Alyla Franco's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

Alyla left the mare with William at the pen fence. The black-and-white horse still screamed inside the rails. The tabby had run under the porch. She pulled an obsidian arrow from her quiver and set it to the string. The barn doors were tall and red, paint peeling in long strips. Hay lay scattered at the base, wet and dark where it should have been dry. "Stay back," she told William. "If it comes out past me, cut the horse loose and run." "I don't run well anymore," William said. He picked up a pitchfork from the fence post. "I'll manage." She pressed the two stones together at her chest. They warmed against her collarbone. She hooked one hand under the iron latch and pulled the door wide. Fog rolled out. It was thick and yellow-green, heavy as water, and it smelled like a wound left too long. It poured over her boots and climbed her legs. Her throat closed. She coughed once, then could not draw the next breath. The paired stones flared white at her chest and pushed a small clear ring around her head. She got one breath. Then another. The fog hissed where the light touched it and drew back a hand's width. Inside the barn, something shifted. She saw the shape of it through the murk. Long body. Low shoulders. Scales like the ones in her quiver, but whole, catching the stone-light in dull sheets. Orange cracks ran along its ribs like a banked fire. Its eyes found her. They were the same orange. She drew and loosed. The arrow struck its shoulder and stuck. The beast screamed, a sound like wood splitting. It did not fall. It turned and drove itself through the back wall of the barn. Boards went soft where it passed and dropped as black dust. A hole opened in the wall the size of a cart. The beast was through it and gone into the field beyond before she could nock again. The fog thinned as the beast pulled it after itself like a cloak. Alyla stepped inside. The foal lay in the first stall. What was left of it. She looked away. William came to the doorway with the pitchfork lowered. "You hit it." "I hit it. It ran." She counted her arrows without meaning to. Eleven. "The scales work. It bleeds." "Where's it gone?" She walked to the broken wall and looked through. A dark trail cut across the wheat, straight north, the stalks gone gray and bent where the beast had passed. At the far end of the trail, past two fields, she could see the edge of a wood where no light moved. "Its den," she said. "It's hurt. It's going home." She pulled the stones apart and wrapped the pale one. The white glow died. William looked at the trail and then at her. "Then we follow," he said.