuckled. “I can’t speak for everyone, but I was taught how to navigate practically from birth, using the stars, the sun, the earth itself. Maybe it does become instinct at some point, but we’re not born that way. Besides, it never hurts to learn something new.”

“Okay,” she agreed easily. “Maybe we should have demons teaching the classes. We’d learn a whole lot more.”

Saint clammed up after that, his habitual frown tugging at his lips.

The water was still moving fast when they reached the place Elsie had spotted on the map, but it was only as deep as their knees. It was so clear that she could see the details of each stone and plant beneath the ripples. She even spotted a crayfish scuttling by as they crossed.

They followed the shoreline for a couple of minutes before she crouched at the water’s edge. “He went in right here.”

Levi had slipped slightly in the soft clay built up around the bend, leaving proof behind for Elsie to find. Evidence that his stamina was flagging when he’d come through this stretch.

Elsie had them stop for dinner again when the sun went down, but this time she set out her sleeping bag.

“We’ll be there tonight. Might as well rest up now. We don’t want to be exhausted when we arrive,” she explained.

She settled into her bag and glanced over at Saint. He’d positioned himself exactly as he had the night before, but he’d turned away from her, looking out toward the woods. Elsie turned her back on him and slept soundly for three hours.

Twenty minutes after waking, they were off and running again.

The light moon crested high in the sky when they stopped at the base of the waterfall. The roar of water was too loud to bother trying to speak with the men. Rock jutted out at the top, moss dripping down to split the falls. The pool at the bottom was deep, and large silvery fish darted through the current.

Elsie gave its beauty a long, proper look, then turned her attention to the cliffs on both sides. They were too wet and slick with algae for climbing. She guessed it had to be nearly seventy feet high, and wouldn’t risk anyone falling.

They also ran the risk of being seen if Levi had found somewhere with a decent view to watch out for them. She had to be smarter than that.

She followed the stone wall away from the waterfall, spotting magic trails everywhere. Most of them converged on a worn patch of stone and eventually began the climb up a narrow footpath along the rock face.