Splinter (Whisper Walker Series) (5 page)

I grimaced. But curiosity got the best of my better judgment. I swallowed and took a deep breath, nodding for him to proceed. He rose out of his crouch enough to move more efficiently, while still keeping a low profile.

I focused on placing my feet quietly. Luckily, being a closet mutant killer, I had learned stealth techniques from watching Drake.

He paused, turning his head back towards me. “Hey, since we’re losing light, let’s go in as far as we think it could be, then work our way back out.”

I nodded, as he kept going. I paused every now and again, checking my bearings and ensuring that there was no one else around. I looked up, the sun was fading quickly. We only had minutes left before we lost the rest of the light. There was no way we could turn on our head-lights while we were on Briln land. It would be like turning on a spotlight and pointing it at each other.

Soon, we got in to where I deduced the hole should be. I started looking around for mounds, piles of rocks, something to indicate an opening. We searched out a ten-meter area, hoping we weren’t off by much. We didn’t find anything.

Now it was getting dark. Drake whispered for me to keep low and move off in a straight line from him. He would then move to me and we would search that area. He waited, keeping an eye and ear out while I picked my way through the thick forest. I got about thirty meters away. I strained my eyes in the ever-growing dusk. I paused, listening. Nothing. Okay.

He stood up slowly, looking in my direction. He cautiously waved one arm, the other hand on his gun.

That was all it took.

I heard the crack of a branch not far to my left. Followed soon by a bird call: a signal. No time to waste now. Drake sprinted towards me, weaving in, over, and around brush and obstacles like it was nothing.

“Come on! We’ve been spotted!” Drake cried in a loud whisper.

I almost gave a smart-ass retort about him stating the obvious, but decided against it since we actually
did
need to get moving.

He grabbed my hand, yanking me up, running left. I guessed he was more worried about getting far away from whoever had seen him than getting back to our side. With any luck, they’d think he was Briln and had just been out after curfew and thus didn’t want to get caught.

Honestly, I doubted they’d think that.

Drake let go of my hand now that we were both moving so we could maneuver around trees and bushes. We ran for a few minutes, getting into some thick foliage. He held up his hand to stop me, but I couldn’t halt in time and ran straight into his back anyway. I knocked him over, causing him to land on his stomach with me on top of him. He let out an “oompf” as the air left his lungs. It was a few seconds after I’d apologized that he finally started sucking air in again in noisy gasps.

“Sorry.”

“Naw, Kelsie. It was my fault,” he said finally.

I rolled off him and sat down. We went still, listening. I heard the distant sounds of crickets behind us, a good sign. He turned to look at me through the gloom from his position still on his stomach.

“I think we might have lost them.”

I’d just nodded when I heard an owl call – answered almost instantly by another, less-natural-sounding owl. The various creatures of the night had also grown silent.

I heard him grumble. He moved his arms to push himself erect, like a pushup. He was just pulling his knees under him when the ground in front of him disappeared and he vanished into blackness.

I FELL HEADFIRST THROUGH the hole, forever, it seemed. Finally, I landed in the dark, smashing into the ground on the back of my left shoulder. I felt a pop at the base of my neck and a flash of burning pain as the rest of my body impacted. The wind was knocked out of me, so I couldn’t make a sound other than a grunt, which probably came out more like a whimper.

My whole shoulder was afire. It went down my spine and up my neck in pulses timed with my heart. I became aware of Kelsie’s frantic whisper from above.

“Drake! Drake! Are you all right?”

I still couldn’t respond, but I was able to manage an audible groan.

“Okay, good. You’re alive. I hate to freak you out, but they’re almost on us. Like right here.” Her whisper was growing panicked.

I coughed, clearing my throat. I finally was able to draw in almost a full breath. “Get down here.” I wheezed. “I think it’s only four or five meters.”

Her whisper became higher pitched. “Are you crazy? I’m not dropping down that far. That’s like three times taller than me!”

I pushed myself up, growing impatient. “Kelsie, if they’re right there, the only thing to do is drop down! Just go feet first and bend your knees. I survived, and I fell head first; you’ll be fine,” I thought about it, “probably.”

She made an exasperated sound.

“Kelsie, you don’t have a choice! Now, get down here. You know what will happen if they catch you.” I heard the restrained urgency in my own voice, glad that it came through, but I hoped it didn’t sound panicky. I wasn’t panicky by any means but I knew that if I sounded panicky she would freak out.

I went through this kind of situation all the time. It was part of my job. It was Kelsie I was worried about. When I went on snatch-and-grabs, I always went alone so I had only me to worry about, though often having another person there would have been far easier. Now I had to think about someone else. Not just anyone, either. Kelsie.

I heard clumps of dirt and debris hit the ground next to me as Kelsie positioned herself to drop in. The small light spot in the dark above me disappeared. I dragged myself out of the way, I didn’t feel like ending up with a foot in my lap, but didn’t feel like standing quite yet, either.

I was dimly aware of a shape dropping through the air and hitting the ground where I’d been seconds before. As Kelsie hit, she must have bent her legs as I suggested because they then unfolded, launching her off-balance backwards into me. More specifically, into my lap.

She landed on me with a squeak that paired up almost harmonically with my third “oompf” in as many minutes.

“See? That wasn’t so bad, was it?” I grunted out through clenched teeth and a grimace.

“I’m so sorry! You’re like a magnet,” she said, sounding apologetic, but making no move to get off me.

“I get that a lot,” I replied, trying to grin through the pain. I wasn’t sure if it did any good since she couldn’t see it in the dark.

I put my hands on her waist and started gently pushing. “You could get off me now, you know.”

“Oh, yeah. I figured your lap was softer than the floor.”

I scowled. “Was that a compliment? I’m so glad to know that my lap is more comfortable than a floor covered in bones.”

“Bones?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that we’re back in the pit. When running, we inadvertently found the opening above it. Which was obviously far off from our predicted course.” I sighed. “We figured out that the opening is on their side. That’s good to know.”

Now she was off my lap, and from the direction of her voice and the faint whiff of her shampoo, I assumed she was kneeling next to me. “So, why haven’t you turned on a light?”

I felt myself flush. “Well, I…uh,” I stuttered. I didn’t know why I’d forgotten about them. It was kinda embarrassing. “I got so sidetracked with you on top of me that I forgot I had them. They’re in the top pocket of my bag. Unzip it and get them out, would you? I don’t feel like unstrapping it.”

“You’re such a dummy,” she said, but with a smile in her voice.

I heard her scoot closer to my back. Then I felt a warm hand down the neck of my shirt. I let her dig around for a second, kind of enjoying it, and wanting to see how long it would take her to figure it out. After a few seconds, I was about to burst into laughter because it tickled like hell. “Umm, Kelsie?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re inside my shirt, not the bag.” I couldn’t repress it any longer and let out an unmanly giggle. I just couldn’t help it. I’m extraordinarily ticklish.

“Oh. Ha, I knew that,” she said. Then she dragged her nails up my back on the way out. Not hard enough to draw blood, but enough to make me stop giggling.

“Hey! That was totally uncalled for,” I snarled, playfully.

All I got was a “yup” while I felt her digging around in the pack. I saw a flicker of light behind me and heard her curse under her breath.

“What’s wrong?”

“One light is a little banged up from you falling on it.”

“That’s not real bad, then.”

She tossed something into my lap. “Yeah, well, it is when the other one is smashed. You need to go on a diet or something.”

I grabbed the object she’d thrown at me and figured out it was the broken light. I shoved it into my pocket to try and repair later, then shuffled around to maneuver my complaining body to a standing position.

Kelsie shined the light around the pit, proving that it was, in fact, the same one we’d been in earlier.

“Shh!” Kelsie whispered, stepping over to me and clamping her hand over my mouth tightly.

I hadn’t intended on saying anything, so it didn’t really go against my plans to start with. I went with it. Then I heard what she was talking about.

Footsteps. Clomping on the earth above the pit. It caused dirt to sprinkle down on us in an alarming way. Dust filled the air. Since I was confined to breathing through my nose with Kelsie’s small hand pressed against my mouth, I kept having mini-sneezes. We heard hushed voices trickling through the hole. They knew we had disappeared around here, but weren’t sure where. That came as a comfort. I’d been afraid that maybe they’d known about the hole. On the other hand, it also meant that the whole Briln Water guard wasn’t in on the invisible skeletons, which only intrigued me more.

The footsteps faded away. Kelsie finally released my face, allowing me to heave in full breaths of air. I’d started to grow fuzzy from the dust and lack of air by the time she let go.

“Why are you panting?” she asked.

“Why do you think? You’ve been blocking my air supply! Duh!”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, snickering. “Guess I was.”

“What was that?” Kelsie asked, sounding alarmed, halting in the middle of a small clearing in the woods. The moonlight filtered down and lightly bathed everything.

I held in a smile. “Nothing. Just a varmint. Nothing to worry about.”

She seemed to relax a little in the moonlight. “Okay. Wait, it’s sniffing at my foot! Get it away!” She nearly screamed.

It took everything in me not to fall to the ground in hysterical laughter. Of course, getting bitten by something like a big rat could be lethal in this setting.

Some animals didn’t show any signs of sickness or mutation, but still carried the infections and toxins in their system that could be released through their saliva in a bite. So even though it was funny to see Kelsie panic over such a small animal, it was a valid concern.

I pulled out a knife and threw it at the large rat-like creature that my father had always referred to as “the rat-rabbit from hell,” whatever that was. The handle of my knife slammed the animal in the head and shocked it. I frowned.

“Nice throw. Didn’t even have to kill it,” Kelsie said.

I tried to look like it had been intentional. In reality, I was irritated with myself. Normally I’d use a straight-style throw for something that was hard to judge the distance of in the low light. But since I was throwing at a downward angle, I’d used a traditional rotational throw because it tended to be more accurate, though I didn’t use it very often. The knife had been intended to hit the varmint with the blade, not the hilt. That meant I’d guessed the rotation wrong. Embarrassing. Even if Kelsie didn’t know that hadn’t been my intent, I still knew. I grumbled quietly to myself. I was going to have to work on that.

“What was that? Couldn’t hear you,” Kelsie said.

I cleared my throat. “Nothing. Let’s go.”

With a backward glance over my shoulder at the still twitching–but otherwise unharmed–animal, I wished Kelsie would learn to take care of herself. How she’d survived the span of woods from the Briln Water Guild to the Sven when she was twelve was beyond me. I wasn’t always going to be around to protect her from curious varmints. Maybe I needed to start teaching her how to defend herself.

We kept walking for a few minutes, me leading the way and having to remember to hold on to branches that I pushed past so they wouldn’t hit Kelsie. It felt so weird not being alone out here.

“Halt!” A baritone voice cut through the dark as we neared the Gate to the Sven Guild.

We pulled up to a stop, and I let out a loud sigh. Every time they got a new guard we went through this. The regular guards knew me by sight and knew that I came and went at all hours of the night for my work as what they called a “Hunter.” The average guildsmen were constrained to a curfew. Most weren’t even let outside the Gates without a guide or having filed the proper paperwork due to the danger.

“Who goes there?” the guard called out, far louder than necessary.

“Acquisitions Specialist Drake Adair and Kelsie,” I responded, fishing in my pockets.

“Put your hands where I can see them. What were you just reaching for?”

I could faintly see Kelsie roll her eyes by the flash of white. I suppressed a grin. “My keycard.”

“Oh, uh…it’s hard to see you out of the light. Please step forward so I can see you better.”

The guard couldn’t be any more inexperienced. Obviously. How they let him have a shift at this Gate alone at night was beyond me. We edged slowly into the light, keeping our hands visible. The guard may be green, but his gun would still shoot very real bullets.

“Jonas! That’s Drake! Everyone knows Drake!” I heard a familiar voice call out from behind the Gate, scolding the young guard.

Okay, so I guess he wasn’t alone.

“Let them through, and stop holding your rifle like that, you look like an idiot.”

The voice drew nearer as a shadow passed in front of the Gate. The Gate was pushed open and held there. Shaking my head, I motioned Kelsie to lead the way. She glared at the new guy as we brushed past him. He looked sheepishly at me before looking down.