Erza styles's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Erza got James inside and laid him on the floor by the stove. Blood soaked the gray shirt through. James's eyes drifted, then fixed on the ceiling. Erza pressed a folded towel to the belly wound and put James's own hand on top of it. "Hold this. Hard." "Where you going." James's voice came thin, but it was still his voice, the same flat drag Erza had known since they were kids. "It's bleeding out there. I can track it. If I don't find where it sleeps, it comes back tonight and finishes us both." James's fingers tightened on the towel. "Take the axe." Erza grabbed the axe and the flashlight and stepped out. The sun was a red line above the trees. He had minutes, not hours. The blood started at the edge of the clearing. Thick black drops on the moss, then a smear across a fallen log. Erza followed at a jog. Three-toed prints pressed the mud between the drops. The trail cut north through the pines. The drops shrank. Twenty yards in, they were pinpricks. Forty yards, the moss showed nothing. He crouched and swept the flashlight low. Nothing on the needles. Nothing on the bark. The creature had slowed its own bleeding, or the ground had drunk the last of it. He cast a wide circle. He checked the base of every trunk for a smear, a hair, a print. The light failed while he worked. The forest went from rust to gray to black. His flashlight beam turned the trees into flat white cutouts and hid everything between them. He stood in the dark with the axe across his chest and understood he had lost it. Something moved behind him. Not close. A branch cracked, then another, farther off, then nothing. It was circling. It knew he was out here alone, and it knew the cabin was behind him with the door open and James on the floor. Erza ran. He crashed back through the pines with the flashlight jerking across trunks. He saw the cabin light through the branches and made for it. The door stood open the way he'd left it. James lay where he'd left him, the towel dark under his hand, his chest still rising. Erza shut the door and dropped the bolt and shoved the table back against it. "Well?" James said. "I lost it." James closed his eyes. "Then it's coming." Erza knelt by his brother and put a fresh towel over the first. The wound was deeper than he'd let himself see in the clearing. James needed a hospital an hour ago. The truck sat twenty feet from the step. Between the step and the truck was a wounded thing that now had all night and knew exactly where they were. Erza picked up the axe and sat with his back to the door.