There's a voice distantly breaking through the cloud of unconsciousness. My arms and legs are heavy. Is my face cold? Yeah, it's definitely cold.

"Orion, bro, you awake?" Khalil's voice comes into clarity out of the fog.

I groan in response, a long, disgruntled half-growl and half-rocks-in-the-mouth waking noise. My eyes slowly crack open, and I see that I'm lying on the traveler's path with my face against its hard-packed earth. I slowly put out my hands to push myself off the ground to a sitting position.

"Hey, there he is. Hey dude. So, uh, I got news."

"Tea first."

"Oh, uh, yeah, so about that…"

"Right, no supplies." My grumbling voice sounds irritated even to myself.

"Yeah, sorry."

I slowly look around, my pale eyes groggily taking in my surroundings. The first thing I noticed was that there were no wiretails, and the second was that it was just Khalil and me.

"Fuck."

"Well, hold up, it's only half bad news."

"Ugh, alright. Let me go out to some bushes first, then you can tell me what you know."

I push myself off of the ground and up to my feet. I don't bother to brush the dirt off my clothing and leather protection; after last night's rolling around in the marsh muck, there isn't even a point until I find myself in a bath. I stagger a few steps before I catch myself and walk normally down the traveler's path a little further out. I step off of the path and handle my morning business. Once done, I shuffle back onto the path to where I left Khalil. I pour water over my hands from my side flask, cleaning them off just a little from the accumulated dirt and grime. Khalil is standing in the same spot I left him in, so I continue walking until I stand beside him.

"Alright. So all we have is whatever's in my pack, the campfire cooking stuff, and what we have on us."

"That's the short and long of it."

"It's fine. I'll hunt us some food on the way back."

"Hold on, don't you want to hear what I was gonna say?"

I stretched my arms back behind me and then up over my head, using my hands to press on the opposite elbows to get a good and thorough stretch into my limbs. Instead of responding, I stood there quietly, allowing Khalil to chat.

"Cool, alright, so when I woke up, Kline and his wiretail were leaving. I think that's what woke me up, for the record. Ranger was still here then; Kline didn't like… try and take off with him. Honestly, it's probably why Kline didn't try to kill us or some stupid shit before he took off. I'm guessing he probably is heading back to Blackham City."

"Not worried about him yet; after a few days, when he gets the registration for Ranger official–that's when we have to worry about him. Pretty sure he's going to want some revenge, and I don't know if he's enough of a prick to want it on just us or the entire village to get at us."

"You think he'd do that?"

"Don't know, like I said."

"Shit," Khalil sighs loudly. "Alright, well, we can't do anything about that right now."

"When did Ranger leave?"

"About fifteen or twenty minutes before I woke you up earlier, I thought he was just leaving t–"

The crunching and snapping of branches interrupts Khalil. Some part of me remembers the noise as something familiar–an enormous beast moving through the underbrush that isn't meant for it to sneak through. Khalil tenses up, but that part of me calms my instinct to tense and prepare, almost like I already know what is coming from the Wilds.

Sure enough, the snapping and cracking of leaves and twigs gets louder and louder until the front legs of a wiretail burst out from the thick woods lining the traveler's path we're on. Ranger walks out, straddling a small Wilds' buck he's holding in his maw. Each of his front legs walks on either side of the medium-sized animal–only slightly larger than a dog–as he drags it onto the path next to us. Khalil stands there with his mouth open, surprise evident.

"Wow. I can't believe he got something so fast, dude."

The wiretail drags the relatively small male deer over to us and drops it before sitting back on his back legs and looking directly at us. I grin despite myself.

"Thank you, Ranger. Good boy. Guess I only need to find our water now."

While I'm pretty sure Ranger can't understand me, he probably recognizes the tone in which I speak. I walk over and pat him on the side of his powerful neck a few times.

"I'll get this buck cleaned up, and we'll cook a meal for ourselves, then let Ranger have whatever he wants of the rest. It's too much meat for us two and Ranger, but we don't have a way of preserving it. If I can keep the skin, I will, but Ranger might have mauled it a bit, so…"

Khalil nods, not arguing with my assessment of the situation. I'm quite surprised that Ranger returned; in all honesty, I thought the wiretail would go right back out into the Wilds when given the freedom to do as he wanted. But, I suppose the night before was profoundly impactful on him, either through my actions or Khalil's talk. Either way, we'll probably never know, but I know that Ranger left and came back on his own, so we don't need to worry about where he goes and what he does.

Pushing my thoughts aside, I take out my whittling knife–good enough for skinning–and move forward to clean the deer.

A brief period of time later, the buck is half-field dressed–after all, Ranger doesn't plan to preserve the meat, and neither do we–and our portions are pulled aside for cooking. I set Khalil on the task of cooking our meals for the day; I figure we can keep enough to have a couple of meals today on the path, and I can carry them in my leather pack. Sure, I'll have to clean the thing when we return to the village, but that applies to everything on me anyway, so what's another thing to add to the list? Ranger grunted and grumbled through the last twenty minutes of dressing the deer, so once I moved back after finishing my work, I pulled the remainder of the deer towards the wiretail before patting him on the side of his broad front shoulders.

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"All the rest is yours, big guy."

The wiretail isn't stupid and gets the hint. He immediately sets to eating, and I move away again to let him have his meal in peace. I look at my bloodied hands, and I sigh. I've already used some water to wash off my hands once this morning, and now I'm going to use some more to do it again, which means I need to make sure we don't miss the brook I saw on the side of the path on the way to this point. After using a bit more of my water to get most of the remnants of dressing the deer off my hands, I slink over to sit by the fire where Khalil is cooking the few slabs of meat I cut for us.

"He must have been trained to do that," Khalil says as I get close.

"Yeah, maybe his previous rider took him out in the Wilds for hunting or somesuch." I stretch my arms slightly to the side, flexing some of the scratched-up muscles. I'll have to double-check them later at night.

"Ori, where d'you think Cassandra ran off to?"

"No idea. She was more pissed than I'd ever seen her before. Maybe she had just to get away from all of us before she went on a vampire murder spree. We don't really know anything about her, you know? She could be old as dirt and twice as powerful."

"Yeah, she could be, but I dunno, I don't think she is. I think she's a younger bloodsucker trying to find her way. Maybe after all that fighting you guys did, and after she was mad as hell and face-to-face with Kline, her instinct for blood kicked in."

"Man, that's probably true, Khalil. I didn't think about that."

"Yeah, 'cause you want to get dirty with her, so you forgot she's a murderous vampire."

"Piss off."

Khalil blurts out a laugh while flipping the slabs of meat over on the fire.

"Yo, my dude, it's chill. I get it. She gave you the vampire-eyes, and you're like," Khalil takes on a puffed-up voice, poorly imitating my voice mannerisms, "yeah, 'I'm Orion. That's me. I'm too good to find a nice girl in our village; I gotta chase a skirt that could go crazy and rip everyone's throats out. And oh yeah, I've got to get my best friend to help me convince a wiretail not to kill everyone, so I can have a big ass cat to parade around on top of.' Uh-huh, yeah."

I pick up a tiny rock and sling it at his chest when he finishes harassing me. It's a strike that pings off his shoulder.

"Ow, shit! That hurt! You know I'm right, you wannabe-bougie bastard."

I laugh at him, and then he joins me in the laughter while we sit and wait for our meat to cook. For a moment, everything feels right in the world.

"Only a little true, Khalil, only a little. I think you're talking more about yourself with that bougie shit, though. Don't think I haven't seen you checking out the shit every time we're through a seam in some place with electronics."

Khalil laughs but doesn't deny it. I gaze over at Ranger, who is busily still chowing down, before looking down the other way along the traveler's path, where Cassandra rode off away from everyone. I can't help myself; even though Khalil made a good point about her maybe needing blood, some part of me worries she might be in trouble out here alone in the Wilds.

"Think we should go after her?"

"Come on, dude, think with your head."

"I am Khalil. What if she got into trouble after she left us?"

Khalil pulls one of the deer steaks off the tiny campfire grill and puts it into a bowl that hasn't been cleaned from the previous night's grabbat stew, and then he offers it first to me. I thank him and take the dish, using my whittling knife to start cutting the hunk of meat almost immediately.

"Dude, look, she'll be fine. I'm serious, you're worrying about something you don't need to worry about. If anything, you should be worried for whatever she finds out there to feed on, just saying."

"Yeah, you're probably right." Mouth full and chewing, I still respond to Khalil.

We lapse into silence after that, with Khalil pulling off his meat for breakfast and putting a couple more slabs onto the fire for us to eat later in the day. He gets to chowing down, only occasionally breaking to flip each piece of meat over. While I eat, my thoughts swirl and drift, settling back on to what Hannah warned me about before we even left the village.

Hannah seemed to know the little wisps of darkness that rest just on the outskirts of my heart, and while she seemed not to think they had a hold on me, she did go out of her way–twice, in fact–to remind me to guard myself against its influence. First with Aria and then secondly with Cassandra. Even just thinking of Cassandra–with her blonde locks kept back in those braids and deep pools of seafoam-colored eyes–caused a little warm feeling to settle into my chest and abdomen. Khalil was right about one thing: outside of Aria, no one in the village had even drawn out this sort of reaction from me.

I don't know much about the history of our kind with vampires other than the stock standard horror stories and "don't trust them!" lectures. Maybe the fey in the more prominent tribes in their cities and towns–where they can collect books and knowledge–know more about them. I'd put trade down on it, truthfully. We Wilder are just the outskirts of faerie society, and while not long ago I was fine with that, now I find myself wondering more and more about our world the more I'm introduced to its mysteries.

Khalil finishes his meal before I do, and his loud belching, followed by laughter, breaks me free from my thoughts. I smile a little at him.

"Orion, you got anything in that pack we can wrap these deer steaks in?"

"Not sure–don't think so, actually. Just get a few big leaves from one of the trees up the path; you should be able to use them to wrap the meat in."

"Alright, cool. Be right back."

Khalil pushes up from where he was seated, leaving me to finish my meal alone–except for Ranger, who is eating far more deer than I expected. Once I finish my steak, I put the metal bowl onto the other campfire cooking materials and stand up. I checked my quiver to see how many arrows I had left and saw that I only had six. Not a great amount, and I don't have the materials to make more on me. Just another thing to do when we get back to the village. We need to stay free and clear of any troubles on the way back, and we should be fine.

When Khalil returns with enough large leaves to wrap the steaks, we pack up the camp and clear the campfire from the road. We leave only a few scorch marks from the flames where we couldn't spread the dirt around much because it was a bit more gravel; otherwise, everything else is pretty much cleaned up as it would have been before we stopped there.

"So, a few hours backtrack should get us to the brook. We'll stop there for water, fill up, clean up, and all that. We keep going after that and then stop when it gets dark. I'll take the first watch tonight, and you can take the second. Cool?"

"Sounds good to me."

"Alright, hopefully we don't have any problems; I'm looking forward to no more drama."

"Agreed, dude. Let's try to keep the whole rest of the trip drama-free. What about the Blackham and our village?"

"Let's just handle what we can handle–getting back to the village first–then we'll tell Hannah and Jorge what happened and let them decide what to do."

"Ace. Sounds like a plan. Alright then, let's get going."

I scoop up the small bits of metal used for campfire cooking and fold them before putting them in my pack. They don't fit perfectly, but I get them stuffed in there and fasten the pack closed as best I can. I give it to Khalil to carry, and he slings it over his back to secure it while I head over to Ranger and the remnants of his large meal.

"Wow, Ranger, you ate everything pretty much. You must have been hungry as hell. Khalil, help me move this off the pathway."

He grunts but then helps me move the bones and other remnants of the buck off of the side of the traveler's path. Usually, I'd prefer to bury it, but we don't have those tools available for such a large corpse. After dragging it a reasonable distance from the pathway, we jog back to where Ranger is busily cleaning himself after his meal. We both have to wait another five minutes for him to want to move, but once he does, I take the forward seat in the saddle on the wiretail's back while Khalil rides behind me on the smaller second-person seat.

Ranger starts at a lazy pace, probably due to the big meal he'd just consumed, which is fine. Khalil and I ride together in silence, save for the grunts and grumbles of Ranger as we head back down the path on his back. I barely need to guide him with the saddle reins; he seems intelligent enough to understand we're sticking to the path, and his pace increases after time to a decent clip of speed.