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Pathfinder's Way(35)
Author: T.A. White

“And you thought my rope would be useful?”

She shrugged. “Well, it did come in handy.”

“And my knife?”

“You can never have too many knives.”

He threw his saddlebag down and glared at her. She spread her hands. “It was either take the rope and save your life or let you get eaten. Are you really going to tell me that you’d prefer to be beetle food?” She jutted her jaw out stubbornly.

“Enough,” Eamon said, stepping between them. To her, “Where’s your jacket?”

“My what?

“Your jacket. The green one with yellow trim.”

Ah, that. “It’s with the rest of my stuff on top of the cliff.”

Buck swore. “Hell, he was running.”

Shea dropped her arms. Eamon’s sharp eyes caught the movement and his face darkened.

“I wasn’t running,” Shea defended. “I was just moving myself to a better position in case things went bad.”

Buck looked skyward and shook his head. Eamon folded his arms across his chest.

“Do you really think I would have come and saved your asses if I’d planned on running?” She could tell by the shift in Buck’s stance that she had their attention and pressed her advantage. “If I’d wanted to run, I could have just left you to your fate. Nobody would have been the wiser, and I could have made it half way home before anyone noticed. If they noticed at all.”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Eamon said, his voice a deep rumble. “He saved us. End of story. We need to find the others.”

Buck pointed a finger, “We’ll be taking this up later.”

Shea rolled her eyes. Yeah. Only if they were all still alive.

 

 

The canyon walls narrowed to a slim slip of space that made it impossible to walk side by side, and Eamon’s broad shoulders blocked Shea’s view of the path ahead. In several spots, the men had to squeeze to fit through. Shea, being smaller, had an easier time of it, though at certain points she had to contort her body too.

She glanced up at the sky. The gray of the rock nearly blended into that of the thin strip of cloud that was visible, making it difficult to distinguish one from the other.

Shea stepped up onto a half buried boulder, checking the ground on the other side for any potential dangers before stepping down. Buck followed, placing one hand on the wall to steady himself as he looked over their heads.

So far there hadn’t been any sign of a struggle. No blood, no bodies or discarded items.

The three had agreed to maintain silence in case the shadow beetle was attracted to noise.

As they pushed further into the canyon, the path became more and more impassable and they were forced down twisting corridors and had to climb over fallen rocks. They passed several more burrows, which Shea made sure to point out to the other two. After the last one, Eamon’s face had gotten tight and his eyes hard.

Why hadn’t the men turned around the moment it became clear the path would be impossible for the horses to travel?

Shea looked above them again, running her hands slowly down the ravine’s mottled gray walls. So far, no sign of movement.

Buck stopped when she did, his hand going to the pommel of his sword. It wasn’t the first time she’d gone still, thinking she had seen something, but no matter how many times she stopped to take a closer look at her surroundings, they didn’t complain.

Eamon held up a closed fist signaling a stop. Buck stepped back and to the side while Shea froze where she was.

Eamon crouched and pointed at a shred of cloth snagged on a rock about ten feet above the ravine’s floor. Movement on the opposite side caught Shea’s eye. There one moment and gone the next as if something had just slid out of sight.

She tapped Eamon on the shoulder and then pointed to where she thought she saw movement. Together, they backed out of sight very slowly until a boulder shielded them.

“Fuck.” Buck’s voice was low and strained.

Eamon pressed his back against the wall and peeked around it, trying to spot the shadow beetle.

“I can’t see it.” The skin around his eyes was tight, and the knuckles of the hand clenched around his sword were bleached white. “That means it hasn’t fed, right?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Buck hissed. “You said if it wasn’t black it hadn’t fed.”

“You’re acting like I’ve spent my life studying these things,” Shea snapped. “The closest I’ve ever been to one was the one I just killed. Usually when I come across beast sign, I know enough to avoid the damn things. Not stroll into its den and poke it with a stick. I’ve only seen this thing twice. Once when it was feeding and had turned black. Judging by the fact these suckers are usually the color of a rock, I figured eating turns them black. But that’s still just a guess.”

She made sure to keep her voice to a low murmur. If you knew one thing about a beast, people always expected you to know everything.

Granted, she usually did know more than she knew about the shadow beetles.

Eamon grabbed Shea by the shoulders, his larger frame dwarfing hers. “You know more about these things than either of us. That means we’re going to be looking to you for answers. It’s not fair, but that’s just the way it is. Now, you know more than you think.”

Seeing the rebuttal on her face, he shook her once.

“Neither of us would have known it had a soft spot on the back of its neck just from seeing an eagle attack it once. We would have simply assumed the eagle’s claws were sharper than our weapons. We’re not expecting miracles from you. Just give us what you know. Every piece of information is more than we had before and could give us an advantage.”

Shea held his eyes, not sure if that had been a motivational speech or just the truth.

People always expected miracles. They might say they didn’t, but when the dead were lying on the ground, the finger pointing began.

Always.

“We could leave them behind,” she suggested watching him carefully, painfully aware of the large paws still on her shoulders.

His chest expanded as he inhaled sharply, and his hands clenched momentarily, before loosening to fall to his sides.

Buck’s lip curled in derision as he looked her over, but Eamon watched her as carefully as she did him. “I can’t do that, and unless I miss my guess, neither can you.”

Shea stayed leaning against the cool rock at her back even when he released her. She bent her head and gripped her forearms.

Might as well tell them her theories and observations. It was a little late to pretend ignorance.

He was right in that she didn’t really have it in her to turn her back and leave them to their fate. She didn’t have it in Edgecomb or outside of Goodwin of Ria, and she didn’t have it now.

“I don’t know how long they stay flushed with blood,” she told them. Before Eamon could get all disappointed, she said, “Tell me everything you remember from when you encountered the last shadow beetle.”

They took turns telling her about the attack. Buck held himself stiffly as he recounted his friend being torn in two. The man had been laughing at a joke and then suddenly he wasn’t. Instead, he was in pieces on the ground, never to laugh again.

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