CHAPTER TWO

There was nothing Norok hated more than hunting with his sister. He loved her-- obviously he loved her-- but watching the way she played with her food made his blood pressure rise like nothing else.

“Daimona,” he said sternly. “Don’t.”

She remained hunched over the girl’s corpse, her fingernails digging into the skin as she twisted the arm backwards. She paused to pout at Norok.

“But I’m starving,” she whined.

“So am I,” Norok argued.

Daimona rolled her eyes. She pulled the arm off with a sickening snap, then threw it to the side. It thumped against the remains of the rock-summoning boy, who Daimona had already reduced to a pile. Norok glared at her.

“You’re making a mess,” he sighed.

“They’ll be easier to roast this way!”

“We’re not roasting shit,” Norok said, kicking aside the lifeless body of the staff-boy. “We are packing up and leaving, before anyone else gets in our way.”

“What?!” Daimona groaned. “But you said we could stop for the night!”

“That was before, when we were cooking the bear,” Norok huffed.

“But it ran away!”

“And whose fault is that?”

Daimona stood up, crossing her arms indignantly. Even with her emaciated cheeks and the heavy, dark eyebags, Norok could see her usual stubborn resolve, the way she clenched her jaw whenever she put her foot down. But he could also see the way she swayed slightly on her feet, the hunger eating at her senses from the inside out.

“Be honest,” he chided quietly. “How bad is it?”

“Not that bad,” she replied. “But I can’t run on empty.”

Norok felt uneasy hearing that. Daimona’s appetite had been increasingly difficult to manage over the last several weeks. At the beginning of their journey, she had made do with birds and rabbits, swallowing them whole and spitting out bones, beaks and feathers as they trudged through the woods. But now, a bear couldn’t tide her over for more than a few hours. How much longer before her hunger grew out of their control? Days? Norok couldn’t be sure.

“Fine,” he sighed. “But we’re not staying the night.”

Daimona grinned, baring her fangs. She pumped her fist high, jumping on to the back of the girl-corpse as she exclaimed, “Woohoo!”

They spent the rest of the evening clearing out the area. They pushed the other two corpses together, rolling them to the far side of the space. Norok made them face one another, twisting back the broken neck of the healer boy. He smiled at his handiwork, amused by the wide-eyed look of fear still frozen on the staff-boy’s face, but then he paused. Can healers heal themselves after death? Norok wondered. Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure how healing magic really worked in the first place. He knelt, touching the boy’s face again.

“Down,” he said quietly. The boy’s face sunk into itself, melting into the ground and flattening out like a puddle. Daimona shook her head as she walked past him, carrying with her a pile of wood and leaves for the fire.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“And you told me no,” she chided. Norok ignored her. At least now, if the healer boy could fix his neck, he’d have to fix his face first. That’d give Norok enough time to deal with him more permanently then.

While Norok built the fire, he occasionally glanced up to watch Daimona sever the girl’s body into smaller pieces. She hummed softly as she skewered the chunks on sharpened branches. It was an old song, one she made up when they were ten years younger, less siblings and more roommates. Back then, the four concrete walls of their containment cell was all either of them knew. Daimona would sit for hours, leaning against the glass door and singing at the top of her lungs, until someone in a labcoat would come in and muzzle her for the night. They were convinced she was trying to use her sound magic to set them free. “Little Siren,” they called her.

One night, as Daimona was rubbing at her face, still teary-eyed from the sting of the muzzle’s unrelenting straps, Norok asked her why she didn’t actually use her magic like that. “It’d be easy,” Norok whispered. “You could make them walk us out the door themselves.”

“You could smush them all like bugs, Norok,” she replied, shooting him a bitter look. “Why don’t you?”

But even as a child, Norok couldn’t admit to being afraid. So he didn’t, and they didn’t talk about running away again, not even when they were vaulting over concaved corpses, fighting tooth and nail under the blaring red lights of the facility for a chance at freedom. It was as if admitting to what they were doing made it impossible to do, Norok thought. So long as they did it, and didn’t look back, everything would work out, and the things that they’d lost along the way would be rewarded.

“That one’s Birdchirp, right?”

Norok straightened up over the blaze, Daimona’s voice taking him by surprise. She settled down beside him. In her arms was a bundle of filled skewers, wrapped up in one of the white-blue torn jackets the group had proudly worn before. It hit the ground between them with a sturdy thwump.

“The song,” Daimona said. She pulled two skewers from the pile, holding one out to him.

Norok took it, adjusting the single finger hanging precariously at the top of his. “No, that one was Featherflap.”

Daimona laughed, shaking her head. “I don’t know how you remember them all, they all sound the exact same to me!”

“It’s in the high notes,” Norok replied with a smile. “At least, that’s what the composer told me.”

“Really?” Daimona turned the skewer over in her hand. “Well, if you ever see him again, tell him to come up with better titles.”

Norok chuckled. “I’ll let him know,” he said softly.

The sky moved from a golden orange to a murky magenta-blue, and soon the night hung above them. The stars twinkled over the forest, the fire’s embers crackling up to meet them. Norok looked to Daimona. Her head was resting against his shoulder, snoring loudly with a skewer still hanging from her mouth. He reached over, gently tossing it to the side and interrupting her exhale. She looked up at him with bleary eyes.

“Come on,” he said, pushing her off him. “Time to go.”

“Aw, lay off, Norok, it wouldn’t kill us to--” Daimona stopped. She suddenly scrambled to her feet. She sprinted to where they had left the last two bodies, her eyes locked on the woods just ahead of them.

“What is it?” Norok asked, cautiously taking a few steps behind her.

“I heard something,” Daimona said. She held her arm out for him to stop moving. For a moment, there was nothing but the sounds of the fire crackling behind them. The night carried on as they stood frozen in place. Then, Norok heard a distinct tapping noise. It was too faint to place what it was, but it was undeniably close.

Tap-tap, tap. Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap. Tap, tap-tap.

Then, it stopped. Norok scanned the treeline, looking for any signs of life, but nothing appeared. Daimona turned to Norok with a shrug.

“Maybe it was nothing,” she said with a sigh.

Before Norok could reply, a green bolt of light whizzed through the treeline, piercing Daimona in the neck. Her eyes immediately rolled back into her skull. Norok rushed to catch her as she fell, feeling her body violently shake in his arms. Her saliva foamed, bubbling up out of her mouth.

Norok turned to catch their attacker, his magic sitting on the tip of his tongue, but another shot rang out from the opposite side of the clearing, jabbing him just between the shoulderblades.

He fell over, twitching and spasming on the forest floor, as a pair of dark boots approached.

“Operatives recovered,” a low voice said from above. “Let’s get ‘em home.”