Jade Bones's Arc

Chapter 6 of 6

The scaled cat stepped off the moss and onto the lantern path. Its horn caught the light. Jade backed toward the tree line, one hand on her knife, the other tugging her cloak shut over her arms. The gold light leaked through anyway. Every vine on her body was a lit fuse pointing at her chest. The red-haired woman took the child by the shoulders and walked her back toward the mansion steps, quick now, not looking back. The mansion door stayed open. Jade saw movement inside it. A candle stood on a table just past the threshold, thick as her wrist, wrapped in vines that glowed the same color as her own skin. It was burning. It had been burning the whole time. She understood then. He was not tracking her from a window. He was tracking her from the flame. Wherever she moved, the candle told him. Advancing meant walking straight down a path he had already drawn. Jade turned and ran into the trees. The scaled creature came after her, wings half open, faster over the moss than she was. She cut left off the game trail and immediately caught her shin on a wire. Dried leaves puffed up. Somewhere behind her a bell clanged twice against wood. She rolled through the fall and kept moving. Ten paces on, another wire brushed her knee. She stopped. She crouched. The wires were everywhere, strung ankle high, smeared with sap and hidden under leaf litter. They did not form a wall. They formed a funnel. Every wire she could see pushed her toward one clearing on her right, where a low wooden stage sat rotting between two pines, red curtains still hanging in strips. A net was rigged above the stage. She could see the dirt-caked mesh sagging in the branches, waiting for a body to land on the boards. The lizard-horned creature paced the tree line behind her, herding, not charging. It knew the funnel. It had walked her toward the stage a dozen times in its head already. Jade backed away from the stage on her hands and knees, under the wires, not through them. She crawled until she found the game trail again and lay flat. Her plan was simple and it was not the plan she came with. She was not going to reach the mansion tonight. She was not going to reach him at all while that candle burned and her skin answered it. She had to put the flame out first, or cut the link, and she could not do either from out here. She pulled her cloak tight and pressed her glowing arms into the dirt to smother them. The scaled creature stopped pacing. It sat on its haunches at the edge of the trees and watched the place she had been. Jade lay in the dark and listened to the bell rope creak. She had learned the shape of the trap. She had not sprung it. That was the night's only win, and she took it.