Hunter by A.M. Yates

Author:A.M. Yates [Yates, A.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A.M. Yates
Published: 2016-07-13T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

She was stuck.

The openness she’d sensed and had thought was a passage was in fact something else altogether—an inky blackness. It was the same muffling moat that had made the threads linking the box to the mage hard to sense and from the outside had seemed a roadblock. From the other side, the inside, it had felt like an opening. But it wasn’t open at all.

It was another trap.

A mire.

And she was stuck, stuck, stuck.

She’d unraveled the threads of the world easily enough, slipping between the layers. So easily, she’d slipped right into this strange, sticky nothingness.

Closing her eyes, she searched for threads, a passage, a hum, anything. But the mire prevented her.

Bone weary, she finally stopped searching and simply hung there—floating weightless. Only this time, no Weavers, no threads. It seemed as though there really was nothing. But she knew that wasn’t true. And she wasn’t going to be defeated by this world’s moat of nothingness.

“Come on, Dee,” she muttered to herself.

Closing her eyes again to the pitch darkness, she reached out and out and out, searching for a hum. Any hum.

For a long time, nothing.

As seconds passed, desperation and fear sprouted, growing into strangling, poisonous weeds within her. What if she really was stuck in this void? What would happen to her? Would she dehydrate or starve? She wasn’t sure how her physical body even existed in the vacuum of space at all—if this was space. There were never any stars. It wasn’t like being launched in a rocket. Obviously, she was surviving without a spacesuit. Was there even air here? Was she really breathing?

Just thinking about it made her feel like she was suffocating.

She cursed. Now was not the time to panic.

But it was too late. Panic had her. Her pulse raced. She gasped for air she wasn’t sure was there, which only made it worse. All around, blackness. It pressed upon her like she’d been tied in a sack and thrown into a tar pit.

Once again, her inner Unraveler rose up, breaking from her control and clawing at the mire. There didn’t seem to be any threads to unravel.

Panic grew, dizzying, heart-pounding, breath-stealing.

She needed to get out. She needed to go home.

Home.

The word echoed like a scream, resonating through her until it was all she could think, all she could feel. Every thread of her being tuned in to that one word, that one vibration.

Home.

And then out of the darkness, from far, far away, she heard, “Scout?”

Suddenly, she was ripped free. Shifting in a breathless blur.

She crashed out of a portal, landing in a heap.

Footsteps. She looked up.

Hunter frowned down at her.

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