Firewalker (Worldwalker 2)

“No. Hold her down,” Lily countermanded as she strode through the brush.

She got close enough to clearly see the massive, leathery body of the mountain lion Woven. She was twice the size of a regular lion and she had the rounded shoulders and sloped back of a saber-toothed tiger, but her hide was not covered in pretty striped or golden fur. It was bare, thick, and nearly armored, like a rhino. Her eyes were different, too—rounded instead of almond-shaped. Lily leaned in, looking the Woven in her all-too-human eyes.

“Don’t get that close!” Caleb chided, pulling her back. “Tristan, kill that thing.”

“No,” Lily insisted. “Hold it steady.”

The Woven struggled under Tristan’s and Una’s hands, but it couldn’t move. Her back was broken and she could barely raise her head. Lily grabbed her neck and felt the skin along her throat. She could hear Dana and Caleb protesting, but tuned them out. Her fingers found a lump at the notch in the Woven’s collarbone. She pinched the lump through the skin with the tips of her fingers and looked the Woven in the eye.

Lily felt a mind there, shying away from hers. She delved deeper and reached through the Woven until she found the suggestion of other minds attached to this one, the way a shadow is attached to a body. Those minds weren’t there anymore, but the shape of them was. Lily realized the shadow minds were the dead of her Pride.

As the Woven heaved her last breath, Lily felt a surge of emotion directed at her, coming from the Woven. It wasn’t anger or animal terror. It was a complicated emotion she could only describe as defiance.

“Give me your knife,” Lily said, holding her hand out to Una. Una gave her knife over, and she cut around the lump.

“Your hands!” Dana warned as stinging fluid landed on Lily’s fingers. “Woven turn acidic after death,” she added needlessly.

Lily ignored the sting that quickly turned to an itch and then a burn, and dug around inside the pocket she had cut until she extracted the root of the lump.

“Water, quick!” Caleb said, and started rinsing the acid off Lily’s hands.

When all the acid was gone, Lily rushed to the campfire to see what she had extracted. It was a crystal, only slightly corroded around the edges. Everyone gasped.

“I got it out in time,” Lily said. “The acid their organs release when they die didn’t have a chance to destroy it.”

“That’s a willstone,” her Tristan said. A long silence followed his statement.

“What does this mean?” Breakfast asked quietly.

“I have no idea,” Lily replied.

* * *

After another week, they made it to the foothills on the other side of the Appalachians. The Woven had kept their distance after the incident with the lions, and with no attacks to fight, Lily’s tribe traveled swiftly.

Although the respite was welcomed by most, it frustrated Lily. She desperately wanted to study the Woven and get some answers to her questions. Debate over the Woven raged among the braves. They could accept that the pack hunters—especially the wolf Woven out west—used willstones to communicate in some basic way, but they all swore up and down that no one had ever seen a Woven do any kind of magic.

“They’re not that intelligent,” Dana argued. “And they’re scared of fire. If they had crucibles and witches among them, wouldn’t they be attracted to it?”

Lily couldn’t argue with that, but still, the notion that the Woven had willstones inside their bodies disturbed her. It seemed as if the willstone had grown inside the lion Woven as if it were a part of her, like another organ. Not even humans were that bonded to their willstones. Lily needed to know what the Woven used their willstones for, if they used them at all.

Lily spent more time on guard duty desperate for a glimpse of them. Occasionally, she would catch a flash of pale fur in the distance and she would be tempted to rush out and chase it, but something always held her back. Lily had a sense that the apparent cease-fire between their two species was more than just coincidence, and she didn’t want to make the mistake of thinking these creatures were her friends. Just because the pale Woven hadn’t attacked the main group didn’t rule out the possibility that she would pick off strays that wandered too far from the campfire.

They followed a cold, fast-flowing stream of melt water out of the mountains for another week. The small streams fed larger and larger tributaries until they reached what Lily knew of as the Ohio River.

“I’ve never been to Ohio,” Breakfast said, staring out at the sunset gracing the vast tracks of open land that lay before them.

“I don’t think it looks like this in our world,” Una said, smiling.

“Yeah, pretty sure it doesn’t,” Breakfast agreed. “Probably a freeway right here. Or a mall.”

“Right? And it’d be one of those nonsensical malls that had a tire shop right next to a nail salon.” Una’s face fell. “I’d kill for a mani-pedi,” she said mournfully.

Lily and her Tristan shared a smile. He threw an arm over her shoulder. “This is the weirdest road trip ever,” he said. “Not what I imagined I’d be doing this spring.”

“We’d be graduating right about now,” Lily said, struck by the idea.

“Yeah,” he said, his eyes drifting across the view. “The whole senior class would be signing yearbooks and saying good-bye. Well, most of us would be, that is.”