Page 61 of Primal Hunger
Chapter
Twenty-Two
Syros
For a moment, I hardly dare to move.
Erin lowers her arms to her side and loses her grip on the item in her hands. It tumbles to the ground, and she crumbles to the forest floor right after it. This time, I’m not fast enough to catch her before she drops.
She lands hard on her rear as I scramble to get to her.
“Erin.” My throat burns, and her name comes out low and gravelly. “Are you okay?”
She came for me.
Shock tightens my chest.
She could have left me to die, but she saved me when she had the opportunity to run.
There is hardly any time to give into the temptation to draw her to my chest, to clutch her tightly and assure myself of her safety. Not when I’m losing blood and my head is spinning toward the sky.
“I couldn’t let that creature hurt you,” she says breathlessly, her eyes tracking to the unconscious creature a few feet away. A wrinkle forms in her forehead as she stares at it. “That’s one ugly fucker.”
My stomach drops when I recall her warning from earlier. She called out to tell me the creature was behind me when I lost track of it.
“Erin…” I hesitate, my gaze shifting between her and the invisible form lying on the ground. “Can you see the Ech?”
“Ech?” She makes a disgusted face, like the creature’s name tastes terrible when she says it. “Yeah, I can. And I take it you can’t?”
“No. No one can see them,” I assure her, still in disbelief. How is it that this little human—weak and useless when it comes to combat—is able to see the invisible beasts that have plagued our world for so long?
Maybe it was more than my selfishness that kept me from killing her.
Maybe… maybe she holds the key to defeating them once and for all.
If she can see these invisible beasts, I can’t help but wonder what other magic skills she might possess.
“What did you use to knock it out?” I ask, looking at the large box she’d held moments ago.
“This old thing?” She huffs out an incredulous laugh. “You just happened to have a portable generator. Battery operated, so I doubt the campers you stole it from would have gotten more than an hour or two of power, but it’s hefty enough to make a good weapon,” she explains. “It was a lucky find.”
Her giggling takes me by surprise. Rather, the slight hysterical tone and the way she stares at thegeneratoras though she can’t believe her own strength.
“I don’t know if I killed it, but it’s definitely not moving anytime soon,” she says, leaning closer to the Ech to inspect the damage. “Definitely cracked its skull.”
I should yell at her for putting herself in the middle of danger, but the truth of the matter is, I needed her intervention. Otherwise, I’d be dead.
I shudder to think what might have happened if she hadn’t chosen to come to my aid when she did.
“A generator,” I repeat. I swipe a claw across one of the wounds in my chest and it comes away smeared with blood. “What does it do?”
“It gives you energy, sort of like those batteries did for the radio. Human machinery needs power to operate. Our world doesn’t have any magic in it.”
We stare at each other across a chasm of no more than a few feet.
A hum of gratitude sounds from deep in my chest. “It is also an acceptable weapon.” I fall silent. “I thought you would try to get away from me.”
I would not have blamed her for it.
